Only 11 days left to go on my Kickstarter project, a comics and prose book gaming out revolution in the United States.
Raised so far: $8,080
Needed: $31,920
I get nothing unless the full amount is raised. Which would mean I wouldn’t be able to do this book.
2 Comments.
Well time is getting tight, but you are still making gains, I threw in a wad and have been bugging people on your behalf.
The sad reality, of course, is that if you got a 3D animator and a programer on board, set the goal to $1.5 million for the same project in video-game format, and then got the endorsement of “Penny-Arcade” you would probably make your goal, but I sadly doubt the book will make the much more modest fundraising goal even though the book is definitely my preferred format for this.
This is a pure guess on my part, but one thing I am noticing is that it looks like you are steadily getting pledges, just at a rate insufficient to make your self imposed pledge deadline. Could you just move to a much farther off deadline? Sure it means the project won’t be started as soon, but better late then never right?
Assuming a continuous linear influx of money (a poor assumption) it looks like you will need to move the deadline back about 5 times what has elapsed between now and the begging to reach your goal. Realistically, however there will be diminishing returns instead of linear growth as those most familiar with your work, and the fastest with pledging money, will pledge first, so you will get a total donation per time graph that will probably look like a Sigmoid function (or possibly just an exponential with a horizontal asymptote for a ceiling). If you have access to the data for when the donations were made and in what quantities I could try to fit the curve to estimate how far off your deadline should be moved back to meet your intended goal relative to your current approximated function of acquiring pledges.
Also how much have you advertised this? We on your blog know about it but unfortunately that is a pretty small readership relative to the intended pledge goal. The difference between an unheard of under-purchased book and one that makes it to the New York Times best seller and Amazon Top 50 list has basically nothing to do with quality, topic, or content it is really only a matter of how well advertised it was. As obnoxious as it is that Rich Berlow made $1.2 million to do basically nothing I have a feeling he (sadly) has a noticeably bigger readership on the site where his kick-start drive was advertised and thus unintentionally he effectively advertised better then you have at least in terms of primary advertising. Can you do a pledge tour instead of a book tour where you get interviewed and talk about what is intended for this book if it gets funded (similar to what you have on your kickstart page, but people have to go there to see it as opposed to you finding them to hock-it on their favorite programs or such). Also they say no publicity is bad publicity, if there is a relatively safe amount of shit you are willing to stir up to draw attention to yourself you could maybe use it as a vector for hocking this book and its requisite pledge drive. Indeed if you are willing to risk it, stirring up the right kind of shit might give you more street cred concerning the synthesis of revolutionary literature among those unfamiliar with you and your prior work.