More news next week and over the month ahead. First, though, you ought to meet Mikaël Louys, the driving force behind Megara Entertainment, who will be producing the hardback editions of Way of the Tiger. Pop back tomorrow to see what all the fuss is about.
The new covers (of which this is my favourite) are by Mylène Villeneuve. Awesome enough for ya?
I'd love to but $300 ~ $375 US? Cannot afford that, but I wish the best to those that can! I hope the KS blasts into the stratoshpere, the more people that get WotT the better.
ReplyDeleteOh and I really prefer the B+W illustrations :-D
Folks who pledge for Kickstarters always amaze me with how much money they have - but then, I'm the sort who'll spot a book in a store, then go and get it for 66% of the price on Amazon.
DeleteI'm sure the new Megara editions will look amazing, though, and worth every penny. You can always pledge for just one, Scott... The prequel and/or book 7 are well worth having.
Btw the campaign has actually gone live today, not October 1st as was planned, but I've already written and scheduled all the posts about it and I don't have time to change them. So official launch date by FL blog time is next Tuesday, but you can pledge right now if you want. And I really do recommend the new titles, Ninja and Redeemer, even if you're thinking the whole series is too pricey.
ReplyDeleteJust been noticing all the octopuses that crop up as monsters in WOTT. Either Mark or Jamie must really hate seafood.
ReplyDeleteIt was Lovecraft who didn't like seafood, and there's a lot of Cthulhu(-ish) stuff in WOTT. Possibly Mark and Jamie will reveal their other influences (Leiber and Tolkien included) in the promotional videos on Kickstarter.
DeletePledged! :) I am actually surprised by how high it went already!
ReplyDeleteBeside, people are very fond of spending money on nostalgia. I got dvds of few children series back in the nineties for example. And hunted down all six books of Fabled Lands on Ebay and so on. Some thing are always more valued with a hindsight!
Cheers,
Joe
Those nostalgia buffs sure got a lot of money to spend. Nearly $6000 for WOTT today and that's just from 24 people. Now, I really like Gene Colan's run on Iron Man, but at the same time I have bills to pay...
DeleteHello, all. Yes, it's terrific how funding has gone so far.
ReplyDeleteJoe: Kickstarter in specific seems to be "a funding platform for nostalgia." Look at the most successful projects and you will see name after name that came from the 80's and 90's. The folks who grew up on these things are now spending money on Kickstarter, and we REALLY hope that The Way of the Tiger will catch that audience.
Scott: as Dave points out, you really don't have to spend that much. Typical Kickstarter pledges are from $10-$70. Search on the page for the words "so for example" and you'll see different ways you can get something good for your money.
Besides, no one said you had to collect the whole thing at once. We'll be around after the project ends.
Thanks for stopping by!
If the project is funded, and particularly if it meets some of its stretch-goals, then obviously the campaign can be called a success. However, I think there is a marketing problem, which has been identified and discussed ever since the draft project page was released and which evidently has not gone away: despite all of the reward-tiers, there is a tendency only to look at what it would cost to pledge for all eight books (the all-or-nothing instinct common to collectors). I predicted that for the campaign to succeed, it would not be able to rely on the bigger pledges; well, so far I am being proven wrong, since over half the pledges (15 of 26) are at the eight-book $375+ tier. Nevertheless, I do think that whatever the final total, it will not be as high as it should be if that ratio persists. There ought to be more backers, those who cannot afford $375, pledging at lower levels. I think that Holdfast is the gold standard for Kickstarter gamebooks (at least, those not by Zachary Weiner): $30,245 from 611 backers, the majority at the $5+ to $50+ reward-tiers.
DeleteI suppose it is easier to market a single book than selections from a complete set: with a single book, the potential backer can immediately see what is on offer and measure it against what they can afford. If I had any inspired suggestions for how to work around this then I would have offered them already; although, the more I think about it now, the more it seems to me that the prequel, Book 0, should have been highlighted almost above everything else in the campaign, because that is the single-book pledge that you would expect might be made both by new readers *and* existing fans.
I suspect Richard would agree with you, Graham. Kickstarter does seem to be a law unto itself. In mainstream entertainment, you would always rather have 10,000 customers paying you $10 each than 100 customers paying $1000, because the value of the IP spreads through the network. Yet as I write this, WOTT has almost reached its first (admittedly fairly modest) target from 38 backers putting up about $240 each. It's not exactly "crowd" funding, but there's certainly something significant at work.
DeleteWe had discussed amongst ourselves the idea of "new books" being their own Kickstarter. In the end . . . I guess there's enough interest to fund all eight at once by BUYING all eight at once. This is completely contrary to expectations.
DeleteThe "marketing problem" . . . well, I might rephrase that: it's a "marketing principle." It is clear now that these backers think in terms of wholes, and one would need to plan advertizing around that perception. Our months of publicity, active discussion with fans, and so on, seems to have allowed us to find enough people to buy the whole.
We didn't need it to be that way: we're quite alright with single books at a time! Really! And if you look at pledge numbers, you'll see that the number of single-book pledges (at the moment) is about 3/4 that of whole-series pledges. Though this still means numbers in the low-double-digits and is therefore hard to judge.
What happens next?
Well . . . tons and tons of promotion, trying to find people to pledge at all levels.
KickStarter should not be seen as crowd funding per se. It's a platform for donations and both the creator and the backer should see it as nothing more than that. Backers aren't necessarily entitled to any of the rewards that are offered and the creator isn't obliged to refund the donations if something should go wrong and prevent them from delivering the final product. Not that I want to discourage anyone, but there do seem to be many misunderstandings about its nature, especially from backers who see it as some kind of shop: it isn't.
ReplyDeleteThat said, congrats to the team for such a great initial result. It wasn't one I was interested in (the internal artwork did not appeal to me) but I'm sure the final books will delight those who have donated.
I have no dog in that dojo, but I am hoping that WOTT meeting its target will pave the way for a Bloodsword campaign next year. Of course, it's important to remember that raising $10,000 or even $50,000 when you have to deliver physical product is largely just going to cover manufacture and shipping. The profit might only be $5000. But it does help to pay for editorial costs and, most importantly, it creates a stir of renewed interest in the IP. Even if less than a hundred people back a KS campaign, being able to say that it raised $50,000 or whatever is a buzz that will attract other (hopefully new) readers.
DeleteWrt Bloodsword, if there is a Kickstarter then Mikaël plans to have Russ Nicholson colorize his own original artwork. That should please everyone.
Trying to comment on mobile and Blogger keeps hosing my text. Will try again later...
ReplyDeleteTell me about it! So many times I'll sit with my iPad and a morning cuppa replying to comments, only for Blogger to lose the lot...
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