Kickstarter Numbers

Now that the Goblin Queen Kickstarter is over and I’ve had a few days to recover, I thought I’d look at some of the numbers.

Let’s start with the big one. The Kickstarter raised $14,825 from 358 backers. It’s likely that a few of those pledges will fall through, but no matter how you look at it, that’s an amazing total.

Of course, Kickstarter takes 5% off the top, which comes to about $741. Payment processing takes another 3-5%. Let’s call it 4%, or $593, leaving about $13,491 for the book and book-related stuff.

With all the different rewards, I’ll be shipping out and donating a total of 351 print copies of Tamora Carter: Goblin Queen. I’m gonna need to buy a lot more envelopes and mailing labels…

How much will shipping cost? If my estimates were right, envelopes and postage should come out to about $1400 total. Everyone who supported the Kickstarter should be proud — you’re also supporting the U.S. Postal Service!

Sitting to my left is a box that arrived today, containing 1000 two-inch diameter stickers of Smudge the fire spider 🙂  I’ll also probably get about 500 bookmarks, but that has to wait until I’ve got finished cover art.

All five critique rewards were snatched up fairly quickly, which is flattering. This means I’ll be critiquing up to 37,500 words of fiction at some point in the future.

The most popular reward level was $25. 174 backers pledged at this level, for which they’ll receive an autographed copy of Goblin Queen, along with the ebook. They also get stretch goals, including a Smudge sticker, autographed bookmark, and an ebook copy of Goblin Tales.

Two people donated at the $1,000 level, which blows my mind. And makes me wonder what would have happened if I’d kept my pie-in-the-sky $10,000 reward listed…

The first day was the biggest fundraising day, bringing in 153 backers who pledged $5,557. Days two and thirty were pretty close to tied for second place, coming in around $1,900 each. Days 3-28 were more of a slow-but-steady increase.

I was excited to see Goblin Queen listed as a “Project We Love” on the Kickstarter site very early on. Looking at the stats, a total of four people clicked through the “Projects We Love” link to contribute. Definitely better than nothing, but not really a make-or-break boost.

I think that covers most of the interesting stuff. I haven’t been tracking the hours I’ve put in, either writing the book itself or organizing the fundraiser. I doubt I’ll bother tracking the time it takes to sign and pack and ship everything, either. Let’s just call it many hours.

Hopefully this will be interesting/useful to some of you. Feel free to ask questions. I enjoy sharing data.