Rainy Road Warrior Newsletter
June 18, 2023
The Day Of Dads
My daughter made a paper fortune cookie for my birthday a few months ago and inside was this “fortune” that is now pinned to my wall next to my computer monitor. I see it every day and I often think to myself, “How long do I have before my daughter comes to realize her mistake? How long before she finally sees, like everyone else, that I am a pathetic loser and an embarrasing failure?” The clock is ticking.
When Success Is Failure
Sometimes in life we must face devastating truths. That time, for me, is now.
The Kickstarter for Epic of Darkness #2 ended “successfully”. Meaning, it reached the financial goal that I had set for it. But there are several problems with that.
First, that goal ($1200) was not enough to actually cover the cost of producing the book and associated items, which is close to $4000. I set it at that goal because that was how much the last campaign made and I just wanted to see if we could at least beat that. Obviously, I was hoping and expected for it to do much more.
Second, the campaign ended up with less backers than the previous campaign. A lot of people from the previous campaign did not come back for this one. And this was the real metric that I was focused on. I felt that, regardless of how much money the campaign raised, if we could at least continue to build on the number of backers, this whole comic book journey would be moving in the right direction. And, one day, we would eventually get to the point where the books would pay for themselves.
Unfortunately, that looks like it will never happen. It seems that I’ve reached a plateau that falls way short of what’s required to continue doing this.
Not being able to garner more than 50 backers and around $1000, means this is over. The comic book people have spoken. It’s time to pack up my things and move on.
Death By Numbers
I thought I’d share some key numbers about the EoD #2 campaign, especially as compared to the EoD #1 campaign, just anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of such things.
I was going to include a detailed spreadsheet but Substack doesn’t have the ability to insert tables so I’m just going to list a few of the more pertinent numbers.
First, the “good” numbers: EoD #2 earned about $100 more than EoD #1. EoD #2 had zero cancelled backers and only 1 defaulted backer (who also defaulted on the first campaign.) EoD #1 had 5 cancelled pledges and 3 defaulted backers. At the conclusion of the campaigns, EoD #2 had 130 followers with 26 (20%) of those converted to backers. EoD #1 had 122 followers with 11 (11%) of those converted to backers. These are all metrics that I consider positive improvements, even if only slightly.
Now, the “bad” numbers: EoD #1 had 51 legit backers while EoD #2 only had 42. Only 14 backers returned from EoD #1 to pledge for EoD #2. That’s 30 people that did not return for the second book. Which, to me, is the most damning number.
So, again, my philosophy was that if I could at least keep moving things in a positive direction with each campaign, I could justify continuing this endeavor. But I seem to have hit a wall and the little support I can garner just isn’t enough.
And I don’t know why. I see campaigns all the time with incomplete books, subpar artwork, juvenile premises and ridiculous characters garner hundreds of backers and thousands of dollars in support. I just don’t get it.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
Since I’ve got a shelf full of books collecting dust, I figured I’d try out a new crowdfunding website called Fund My Comic, which I can use as a storefront of sorts.
My plan is to run a campaign offering all of the books, like I tried with Indiegogo, to try to reach more people and gather more support. I’ll launch it sometime in July and reevaluate everything depending on how it goes.
This Week In Randomness
This is an old clip, I know, but for some reason it popped back into my head recently and thought I’d share it. Some comments on this video state that this is all an act but Simon’s reactions look genuine to me. Anyway, it’s an interesting bit of psychological warfare.
Until next time!
~Michael T Gonzalez
