Sunlands Finances
Extremely small-time.
This was originally published as a Kickstarter update on 19 July 2020, following the successful fulfillment of my Sunlands ZineQuest campaign.
I've reproduced it here in an attempt to start collecting all this stuff in one place.
As part of an attempt to increase transparency in the RPG industry, I'm going to repeat the financial post-mortems (post-morta?) I did with Pigsmoke and Bleak Spirit.
If you want to know where the money went, this is the post for you. In fact, this is the sentence fragment for you: into my pockets. Similarly, if you want to get a feel for what the finances of a very small Kickstarter can look like, here we are.
1. PRE-KS EXPENSES
Nothing. Part of my motivation to join ZQ2 was to make something with deliberately low production values -- hence the art -- and commensurately low costs, so I basically started from scratch a few weeks before my arbitrarily chosen launch date.
2. THAT LAUNCH DATE
The impression I get is that if you're going to do Zinequest or something like it, launch on February 1st. I suspect that by waiting until the 18th I effectively let the breaking wave of hype fade, and I could have made a pile of extra cash if I launched on the 1st. Maybe I'll try that next time. Maybe I won't. The good thing about mini-projects like this is that you can be experimental.
Running Total: £0
3. INCOME
After Kickstarter took their cut, I got £873.66 -- thanks to all of you!
Running Total: £873.66
4. PRINTING
It cost me £204.46 to get 100 copies of Sunlands printed and sent to me. Enough to supply the 79 people who ordered a hard copy with a few left over that I intended to sell at conventions this year.
Those convention copies are now going to be sitting in a box in my storage space until probably June 2021. Mumble grumble stupid plague.
[Editor's note: December 2022.]
Running Total: £669.20
5. SHIPPING
I was just about ready to ship everybody's copies -- then Covid happened, lockdown happened, and the Post Offices closed. There's not really any planning for a global pandemic, so I'm just going to shrug and jump ahead to the bit where Post Offices reopened.
It cost me £29.24 in packing envelopes and sticky labels, and £348.34 in paying for actual shipping to various locations around the world. As a side note, between March and July the Royal Mail added a special international postage rate for the USA which makes it the most expensive place to send stuff. Luckily Sunlands is small and light enough that it only cost me an extra 50p or so per package, but I know other creators in the UK who make bigger, chunkier books have taken a rinsing.
Long story short, the reason for this is because the US government has been trying to kneecap the US Postal Service since at least the George W. Bush era, and this has led them to dramatically increase prices for overseas customers. If you're a US citizen reading this, it's probably worth contacting your local representatives and badgering them to do something about that. The ways and means for doing this are beyond the scope of this update, which is supposed to be just a financial post-mortem rather than a dissertation on international politics and the postal services involved, but a quick Google should sort you out.
ANYWAY.
Running Total: £291.62
6. CASH FOR ME
So, just shy of £300 for me. Now, here's the question: Was that worth the effort I put in?
I actually clocked the time I spent writing and laying out Sunlands, and it landed at almost exactly 40 hours of work. Massaging the numbers a little for the sake of making the division easy, that's about £7.50 per hour.
For comparison, the National Living Wage -- basically the minimum wage in the UK -- for people aged 25+ is £8.72/hour. My day job pays me something like £18/hour once you take paid holiday and wotnot into account. So £7.50/hour is pretty bad.
So where did I go wrong? Well, leaving aside hypotheticals about start dates affecting backer count (see part 2, above), the answer is simple: I underpriced Sunlands.
Let's back-solve from a desired hourly rate. £15/hour seems like a reasonable rate to me, so for a 40-hour job I would need to take home a profit of £600. Assuming I could move ~100 copies of Sunlands regardless of price, that means I should have been angling to make a £6.00 profit on each one. (There are a lot of complicating factors as well, but I'm ignoring those for now.)
Instead I made a £3 profit on each one, and took home about half of what would make a reasonable payout. More fool me.
If I can shift the remaining 20 printed copies and 100 digital copies then I can make up the shortfall -- but even though over Sunlands' entire product life it will probably make that money, it will take years.
The moral of the story then is this: I should either charge more for what I'm making, or I should put less effort in to match my expected outcome. (It's going to be the first one.)
And with that, we're done. One more exhortation to sign up to my mailing list, and that takes care of that.
Thanks again for supporting this project!
Chris
