Ends of the Earth Finances
Another ZineQuest, another small pile of money.
My goal with ZineQuests -- all two of the ones I've done -- is to go low-effort, low-cost, high speed, here is a thing you might enjoy with maybe some rough edges. This makes it quite difficult to do financial post-mortems on them because I have no collaborators and very little in the way of expenses, so basically I keep the lot and that's that. (I wanted to buy a Steam Deck with it, but I have to replace my bathroom so it's Sensible Adult Spending instead, boo hiss.)
So the rest of this post will be me trying to spin nothing into something.
1. Pre-KS Stuff
I got the idea to do this in... I want to say November or so, when I thought 'oh I've got plenty of time to prepare for a launch in February' and then I blinked and it was late January. I'd already got the basic details laid down and I'd done most of the map by then, thanks to stress-induced insomnia from everything else that was going on in my life, so I launched with minimal preamble or promotion.
Unlike Sunlands (Abre numa nova janela), though, this time I'd chosen to launch on February 1st, to try and catch that ZineQuest hype wave.
As a side note, a large influence on the way I designed the map for Ends of the Earth was Map Crow's video tutorials on Youtube, particularly this one (Abre numa nova janela) where he says 'you aren't designing a map, you're designing a game board'. Good wisdom, that.
2. Income
Thanks to my backers, I raised £1127.03 after Kickstarter took their slice. That's about £150 more than Sunlands. Did the launch date make a difference? Do I just have a bit more of a following now than I did then? Do people like this product better than that one?
Who knows. I certainly don't, and the difference is small enough that I don't think it matters anyway.
(I do know that I sold out of the 100 print copies this time, which I didn't with Sunlands.)
Running Total: £1127.03
3. Reach? What Reach?
For the first time for one of my Kickstarter campaigns, I made custom links to help track where the backers for my project were coming from and actually remembered to use them.
The results were dreadful!
I had a custom link for Twitter, a custom link for Mastodon, and a custom link for the ZineMonth pile o' zines page (which apparently isn't meant for people running KS campaigns, oops). Of the 174 people who backed Ends of the Earth I got:
6 from the Zimo link.
2 from twitter.com, although not via the custom Twitter link, but maybe that's because Elon Musk had already started hollowing out Twitter by that point.
0 from Mastodon.
Of the remaining 166, about 72% of them were delivered unto me by Kickstarter's internal referral systems. This is why I have trouble funding on other platforms, even though I would dearly like to bail on KS.
I mean, this is a very small sample size from a very small creator; I'd love to know if other small-time creators experience the same thing. Like, I know Kickstarter's referral systems are very powerful, especially for creators with no reach, but I'd love to start putting some numbers on that.
4. Printing
I went back to my friends at digitalprinting.co.uk (Abre numa nova janela), who printed Sunlands for me on very nice paper, and got them to print Ends of the Earth on the same paper with a slightly different cover colour in case you're collecting my (two) zines. That informed my cover layout and interior font choices too; I want them to look sort of unified.
I ruined this, of course, by not considering the way I'd handled headers and other interior text layout decisions in Sunlands when I did the layout for Ends of the Earth, so they don't look that unified. Oh well, zines.
Anyway, I spent £366.63 on printing.
Running Total: £760.40
5. Shipping
Just shy of £30 on packaging and just shy of £370 on postage came to £396.83 in costs to get the things where they needed to go.
When I posted Sunlands in 2020, I used a bit of layout trickery and sticker sheets to make doing customs labels for 80-odd envelopes easy, but when I tried the same scheme for Ends of the Earth it turned out that you're not allowed to do that any more. Due to a Post Office hack in January all customs labels now have a unique barcode on them, so you can't bulk print them without a special printer and a roll of labels.
So I spent a weekend manually writing 80-odd customs labels. It sucked and was boring but it went reasonably quickly in batches of 15-20. If I do this again I'm going to have to see if there's an easier option.
Final Total: £363.57
6. Return on Investment
So, was all that work worth it for £363.57?
If you go back to my Sunlands post-mortem you'll note that I didn't earn anywhere near enough money to make the 40 hours I put into that zine worth it, so I said I'd raise my prices next time.
If you compare the Ends of the Earth campaign with that one, you'll see that I didn't do that. This is because learning from one's past mistakes is for losers and weaklings.
No, wait, it's because for ZineQuests I like to keep the price (and expectations) as low as possible, and £5 for a print copy just feels like a nice number. I don't know how much work I put into Ends of the Earth because, as I mentioned before, I produced quite a lot of it in a sleep-deprived fugue between the hours of 3 and 5 a.m. over the course of some number of days. How many? Who knows. Sleep-deprived fugue.
EotE definitely felt faster to write than Sunlands, though, so let's assume 30 hours?
At my 'this is a reasonable return on investment' rate of £15/hour, a 30-hour project would need to make me £450 to be worth it. £360 and change is pretty far off that, but I did print 30 extra copies to sell at conventions (UKGE this year, Dragonmeet every year except that one time I got covid) and if they all sell that tasty extra £150 will push me into 'worthwhile' territory. Or if I sell a bunch more in electronic formats for $3-4 a go. So I think I'll be alright.
Not minted, but alright.
