Emerald City Comicon and Kickstarting Year Three! (Part Two)
(Cross posted on the Cura Te Ipsum Year Two Kickstarter)
Preliminary note: Cura Te Ipsum will be at the Emerald City Comicon in booth E-07, so please, by all means, come see us! We will have trades aplenty, and neat new banners! NOTE: We will not be present on Friday due to circumstances beyond our control, but we will be there for Saturday and Sunday, all day.
Now, on to the Kickstarter:
There she is! The mockup of the Year Three trade, which we are now working to finalize. Dex and I have spent the last few weeks crunching numbers, talking to close friends and readers, and assessing where to go with the next Kickstarter, and this is where we’re at, after hearing your input:
-START DATES AND GOAL:
We will finish this year on April 5th, but the book is already ahead of schedule in terms of readying it for print, given what we learned from the last Kickstarter. Our current plan is to run the Kickstarter from the very early morning of APRIL 2ND until midnight of MAY 2ND. This will give us thirty days. While it would be nice to go from April 1 to April 30th, as you might have guessed, the internet has things to do on April 1st that might be distracting. Our target goal, which factors in limited hardcovers and glossy paper from the start this time, as opposed to as stretch goals, will be $7,000.
-LIMITED HARDCOVERS ARE GO, UNLIMITED HARDCOVERS ARE SCRATCHED:
People want hardcovers, but we realized that we don’t need unlimited hardcovers to get you them. Unlimited hardcovers added WAY too many tiers, and complicated everything. It also added grossly to cost. We will continue the limited hardcovers (and there are a good number left), and if they all sell out, we can always reassess, because we’ll be in a much better position. This serves several purposes. 1) It keeps the hardcovers special. 2) It keeps costs way down, and 3) It means we can focus more on the priority, the Year Three softcover trade.
-EXTRAS and STRETCH GOALS:
So far, the word is stickers. Stickers and buttons. I’m thinking we’ll make stickers and buttons come with all orders straight out of the gate. What else do you guys want for stretches? Tee shirts? Prints? We have some ideas, but we also want to hear if there’s something special you want, for those of you who haven’t already sounded off.
This can’t work without you, so please, by all means, feel free to leave comments or email me at neal@nealbailey.com if you have ideas, desires, or comments.
Thank you so much for supporting our comic!
Neal
HELL YES! That is one awesome cover. Dex, you’ve knocked it out of the park yet again.
Tee shirts would be cool, seeing as how I wear my Cura shirt all the time. What designs would you think you’d use?
Only drawback with the tees is that you said before that they’re expensive and last time you did shirts you ended up with a ton left over–am I remembering correctly? So I guess the tees depend on 1) if it’s financially feasible and 2) if there’s high demand.
You remember correctly. I ended up with about half the stock left, and they all went at conventions, eventually (I think there are one or two left), but it was a case of folks saying it was what they want, and then losing a bit of money (which isn’t as bad as it sounds, as with everything, experience may vary). That was also, I think, two years ago.
If we meet our goal, it will become financially feasible to experiment that way again, especially with demand. What designs would you like to see? We have a ton of ideas. I keep wanting to do DINOSAUR DINOSAUR DINOSAUR, because that has broad appeal, but I don’t know what folks would want. I know what’s special about the comic to me, but I need to know what it is for you fine folks…
Looks good to me, I look forward to pledging my support. Killer cover as always.
Stickers are awesome! And I would love t-shirts too, but for me it all depends on what tier they’re made available, because with international shipping on top of the tiers, it makes it a little more expensive. And usually t-shirts are on higher priced tiers. Prints would be amazing also.
Maybe get people to vote on a specific page or panel they like, and the – I don’t know – top 3 suggestions get made in to t-shirt designs or prints or something?
Basically I will definitely be getting a softcover Year Three trade from the Kickstarter (to match my Year One and Year Two softcovers), but the other stuff (shirt, prints etc) does depend on how much more expensive it makes a tier topped with international shipping.
If we do tee shirts, I’ll definitely open up the comments on the Kickstarter page and here to hear suggestions. It’d be a later stage thing, I’m sure. But, that said, provided my cost hunt this week doesn’t reveal stickers to be insanely expensive, I will be putting several in each other so far. Do you have a preferred kind? I was thinking a logo, and then an ovoid portal sticker, and maybe a dinosaur, dinosaur, dinosaur sticker…
The logo would be great, possibly with the website written on it too, so if it’s displayed somewhere (like on a car or a binder or something transportable) people can see the website address and it could maybe create more traffic?
Dinosaur, dinosaur, dinosaur and portals would be awesome also.
Cast stickers would be good, but it depends on sizing/s of the stickers. Otherwise, I’d have to go back through the series to find ones I really liked. I loved the Dark Everett/Charlie Prime stranded on a desert island storyarc. Not sure if any images from that would be particularly sticker-worthy though 🙂 And personally anything with Nerd or Leo on it would be cool.
Cool! I will bear this in mind as I proceed. Thank you.
Bookmarks ! Would be good for you to also use them as a promo tool at a convention when people don’t pull the trigger right here right now to buy a book.
Love this idea. We printed extra after the Kickstarter last year for just this reason, and there are some left, but I see no reason not to make more, along with the stickers.