Blackwood Kickstarter Postmortem

The Blackwood Errantry Codex

Kickstarter Campaign

[Kickstarter Page]

It’s been a wild couple months! The Blackwood Errantry Codex, our new setting for Savage Worlds, launched on Kickstarter on May 1st, 2017. We ran a 28-day campaign, and I’m thrilled to say we managed to fund! We even unlocked our first stretch goal. By November of this year, The Blackwood will a book you can hold in your hands and play in with your friends.

Kickstarter is a little bit of a wild frontier for us, so we took careful notes as the campaign progressed. We want to be transparent to our backers about all this information, but we also think it’s good to put this information out there for the benefit of people thinking about running their own Kickstarter.

The Final Tallies

Final Amount Pledged: $6,404
Final Backer Total: 286
% of Funding Target: 128%
Initial Funding Reached By: Day 24

Funds Raised

Gross Pledges: $6,404
Dropped Pledges: -$45
Refunds: -$0
Subtotal: $6,359

Deductions

Kickstarter Fee: -$317.95
Payment Processing: -$249.95
Subtotal: -$564.18

Total Funding $5,794.82

Traffic and Marketing

Kickstarter has some great tools to track referral sources. We didn’t make use of all of them, but we still found out plenty of info.

Facebook: 37 backers ($1241, 19.38% of total funding)
Direct Traffic No Referrer Info: 50 backers ($1231, 19.22% of total funding)
Direct Search via Kickstarter: 50 backers ($1101, 17.19% of total funding)

These 3 sources account for almost half of our total backers (137 out of 286). The next biggest slice of the pie was only 7% of total funding, so I consider these to be the most important data points. As far as I can tell, the “direct traffic no referrer info” category comes from the many podcasts I appeared on for interviews:

• RPG Academy’s Show and Tell
• The One Shot Network’s Twitch Stream (also got a shout out on their main podcast)
• Roleplay Public Radio
• The RPG Brewery
• The Wild Die (also had an Actual Play episode on this podcast)
• Savage Worlds GM Podcast
• Manuel Samb’s Veiled Fury Entertainment

I also got quick shout outs on the Misdirected Mark Podcast, Gaming and BS, and made an appearance on Panda’s Talking Games to talk about cartography, but I didn’t talk much about my Kickstarter specifically.

It’s probably no surprise that one of the biggest boosts I got during the campaign came from the One Shot Network. Interestingly though, it came after my Twitch game was announced on the main podcast. There was no noticeable bump after running the game on their Twitch stream, but a couple people told me they backed after watching that video.

Production Status

By this point, we’ve nearly received all our Backer surveys, as well as NPC and Settlement descriptions from backers at the Classicist, Sentinel, and Noble levels. Contracts have been signed by our layout guy and all of our artists. We’ve been getting work back from the artists for a couple weeks now. They look great! Here’s a preview of the wolfish, apelike beasts known as Howlers:

We didn’t unlock the stretch goal for color production, but we decided to spend some of the extra $400 we’d raised over our first goal to pay for color production anyway. Most of our art remains grayscale, but select pieces and the book layout itself will be in color.

As of right now, we’re 100% on track to have the book arrive on DriveThruRPG in November. We’ll have a few production updates sprinkled into regular blog posts between now and then. Stay tuned!