With the Kickstarter for “Add Magic to Taste” fast approaching, we’ve begun finalizing aspects of our budget and drafting the copy for the campaign! When we settled down to do this, we made a surprising discovery: Kickstarter counts shipping costs toward the campaign “goal” amount. As we hadn’t planned our budget and goals that way, this required a fairly extensive re-tooling of our budget – though, fortunately, we’d already done all the research on shipping prices, we just hadn’t included that amount when we projected that the funding goal for our Kickstarter would be $4,500 (all prices USD).
We’ve already updated our public projected budget, which you can view here. Note that our projects on sales and costs to produce haven’t changed – the only difference is, we’ve had to up our goal to accommodate the high price of shipping, especially internationally.
Changes we made:
- Adding our projected shipping costs to the Kickstarter goal amount increased our goal by $2,200.
- Funds were added to enable us to pay merchandise artists; we’re currently estimating the cost at $30 per piece, and we expect to have a more clear idea in the next two weeks.
- Originally, packing material was priced from ULine, however we’ve since discovered that ULine donates to some causes we cannot support, and we will be using Valuemailer.com instead; this increased the price of purchasing packing materials by approximately $200. However, on the plus side, we confirmed we can save shipping on some domestic US shipping options by using Flat Rate boxes, and the boxes themselves are also provided by free by USPS, so we’ll be able to modestly reduce costs in that regard.
- Including the cost of shipping in our goals means that Kickstarter will withdraw their fees from shipping costs (presumably why it’s set up this way, when it didn’t used to be), so also increased the fees we’ll owe them by around $100.
All in all, these changes increased our minimum goal on Kickstarter from $4,500 to $7,000, and increased all our projected stretch goals a commensurate amount.We’ve also updated our FAQ as we transition from the “writing” stage of anthology production to the “sales” stage of anthology production, and it includes the latest information on our projected backer levels and more! You can read all about it here.
Let us know if you have any suggestions, comments, or questions!