One of the most influential cartoonists of the last fifty years is hanging up his comic; while not a webcomic, Matt Groening’s Life In Hell (with its monstrous overbites, bulgy eyes, and sardonic observers dripping iconoclasm from every pore¹) provided an example in bizarro stream-of-consciousness via recognizable character that would find expression in a hundred later creations². For all that you taught us about junior high school, petty authority, and the airport snack bar, thank you Mr Groening. Now could you please tell us which one is Akbar, and which one is Jeff?

You know what it’s like today? Hot. The kind of oppressive, viscous, walking-is-an-effort kind of day where the only respite is the occasional good fortune of passing an open doorway, and catching the cold air rushing out before the storekeeper yells at a departing customer to close the damn door. It’s dangerously hot out, with official warnings about the risks , and school boards wondering how what an acceptable number of heatstroked kids might be before they decide that maybe losing the graduation robes would be a good idea. If the kids are the future, maybe a few more of them should live to see tomorrow instead of roasting inside nonbreathing nylon tents in solid colors.

And lucky us, it’s going to be worse tomorrow.

Hey, you know where it’s not quite so foul? Toronto. They even have a chance of a sweet thunderstorm to bring down the heat and humidity maybe. It’s also traditionally quite pleasant in TO in the early autumn, which is why I want to mention that during Toronto’s inaugural iteration of the venerable Just For Laughs festival come September, there will be 42 separate acts of the humorous variety³.

Act number 7 on 21 September, 7:00pm? Kate Beaton. Because webcomics needn’t be the entirety of her creative drive, because she’s still got the performing bug from her monthly series with Michael Kupperman, because she is funny as hell. If you’re in the (blessedly cool, possibly even cool enough to support the ice weasels, ) GTO in September, be sure to check her out.

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¹ Especially personified in the form of Akbar & Jeff, who are “brothers, or lovers, or possibly both”; their weltanschauung (look it up) was especially malleable, and disdainful of nearly every philosophy that’s ever flirted with saying “Feh”.

² Speaking of which, did I mention that there’s a new Achewood today?

³ Unlike Groening’s description of “What is funny about man get kicked in crotch?”, it is unlikely that any of these will feature that particular occurrence for big surefire laugh-chuckles.

Long before I ever met Randy Milholland or his rampant, luxurious beard, I was talking about him and his work to others. In particular, I spent part of the reception at the Harvey Awards in 2004 (attached as it was in those days to the MoCCA Fest at the Puck Building) talking about Randy Milholland with Neil Gaiman, who had noted in his keynote address the import of his (that is, Beardy’s) jump to full-time comickin’¹. There is some secret thrill to be gained by talking with somebody you admire greatly, and finding out that you’re both fans of the same work.

In the years since, I’ve come to know Milholland reasonably well and to admire his work even more. All of which is to say, the going-pro event took place eight years ago yesterday, and I thought it worthy of note. So, noted.

There’s a lengthy piece on paying for music by David Lowery that’s been making the rounds for the past day or so. It’s very long, it’s very good, and I will not be excerpting it here because it deserves to be read in its entirety. Go do that now.

I’m pointing the three of you that hadn’t been linked to Lowery’s piece previously to it because I think it has something to say to the ongoing conversation about webcomics. On the one hand, piracy/ripping aren’t the issues for webcomics that they are for music, in that the model is predicated on giving things away and making money on the back end, the economics of which work better for webcomics (as an industry) than for music (again, as an industry). Naturally, there are contrary cases that one can find almost immediately, artists who have embraced the new economy with both hands and wrestled it into submission; we’re talking about the non-exceptional cases here, and Lowery makes a cogent argument about why those ways don’t necessarily work for the vast majority of musicians.

What I took away from Lowery’s piece wasn’t so much a parallel of the dangers (share sites for scanned comics, stripping away of attribution, even cases of outright thievery), or trying to work out an equivalence between “not paying for music” and “not buying from webcomickers”; it was more generational.

This page has made much of the generational shift in comics, between The Old Way and The New Way, but I think that struggle is pretty much done. Some people don’t (won’t/can’t) acknowledge that The Old Way ain’t coming back; the era of disintermediation is here, and attrition will take the hindmost. Lowery’s piece (and the posting that inspired it) really have me thinking about a reluctance to buy anything on the part of cohort that’s a half-generation behind many of the young creators I follow (and thus nearly a full generation behind me).

The direct creator:audience relationship has allowed a thousand artistic visions to bloom that otherwise would have been held back by gatekeepers, but now I wonder if we’ve at a pinnacle for that flowering, rather than the early days of a growth period. The kids that are just now getting onto the internet under their own identities (and Facebook’s trying to get them ever younger, with its efforts to sign up pre-teens) may represent a period of unparalleled demand coupled with an unparalleled willingness to pay for anything, endlessly mashing up and remixing what their forebears created and sharing it among themselves for reputation. New requires time (effort/compensation); reposting requires nothing.

It’s a more pessimistic way of thinking than I’ve had before, and I haven’t convinced myself as to how likely it is, but it wouldn’t be the first time that a bubble deflated before getting all that large. Any creators making it on their own now (or planning to) need to be putting serious planning into what their business will look like next year and the year after that — and only slightly less predicting what 2025, 2030, and beyond can (should/must) look like. The market for your creations in the coming decade won’t be so much what you can improvise (design/exploit), it’ll be what you force it to be.

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¹ I got Gaiman to autograph a program from his speech to Milholland, and he drew a quite nice sketch of a Middle Ages plague-doctor; Milholland has since returned the favor.

How was your weekend? I was sneered at the by reception staff of the New York Athletic Club and directed to please get my plebian, denim-clad ass out of their very fancy lobby and into the freight elevator (via the rear entrance, naturally) before they succumbed to an attack of the vapors¹.

Duly reminded of my place in the world, I was finally permitted to make my way towards meeting space, where I participated in a roundtable discussion on the future direction of my alma mater, then met my wife so we could go kayaking on the Hudson while the sun went down and the city lit up. So you know — pretty cool except for Mister Sniffy behind the big desk there. Some things happened in the world of webcomickry, too.

• Not quite over the weekend, but what the heck: My evil twin introduced me via email to a very nice gentleman named Richard Bliss, who holds forth on boardgames and has been producing a podcast series of discussions regarding games vis-à-vis Kickstarter. Last week’s number-bothering caught his attention, and we had a nice discussion on Kickstarter, how it applies to the boardgames sphere as opposed to the webcomics sphere, and what it all means. Then we had a part of that discussion again and recorded it, which should be available sometime in the next 24 hours, here-ish.

  The most interesting thing that I learned is that the tendency for [web]comics projects to not succeed unless the creator is a known quantity with an established audience runs in large part counter to boardgames projects. It might be a crappy game from that unknown designer, or it might be really good, but if you’re only risking US$10-20, that could be better odds than hunting down a really expensive imported Eurogame and finding out it sucks anyway.

  The second most interesting thing I learned is that there’s a website that tracks current Kickstarter projects, complete with predictions as to final totals. I hadn’t heard of Kicktraq before, but if their predictions on, say, the Dylan Meconis library reprint project hold anywhere near true (their prediction as of this writing: 603% of goal, or about US$91,000), it was probably a good decision on her part to start drawing that bonus story that she promised at US$18K.

  Also, if you look near the bottom of the project page, below the “Backers Per Day graph, there’s a small link on the letter Π, which leads to experimental graphs. It’ll take some more time to get enough data to be really interesting, but you can see the prediction and actual converge, and eventually see a hurricane-prediction style cone of possibilities. This shit could keep me riveted for hours, no fooling.

  The third most interesting thing I learned is that my new wireless headset will, at random intervals, drop a faint, quarter-second delayed echo of my own voice into the earpiece for about 45 seconds at a time and it becomes really difficult to talk under those circumstances without repeating yourself. If I got redundant, don’t tell me, it’ll only break my heart.

• The world has by now learned about the wildly overreaching lawyers letter to Matthew Inman, and the utter inability of FunnyJunk’s lawyer to comprehend that it’s time to cut his losses. Seriously, counselor, there is no way you can win this except if you quit quickly enough that your name does not get attached to an object lesson in the vernacular. You’re pulling a Wilson in slow motion.

  At this point, I’m watching in rapt attention and no small amount of horror-musement as Charles Carreon digs deeper, and deeper, and deeper one mo’ ‘gin. I don’t feel like kicking a corpse, so barring any radical developments in the case, I’ll just direct you to Popehat for your news on the case, as they are actual lawyers and able to explain why Carreon is acting like an idiot in the application-of-law sense, whereas I can only comment on the dude-you’re-only-making-it-worse-on-yourself sense.

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¹ May I suggest, NYAC Trustees, that if you’re going to rent out meeting space on Saturdays, you might want to let your guests know in advance about your dress code? There’s a chance that the people who are paying for the privilege of being condescended to might find it less than entirely charming to be told at length what a favor you’re doing by letting them cross your hallowed halls in their obvious, undeserving state. Jerks.

I’ve waited a long damn time to see Jovia back with Beams (why, nearly six years, exactly), I suppose I can wait another thirteen to see them both back with Cutter, Holiday, and Mr Jinx. Thanks to Kris Straub for bringing the space-adventure, the space-humor, the space-pathos, and whatever space-thing this was to Starslip for seven years. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

Now, instead of me going on for another 1500 words or so, how about you start from the beginning, or the super-space-beginning?

How’s about a roundup? I feel like a roundup today.

• New comics, each with fewer than ten updates, which I feel confident in recommending to you: on the one hand, what looks to be a first foray into webcomickry by Priscilla Tramontano, whom I’ve not heard of before, with the whimsical and charming My Roomie, The Dark Lord. Theoretically a weekly (just RSS it and you’ll be fine), a nameless girl (unless her name really is “Vermin”) shares a flat with a standard (if nameless) evil fantasy-world Lord of Power and Doom and Badness. They seem to get on great, and it’s the little touches, like the Dark Lord’s jammies or the girl’s utter nonchalance at his malevolence that drive the humor. There’s a lesson in roomie relations to be found as well, as any two people, no matter how different, are sure to have aspects of their personality that the other can value. I’ll be watching this one.

  On the other hand, acknowledged master Doug TenNapel is worldbuilding with Nnewts. It’s about, well, newts, those little amphibian critters that undergo all kinds of metamorphoses on their way from egg to tadpolish swimmy deal to moist-skinned quadruped. Only these newts have magic, and society and adventures and it’s pretty. Readers may recall TenNapel’s previous webcomic, Ratfist, which ran for a year and got ever’body good and hooked before completing in print; no idea yet if Nnewts will do the same, but dang if there’s not something appealing in the idea of a creator running a story for a while, wrapping it up, and moving on to something completely different.

• Speaking of “wrapping it up”, both John Allison and Kris Straub are killing it as they bring stories to a close. For Allison, The Case of the Fire Inside has delved ever deeper into the minefield that is the psyche of Tackleford Teens, what with hormones starting to bubble and opposite sexes getting noticed and wondering who you really are, oh, and seal girls also. The conclusion was stepping along smartly, with everybody possibly getting what they wanted, (if not necessarily what they needed) in a bittersweet fashion and then … wham. Punch in the gut.

  Meanwhile, all the pieces that Memnon Delphius Vanderbeam put into place were coalescing, as he died in his own arms his plans to save the now by canceling the future via the past came together with the promise of his heart’s fondest wish. I’ve been wondering how Straub would take an act of supreme optimism born of despair and make it pay off without cheating. Now we know.

• Portland, ho, where one should note some books on the horizon. As previously noted, Bucko is getting a print treatment in September, and should you have an interest in purchasing it¹, the Diamond order codes are now available to take to your friendly local comic shop. And just across the aisle at Periscope Studio, Dylan Meconis is prepping up print versions of her three most prominent out of print/never been printed works: Bite Me!, Danse Macabre, and the Eisner-nominated (Best Digital Comic, to be determined in a month in San Diego) Outfoxed, which you may peruse via the requisite Kickstarter².

  My only dilemma — I already have a (signed, sketched) copy of Bite Me! and very little shelf space, so I don’t need another copy. Which level of support (it’s a given I’m going to support any project that gets Meconis’s work out in print) do I pledge at to get a copies of the other two, and not get a superfluous copy of Bite Me!? Modern problems, y’all; might just have to bite (so to speak) the bullet, get all three, and give the spare BM! away.

• I don’t know why it’s not at their website, but at least some of this week’s books from The Big i feature a house ad of Jim Zubkavich, all around nice guy and walking creative explosion. Fortunately, Mr Zub has a copy of it at his site, and it’s damn good photo with some damn good words. Nice one, Jim.

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¹ Which should be akin to remarking, “You like to breathe.”

² Which features the best video I’ve seen this week, and that includes Neal Stephenson’s video for Clang.

I’ve been wondering why it is that I hadn’t met Matthew Inman before Memorial Day weekend at the NCS shindig, then I started wondering why I was wondering. We hadn’t crossed paths because I don’t do that many conventions these days, and he does even less; most of the people I’ve met in this deeply weird community have been via personal introductions. The Oatmeal is on my casual follow list rather than priority follow list¹. That being said, he’s exactly the guy that you want to be talking with when you’re in a room full of people you don’t know and have not so much in common with, and he’s somebody that I’m going to genuinely look forward to seeing when our paths have cause to cross.

All of which is to say, I am resolved that should I ever feel the need to be a tremendous douchebag towards Matthew Inman², I am going to remember a few things:

• Follower counts count
• When faced with an unflattering portrayal of my mother, the last thing I should do is double down
• Streisand effect, Streisand effect, Streisand effect

Not that I am likely to feel the need to treat Inman with extremely rude, explain-to-me-how-this-is-not-extortion-please behavior, as I have managed a run of 1882 consecutive days of governing myself accordingly³ and don’t see that streak ending anytime soon. Still, it looks likely that at this rate, the bears and the cancers are going to be splitting northwards of US$250,000 (US$152,000 with thirteen days to go as of this writing) so I guess we should all thank the FunnyJunk [no link because seriously, screw those guys] people for deciding that Matthew Inman gave them a sad and that escalating their hurt feelings into legal threats was a good idea.

Speaking of legal threats, The Great Todd Goldman Contretemps of Aught-Seven⁴ stirred up not just a lot of commentary at this page, but also a lot of communications direct to me; nothing has matched it since, but the amount of requests and enquiries I’ve gotten from the latest Kickstarter pieces are getting close. Since it looks like I’m not going to be allowed to let Kickstarter fade into the background just yet, let’s mention some of the more notable ones:

• From commenter “Myth”, an argument that the US$10 and under tier represents “impulse buy” tendencies and attracts people who want to feel randomly good about backing things. In my experience, most people won’t kick a quarter into the tip jar of a talented busker on the street, so I’m not so sure about them donating ten bucks for random good feelings. I’ll concede the possibility, but there’s no way for either of us to assert definitively without a survey of users as to their motivations, and I have neither the data nor the time to manage that. As for the specific dollar figure cited, I’m going to fall back on a half-decade of working con booths and stand by US$20 being the quantum unit of money.
• From commenter Mark V, a wondering as to whether low-tier backers drive participation at higher tiers by means of momentum. I was mentally thinking Hey that sounds interesting, go do that to Mr V’s suggestion to do a daily sampling of a bunch of projects and look at the cross-correlation of the time series for the different tiers (time, people, I am not made of it!), but before such a churlish suggestion could escape my lips, he produced a quick analysis of success vs backer count, incorporating my 39 projects and another 20 that failed.

  Two things to note here: I really wanted to find some “near miss” projects, ones that came just shy of succeeding, but couldn’t come up with a set that wasn’t all outliers the last time I went looking (similarity was a big part of why I set an arbitrary floor of US$10,000 for my analysis), so good work by Mark finding a set that he considered valid. Even more interesting was a datum that jumped out at him:

  Surprisingly (?), there is a clean break between the funded and unfunded projects at 100 backers. Does anyone know of any unsuccessful comics Kickstarters with more than 100 backers?

  Damn good question, Mark. Anybody know of any? And please, before somebody that’s looking at Kickstarter as a kind of magic ATM skims this bit and takes away the wrong lesson, 100 backers is not a magic guarantor of success. The dependency goes the other way — if you’ve got the kind of project that would be a success, you’ve already amassed a pool of supporters that would hit triple digits. As always, there are contrary cases.

  Thanks to Mark V for seeing an investigatory direction that I hadn’t considered, and to everybody else with specific questions — the data are there waiting for you same as for me. The more people that dig around and look for answers, the greater chance of something meaningful getting unearthed.

• Alternately, you could wait a couple days and hear me and Richard Bliss compare notes; Howard “My Evil Twin” Tayler introduced me to Mr Bliss via email yesterday:
  

  Richard “The Game Whisperer” Bliss has been doing research on, and a podcast about Kickstarter since November of 2011, mostly focused on what it means in the board game space.

  So scheduling on that is getting worked out today, and I’ll let you know when you can listen. Honestly, when I stared my lines of enquiry, it was because I’m a numbers nerd and when I see patterns in them I have to dig around and see what I can find. I didn’t expect all of this interest from so many quarters. Oh, and as long as I’m on the topic of Howard Tayler, congrats on completing twelve years of updating Schlock Mercenary every damn day.

Hey, did you notice that Cameron Stewart brought back Sin Titulo? Because he did, and with no other projects competing for his time, it’s going up every day until it’s done. Read it again for the first time.

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¹ Inman’s in good company there — there’s some incredibly popular and successful comics that serve their audiences well, but they aren’t for me.

² Say, bears are facing an extinction-level threat and need a few bucks.

³ Seriously, Charles Carreon, Attorney-at-Law, when somebody calls your bluff on legal threats that we all know you were never going to act on, you cut your losses and quit with making the noise.

⁴ If I may be indulged for a moment, it’s probably my greatest point of pride with respect to this blog that we at Fleen did not remove any of our Todd Goldman coverage when “invited” to do so. Major publishing houses did, we did not.

For those that joined us late, yesterday I looked at a bunch of Kickstarter projects related to webcomics and drew some conclusions that seemed to hold pretty true for a wide variety of cases. But I kept coming back to two sets of numbers. The first being the listing of all contributors in various tiers across all 39 projects:

… and the second being that same graph, with the most obvious fringe cases removed:

Removed because the sheer number of contributors to just four projects (Order of the Stick, Poorcraft, Diesel Sweeties, and Borogove) really skewed the results. Without those four projects, the others produced a tolerably flat distribution up to the US$100 tier, then a second one up to US$250; past that, the counts were negligible.

But these projects weren’t necessarily unusual just for their supporter counts (the 14,952 OoTS supporters accounted for more than 37% of all backers in all projects; the other projects had support counts¹ that were matched or exceeded by other projects not called out), but for their lumpiness. In fact, there were other projects that were lumpy in interesting ways, but tended to balance each other out and disguise that fact. It’s the lumpies that we’re looking at today.

In addition to three of the four already cited (I’m omitting OoTS from call-out analysis because there’s just too much there — too many microtiers, too many limited rewards, too many add-ons … I suspect some B-school wannabe could write a thesis on just that one campaign), we’ll be examining how Girly, Narbonic, Kickstand Comics, Schlock Mercenary, Modest Medusa 1², and Smut Peddler are atypical, yet found niches to exploit. The usual warning that your mileage may vary applies double to these case studies.

First up, a pair of projects that have opposite tendencies in dollar figures: Borogove had 1500+ backers, and operated predominantly at low dollar figures; Girly had about 200 backers, with the lowest reward tier at US$100:

Quick side note: because details would be lost comparing two projects where the backer counts differ by a factor of five, I’ve translated this and the remainder of charts into percentages; the 740+ backers at US$10 or less for Borogove equals just under 50% of all backers for that project. Likewise, the 74 and 99 backers at the US$100 and US$150 levels (respectively) equate to 35% and 47% (respectively) of all backers of Girly — we can see how the relative counts stack up without Girly being too small in the vertical dimension to appreciate.

How did Girly succeed with only high-dollar value donors? The base reward was a multi-volume, slipcased book set with a built-up demand. Low count, very high margins per item. Borogove, by contrast, was a card game (cheap to produce) that was tangentially referenced in Kory Bing’s Skin Deep. Essentially cheap enough to be an impulse buy, one has to hope that the few dollars to be made after cost of producing the decks didn’t get entirely consumed by shipping and the efforts of shipping. This was probably a break-even proposition at best.

Next up: Poorcraft and Schlock Mercenary: The Board Game.

I chose these two not only for their obvious contrast in distribution, but because both managed to absolutely dominate in just one reward tier (nearly 80% penetration), at opposite ends of the spectrum. 877 out of 1111 people took the lowest pledge that would get them a copy of the boardgame, and 495 out of 793 people took the lowest pledge that would get them a copy of Poorcraft (plus another 51 in the same statistical grouping that would have gotten a PDF instead of a physical copy).

Ironically, the much higher-priced SM: The Board Game might not actually work as a high-margin item, as it’s a fairly complex production with lots of parts and fiddly bits³ requiring assembly and many bonus content doodads. Poorcraft, by contrast, had most of its rewards related to nothing more complex than the number of copies that went into the envelope, with higher value rewards attached to essentially free items — credits in the book, appearances in the book, original pages (already paid for). If the books could be gotten in quantity sufficiently cheaply (and finding good value for money is the theme of Poorcraft, after all), the ROI might actually be better than for SM:TBG.

Similar breakdown with Modest Medusa 1 and Smut Peddler:

The US$15 tier at SP gets you a PDF of the book, and the US$30 tier gets you a paperback; the 2291 backers made those two reward tiers account for an unreal 88.3% of all pledges. The near-zero cost of distributing PDF (compared to mailing) and the higher income per copy of SP (by a factor of three vs. Poorcraft) means a whole lot more free cash rolling around in Spike’s pockets, which she famously paid out to her artists — US$700 per creator or creator team. As a spread-the-wealth project, this was a resounding success, one that couldn’t have worked at lower pricepoints.

Modest Medusa saw a pretty impressive spike at the base-get-a-book level (70%), which makes it a perfectly cromulent use of Kickstarter to accomplish a particular project. Given the relatively low backer count (274), the excess funds aren’t enough to be self-sustaining going forward to the next project (cf: footnotes, where we note that MM2 is currently raising funds).

Last up, a contrast between relatively few reward tiers and a lot of reward tiers all over the damn place: Narbonic, Kickstand Comics, and Diesel Sweeties.

The first two have, respectively, 6 and 4 reward tiers (two of which were combined into one by the data grouping in the case of KC), each featuring a relatively high price point (US$50) to get something tangible (the US$10 tier for Narbonic gets you a PDF). They’re also both giving fairly large rewards — six years of comics in the case of Narbonic (with higher reward tiers giving tangible and desirable value-adds in the form of hardcovers and handtooled slipcases), and three books totaling more than 1000 strips in the case of Kickstand. The only differences between the Kickstand rewards were foreign (higher shipping costs) vs domestic, sketched vs unsketched; the relative paucity of bike-themed comics probably worked in Rick Smith’s favor, particularly given the prominence of cycling culture abroad (a full 29% of his 660 orders were international, which is probably a record).

Rich Stevens, by contrast, is able to treat the one third of backers in the cheap seats as free money — he had to put in the effort of making an e-book out of 3000 comics to satisfy the higher-tier rewards, and they get to download work he did anyway; that’s 490 people times 10 bucks (actually 8, since he did almost all his pricing in 8-bit multiples) times no fulfillment costs. As noted in earlier analyses, that’s the only way to not go broke with so many backers getting something for so little money.

The spike at the US$40 range (actually 32) represents the minimum to get a tangible reward (a USB drive with the e-book on it). The real costs to Stevens are the time/effort to produce the book; the drives themselves can probably be had very cheaply in the quantities Stevens is looking at (458 in this tier, plus everybody at higher tiers, for most of 1000 people — and you can find USB drives of similar case complexity for 8 bucks retail), and the damn things are made of rubber so they don’t need protective shipping. One caveat: Rich Stevens is a mad genius who regards sleep as the enemy; unless you emulate that, you will go crazy trying to work things like he does.

Tomorrow: Nothing about Kickstarter or I may kill myself.
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¹ Poorcraft: 703; Sweeties: 1520; Borogove: 1507.

² I probably should have noted yesterday that Modest Medusa volume 2 is likely to outstrip volume 1, but still has two and a half weeks to go.

³ Not that my evil twin would have it any other way — fiddly bits are a way of life for him.

No kidding, you guys, I have been crunching numbers on successful Kickstarter campaigns since last week, and everything I look at reveals as many questions as answers. Time to share what I’ve come up with, and what I think it means.

To start with, a few definitions:

• I wanted data sets with large numbers of contributors, so I set a floor of US$10,000.
• Projects are being added all the time, so I picked an arbitrary time of June 8, early afternoon EDT as the time to collect numbers; TwoKinds was still collecting funds for another 26 hours at that point, but I don’t think that will cause a major shift.
• There will be roundoff errors — there are projects where backers pledged at a level below the first reward tier, and they don’t show up.
• I’ve reduced the backers into dollar ranges that don’t necessarily match one-to-one with each project; when I say 100 people backed this project at the US$100 level, it means They gave more than the next lowest category (US$75), up to and including US$100, despite the fact that the actual pledge amount may have been US$80, or US$93, or some other increment in between those endpoints. Again, probably won’t have a big effect on the final conclusions.
• I’m looking at webcomics, for which there is not a clear category; most of the projects listed in this analysis came from the Comics category, but I allowed others in, provided that they were from prominent webcomickers, and driven primarily by that creator’s identity/property.

  This means that some tough choices got made — I included some anthologies like Smut Peddler, Cautionary Fables, but excluded Daisy Kutter. The Schlock Mercenary game and SFAM bunnies are in, but Scurvy Dogs isn’t. If you think I should or should not have included a particular project, I invite you to gather your own numbers.¹

For reference, the projects included Dreamland Chronicles volumes 4 and 5, Athena Voltaire, Cautionary Fables, Modest Medusa volume 1, nemu*nemu 2011, Multiplex volumes 1 and 2, Poorcraft, Regalia, TJ & Amal volume 1, Spacetrawler volume 2, Sfeer Theory issue 1, Skin Horse volume 3, Rice Boy one-volume, Order of Tales one-volume, Boxer Hockey/Diesel, Wormworld Saga app, Double K volume 1, Narbonic perfect collection, Tiny Kitten Teeth hardcover, Girly complete collection, Dumbing of Age volume 1, Kickstand Comics 2, 3, and 4, Goats volume 4, Benign Kingdom, Cucumber Quest, Extra Ordinary Comics volume 1, Smut Peddler, Erfworld motion comic, Order of the Stick reprint drive, TwoKinds, Monster Alphabet board book, Schlock Mercenary boardgame, Borogove card game, Dr McNinja video game, Glorkian Warrior video game, SFAM bunnies, and Uncle Rich’s crazypants largest e-book in history.

Some basic stats:

• Thirty nine projects
• 39,727 rewards-level backers
• A total normalized value of US$2,424,955

That word is important — normalized. Given that individual reward tiers were grouped together for convenience (Rich Burlew had more than 60 by himself), the normalized value was derived by multiplying the total number of backers in a dollar range by the assigned value of that range. This is likely overestimating the value somewhat, but a surprisingly large number of the reward tiers fell at or near the chosen range values².

Here’s what the total number of backers at each level look like; there’s no legend because there’s too many projects, just get a look at the overall shape:

Big vertical spikes for OoTS, but notice how you can’t really see which levels dominate until you get to the higher levels and there’s almost nobody. Now we’re going to show something different — same data, but stacking the totals in each dollar range on top, adding the OoTS numbers to the Poorcraft numbers to the SFAM numbers, plus another 36 projects:

From this we can see that the low-value tier (up to and including ten bucks) is the most popular, with more than 15% of pledgers there; not all projects offer any kind of reward at that level. Now here’s what surprised me — I’ve been saying that the sweet spot in Kickstarter rewards is between about US$30 and US$75 for a while now, and there are peaks at 25 and 75, and pretty healthy stacks in between those two points. After 75, the numbers have a pretty clear down trend except at 250, which is almost entirely an outlier.

That’s because a few high-count projects (OoTS, Poorcraft, Borogove, and Diesel Sweeties) are dominating some of these levels. Just to play “what if”, I’m going to take those four projects away, since nearly everybody that starts a Kickstarter will not have responses like those four; don’t worry, I’ll put it back in, but I was curious to see what happens when the outliers went away:

I left the vertical scale the same so you can see the impact — 75 now dominates, and the highest dollar value with a significant count occurs at 150. Interesting. Also, I just noticed that when I screen-shotted that chart, there was a pop-up label but screw it, I’m not going back and doing it over. Y’all can just deal.

Back to the issue at hand, maximizing those supporters by any means isn’t the key thing, unless you don’t mind going broke fulfilling a Kickstarter campaign’s low-value rewards — each of those low-dollar supporters might incur a couple of bucks of postage, effort, or bandwidth if they get a reward. The question is, do you want to work on volume or on margin? Which is why the next picture is the important one:

What you are looking at is the total dollar value for each of those tiers — as noted above, this is going to be approximate, since anybody that pledged between 1 and 10 bucks gets counted as a 10 dollar donor, but that effect of overvaluing is most pronounced at the lower tiers. And look at those tiers — the 10 dollar tier accounted for 15% of donors, but only supplied 2.5% of total dollar value, and that’s with an overvaluation. The peak value points are at 75 and 250, and you can ignore 250 because that’s literally about 90% due to Burlew alone (likewise the spike at 300, which is about 97% Burlew).

In fact, when looking at value, we have to ignore pretty much everything above US$200 — the only tiers above that point with enough backers to be statistically significant are 250 and 300, and since they’re almost entirely down to the stick figures, they don’t apply to ordinary projects by you. So if Rich Burlew’s project was an anomaly that shouldn’t be relied on for predictive power where it’s radically out of sync with other projects, what should we be looking at? I’d like to introduce you to something I’m calling the Value to Count Ratio.

Put simply, if 5% of your backers produced 5% of your value, that’s expected. If 5% of your backers produced 20% of your value, those are people and habits that you want to identify and seek out. 5% of your backers producing 1% of your value are under-providing slackers that are worth less of your time. Divide the value of a tier into the total value of the data to get a percentage; likewise, divide the backer count for a tier into the total number of backers for a second percentage. As stated above, the 15% of backers at the 10 dollar tier only produced 2.5% of value — meaning slackers. How much? Value% divided by Count% gives a ratio of 0.16383, well below the 1.0 level that indicates expected performance. Here’s what the ratios look like:

Remember, value ratios under 1.0 are underperforming, and above 1.0 they’re overperforming. Don’t worry about numbers past 200 — I’ll concede that the ratios get explosively large, but you aren’t going to get enough pledges in that range to make the effort in tailoring your campaign to those high-value donors worthwhile (not that you should entirely ignore them — see below); for our purposes, they’re an attractive nuisance. Instead, we’ll note that 75 is once again a significant value, where the ratio gets into overperforming territory. But remember — 75 is also the peak-value point. This is leading me to somewhat revise my earlier conclusion that the US$25 to US$75 range was the sweet spot.

True, that’s going to be where you get nearly half of your backers (49.91%, to be precise), but it underperforms by a decent interval on value (36.60%; ratio of 0.7333). It’s still where you want to pitch the majority of your rewards, though you should set up some high-value rewards in the US$100 to US$200 range³ to sweep up the generous donors. Note that limited rewards in this range seem to almost always max out their selection when 20 or fewer are offered; it may be the scarcity drives a few on-the-fence types to adjust their purchase upwards. This is probably also where you want to introduce the greatest number of additional goodies unlocked by stretch goals.

So taking my earlier advice of US$25 to US$75 as the prime range, and adding in my new appreciation for rewards up to US$200, we find this wider range accounts for 62.786% of backers and 62.785% of value captured — a ratio of 0.9998, which is as close to balanced performance as you can get. Bringing in the low-value tiers (US$20 and under) only adds another 7% or so to value, but accounts for a whopping 94% of all backers.

Conclusions: You want to put the bulk of your rewards in the US$25 to US$75 range, with some nicer onces (maybe limited availability) up to the US$200 point. Anything in the lower tiers should be minimal cost to you to produce and distribute, since you’ll be producing/distributing a lot of them for not very much income. Go ahead and have some pie-in-the-sky rewards at US$250 and up, but realize it will be rare occurrence that somebody actually takes the bait.

Tomorrow — how some projects are rude and don’t follow the patterns. We’ll see if there’s anything about these outliers that can be made to make sense for the typical project.

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¹ Seriously, please do. My decisions were consistent, but could be considered arbitrary, and the number of projects is at the low end of anything I’d ascribe statistical significance to. Then again, large number of backers. Then again-again, fan behavior is not easily modeled.

²Those chosen values were (all in US dollars) 10, 15, 20, 15, 30, 40, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 200, 250, 300, 400, 500, 60, 750, 1000, 1500, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000. Several projects had listed reward tiers up to 10,000, but no pledges were found above 5000, so that’s where I stopped. Each of these ranges, by the bye, has at least one backer.

³ Many of the campaigns had a fair number of limited rewards, which can throw off these analyses something fierce — but for the most part, they didn’t occur until the US$100+ tiers, which minimizes their impact.

Guys, I may have cracked the Kickstarter code. Gotta crunch some more numbers.

Yeah, still working on my latest Kickstarter thing; there’s 38 separate projects I’m including in this one, so it’s taking a while. So let me point you at some brief items of interest.

• Firstly, I want to show two ways you can purchase the first collection¹ of A Girl And Her Fed (by K. Brooke “Otter” Spangler) in PDF form: 1, 2. One may note that both copies of Rise Up Swearing contain the full content of the print book, minus the bonus art on the get-Otter-to-sketch-this-page page, because hey, no pages. They are in all ways identical, except for the price.

  One of these versions is identified as To Own (for US$5.00), and one as To Give To A Friend (for US$2.50). Naturally, there’s no way for Otter to tell whether the copy is for you or for somebody else, you’re on the honor system here. I actually think this is a great way to get an established member of your audience to help spread the world-of-mouth to people that may like a comic, by making it easier for them to do so. It’s a PDF, so the production costs are already sunk from the print version; getting half the usual price is better than none, when pretty much by definition it’s going to somebody that never would have bought it in first place due to not knowing about it; in the case that new somebody likes it, they may well become a paying customer in the future. I’d be surprised if I didn’t see this model adopted by other creators.

• Attention, residents of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and surrounding areas: Andy Runton² is coming to see you next week. On Saturday, 16 June, Runton will be at the ToonSeum³ at 1:00pm for a demonstration and signing. No special charge for the event, but there is the regular admission fee to the ToonSeum which is only five bucks if you’re 13 or older and one single dollar for children 6 and over. That’s as good as free, and Andy captivates kids as well as anybody this side of Patrick McDonnell. Grab yer kid, grab yer Owly books, and go meet a humble, talented guy who will most definitely put a smile on your face.
• Attention, residents of Boulder, Colorado and surrounding areas: Chris Yates isn’t coming to see you, on account of he lives there. But he will be dropping by FACTORY|Made creative lab/design incubator to teach a workshop of wooden puzzle making. The fun starts on Sunday, 17 June from 12:00 noon to 6:00pm; tools and materials provided, just bring your imagination and a willingness to get all swoopy and curvy with a scroll-saw. I imagine room will be limited so that participants aren’t sitting around all afternoon waiting for their turn, so advanced registration is recommended; call FACTORY|Made at 303 927 0802 and please note the US$60 registration fee. If you’re uncertain as to whether or not Yates makes stuff that’s up your alley, check out his work here (where, I hear through the grapevine, he’s having a sale).

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¹ Disclaimer: I wrote the foreword for this book, but I don’t get anything out of pimping it here, other than a sense of satisfaction that a work I really like might find another reader or two.

² Who, yeah, technically doesn’t do a webcomic but Owly is great and it’s in the spirit of independent owners and it’s my blog so shut up.

³ Who, yeah, aren’t devoted to webcomics either, but they do a lot of good exhibits and events and they got the funk.