Setting up a new Kickstarter campaign, and thoughts on stretch goals

Cheapass Games is off on the JoCo Cruise, which is lovely for them, and not too bad for us, since it means they can't frown at us over all the art we're supposed to be getting to them for the new edition of the Girl Genius The Works card game. I'm told they might be demoing it on the cruise, so if you're there, lucky you, and see if you can get in on it! When they get home, we'll have a whole bunch of new art for them, and our newest Kickstarter campaign up and running.

I spent all day today fighting a nasty migraine, and getting the campaign ready. It's probably the weird changes in the weather, we've been having snow here in Seattle, which is extremely odd for this time of year. I love it, but I do sometimes get headaches when the weather changes. Bleh. At any rate, I've got everything but the video set up. I really don't think I can get away without some kind of video this time...I had to post last year's campaign without a video and it just didn't feel right.

The other thing that doesn't feel right...running a new campaign when I still have old stretch goals that I haven't finished up. They're all digital fun-type things...and I have to get the book out, or we won't be able to pay people like our color artist Cheyenne and our email helper Chris and our local grocer Art...but they bug me. I have a partially-designed box for the first 13 Girl Genius books taking up all the space on my work table, but I've had to leave it there while I set up the campaign. (I'd been hoping to squeeze it in before the campaign went live, and I still might, but time will tell.) Underneath it is the test printing of a PDF dust jacket for the hardcovers, which I need to photograph (or film) myself using, for illustration purposes. So people can see how it's meant to be used when I post it. I still have to figure out how the heck the Jägermonster toast goes. It turns out none of the Jägers can decide on the traditional one, and then they all start fighting, and everything I come up with sounds stupid. We'll see. I'm still working on remastering all of our old desktop wallpapers, I'm about two-thirds of the way done with that. I'm trying to do one a day, at minimum, but it's amazingly slow going. It turns out there are a lot of them. So...I'm really trying not to add any more of that "I will do X" kind of stretch goal. I have some ideas for this campaign that will help me avoid that sort of thing, at least until I finish up my old ones. If you're interested in the status of our uploads, they're all listed at the bottom of the Kickstarter Information Page I've set up on the Girl Genius web site, so that I have the list all in one place and can keep track of it. I want that monkey off my back.

And of course, there's the big monkey on my back, the fob from the City of Lightning campaign. It's got a profile face on it, and it has been the biggest manufacturing hassle I've ever had to deal with. I think we've finally got it right, but I won't know until next Monday at the earliest. I'm really excited about it, though, I designed it because it's exactly the one I want, and I can't wait to actually have it in my hands. I've never put a picture in this blog before, so I'm going to try it out now. Here's the latest set of notes I sent to the pin maker:

I'm expecting metal samples soon, and then we'll be nearly there. Right now, I'm off to bed. I really should stay up all night and get that video done, but...eh...I'm sleepy.

Our new "Kickstarter Backers' Contact Form" and information pages

I've made a lovely new information page with up-do-date status reports for all of our past Kickstarter campaigns.

I've also made a lovely new "Contact Us" form for our backers to use, once they've looked at the status reports and realized that the thing they thought we never sent to them probably just got lost in the mail. (We were not always able to send tracking numbers in the past.)

Our friend Carol Monahan (from Cheapass Games) is seeing to it that our old pledge managers are shut down. Carol's helping us get our ducks in a row so that we can get our next book out, so that her company can get the Girl Genius : The Works card game out. We are all in each other's pockets around here. Someday I'll draw up a chart. ANYWAY:

 She's making sure that there's a proper note on the landing page of each old pledge manager, telling people that, although the pledge manager is closed (like the ancient tomb it is) it's not too late to contact us for customer service. Because it's not. We still have little hoards of most rewards squirreled away, just in case.

The thing is, all those old Kickstarter campaigns are getting harder and harder to keep track of. A message on an old campaign page is easily missed, (although we do try to look things over regularly, it seems to happen more than we'd like.) So we're trying to consolidate things, to make things easier for our backers, and to make things easier for ourselves. Hence, the new information page. I hope it helps!

The state of the Studio, and some thoughts on Christmas Eve

LETTERING THE PAGE FOR TONIGHT:
It's Christmas Eve, and I'm trying to get tonight's page lettered before my Mom comes over for dinner. Some years we post a wallpaper or a funny picture or something else that means a little less intense work leading up to the holiday, but this year it's just another page. There have also been years when we've put up a secondary story and told everyone that we've "gone on vacation." Once or twice that's even been true, we have had a couple of guest artists. Usually, though, it's a joke: of course we're not actually on vacation, since we're still writing, drawing, and posting something on the same schedule.

JAGER CHARM STATUS:
The three Jägermonster portrait charms arrived yesterday, not the samples, but the actual big heavy box of charms. We are still waiting on the Jäger sigil charm, the final proof will be showing up a day or so after Christmas, and if we like the new finish on it, we'll go straight to production. When all four designs are here, we get to bundle them up into sets and put them into the nice little cloth bags, and off they'll go to TopatoCo, to wait for the medals to arrive. When the medals come in, they'll all get shipped out, and we'll be done with that side of the Incorruptible Library Kickstarter.

MAILING ORIGINAL ART:
My office is full of cardboard mailing tubes, the last of our old supply. I had hoped to get the original art shipped out before everything shut down for Christmas, but it didn't happen, so my new goal is to get this cleared out before the New Year.

WE HAVE NO MAILING ADDRESSES FOR OUR BACKERS WITHOUT SURVEYS:
I'm going to have to do more to let people know that we don't actually have their addresses for mailing Kickstarter rewards until they've filled out a survey. I've talked to a couple of people who just don't realize that we NEED the campaign survey filled out. Kickstarter has their address, but WE do not, and the only way we get it is through the survey, whether we use the very simple one that Kickstarter provides, or a slightly fancier one like BackerKit. (We used BackerKit this time.)

JAMES ERNEST'S THE WORKS CARD GAME
James and Carol from Cheapass Games came over on Thursday. They brought the card list for the new version of The Works card game and we spent several hours going over the attributes of each character represented on the cards. We also made some decisions about which characters to include, and which could safely go by the wayside or at least wait a while. It was fun, and we only got about halfway through. Next week, we're all going to go see Star Wars, and then, if we can talk about anything else, go over the second half of the list. I think James is hoping to have this new edition out by San Diego ComicCon 2018, which would be lovely. It will be nice to have something new on the table that isn't an expensive high-number volume of an monster ongoing series. Heh. I should probably talk about that in another post, sometime.

THANK YOU, AND GOOD NIGHT!
So, I'm off to get the last of my work done. For those who celebrate Christmas, I wish you a very happy Christmas indeed, and for those who don't, I wish you a nice normal day of health and good cheer. As for the New Year, which rolls along no matter what we do, I hope it's a wonderful one for all of us!