BackerKit Surveys for the Queens and Pirates Kickstarter campaign are Going Live!

Hey everybody! This is a message for our Backers from the Queens and Pirates Kickstarter campaign, which I'm trying to post everywhere so that it has its best chance of being seen...

We are beginning to send out the BackerKit surveys, so please watch for the email in your inbox or spam folder.

We are starting with the "smoke test" which sends out 5% of the emails to test the system. After that, they'll all go out. So, you should have your survey in your email box today or tomorrow.


When you get it, you'll see that it has a "deadline" near the top. Don't worry about that, you can still fill out the form just fine after that date. The deadline field was required, so we picked a "we hope to start shipping around this time." day.


ABOUT THE PDFS:

The PDF links for the Queens and Wizards book went out in emails from DriveThruComics back in September. If you didn't get it, (check your Spam folders!) we are happy to resend. Don't trust comments to be seen, though, please contact us through the Queens and Pirates campaign page (click on "Created by Studio Foglio" in the upper right to find the blue "contact me" button) to be sure we see your message.


Cinderella PDF links will be announced later, when I've got the files ready.


Thank you, everyone!

Don't Worry, it's Not a Medical Emergency

I’m arranging to sell Douglas Shuler’s original art for the Uthden Troll Magic the Gathering card. I love this painting. It’s my favorite card in the game. I love Scandinavian troll folktales, and the art of John Bauer and Theodor Kittelsen. I’m also very fond of orcs and goblins and all those other cranky, toothy guys from the stories, so of course I fell in love with the angry little Uthden Troll when I opened up my first pack of Magic cards back in the day. I’ve been thrilled to own the original artwork for so long.

I’ve had the painting since made a trade with Doug Shuler back when the game was new. I got the troll in exchange for the Cuombajj Witches artwork that I did for the Arabian Nights expansion. He’s hung on my wall for years, in a dark hallway that I like to think was a comfortable place for both trolls and original art.

Okay, the painting is one of my treasures, so why am I selling it?

Two reasons. First, I’m a little alarmed at how valuable he has become. Original Magic art has started selling for crazy amounts of money. According to various internet sources, my own painting of Shahrazad, from the Arabian Nights expansion, sold for $72,000 last year. I think I probably originally sold it for around $500, and was delighted to get it. Amazing. Having something like that lying around my house makes me jumpy. (I've already relocated Mr. Troll for safe keeping, because, yikes.)

Second, and more immediate, I need the money. I’m actually writing this all up because I have had a lot of very kind people checking on me to ask if everything is ok. I’m really touched. When you work in your own Studio and seldom leave your lair, it’s nice to be reminded that people care. So I want to fill everyone in on what’s going on:

Our latest Kickstarter campaign funded earlier this year, and we had planned to have the latest volume of the Girl Genius Collection printed in time to ship in September. That left us with nothing really new for the Summer conventions, which cut our profits at those shows to about half what they usually are. That perhaps shouldn’t have been a huge surprise, but…well…it kind of was. I am aware that I need to improve my grasp of business finance. I’m working on that pretty hard now, actually.

In addition to the bad sales at the Summer shows, the book is now coming out much later than we expected. There are a lot of production reasons for this that I won’t go into. The new collection is looking great, and now it’s on the way, so hooray.

So now, we’re dragging along into what are always the lean months of the year, but it’s worse than it’s ever been because we timed things badly and our cash flow is completely, as we say in the very serious World of Cartoon Finance, borked.

I want to stress that I am well aware of our privilege here. We are not in any real danger, we are merely temporarily embarrassed for money. There are people out there who truly have money problems, and have no way of getting out from under them. Compared to those folks, we have nothing to complain about. We’ll get back on our feet, and hopefully plan things better in the future. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have to do something about it, though. I have people that rely on me to pay them regularly, and I have to make sure that I keep my medical insurance, or this will become a medical emergency. (A lot of you know that I have Crohn’s disease, which has sent me to the hospital a couple of times. No big deal, I have it a lot easier than most, but I’d better keep that insurance.) I also need to make sure that, when the boxes of Girl Genius Volume 18 show up, I can pay for the postage to ship them all out to our Kickstarter backers.

Studio Foglio is a tiny company. It’s me and Phil. Cheyenne does the color work freelance, and Chris helps us with the email part time. My Mom and kids help out once in a while when we have envelopes to stuff. For a tiny, often-overwhelmed company like ours, Kickstarter has made a lot of things easier. It allows us to get a general idea of how many books to print, and lets us pay for the print run out of profits from the book itself, rather than scraping up the capital in other ways beforehand. It is also fantastic for getting the word out.

Nevertheless, taking preorders through Kickstarter carries a lot of responsibility. I’ve backed several campaigns where the rewards never shipped, often because the people behind them ran out of money and/or just wandered off. I just shrug when it happens to me, it’s part of the Kickstarter experience, I guess, but I also promise myself to NEVER be that guy. I can’t be that guy. Even if I was okay with taking people’s money and not delivering, which I am absolutely not, (Lawful Good, thanks, ) I can’t afford to do something like that. After all, I’ll have another book coming next year. And the year after that. What I’m saying is, sometimes it takes me a while, but I must get the Kickstarter rewards out. It’s a sacred obligation.

So. I’ve borrowed a bunch of money to keep us going. I’m trying not to spend much, and I’m selling off some Magic the Gathering art. I’m also getting back to eBay sales, digging through our own original art, and looking at places to post things like art prints. I’ve also found a bunch of old, silly T-shirt designs that we never posted anywhere. I’m also trying to find some things to post over on our Patreon page to thank all our Patreon backers, who’ve really made a difference to us through all of this.

In conclusion, we’re on rough seas, but don’t worry about us, we’re keeping the ship above water. It’s going to be a lot of work, but we’ll get through it like we always do, and we’ll probably even be better for it. We’ll have new things for sale when we can, and this Summer, maybe even a second new book. Oh, also, the new Girl Genius novel is coming out this Spring! Watch the main page at www.girlgeniusonline.com for all our announcements, and thank you all so very much for your concern and support! I’ll let you all know how the auction goes.

--Kaja

*One thing this is doing is forcing me to actually write blog posts and cope with social media, something I’m really bad about. So that’s good, I guess?

*Also, speaking of original art and Kickstarters, there are still a few of you that I will be contacting about the original art from the name-insert pages. I need to double-check your addresses. Thanks!

We're going to Capricon in Chicago, February 14-17

Capricon is this month! This year, Phil is Artist Guest of Honor.

Also at the con will be: Seanan McGuire (Writer GoH), Doug Rice (Fan GoH), and Carrie Dahlby (Music GoH). I’ll be tagging along with Phil to watch the fun and do a reading from the upcoming Girl Genius novel. We’ll also be doing a new Girl Genius radio play, so if you’re up for an impromptu reading in front of a forgiving (we hope) audience, and want a part, talk to Phil at the con!

The convention is held in Chicago, at the Westin Chicago North Shore hotel, and runs February 14-17.

Ok, remember that Kickstarter campaign I was on about earlier?

Here's the proper information about the state of the campaign:

Our latest Kickstarter campaign: Girl Genius: Kings andWizards has now funded, and we’ve posted a few stretch goals! The Envelope of Madness is now active: and a variety of extras are added as the campaign rolls on. So far, we have a very nice poster, a cute wasp eater sticker, the bookmark, TPU student ID card, art card featuring Agatha and Colette, and, of course, the autographed bookplate. We have also now reached the deluxe medal stretch goal!

The campaign ends on the 19^th, and we plan to ship the books straight from the printer for everyone who fills out their BackerKit survey in time. Just like last time, we will have the post-campaign BackerKit store open for a couple of weeks, but keep in mind that, this time, backers of the Kickstarter are getting a special “backers-only” price on the campaign exclusives–like the medal and campaign patch. We hope you’ll visit, if only for the free-to-all-visitors downloadable wallpaper posted near the bottom of the page.

Can I put a link in a caption? Let's find out!

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.

Rambling about Kickstarter Fulfillment and Shipping

The Kickstarter Backer Contact Form seems to be working well, we spent quite a bit of time over the weekend tracking down lost packages and packing up replacements for damaged or mispacked shipments. Chris, who does part-time work helping us deal with the mail, goes through the form responses and sends me a list of things to re-send or check into, and I check into them and then pack up books and re-send them. It's been a bit harrowing, but I feel good about getting the customer service more under control.

All this has really bringing home to me how much I love the new system we're using--BackerKit and MakeThatThing and Stamps.com for anything that needs to be shipped from my house--because the old systems have me digging through spreadsheets and huge binders full of packing slip copies to find the details of five-year-old pledge rewards.

For the first several Kickstarter campaigns, we packed and shipped everything from our basement. That means that my Mom was down there for ages packing things, then taking them to the post office every day. Sometimes our friend Carol from Cheapass Games came in and did the same thing, mostly for Beast of the Rails, if I remember. We weren't able to get tracking numbers back then. I have now learned how much I love tracking numbers.

Also for the first few campaigns, I was not in charge of the whole circus. That makes it even harder for me to go back and check on the crunchy details of things.

I really like having MakeThatThing ship the bulk of the rewards, and if we're on a good schedule, we can even have books mailed directly from the printer to our backers. That saves a lot of trouble, but means that we have to have our backer surveys in by the time the printer needs the shipping list. We weren't able to do that last time, and it really bit me hard. I'm setting up a new campaign for Kings and Wizards (the 17th Girl Genius collection) and this time, I've built in time to have it shipped from the printer. I love getting the book to our backers right away, it takes a lot of the stress off.

Well, I should stop "thinking out loud" about it here, and get back to work. I've got that next campaign to set up, and the pressure is on hard.

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!