@SheltieMum asked about using Kickstarter to finish off the last of the Amulet Rampant audiobook, and my answer started getting so long (and crunchy!) that I thought I'd make it a general post. It exposes a lot of my thinking about how to assess profitability and risk, which may or may not be helpful.
The short answer: I'm not planning on using Kickstarter to raise the money to finish the PG3 audiobook, because I can't think of a way to do it that would make me money.
This is important because I can no longer do projects 'for the love.' Everything needs to pay me as well as anyone else. And audiobooks are always 'for the love.' I've made a profit off exactly one of them, thanks to the enormous Bookbub that ran on Earthrise... and even then, the audio sales paid off only the cost of that book's production, and part of Book 2. (That was a 17,000-unit sale month, so you can understand the scales required for a return on investment.)
But I ran the numbers, because it's better not to trust your gut when there are numbers are involved.
- Every finished audio hour costs around $200 that I give directly to the narrator. And that's to sell direct. If I want to sell at retailers it's closer to $375 an hour.
- After the audiobook is finished, I can HOPE to see one copy of it sell a month. (My average for all 30ish of the audiobooks I have is around 5 copies a month. That's not 5 copies of each title, that's 5 copies in total, despite having 30 titles).
So I make no money on the audiobook after it's at retail, functionally. We still have over half of the book to go, which gives me another 6 to 7 hours to buy... call it, conservatively, if I don't want the 'for sale at retailers' option, about $1250. I'd have to bump it up to $1750 to cover taxes and fees and fulfillment of prizes. So, say a $2000 Kickstarter... which would pay the NARRATOR. Not me. If I wanted to profit at all off it, I'd probably have to double the pricetag, particularly since I won't make almost any money at retail so this is the only profit I'd ever make off the audio edition unless some unicorn fell from the sky.
Now we're up near $4000, just to fund the audio edition of an older book most people already have. This is important because it limits the attractiveness of my prizes. Most readers will have e-editions of a book that's been available for years, and probably also paperbacks. Signed/doodled paperbacks of this book could be purchased on Etsy, so no guarantee those will have enough takers. Since I build my Kickstarters to use a limited number of premium prizes to make the full amount, you can see how not having access to even one of those premium prizes guts my chances of making the goal. With all my typical prizes already reduced in value, that leaves me with only the audio as a new prize, and as you can guess from the sales figures, I don't have a ton of audio 'readers.'
Which is not to say I couldn't try it, but this is the point I go into the historical data. I've run two audio-edition KSes, and both were anemic performers. The Heir audio campaign only made $1864 (which meant that I had to pay the remaining price tag on the narration... we didn't hit the stretch goals that would have paid for all of it). And the Vow and Wings audio, which was a combined KS, only made $2570. Waaaay under the amount I needed to get both narrations paid in full. Just as with the first, I paid out of pocket to finish them off.
It's possible that these did poorly because they were for my fantasy series, but the PG series doesn't sell much better in e-edition than that fantasy series. So while two Kickstarters don't provide a lot of data, if I combine it with my analysis of my audio sales at retailers, I conclude that audio editions aren't compelling to my current audience... neither as products, nor as Kickstarters.
If I had the budget for vanity projects, I'd commission the remaining hours of Amulet Rampant in a heartbeat, out of pocket... I had been, in fact, since the donations so far haven't covered the price tag for the half of the book we've finished. If I could afford to do for-fun projects, I'd see it done. But for the foreseeable future every single thing I do has to have a good chance of making a profit, and projects that I know won't, I can't greenlight. :/
We could buy lottery tickets? I'd totally do it if I won the lottery! And if you gave me some of your lottery money, I'd plow it into all the audio you could request.🙂
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
- Pen: Moonman Starry Glass dip pen, Mars: https://www.jetpens.com/Moonman-Starry-Sky-Glass-Dip-Pen-Mars/pd/31536
- Paper: Strathmore Writing Series 500, lined: https://www.jetpens.com/Strathmore-500-Series-Writing-Pad-8.5-x-11-Lined-50-Sheets/pd/15322
- Ink: Robert Oster, Rose Gilt Tynte: https://www.jetpens.com/Robert-Oster-Rose-Gilt-Tynte-Fountain-Pen-Ink-Shake-N-Shimmy-50-ml-Bottle/pd/25170
In which I talk about the paper, the paint, and the experience of oils versus gouache. Fun stuff, will do more.
Thank you Locals supporters! Your contribution to my art war chest here is what's powering these experiments and videos. For now I'm keeping them public but I may start doing some subscriber-only videos if you all are interested.💖
Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.
Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!
Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461
Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.
After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...
A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.
It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)
I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....
One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.
Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.
We have forgotten how to listen.
Increasingly, we have also ...
What if I told you that, after years of requests for the return of my Stardancer.org gallery, I was in the process of recreating it?
Because I am…! RIGHT NOW. flail
CHALLENGES
First, let me tell you why I haven’t had an online art gallery since stardancer went down:
I did not want to put thousands of images on free gallery sites (like DA) because it would be a ton of work, and I wouldn’t have any control over the site (“what if they go down one day”, “what if they start charging per-upload fees”, “what if they have copyright policy changes I don’t like”, “what if they start using their corpus to train AI”, etc, etc, etc). Can you imagine dumping hundreds of hours into uploading stuff only to lose it because the site owners made questionable decisions? Ugh.
I wasn’t capable of coding my own gallery and I didn’t like the gallery plugins for various content management systems. I could have installed a package on my hosting service, but none of the ones I saw were customizable enough, or did ...
I'm just about done collecting all my notes to begin "Red Honey", a lot of which involves looking for sketches... and this one, I overlooked until just now, is of Kediil and Serel. I love toned sketchbooks! They are so satisfying.
Anyway, next week, we begin!
We’re just about at the midpoint of 2025, so I thought today would be a good day to do a Jaguar check-in! What a weird year it’s been. Very busy, family-wise, with lots of both good and challenging changes; I am using up a lot of time on that, but how is that news? You know how it goes.
My current major project is finishing up the second Jokka collection and mailing all the Kickstarter prizes. That should be wrapped up next month sometime, when we start the Red Honey serialization. I tell you, it’s a wild to be scanning old sketchbooks, only to find sketches of the Red Honey characters from the 2000s! This story has been on the backburner a long time! I also unearthed a lot of sketches from the development of the jokka.org website, which I used the wayback machine to archive (as much as possible). I’m thinking of restoring some amount of it to my current website, which is my other major project right now: my website. I feel like ...
We once allowed our neuters to rule us; they raised up a glittering kingdom, one that rotted from its core the longer we permitted that offense against nature to continue. When we refused to address that imbalance, the Brightness and the Void Themselves smote the World, so powerfully that nothing was left of that time save fearful rumors, whispered across generations.
To this day, the World suffers from the blow Its divine siblings struck against It. We should be more careful of our virtue… or we may not survive the second lesson.
