@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.🙂