SAMIDOON UPDATE 4 - GOALS & PROMOTION
Hi there,
At time of writing, we’re two weeks into being live, with 9 weeks to go in the initial pre-order campaign. We’ve also raised about 1/4 of our intitial funding goal, $1000. That is so wonderful and if you have already backed, thank you so so much! If not, there’s still plenty of time and today I want to update you on why the goal is where its at, what we’re currently doing to promote the project, and where we’re going.
THE GOAL
If you look at the tracker bar on our store page, you can see that our initial funding goal is $4000 USD with a little message about why that’s the number and what the money goes to. I want to dive a little bit deeper.
Our ideal initial print run is around 500 copies. With the standard physical book order being $20, it means we’d be looking to get around 200 pre-orders to cover that goal (20 x 200 = 4000). That’d leave us with 300 copies in excess. About 50 of those would be reserved as complimentary copies for our contributors and support staff and some extra copies in case of damages or other needs for replacement. And that would still leave us with 250 copies, half the print run, where all proceeds for the life of those books just goes directly to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, as well as the proceeds from any future digital sales.
The $4000 goal is a little higher than the expected costs. If everything goes to plan, for a 500 copy print run, including printing the books, shipping them to the team for distribution, and any sort of additional overhead—that number should be closer to $3000—we’re going up to cover if there is anything unforeseen that happens and potentially to start donating a larger sum to the PRCS earlier!
If we don’t hit that goal, this isn’t an all-or-nothing campaign like you may see on crowdfunding sites. It doesn’t mean that the project doesn’t happen or that you don’t get your books or anything like that. It means we set a smaller print run, that in turn costs less, and do the exact same thing we’re already promising. So there’s no risk on that side, like you might otherwise experience. This is just like pre-ordering any other book or comic.
PROMOTION
I mentioned crowdfunding sites a moment ago and wanted to follow up on that a bit. We aren’t hosted on a crowdfunding site. We built this website ourselves. We built all the promotional materials ourselves. And we’re doing the legwork of talking about it ourselves. There may be some media to come—feelers are out there with folks who are interested in covering the campaign—but our primary source of telling folks about it really is word of mouth and social media output. Our amazing contributors are putting out their efforts where they can—those of us who have additional blogs or mailing lists or whatever are talking it up there as well—but ultimately, we don’t have the major marketing machines of publishers backing us up. We don’t have the recognizability or, again, support assets of a Kickstarter or other big crowdfunder to help push. We’re talking about Palestine and raising money for it, so we are often working against the algorithm of most of the big social media sites. And we’re largely a bunch of creators who have other things going on in our lives—other projects, other responsibilities, day jobs, etc.
All of which is to say, I am so proud of how far we’ve already come. I know I will be proud of how far we will go. And I thank you profusely for spreading the word and helping extend our reach. We truly could not do this without you.
THINGS TO COME
That is about it for today’s update. We are continuing to look at shipping options—hopefully at some point we’ll be able to have better options for folks in the EU. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be showing off previews for the last two stories that will be in the anthology. And we’re going to keep trucking on this.
Thanks!