Hey folks,

I accidentally set the sale for the itchfunding campaign to end at 00:00 on the 28th of February instead of the 1st of March, so I guess I'll do this post right now instead of tomorrow. This post will be a thank you to all who supported the project this month, a quick look at my plans for it and some campaign stats for future reference for myself and other creators.

First off, I'd like to thank you all for your overwhelming support! I started this campaign with very low expectations of how the itchfunding process would go. The goals I did set for the campaign already felt like they were stretching the limit of what was possible for a small creator outside of the Kickstarter sphere, but we broke through all the goals within 12 hours! So thank you so much <3

My plans

I've been very busy this month with finishing a bunch of commissions for other ZiMo projects. Because of these commissions and your support, I have a little more financial breathing space to fully dedicate March to writing the first draft of the whole zine and incorporating the playtest feedback I've collected. After that is done I will send it off to Ava so she can work her magic to make it more readable and I will focus on making illustrations myself and commissioning additional art. I'll try to do some periodic updates on here too, but if you'd like to stay up to date and take part in the conversation that shapes the zine, consider joining the Discord. (Side note: if you have feedback or thoughts on the rules/content, you can always shoot me a message on Discord or on Twitter :) )

I hope to have the final zine ready this summer, so I'm aiming for mid-July but this is in no way a hard deadline since I'd rather publish something great a little late than an unfinished zine on time. So please bear with me.

In regards to the additional funds the campaign has collected: most of it will go towards commissioning additional art and paying Ava closer to what she is actually worth. A small portion will be used to support me while I finish the zine and to fund print copies when it's done.

Once again thank you for supporting this project and making this is all possible!

Some stats

Okay, so the next bit will be some general stats from the funding campaign. I'm posting this is mainly because the funding bar and total disappear automatically. So this is my way of preserving some of that information for folks to reference when researching options for their own projects. This kind of info was hard to come by when I was planning this campaign so this is my way of making it a little easier for the next person wanting to do something like this. 

This does however come with one disclaimer: I did not plan on doing an itchfunding campaign during ZineMonth. I was working on TEA for a few months already but the decision to do a campaign came on the last Monday of January. The rest of that week was me scrambling to make my draft presentable, feverishly writing a playtest scenario and cobbling together a preview from notes and illustrations I had lying around. So honestly, I did not expect it to do as well as it did.

With that said, here we go:

• The project launched on January 29 at 15:00 CET 
• The first goal of $300 was reached within 5 hours
• The second and main project goal of $800 was reached when I was asleep, just within 12 hours.
• The project ended on February 28 at 00:00 CET with $1,892.92 (236% of the $800 goal)

As of right now, the project has 166 sales and 280 community copies were made available (of which 255 are claimed).

What was available during this projects funding campaign:

• A free PDF, available for everyone, containing the playtest rules.
• For $9 (Plus $0.09 of the -1% campaign sale) two PDF files. One containing 2 preview spreads detailing a region of the world with some locations and random encounters, and a short timeline of the setting. The other contained a short adventure scenario to playtest the rules. Every sale also made one available as a free community copy.
• For $18 (Plus $0.18 of the -1% campaign sale), all of the above + one PNG of a smiling buffed figure thanking you for being a community here. Every sale at this level made 5 community copies available.

Promotion

I really hate doing promo so I didn't do as much as I probably could have. The main things I did:

• I teased the project a bit on my Twitter and Discord in the week leading up to it.
• I did a big Twitter thread talking about the project at launch. Most of the tweets later in the month linked back to this one.
• I  wrote an update tweet every time a goal was hit and retweeted some of the things people we're saying about the project.
• At launch, I made one post on Reddit r/osr to show off the project.
• At launch, I linked to my Twitter thread in some Discords that had a promo channel.
• I linked to it on my Instagram, but that had almost no effect since my Instagram only has a small following.

Things I didn't do that also helped:

• PlusOne Exp and Prismatic Wasteland briefly talked about the project on a stream about Pris' big Kickstarter project the Barkeep on the Borderlands.
• The KNOCK! guys wrote a little section about the project in one of their Kickstarter updates.
• Other ZiMo projects for which I did some illustrations also linked to my project on their project pages.

Some stats that might give you an idea of the personal reach I had when I started the project:

• Twitter  - followers on launch: 1,247 / followers right now: 1,621
• Instagram - followers on launch: 286 / followers right now: 325
• CULT OF THE LIZARD KING Discord - cultists on launch: 105 / cultists right now: 154

I hope this preserved data set gives some people some new insights and maybe help them in planning their own project. Feel free to shoot me a message on Discord or Twitter if you have any questions about anything regarding this project or my limited experience running an itchfunding campaign.

If you are still here after all that, thank you and I hope you have a good rest of your day!

Cheers!

Emiel