Hello my friends in Misery!

Happy New Year, and thank you to everyone who joined the livestream last night! It started at 5pm MST, and it lasted until 9.45pm MST! I was live for nearly 5 hours, as you guys kept the campaign alive by finding new backers, adding items to your pledges, and more, having us in overtime for almost 4 solid hours after the campaign was supposed to end! It's always a delight. You can watch it here if you want, and see the chaos in that chatroom!

For those of you who missed it, be sure to check the final hour stream out on the next project you back from me! It's become a tradition. (Your earliest chance will be on the Goblin's Journey enamel pin, plushie, and ita bag project launching in 20 days!) In those final hours, we saw cheaper discount pledge tiers and add-ons appear, and we saw new items get added to the project in the form of The Twisted Idol, a hand-made idol in the theme of the project that I will be making for 3 people, as well as a Commemorative Mug for Enoch, our artist, who we found out during the live stream I am keeping in a basement with a creature that I threaten to release any time we didn't have enough backers.

The Twisted Idol is a weird item I won't put available on the survey, but the mug will be available for anyone to add to their orders in the pledge manager. Likewise, the last minute cheap tiers and add-ons were only available in those final hours, and will not be made available in the pledge manager.

If you've backed a previous project from me, you'll know I like to share the numbers whenever possible. I like to be transparent for a lot of reasons, but more than anything so people can see where their money goes! That always feels nice to me, at least!

We raised $77,800 on the dot with 812 backers.
In context, this is $22k more than the Hot Housewives raised, but $80k less than the Normal Tarot made, and $570k less than the Alleyway Oracles. I had no idea what to expect here, because I don't run projects in December if I can help it. I've been told it's not a good time to do so. But it did pretty decently I think, considering that I have so many projects going on at the moment. Overall, I'm happy with it.

As the 43rd project/product from me over the years, I'm feeling good. This is one that I intend to make a staple in my business for years to come, so this startup helped me found it and pay the artist what he deserved.

Now, let's chat about where the money goes:

First, it must be made clear that I won't receive all the money. People's pledges will fail, some people won't fix their payment methods, some people are paying over time and I won't get all their funds until 4 months pass.

Based on these numbers here, if everything comes through exactly as imagined price wise and money in wise, we have just $1492.69 leftover. I could, if I want, pay myself $1500 and call it about even for earnings.

But from experience, these numbers won't be right. Maybe it turns out the Disk in the deluxe edition will end up being made differently, costing more or less than expected. Maybe tariffs on China will inflate these hugely and I'll have to go somewhere else to get it all made, throwing the entire project into disarray and changing every single number on manufacturing. Maybe people overcommit and I lost 2k-5k as people's cards fail to charge and they don't fix it. 

You never know! 

What I do know, is that right now I plan to have about 110 standard copies in hand to sell after the project is over, and 250 deluxe copies to do the same with. I needed to make at least 500 deluxe sets to make some of the components reasonable to manufacture, so it seems at the moment I'll be hanging out with more of those than standards, which seems quite backwards.

If they sell, we'll be looking at something like $36,000 in earnings. Now, if I sell through New Titan (the manufacturer who takes care of www.alleymantarot.com to sell my items for me) they take a cut that I agree on for their work handling the items, so the business would bring in something like $25,000. But that's all potential earnings in the future, nothing right now.

And that's the wild part of things with indie creation, it takes a lot of work and sometimes no money comes in when it's done until it gets setup to become more passive income in the future. So I march on to the next project to set up another stream of passive income, and the next, and the next. But the most exciting thing to me is that now the Misery Tarot is covered and I'll never have that big $30k lump sum to pay up front again if I want to make more, so on a reprint I can just focus on manufacturing costs! 

So now what?

I'm going to get the pledge manager set up in the next week or so, open the pre-order store, and get you surveys so you can add commemorative mugs that I know you deeply desire. (You do, don't deny it. No, I have no idea what it will look like yet.) Otherwise Enoch will continue to turn in cards, which I'll be revealing Mondays, I will get the guidebook together, the disk, the cloth, the mug, the dice, and we will watch the final pieces slot into place over the next few months!

On the way, I'll mention things that are happening elsewhere-- the enamel pin project later this month, the game in March, the Oracle Dice's final edition in May, and a new, actually regular normal tarot in July. A comic in September, mayhaps? Probably something in October, maybe over on Kickstarter to mix things up.

So stay tuned for Misery Monday updates, and for me to let you all know we're sending surveys out for you to update your pledges, give us addresses, and get more fun items! : )

Thanks for the fantastic start to the new year my friends, I'll see you all Monday. Have a good weekend.

7DA
your pub gob