Afterlife: Wandering Souls Post Mortem
How to learn from all the horrible mistakes you’ve made before…
31 May 2019 marked the end of the Afterlife: Wandering Souls Kickstarter – Angry Hamster Publishing’s fourth official campaign. To date this has been AHP’s most successful campaign with 501 backers and roughly 17.5k euros raised. Before I completely lose myself in developing this book I wanted to take a look at the campaign and do a review of everything before I forget the trials and tribulations in a hail of book-making joy.
A lot of this post will be me (Liz) looking back at all the terrible choices I’ve made as a publisher, so come revel in past misery with me and enjoy the current success!
Note: This post mortem skips over the playtesting phase of the game, which was an entire 4-year journey unto itself and would deserve its own post.
Marketing
Before the Kickstarter launched I was already busy promoting the game as much as possible. Our last campaign, Familiars of Terra, felt doomed to fail from the start when our website was hacked, taken down, and subsequently all my marketing contacts didn’t receive my emails until very late in the Kickstarter game eg – a week before the campaign was set to launch. A smarter woman than I would have postponed the campaign, but I just didn’t want to do that (for absolutely no good reason besides – I am stubborn) and that was a… stupid mistake. I was not going to let this happen to Afterlife.
Ignoring the problems linked with Familiars of Terra, I pretty much marketed Afterlife the same way (sans lateness). I created a quickstart, sent it out to as many RPG media outlets I could – podcasts, websites, YouTube channels – and waited to hear back. The one noticeable difference in my marketing strategy this time was that I focused a lot more on actual plays. I demoed my game on the Gauntlet and also played it online as many places as I possibly could.
I honestly feel this was one of the largest factors in hitting Afterlife funding goal (5k euros) in under 24 hours. There’s an inescapable magic in playing your game with someone. People can love your art and pitch, but without seeing how the game runs, what being a player is like, I feel people are less likely to back.
Obviously, running so many online actual plays isn’t easy. It’s the largest time investment I do marketing-wise. Not only is it 3-4 hours of sitting down and playing, but it is also hours of preparation, setting a playing time, getting players, etc. Not to mention you’re putting yourself out there – you’re running your game for people you don’t know and opening yourself up to criticism not only on your game design, but also on your GMing skills, pacing etc. Honestly, it is exhausting.
I personally loathe playing games online, whereas I actually love running games in person, but talking to a screen for 4 hours at a time isn’t my jam. And this has absolutely nothing to do with the players I had games with, because they were all beyond lovely. Online I miss a lot of the fun of playing a rpg which comes from everything around it – small side conversations before the game, munching on snacks together in the break, being able to gauge players reactions by their body language, and more. Not only is it hard to gauge player’s reactions, but if you are actually looking for feedback on your game it can be hard to illicit that feedback from your players who may feel uncomfortable, because they’ve only really met you through a screen.
Now, saying all that – I still feel playing my games with a wider audience was a key to Afterlife’s funding success and I would urge any indie developer to do the same.
Kickstarter Creation
WITCH: Fated Souls was AHP’s second most successful campaign to date, being roughly 10k euro over-funded and with over 450 backers, but financially the campaign was a person disaster for me. When I started the campaign I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a ‘legit’ publisher yet, I just wanted my book to be out there in the world, which led me to horribly over-promise on the campaign and not be able to even begin to cover the cost of everything with the money the campaign earned. I was so excited for my game to be released I offered most of the stretch goals for free, which meant that I didn’t have enough to cover them…
What did this mean for WITCH? Well, I didn’t want to disappoint all the people who’d given me money to create my game – so instead I emptied my own savings (and a few paychecks) in order to pay for everything – and solemnly swore to my bank account that would never ever (ever ever ever) happen again.
Coming back to Afterlife (and the campaigns after WITCH) most of my Kickstarter planning centered around money and making sure the campaign would earn enough. The monster of an excel sheet I built for this campaign is both a thing of beauty and an unwieldy pedantic beast whom I know will always still miss something I’ve overlooked. Which is why a healthy buffer is my best friend during every Kickstarter campaign.
I say this with no amount of ego, but at this stage of my career I was pretty sure (95%-ish) that Afterlife would fund and reach one or two stretch goals. So the main tension for me was trying to figure out a funding goal that would allow me to fund early enough to get the ‘success’ boost Kickstarters get when they’re funded early vs. having a goal that says – this is a campaign for a “serious book” and I don’t just want 200euro. I settled on a 5k euro goal – knowing I’d need to make it to at least the first stretch goal in order to cover all my costs.
Kickstarter Campaign
As the chart above shows, Afterlife reached most of it’s funding goal on the first day and then the rest within 24 hours. This was very different than Familiars of Terra, which struggled to make its goal within the first week. I feel Familiars had a more commercial appeal, animal familiars, versus Afterlife’s theme of recovering memories in a surreal world, but it still did worse.
I put Afterlife’s success down to two things – the first is the marketing, which I spoke about above. The second is the fact that Afterlife: Wandering Souls is much more in theme with what AHP fans have come to expect out of our company. The game is dark, emotional, and weird – our fans like that – which meant we had people who loved WITCH coming back for Afterlife. Whereas, Familiars of Terra is a generally sunny about heroes and animals, which doesn’t necessarily dovetail for our audience.
After the first two days of the Afterlife campaign pledges took a nose dive, as is pretty normal for Kickstarters. I expect this, but it does make me re-think a month funding period. Ask any creator and they’ll tell you how excruciating the middle part of a Kickstarter is. It’s a daily slog of wanting to keep backers interested, worrying about dropped pledges, and wondering what you could do to boost your campaign. Till now I haven’t found a magic bullet to make the middle of a Kickstarter fund better, but instead have changed my own personal outlook on the dreaded-middle – to not worrying so much about it so I don’t drive myself crazy.
…and then Success?
Then, in the last 72 hours something happened that I honestly didn’t expect – Afterlife: Wandering Souls nearly doubled the money it’d earned up till that point. I’m still not 100% sure how that happened and am blown away by it. I do have a few ideas though and I’m assuming it was the perfect storm of events, which I’ll try to go over now.
As you can see above, Kickstarter has this new amazing (and agonizing) feature which shows you how many people have followed your project and how many turned into actual backers. Before the last 72 hours Afterlife had a 6% conversion rate and after, the Kickstarter ’72hrs to back this project’ email went out it ended at 19%. So in the last 72 hours roughly 88 people found the project tantalizing enough to back – yay! Thank you!
This however still does not account for other 100+ people who backed.
I also had an email sent out to my DTRPG customers reminding them about the campaign (thank you to my awesome DTRPG rep for helping with this <3), this surely helped. Also, a lot of our backers shared the project – which always helps, because word of mouth is the true magic of any good Kickstarter campaign.
Finally, a personal highlight from me was seeing a Tweet from Monte Cook Games, a company of which I am a huge fan of. Plus, it got a good amount of likes, which is always positive for the word getting around about your game!
The End
This campaign was certainly a roller-coaster of emotion and work on the book is just getting started. Overall, I am extremely happy with how the funding went. I was expecting a moderate success (for my company) of around 9-10k so getting 17k was amazing (well 15k after Kickstarter’s cut). It has also been a lot of fun chatting with backers on Afterlife, who were really vocal towards the end of the campaign. Part of the fun of a Kicsktarter is the feeling that you’re in this project together with everyone purchasing the book and it is always a part I enjoy. I love meeting the people who buy my games, because I always wonder who they are. Are they like me? Is this their first game? Why’d they back? It’s always so cool to hear from them.
Now, the real work starts as they say. I am very happy I don’t have to look at Kickstarter every day any more. I really love making books writing, going through edits, doing layout, requesting art, playing my game with people, and everything else… basically everything except getting bills cause honestly, who likes that?
Kickstater, well it’s a necessary evil there are parts I love like meeting cool fans and getting to make books! But there are parts I loathe, like my failure to budget for every eventuality and spamming good-hearted people who follow me on any type of social media with near-daily reminders that they should buy my game…
Once I wrap up production on the book and get all the pledges sent out I’ll post another update so that we can take a good look at how everything went.
Till then have a great day!
-Liz