So yesterday in addition to the actual books, there was the final invoice from Marquis. Shipping was $304, so with the slight print overrun, I ended up paying $4004.80 for 420 books. That works out to about $9.54 per book. If all people had chosen was the $25 “you get a book” option, I would have broken even at 160 books. Not including shipping them out; I’ll see how much that ultimately comes to and do the final accounting. The Kickstarter closed at $5928, minus like $600 for Kickstarter and Amazon; I am pretty sure that the bonus prints and shipping the stuff is not going to cost $1.5k!
As is, I’m shipping out 105 books. 106 now, as I got an email asking for a copy after posting photos to FA/LJ/Tumblr/Twitter. Since he wasn’t part of the Kickstarter, I’m charging him a couple bucks extra for shipping. And I sold an extra one last night in person; I passed off the first two at a party last night, and had a few more books in my bag just in case anyone else wanted one. Which the hostess did! So yay.
Overall I’m pretty pleased with these numbers. It’s not “making a living” numbers but it’s also not “throwing money away” numbers. I’ve also got 312 books that will sit in my closet and hopefully get sold over the course of the next year; I’ll be selling a few to one of the local comic shops today for starters! At a reduced rate of course but still, that’s that many more books out of my hands. And every time I look in my closet I’ll have a reminder that I want to EXPAND MY CON PRESENCE; as is, I’m doing ECCC and AC this year in addition to my usual rounds of FC and RF. I’d applied for an alley table at Sakuracon but ended up way down on the waiting list, so that’s probably out unless someone got in and wants to share.
(Memo to self: look up local comic shops, drop them an email asking when there’s someone with authority to buy stuff in the store, bring ’em some books.)
(Also probably toss some at the local bookstores. I really feel like my market is not necessarily in comic shops. And maybe try to donate one to the local library when I’m there dropping off books that are due today, as well!)