So I’m packing my stuff for Emerald City Comic Con (table cc-09 in the Artist Alley if you’re going, stop by and say hi!) and I have realized that book 1 of Rita is damn close to being out of print. I’ve got a box and a half of it set aside for backers of book 2, and I’ve got, like, about 20 copies besides that. And my own personal copy sitting on my bookshelf.
This is annoying in the short run, but in the long run I feel like it’s good place to be in! I printed about three times as many books as I got backers for in the initial Kickstarter, and I’ve sold just about all of them over the past year and a half. That makes me pretty happy. Especially given that I figure I’ll sell my entire remaining stock at ECCC. (I’d also better double-check how many people are getting book 1 from the Kickstarter for book 2, and make sure I’ve got that many books in the boxes marked ‘reserved for KS backers’.)
I’ve marked it as ‘sold out’ on my store, and just did a count of unshipped orders – I’ve got all of one copy on reserve right now, so that’s good. Now to double-check the KS2 backer stock. And start deciding how big a run the second printing will be!
(There is a part of me that wishes I’d done a bigger initial print run, but at the time, 400 books seemed like an impossibly huge number that I’d never move. Even with about 140 of them going out to the initial Kickstarter backers.)
Okay yeah I have enough books to cover all the KS2 backers, plus a small margin of error because I know there were a few people who pledged at a ‘sponsorship’ level and wanted book 1 as well. I’m taking 29 books to the con, and that’s it. Good thing I printed up a new batch of fliers. Sadly I won’t have any Tarot decks either, as I haven’t seen the new box of those LS was sending – hopefully it slipped through the cracks on their end, rather than getting lost in the mail. I’ve been putting off dropping them a line about that; I finally did just now.
As self-publishing problems go, this is pretty much the best kind. It’s a hell of a lot better than “I will have five thousand copies of my first book filling up my garage for the rest of my life”.
edit: pondered the print run, sent off a couple requests for quotes at 600/800/1000. My logic? I’ve sold about 300 copies of Rita 1 in the year after the initial KS; I’m still definitely in new fan acquisition mode and feel confident I can expect this kind of sales for a few years more. And if my sales keep increasing, I should be running out about in the middle of the KS for Rita 3. We’ll see how ECCC goes; if I sell out of what I have than I’ll definitely feel like going higher.