Amazed.
Envious.
Astonished.
I could go on, but you’re smart people so I think you probably get the point. The huge Order of the Stick Reprint Drive ended earlier today and it looks like Rich Burlew should have no problems whatsoever getting every last one of his out of print books back on shelves again, not to mention all sorts of other goodies that clearly he was just pulling out of his ass every time he heard that everyone had blown yet another one of his goals justly out of the water!
$1,254,120 from a total of 14,952 backers in 30 days.
An average of about $84/backer, $1,742/hour.
To have that kind of a dedicated readership would be, well, see previously mentioned words above. It was almost amusement in itself to watch the “community discussions” that took place in the comments sections on Kickstarter because these weren’t just people offering up a singular donation for a set prize. There was bartering for reward levels and one-upping each other and bets on how long it would take to crack $X, almost like an RPG being played out by the masses to collectively score Rich as many points as possible! At every turn when I would check, my internal dialogue would be, “Well, they’ll get to $X, but it’ll probably taper off soon and $Y is just way too much money…” and then the next day, $Y was in the rear view mirror and they were bearing down on $Z off on the horizon…
Good god, that’s A LOT of money!
Of course, as Dave Kellett pointed out interestingly enough on Twitter, we mustn’t forget that the entire $1.25 million is all taxable income, so Rich can probably plan on giving a healthy $400,000 at least back to the government in taxes. But still, talk about a problem to have! Hopefully he thought about that long before he started the actual drive, though, and took his full shipping and taxes and etc… into account to ensure that he can still make a profit. I’m sure that he would’ve had to, to be honest with you – how else could anyone even realistically do business without knowing what their true profit margins at the end of the day actually look like?
More so, though, I sincerely hope that he has a good handle on exactly how he’s going to fulfill almost 15,000 rewards because I can speak from experience that the quickest way to sour someone’s opinion is to take their money and then subsequently take forever to actually give you the thing that they promised you for your donation. I had it happen to me with another webcomic artist on Kickstarter a year or two ago – I helped to pre-pay his next book printing and then the guy took an entire year to actually ship my copy out, all the while he was selling other copies in his store and heavily promoting them on Facebook. It rubbed me the wrong way so bad that when it finally came I didn’t even care to look in it and I almost never read the strip online anymore because my mind goes back to how I wanted to help support the guy and he took advantage.
But hopefully that won’t happen with this one, though!
I have done other Kickstarter drives since and all of the rest have been exactly as promised, so I can wish Rich nothing but the best as he now attempts to tackle the undoubtedly overwhelming task of actually living up to being able to raise over a million dollars for his creative works! At a glance, the guy’s got something like 25,000 books to ship out, 9 new stories to write including 3 custom ones based on reader requests, just scads of other swag to send out as well, not to mention having grabbed the title of most successful creative Kickstarter of all-time, I’m sure a few people will want to interview him, too!
Again, though, what an awesome problem to have… 