Holy cats! Talk about a GREAT surprise (especially on a Monday!).

They look, feel, and even smell AWESOME! (I love “new book smell!) And I can’t wait to be able to share them with the rest of the world.

We’re still on track to send copies out to backers sometime in June. Right now, the rest of the print run is being completed and assembled, and then it will make the long, trans-Pacific boat trip. But for now … I’ve got two very real copies that I can grin stupidly over.

That happened again recently, and after I finished writing the reply email, it struck me that maybe I ought to share the advice more broadly. At the very least, by posting the advice here, I’ll have something to point back to rather than try to re-write the advice each time.

So, without any further ado, here is what I say when someone asks me for advice about Kickstarting:

I wrote up some of my thoughts on Kickstarting back in August. All of them proved to be accurate, based on my latest experience in Nov/Dec. The posts are here:

Kickstarting
Don’t Fear the Reaper — Learn from Him!
Thinking about Kickstarting

Beyond that, if you’re inclined to spend a few dollars, I think that the advice that Monte Cook & Shanna Germain put into their ebook Kicking It! is all solid. (But that, for no small part, is that Monte and I agree on just about all of the points.)

I think the Top 3 pieces of advice I could offer, though, are:

1. BUDGET WELL. There are all kinds of hidden costs in whatever you’re doing, and you can’t go back and revise your target number. Make sure that you’ve got all your budgetary “i”s dotted and “t”s crossed. Make sure that you add in a “fudge factor” on top of that. And make sure that if you only hit your target number dead on, you’ll still be okay.

2. STRETCH GOAL MANIA. Stretch goals are a big part of most successful Kickstarters, and when things are going well it’s easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm when choosing and announcing stretch goals. Be just as calculating and clear-eyed when you budget out the money (and TIME) involved in providing the stretch goals. Bad calculation here can undo the good budgeting you did at the start.

3. EYEBALLS, EYEBALLS, EYEBALLS. The biggest thing you need to do during your Kickstarter is spread the word. I’m STILL getting email from friends (FRIENDS!) who say they had no idea that I ran the Littlest Shoggoth Kickstarter in Nov/Dec … and I spent A LOT of time promoting it in ALL of my social media, paid ads, and as many other venues as I could get into. And the real goal is to get out BEYOND your friends and personal voice range into the broader fan base for whatever it is you’re trying to fund. You’ll need to spend as much time as you can find promoting, advertising, linking to, and otherwise trumpeting your project AND–perhaps even more important–getting OTHERS to do so for you.

It was a success as far as Harper Collins was concerned, but I’ve always wished I could have managed to get the broader RPG-playing community on the bandwagon.

Water under the bridge, now. It’s been two years since my work on the project ended, and all the material has been released. So imagine my surprise when out of the blue the folks over at Bring Your A-Game contacted me and asked if I’d be willing to do a Q&A about the Warriors Adventure Game.

It was a lot of fun, to look back on the project and talk about it from an RPG design perspective. I can only hope that maybe a few more gamers (and, in particular, gamer parents with kids in the right age range) will be intrigued enough to take a look.

Who knows, maybe the game will be a late bloomer after all.

You can read my Q&A on the Bring Your A-Game site, and get the free Warriors Adventure Game for yourself at the official Harper Collins site for the Warriors series.

We had a total of 360 backers, so I’ll be doing two new pieces of wallpaper art.

Thank you to each and every person who backed, blogged about, retweeted, handed out fliers, or just told friends about the project. Without you, this would have gone nowhere. Truly, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

The marketing phase is over, but there’s still plenty of work for me to do. I’ve got to go over the post-campaign info from Kickstarter and figure out all the steps I need to take.

I’ll post updates on the Littlest Shoggoth website and the Littlest Shoggoth Facebook page.

Thank you all again! I can’t wait to get the books, lapel pins, t-shirts, e-books, post cards, and wallpaper out to you. This remains a labor of love … and like other forms of love, it’s best when shared!

I’m of two minds when it comes to thinking about the Littlest Shoggoth Kickstarter. On the one hand, it seems like it’s all I’ve been doing for the longest time—and that’s pretty much the truth (between managing and promoting the fund raising, and working on getting the files ready for the printers, I’ve worked on very little BUT shoggoth-related matters since November 12th). On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that just 7 days from now the fund drive will be done, for better or worse.

Likewise, Week 4 was one that had both highs and lows. Since last Sunday, we’ve had one of our BEST days of fund raising, and two of our worst. Now, I always knew that this would be an uneven road . . . no one expected there to be any real consistency in the flow of funds. But as we draw toward the completion of the drive, each less-than-robust day feels more and more impactful—like missed opportunities that will never come again.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I truly believe that the most important factor in achieving a strong finish is to have people OTHER THAN me talking about it. That’s not to say that I’m going to give up talking about it myself—that’d be ridiculous. But it is saying that people EXPECT me to talk about it, and after four weeks of me blathering about it pretty much non-stop, nearly everyone whose ear I have already KNOWS about it. The word must be spread to NEW ears . . . and quickly.

So, in the coming days you’ll certainly hear me trying to rally the crowd (and that includes YOU, if you’re reading this) to make posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumbler, personal blogs, and anywhere else you speak to the world. If possible, I’d love for these posts to include the words “The Littlest Shoggoth” and the URL for the Kickstarter.

If that bugs you . . . well . . .  first of all, I apologize. That’s not my intention, but I can sure understand how this could get annoying. Second of all, you have my permission to ignore me entirely for the next week . . . just mute my channels for seven days or so. Because after next Sunday, the Kickstarter will be over and I’ll be through.

This has been a huge learning experience for me. Certainly, it’s been successful (in that I’ve generated enough money to print the book), but at the same time, I wish I’d had all this information BEFORE I started . . . because I’m sure I could have done this better, start to finish, with the information I now have. That’ll have to wait, though, for whatever my next Kickstarter is, and I’m pretty sure there WILL be a next one . . . eventually.

First, though, I’ve got to wrap up this one, and then deliver the goods!

So thanks for your support so far. I’d quite literally be nowhere without your help. Now, I hope you’ll join me for this final week of the campaign . . . and that we can all be celebrating the successful conclusion at this time next week.

This, of course, only encourages me in my notion that it’s important to keep pushing to get MORE of that kind of grassroots chatter, but here’s what I’m NOT asking:

• I’m not asking you to suddenly turn into “shills” for the project.

• I’m not asking you to spam your friends with repeated entreaties to pledge.

• I’m not asking you to give more money yourselves (unless, of course, you see something in the project that you WANT to spend money on … in which case, totally go for it).

What I AM asking is that if you want to help get The Littlest Shoggoth to hit the next couple of stretch goals, you make a post about the project in the next couple of days, and then one more toward the end of next week.

There are over 500 people who have “liked” the project’s Facebook page (not to mention over 1,500 that clicked “like” on the Kickstarter page itself). That’s a pretty massive force of low-pressure promotion, if we can mobilize ourselves. My goal is by Tuesday to get a quarter of us to post, blog, tweet, or otherwise put up a public message that contains the words “The Littlest Shoggoth” and the URL for the Kickstarter. My secondary goal is to get that many folks to do so again during the following Wednesday-to-Sunday streak.

Believe it or not, the Kickstarter campaign WILL be ending a week from Sunday (Dec. 16), so there are only 9 days left to raise funds … and then it’s all done.

Thank you again for your support and help thus far. I’m just trying to make sure we get across the finish line with a strong push. In the end, if you pledged (or even plan to buy a copy later at a brick & mortar retailer), it is in YOUR interest to help … because the money raised will go to making the final product better for everyone.

In any case, the fund drive has passed the $7,500 mark, which marks the first of the existing stretch goals. I am now committed to sending hand-signed post cards to everyone who bought at the $25 level and up. So I spent some time the other day finishing the art, and putting in my order for the cards themselves. It all was relatively easy, and I expect the bundle to arrive sometime next week. Now I’ve just got to go down to the post office and buy a whole bunch of 32-cent stamps.

In other Kickstarter-related news, a sample of the Littlest Shoggoth t-shirts arrived yesterday, and I couldn’t resist showing it off. Looks pretty neat, eh?

The shirt itself actually looks green in person (it seems more black in the photo, maybe because of the stark white walls behind me), but otherwise, that pretty much captures it. Right now, I don’t have any plans to sell the shirt in any venue other than the Kickstarter . . . so if you want one, this might be the only chance.

On the other hand, I’ve been thinking about going out to more conventions and starting to get Artists Alley tables, once the book is printed and I have something physical to sell. If I do that, it probably would be smart to print up some extra t-shirts to sell, too.

We’ll all just have to wait and see on that one. All I know is that I’VE got MY shirt already.

The idea basically is . . . ummm . . . to teach your kids to game. Something non-electronic. An “old-fashioned” board or card game, or a newfangled one. A roleplaying game or a storytelling game. It doesn’t really matter, though I suggest this: Play at least two games—one the kids already know and like, and one that’s new to them.

Don’t have any new games? Well, of course, OneBookshelf has a whole category of family friendly games for you to choose from, and a bunch of them are free or very low cost.

Seriously, if playing games is something you love to do, it’s important to pass the torch on to the next generation. You can’t just rely on them picking it up on their own. The allure of electronic games is so much stronger, the emotional rewards are gathered so much quicker, it’s quite possible that modern kids will just skip by traditional gaming, seeing it as out of date and (worst of all) booooooring.

So if you’re a parent, or an uncle or aunt, or a big brother, or just a close friend of a family with kids, plan out some time to play some games this weekend if you can . . . or next weekend. “Teach Your Kids To Game Week” aside, t really doesn’t matter that much when you do it, though I’d suggest playing some games BEFORE the holidays, so that the idea that this is a fun activity can already be in their heads when the week of being cooped up with relatives comes along.

All this talk about holiday and gaming has me thinking that it’s a good time to start putting together a post about games that would make good presents. I know a lot of sites and podcasts and radio shows will be doing that sort of thing soon . . . I’d best not wait until they’ve all had their say, or I won’t be able to have an original idea.

But before I do that, I think I’ll put a post up later this week linking to some of my favorite FREE games that you can find online. Just as a little resource for anyone who takes this screed of mine seriously.

At this rate we’re seeming closer and closer to certain that the stretch goals for color interior and a hardcover printing will be met. And yet, I have my eyes on a bigger prize. A SECRET stretch goal that I only talked about with close friends … that is, until today.

A little while ago, I posted a video update to the backers telling them about this no-longer-secret goal.

If the fund drive can raise $20,000, I will have a professional voice-actor record The Littlest Shoggoth, and I’ll use that as the basis for creating some kind of animated short film using the art from the book. The higher the pledges go beyond that, the higher the production value I’ll be able to put into the film.

Imagine, if you will … with a big enough budget we could get Bruce Campbell, or Clancy Brown, or William Shatner to be the narrator. I could hire a Flash animator, or a small animation studio to make my drawings come to life.

Now, those kinds of dreams will require significantly MORE than the base $20k, but they’re achievable. The key is to get more backers involved. And to do that, I really need the help of each and every one of you reading this.

As I said, there’s only two weeks left in the campaign. If each of you were to do a little promotion and post the link on your social media sights just once each week, we’d see a marked increase in new backers.

If half of you were to print out a few of the promotional fliers and politely ask your friendly local game store (or comic store, or sci-fi book store) to put them by the register, we’d spread the word even wider.

I’m not asking anyone to go crazy or make a pain in the butt of themselves. But I am asking if you’d each just do one small act of promotion … one little bit of helping to ensure that all the Cthulhu fans in your area know about this project.

If we can all do that, I think you’ll be surprised at how big the response turns out to be.

The answer is yes, and the time has come to unveil the add-ons!

+$10 — Shoggoth Lapel Pin: A 1.5″-wide, die struck, soft enamel, full-color lapel pin featuring the smiling face of Squammy wearing his holiday hat.

+$25 — Shoggoth T-Shirt: A squamous-green t-shirt featuring Squammy wearing his holiday hat. Available in sizes S thru 3XL.

+$15 — One Extra Book: An extra copy of The Littlest Shoggoth to stash in your secret occult library, or give it away to another potential cultist.

+$50 — Shoggoth Sect Starter Kit: Four extra copies of The Littlest Shoggoth to disburse as you see fit.

Do you have suggestions for other add-ons? Leave them in the comments . . . I’m always interested in hearing what you think. And if I end up using your idea, I might give you one of the items in question just for being such a clever monkey.