Hey guys,
all Lines books are now printed & shipped and I'm closing the project. Producing such a project is always a bit of a black box when it comes to calculations, so I thought it would be interesting for you to see some final numbers. 💰 So let's break it down, and further below you'll find a personal opinion on if such projects are worth doing.
Income/Revenue:
Kickstarter crowdfunding: 19.323,00 EUR
Indiegogo second round funding (preorder): 2.322,00 EUR
Income includes everything from book prices to shipping and fees.
Minus backers who didn't pay/failed credit card bookings: 715,00EUR
Minus taxes (VAT): 3.455,92 EUR
Net income: 17.474,08 EUR
Expenses:
Book printing: 5.438,00 EUR
Additional Prints (Postcards, A4 art prints, etc.): 498,62 EUR
Packaging Material (Envelopes, Labels, etc.): 174,57 EUR
Kickstarter & Indiegogo Fees: 1.046,50 EUR
Credit Card processing & bank fees: 748,09 EUR
Misc (ISBN numbers, Transport, etc.): 180,00 EUR
Shipping: 2.545,24 EUR
Expenses total (net prices): 10.630,99 EUR
What's left for my pocket (before income tax) is 6.843,09 EUR.
Final Conclusions
I wanted to work on a solo book project for years, and I'm glad I finally did it! There's something special to making a physical item that includes so much of my art, and sending it out to supporters all over the world.
However, given the time and effort that went into this project (not just the artworks themselves, but also writing, layouting, building the campaign, shipping etc.), Lines was more passion project than source of income to me. I've invested around 250 hours of work into making this, and this doesn't include a majority of the art (27/30 illustrations already existed and I only had to export them as outlines-only files).
If you take my final income from this and divide it by those 250 hours, you get an hourly rate of ~ 27,40 EUR. That isn't even remotely close to my usual hourly base rate of 90 EUR. Would I do something like Lines again? Yes! But only if the circumstances are right (meaning I don't have to stress about it from a financial and time side).
Of course there are ways to increase your net revenue on such a project:
Print and sell more books (price-per-piece goes down and your margin goes up)
Find a publisher and let them market and scale the book
Make cuts on the quality of the book, for example use a cheaper online-printer
Then there's a last point that can't be measured with money: the learnings. With doing such a project, it's like founding a start-up. You learn an incredible amount of new stuff, and that's worth a lot! This will always make up for the effort, but if your main goal is to make money from such a project, I'd rather not do something physical but try to sell digital items! (We're going to look at that as well, in my freelance advice guide that I'm working on)
Any questions about this? Just comment or DM me! :)
CheersStefan