BoB Annual Meeting & SENTIENCE Week 2 Kick-off
Band of Bards held its annual meeting on April 18th. This is something we have to hold as a legal requirement, not just because we like to have self important meetings. Since it would be silly for Chris and me to just talk to each other about things we already knew, we invited the Bards as well as the Honorary Bards (invites to all our annual meetings are part of that reward). The idea was to make this a bit more fun and to be able to share important info with the people who chose to work with us, the little comics press that could.
I thought I’d share some of the highlights from that meeting in the BardBlog, as well as some important updates on the SENTIENCE campaign.
Like most “year in review” type things we talked about the successes, failures, and lessons learned in 2021. I think we were both a little surprised when we realized there wasn’t a whole lot to talk about on the failures side. That’s not to toot our own horns, but I think we both expected to stumble a little more than we did in our first year. When we did fall short or muck something up we tended to correct ourselves pretty quickly and use it as a learning experience. Failure is part of the process to success. You cannot be perfect, you can only know that you will fall short at times and that the true failure is to not reflect and improve when you do.
Looking forward to 2022 and beyond we talked about our distribution plans with Ingram and Buy Small Press, as well as our application to Diamond. We’re expecting to hear from Diamond by the first week of May, so we’re a little on the edge of our seats for a few weeks. Securing distribution through Diamond is no silver bullet, we still have to do the work of convincing retailers to buy our books. It is a huge step forward though, one of those benchmarks you have to pass if you’re going to hope to sell large numbers of comics. Fingers crossed for good news.
FROM THE STATIC was also a major discussion point. It’s our first anthology and a chance to work with a ton of amazing creators. It’s also a bit of a happy accident that so many great pitches came in and we are in the process of discussing the development of two dozen more stories into stand alones. This will be a way for us to solidify our publishing schedule for 2023 and a large chunk of 2024 too. Having some long term stability like that is something I’d point to as a significant accomplishment for a new publisher.
Not only does this help us position Band of Bards for the near future, but it also helps us project some firm growth and manage our catalog. Everyone wants to grow big and grow fast. Too much growth will shut you down almost as quickly as no growth. Being mindful to not outstrip out capabilities, not getting caught up in our own enthusiasm, and smartly plotting out year-over-year growth is how we will set Band of Bards up for long term success.
Now for some SENTIENCE updates. We took a hard look at Week 1 of the campaign over this past weekend. Some things stuck out. Chief among them was that people appeared to be balking at the price after the Early Bird offer expired. While we all believed the prices we set were fair and reasonable for this work, the reality is that if it was a barrier it needed to change. So we knocked $2 off both the digital and physical copies in the main tier of rewards. Anyone who backed after the Early Bird expired will have their pledges adjusted to reflect the current reduced price when the campaign concludes. We also reduced the price on our 4 logo sticker pack down to $12, you get 4 stickers for the price of 3. Some more details on the oversized BoB logo with Archibald the mantis were also added in. It’s a $5 sticker and we wanted everyone to see just how premium of an item it is as a 5”x5” holographic vinyl sticker.
You may have also noticed that we reduced our funding goal. Kind of a bold move, so let me explain. Early on in our discussions with Zoop it was made very clear to us that anything could be changed after launch. This helped with pre-launch anxiety as it took a lot of the guessing game out of play. We knew that if we were a little off on anything it wouldn’t kill the campaign. I think that’s a strength of Zoop as a platform. It also made me a little overly aggressive in our budgeting.
That’s on me and nobody else. The reduction in our overall funding goal reflects a more conservative initial print run. The upside is that reducing our initial goal has also helped to bring our stretch goals into focus. So we are now running with an initial goal of $4,000. Our first stretch goal at $5,000 doubles our print run (with BoB paying some cost out of pocket). Second stretch goal kicks in at $6,000 and will help us get a start on funding FELL WITCH, the next title from Elyse & Dany. The third stretch goal kicks in at $10,000 and will be a straight creator bonus.
Keeping things simple when you can is pretty important for a funding campaign. We prefer to roll with funding goals that do not add complexity and help drive more comic production. Speaking of production, Chapter 1 should finish up this week. We’ll be sharing some more artwork from that chapter, and everyone’s favorite Yeti will have an exclusive preview of Chapter 1 to share with you shortly.
Cool and exciting stuff is happening. We’re just getting started on a jam packed 2022. Please consider backing SENTIENCE, or sharing it with your friends if the title isn’t your cup of tea.
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