The B&B Campaign Has Come to a Close!

The Bullets & Bourbon: Reloaded crowdfunding campaign has officially ended!  We were able to raise just over $750, putting the campaign at 75% of its goal.  Fortunately the unfunded $250 was for unexpected costs and an expanded print run, so even without it I was still able to order up a batch of physical copies to get shipped out to everyone who wants one!

Bullets & Bourbon: Reloaded is not the first project I've crowdfunded - that particular honor goes to Rangers of the Midden Vale back in 2021.  That was a real learning experience in promotion and distribution.  Kickstarter has some solid distribution tools that make it pretty easy to follow up with backers to collect shipping addresses.  Itch (to my knowledge) doesn't have that same functionality (which was a speedbump for my oft-collaborator NondairyGiant while we worked on NUKED! A Post-Apocalyptic Knave Hack). Fortunately this was easy enough to work around since I now have a website and eStore.

The biggest difference I've found between running the Bullets & Bourbon: Reloaded crowdfunding campaign and Rangers of the Midden Vale (and even NUKED!) is promotion and sharing.  KS has a powerful marketing tool that gets the word out to backers very quickly (most of my backers for Rangers were people that found out through "Other Projects You May Like" links on the website).  Meanwhile I didn't have access to those same tools via itch (which isn't a complaint!).  I also stepped away from a lot of social media, which makes sharing difficult (it's like I deliberately chose Hard Mode for this project!).  Not having direct access to Twitter and Facebook definitely made it harder to get the word out about B&B.  Fortunately I have several friends and collaborators who were more than happy to shout about my game from the virtual mountaintops.

What I did have with this project was the amazing ZineMonth community!  I had joined the Discord server last year, but NondairyGiant had done most of the heavy lifting regarding networking.  Given that B&B is a solo project I had to put on my big boy chaps and go talk to strangers on my own and found them to be extremely kind and welcoming. Folks were willing to review my page and provide feedback, I connected with other creators for cross-promotions, and even found some backers! If it wasn't for those wonderful people, I probably wouldn't be writing my post-mortem from a seat of success, so thank you to that wonderful server!

For whatever project I plan on releasing next, however, I will probably step away from itch.io and check out Crowdfundr or maybe go back to Kickstarter.  I think this platform is great for digital sales, but it's tough to generate the same amount of buzz and interest as some of the other crowdfunding tools (and honestly itch's "crowdfunding" is really just a repurposing of its sales tool).  You'll still be able to find digital copies of my games and projects for sale here, but the initial funding will be carried out elsewhere.

Before I sign off I just want to remind everyone who backed at the physical levels to check your email to get the redemption code to use on my webstore. If you didn't get said email, please reach out to me at sean@macmakesthings.com and I'll make sure you have everything you need!