I like transparency when it comes to money matters. I know when we all see the Kickstarter page it looks like there’s a whole lot of money there, but even this morning (7/17),  we’re at $8.700, and we’re still not quite profitable yet. I’m confident that with April’s help in advertising the project that we will sell out, which is fantastic. We may even sell out during the Kickstarter phase.

I did not figure the artist payments out correctly AT ALL at the beginning. First, the production expenses are higher than I had originally thought, and the charity payment is technically the licensing fee to use Regretsy, which is considered an up-front payment (an expense). So the total production expenses come to $9600 before the project becomes profitable.

How I got this figure:

Printing $5460

Licensing Fee/April’s Charity Fund:  $2000  ($2.00 per deck)

Lowball estimate on shipping Kickstarter pre-sales decks: $1000 (this will likely be more than that – it’s an estimate)

Bank fees charged by Kickstarter and Amazon: 10%

I am not sure how many decks will be left after this amount is raised through pre-sales and backing donations, but it will be something around 500 decks. The sale of those decks will be the project’s profit. And that is the pile of money that is available to be shared among the artists and the charity. Remember that everything sold via kickstarter is subject to their 10% banking fees. I know it sounds usurious, but my online credit card processing place (ccnow) takes 9%.

Artist’s Payments

The minimum artist payment will be $8 per deck, which works out to $0.10 per card in each deck sold after break-even.

I’m going to offer a $2.00 commission for each deck sold though this website after kickstarter is over via some sort of affiliate program, That way, anyone can help sell decks and make a little money from that. That is assuming there are any decks left after kickstarter funding

I am getting $2.00 per deck for order fulfillment, management and administration. The bookkeeping and periodic payouts will keep me quite busy until the decks are sold out.

Any profit over this will be distributed to the artists based on number of cards per deck, OR donated to a charity  OR a combination of the two, depending on how much money we’re talking about. Which we don’t know yet.

Bottom Line

This means if we sell out, everyone will get AT LEAST $50 per card.

Card Awards

Right now (7/17) I have  160 decks available at wholesale prices. If you think you can afford it, you may want to consider getting 10 decks to sell after production – the profits will be yours to keep if you want. There is a good chance I will move the unsold wholesale decks over to the retail pile if I see the remaining retail cards fall under 100 – Let’s face it, the project makes more money from retail sales. If you think I should do this sooner, leave a comment about it.

I have reserved 100 decks that are not currently allocated to kickstarter rewards. I will be buying 30 decks at wholesale – 10 are going to the AA shop, and I will be selling or giving away as gifts the other 20. 25 decks are going to the artists who created the artwork for the decks.

That leaves 45 decks “unspoken for” – I can add them to the Kickstarter reward pool, or we can send some of them to people who bought prints or original art (that would be 29 decks, max). What do you think?

Prints and Artwork

I have it set up so that each artist is expected to donate one print of card artwork to the project, to spread the cost evenly across everyone – if we sell out of all the print rewards. It would probably be a good idea for when the funding drive is over for you as artists, to offer prints in your Etsy shops. Just a thought. We’ll figure out the logistics for this in August.

Aftermarket Accessories

Someone had a great idea in the Regretsy forums this week, when I was angsting over money, about offering to make and sell custom boxes and bags for the decks. I think this is a wonderful idea, and I encourage the Regretsy community crafters to come up with some awesome fuckery for keeping this deck. I think it’s a great way for Regretsians who didn’t contribute to the deck itself to get something back from the project. And I’d be more than happy to help pimp out their work in the fall after the deck has shipped out.

A final word

Once the deck arrives, there will be an incredible amount of packaging, labelling and shipping to do. If anyone on the project lives in the NY Metro area, and would like to spend an afternoon at the Eagle’s Nest boxing tarot decks, let me know.