DIY Crowdfunding

TL;DR we're hosting our own crowdfunding campaigns here and also here NOW. Down with the old order, long live the new flesh.

Melsonia has been in operation for over ten years now, and we've made a tonne of books in that time, most of which were crowdfunded. I can't honestly say the experience of running a Kickstarter/Backerkit/ETC has ever been anything other than stressful, excessively time consuming, and broadly demoralising. For years we've dreamed of moving away from them entirely and focusing on making books faster; we have a serious backlog of nearly finished projects that are jammed up 'cos of the one-at-a-time culture of crowdfunding. In reality we're working on several books in parallel and waiting for them to trickle out to insincere fanfare via Kickstarter is a drag! The first step of this move away from cynicism and towards TTRPG nirvana was the Friends of Melsonia subscription, where all our best and most precious supporters gather together and create a stable foundation for us to plan around, and which has already caused a noticeable bump in our production speed on non-crowdfunding books. The next step is to crowdfund our own books, on our own shop, on our own schedule. Which we are doing, starting with two books that have been in development for literally years at this point: The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick, and Witch-War to the Vale of Forbiddiction & Beyond.

What does this mean? Well for starters we can spend less time and money on looking and sounding fancy and more on doing what you and me are here for: more games! In a way this is the natural evolution of crowdfunding, we're just breaking the kayfabe and no longer maintaining the illusion of them being plucky dreams only made possible by generous strangers and returning to the cold reality of them being glorified pre-orders. In the modern crowdfunding landscape no creator turns up with anything short of a mostly finished idea that is well beyond being abandoned if it doesn't make funding, so we thought "hey, let's not waste people's time and just come out and say it!". So here it is. We will absolutely still make these books if we don't hit our finding goal, we're a publisher, that's what we do, however we do have some incentives because it's fun, and there is still a lot of value in knowing how many copies we need to make before we print them.

So why should I support these projects?

Look, I'm not going to try to trick you into parting with you money on a puffed up dream. It's a very simple proposition:

1. Pre-ordered books are cheaper! See the crossed out prices on the books' pages? It goes up when it comes out.
2. If the project funds in the first 30 days then we'll add some fancy extras (check the specific book pages) that we would only be able to do if we knew the book was successful before we go to print.
3. I said we won't cancel the book if it fails to meet our target, and that's true, but a crazy niche publishing house like us runs on good vibes. The targets we have set are legitimately hard to hit, and might fail! If these succeed we'll not only be able to pay the bills for another month, we'll also get a much appreciated morale boost.

How does this work?

You buy this book like any other book on our shop (you can buy other books with it if you like), pay for it up front, and we ship it to you once it's done. If for whatever reason the book doesn't get made we will refund you, because that would be stealing if we didn't, right? Unlike on crowdfunding platforms where we have layers of plausible deniability and you have no guarantee or protections, on here we're a shop and we are implicitly (and explicitly) promising you a book or a refund.

So when do I get the book?

We think this first pair of books will be ready to ship out around January 2026. This could be wrong! It could be longer, it could be sooner, but this is our educated guess.

How do I stay updated on progress?

We talk about what we're doing in our newsletter (scroll down to the bottom of the page to sign up). Feel free to reply to it by the way, we are happy to chat.

Is that it?

Yup. Things don't have to be so complicated.

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Please sir, can I have some more?

Ok, everything below that line up there are some very INDUSTRY thoughts on crowdfunding which may be helpful to other people.

• Crowdfunding has its own consumer culture, distinct from bricks & mortar or regular online shop customers, and it's pretty full on. This is understandable, since crowdfunding is a weird sales system and only attracts people who are fairly deep in the weeds of their given niche. Passionate people make passionate noises, and it can be a bit much sometimes!
• Platforms take far too much money. There is this vague notion that they bring customers to you with their technology and trustworthiness, but I'm not sold. We see the same names come up time and time again on our campaigns, so it's a bit silly to be paying Backerkit for the pleasure. If you have an audience, why feed it into the maw of big tech?
• Crowdfunding subtly (and not so subtly in some cases) push you to zhuzh up you campaign, spend more, do more, add bells, add whistles, until the original idea looks like a pig in lipstick. Don't give in! The world is noisy enough already.
• To their credit, Backerkit do make record keeping a lot easier. 
• When you have been making crowdfunding campaigns as long as us, you end up with lots of crowdfunding pages. Now, on each of those pages is a little chat room which never goes away and you always sorta-kinda need to monitor it for the rest of time. That's... stressful. 
• Numbers go up, nice. Oh no, costs go up, bad. Oh no, labour time goes up, really bad. I feel like I should be able to do it, but the hours just slip away (see infinite chatrooms in previous point).
• It really does feel like you're supposed to be casting a magic spell to convince people to buy your things. It's a kind of marketing that needs you to sell your soul, which I can't get behind.

Ok, I'm done. Go support our books! We can only continue to do these bizarre things with the support of tasteful people like you.