Anthony and Justin thank you so very much! I'm printing out each post as they come . Such a wealth of knowledge it's amazing!
I think I get it much better know. I agree ; $15 sounds expensive.
Another question ! Do buyers prefer decks with custom fronts and backs or would backs be okay for my first set? Would that be too "lazy" ? I've been seeing cards that have these really weird fronts that I doubt people actually "play" with but the backs are lovely. SoI'm unsure what's more important.
Where would I get tuck boxes printed?
A fulfillment service ! With 5000 decks it'd be a must have. Is it common for Kickstarters to make that many sells. I've been seeing rewards of coins ; where are those printed? I've only seen one source mentioned online ; are there any others you could recommend?
Thank you all again!
For certain decks, a standard face is actually
preferred over a custom job. Some poker players don't cotton to using custom-faced decks, especially if the faces don't conform to certain design conventions with decks, like a proper representation of the correct cards as the one-eyed Jacks, the suicide King, the bedpost Queen, etc. A magician wanting a deck for performances will often choose a standard face because it's what a general audience would most identify with - "Oh, just like the ones I have at home, etc."
Having said all that, unless you go hog wild on the packaging and backs, people will be expecting a lower price tag. Standard decks are an order of magnitude easier to design - you're really just making the backs, the tuck box, an Ace of Spades and two Jokers, max. If you use a publisher that has a 56-card deck sheet as opposed to a 54-card sheet, you'll have two extra cards to do something with as well - but again, that's it in a nutshell.
Collectors in general have become a demanding lot - now that they've suckled from the teat of full-custom deck design, most are not likely to want less. Fortunately for you, collectors are really just a fraction of a fraction of the overall market! They buy more cards in general, but not enough to give them outsized influence over the industry as a whole. The majority of the people ordering your deck will be plain ol' Joe and Jane Six-packs tech-savvy enough to know about Kickstarter. No deck project in the top ten at Kickstarter succeeded strictly on the buying power of collectors alone.
Your tucks are typically made by your printer. If you order a deck from USPC and choose Bee Casino stock, they'll hire a subcontractor to make the slightly larger tucks needed - they lack the equipment to do it themselves - and it'll delay the project by weeks. Nothing stops you from using a different printer to make your tucks for you, but it will increase both the cost of completion and the time needed. The vast majority of designers take the easy way and have their printer make both the cards and the tucks.
Fulfillment services... All creators have a choice on Kickstarter when it comes to delivering on their promised rewards. They can either a) hire a fulfillment company for a fee, b) hire a staff to make your project the true launch of a new company, c) use the "pizza party + beer + friends" formula or d) literally do all the work on their own.
The least desirable method is d) - unless you're unemployed or livin' with the 'rents, you have to be punching a clock somewhere to put a roof over your head, food on the table and gas in the car. You will either be spending every waking free moment (and there won't be many of them) to pack and ship your decks, you will hate the world and you'll fall asleep mid-job and drool on the cards or you will fail to deliver and disappoint your backers while they clamor for refunds. Mind you, this isn't impossible - but it will put a serious dent into your free time for days if not weeks, and your backers will remain patient for only so long before they start clamoring for their decks. Making this worse is the fact that if you sell any to a large-ish retailer, you're likely to take advantage of USPC's willingness to drop-ship a portion of your order to them at no extra charge - meaning that the decks will end up in stores
before your backers get theirs.
C) is not really a bad method at all - if you have enough stalwart friends willing to give up pretty much an entire weekend (or two) to help you out. Without that key combination, c) will change to d) in no-time flat. Plus, assuming the friends are indeed there for the exploiting, they need to take the work seriously and someone (preferably you) has to lead the operation to be sure everything's being done right. If you can't be a inspirational leader of men and women, you might as well hire a horde of invading barbarians... This is hardly impossible either, and surely easier than d) if you have the right combination of leadership and friendship working for you.
Almost no one uses b). In theory, Kickstarter is supposed to be used as a launching point for a new company, giving them the leg up needed to get a business off the ground and perhaps even employ a few people on the way. In reality, it's a marketplace, the one thing they've stated flat-out that they aren't. A rare few people manage to make a company strong enough to stand on its own, post-Kickstarter, at least among the playing-card designing segment of creators. More often than not, people keep coming back to the well, making project after project seeking funds on Kickstarter, or they fade away after one or two projects, never to create again.
You can't blame them, really - in the early days, if Kickstarter had as many as three people running deck projects at once, it was unheard of. Today, the rare event is if at any given moment that there's less than
twenty-five deck projects running at once! But the point is, despite their initially-lofty goals, Kickstarter just stands aside, collects their fees, pays your taxes to the government if you make enough on your project, counts the money in the bank - and does little else beyond that. They won't even pursue creators who fail to deliver on projects - they'll tell you that their rules demand rewards or refunds, but out of the other side of their mouths they'll tell you they do nothing to enforce their rules and you have to pursue the case with local law enforcement. It's so much easier for them to stand out of the way and let the money fall from the Internet into their bank accounts, who can blame them for not trying to get people to start making real businesses with real employees on a real payroll that no longer have to rely on crowdsourced funding?
So that leaves a). It's a fine choice if you can afford to part with the extra cash - and for some, the savings in terms of personal sanity are invaluable. But you have to choose the right fulfillment service. Most have no idea of the fussiness of deck collectors, prefer to use the cheapest of packaging materials and hire untrained monkeys to do the packing because they'll work for bananas. You'll lose a hefty portion of your stock with the wrong company. A note of joy in there is that there are companies that give a crap about what you're doing and know how to do their job right - but you might have to pay a bit more to hire them.
By the way, due to the costs of mail and packaging material, most creators LOSE money on their small orders of only one or two decks, unless they price them so high that they're not longer appealing financially. With varying shipping rates to different countries and no real way to have Kickstarter account for those price differences, you'll be "selling" many internationally-purchased decks at a loss. Those international shipments get abused like a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest, so if you don't make the package practically bullet-proof, you'll have people complaining of damaged goods and wanting refunds. And lest we forget, there's also that handful of scammers who will claim they never got their delivery even though they actually did - they just think it's fun to get free stuff at someone else's expense.
Coins - in most cases, if you ask a creator who offered coins which company they contracted for the job, I'm sure they'll tell you, or the next creator you ask will. These aren't exactly industry secrets!
Among the more popular tchochkes are uncut sheets, art prints, coins/card guards, custom dice, poker chips and t-shirts. I've seen whackier nonsense offered though. One campaign offered a variety of jewelry. Some people offer a well-heeled backer the opportunity to have their image on a card - that slowed down a LOT after one company ended up with some really weird-looking dude claiming the reward. One guy I know of offered a high roller a trip to Las Vegas (airfare not included) with two nights at a hotel, a show and a dinner with the creator - where he would proceed to try wringing more money from you as he pitched his idea for his second deck! But the craziest one I've found so far was the guy who was selling cassette tapes and CDs of his music to go with his decks - he seemed confused about whether to be a card designer or a musician. No, wait - I forgot about the project that offered the jigsaw puzzle...that was pretty unique, and that's not a compliment.
As I see it, you should pick a few high-quality items to supplant what your primary purpose is, which is to make money by rewarding investors with decks. Offer stuff that people are actually getting from other campaigns instead of crap they'll never ask for. Limit the number of items you offer - it will make your campaign more complex to manage than insurance actuary tables while at the same time convincing backers that you're actually running a Middle-Eastern bazaar.
I mentioned the word unique as not being a compliment. Do NOT fall in the trap of so many designers who came before you. They tried as hard as they could to make their deck unique, with design changes and added features up the wazoo. In the end, they either made ugly cards or something so unique they barely fit the description of cards any more. Card designs have evolved over centuries - it was a little arrogant of them to think they were going to spend a few months and come up with something that's better simply by being more unique. There are design rules. You can bend them a bit, no problem. You can even break them, but if you do, you should have a reason for it, something more than "I didn't realize that was a rule" or "I want to be
unique." You don't need to be an iron-clad conformist, but there is some truth to the Japanese proverb "the nail that sticks out of the wood is the nail that gets hammered down."
OK, now this is long even by MY standards...
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