Rewards seem a little nonsensical, I'm not sure why I'd want to pay full for the book up front and not get it for who knows how long. The other reward tiers are basically just asking me to donate money :|
That's kinda how Kickstarter works.
Yeah except as stated, backers aren't expected, at least in the better ones, to front the full cost of a product. As stated, the Wasteland 2 kickstarter sets one up with the full game at 15 dollars, because it's a digital download, and there's no reason to limit how many people get that- especially when the more people donate, the more money they get.
If you have a publisher who is not going to budge on basically giving people a discount at all for funding the creation of the product, then what is the point of having both a publisher
and a kickstarter? It's the publisher's job to have funds to make the product and pay the dude, so why have pledgers back the costs and end up paying
more for the final product?
I understand he wants some up front money to do interviews and get some more art in, and stuff, but either have the publisher pay for that, or give the people who are paying for it to be made a discount. Or break away from a traditional publisher and do print on demand.
There's just so many flaws in the way he's going about this.
This is Joss Whedon saying "yeah a film company has decided to let me make another season of Firefly and put it out on DVD. But I need to front the costs. And if you donate, your reward is that you get to pay more for the DVD than everyone else will."
So the film company isn't doing anything other than making pure profit off of it-- why have them be involved? Even if you really want the project to succeed, that's fine, but it's still a really wonky system that places all the costs on not just the consumer- but the core fans who should be treated with maybe a little more respect. Since they're the ones who are working to make it happen.
Edit: To clarify, there was a wildly popular KS for an espresso machine a few months back. For the lower tier pledges you'd get neat little coffee goodies, like a tamp and a measuring spoon or whatever. The KS was to get money to put the design they had into mass production, to sell for 400 dollars- which is about as much as decent espresso machines run. If you donated 200 dollars though, you would get one of the espresso machine, because they have no problem basically selling you one at cost, or even a loss, because without those sales they would have no money to produce anything at all. People who donate early get a nice discount on the product, and know they helped out, where the company itself gets to help early adopters and actually make their product a reality.
The idea that the publisher, who is making the dude pay upfront for the book to be produced, can't spare 100 copies, or even 100 ebook copies, to Allow The Book To Be Sold At All So Everyone Benefits is kind of shady.
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