Thank you for your feedback Michael and James. Much to ponder and to consider. So it seems it is not an exact science and there is no handy formula??
Michael - re. printing only 50 of each instead of a 100 - I agree totally and am making 78 books of the special edition version available as pledge gifts so that brings the total to 128 books to be printed. The 50 not available as pledge gifts will be used to test the retail market with. This goes for the standard version of Wild Voices as well, but will include a box for packaging the standard version in.
James - re. your comment about keeping it simple. Yes to that as well - funding gifts include an ebook, gift ebooks, card set, card pouch, journal, t-shirt - (different combos of these of course) then the higher levels offering hardcopy book versions and the final level original artwork +.
As we have to date just worked on budgets and have not incurred costs (except for my work in creating the design and artwork and the author's work), this is how I see things:
1. Kickstarter is one helluva good platform for testing and marketing your product - that's got to be worth a whole lot, and
2. as long as you have got the cost of pledge gifts covered with a reasonable amount of profit coming into the coffers -
3. if 100% funded decisions will have to be made where the profits left over from making the pledge gifts gets spent, meaning we might actually not be able to pay a website designer, ourselves - BUT
4. if we work our butts off with promoting Wild Voices we stand to make much, much more as there is $28000 worth of potential funding available.
So a bit of a gamble from beginning to end - makes it all very exciting and if cleverly played, even if we lose we still get to testing the market and getting some valuable feedback - and have our creative egos tested to the max
Of course if I have not jumped to the right conclusions - please do jump in and let me know.
Thanks!