I had big plans for 2020. I’m sure we all did. I’ve not yet looked backwards at the financial end of things, but I can look qualitatively at my plans and see how badly 2020 blew them up.

2020 Goals and Outcomes

So 2018 was revenue (check). 2019 was profit (check, and also revenue)! But it was also the second year in a row burnt out on the effort to make all that happen.

So I need to look to 2020 cautiously, but there’s room for optimism. Goals, then?

• Finish the Nordlond Sagas books and get them off to the printer and fulfilled. Try and hold “late” to less than three months.

This succeeded, more or less. I did get the four books finished, printed, and all delivered. The process was painful, and the prices too low during the crowdfunding. But they’re beautiful, useful, well-made books. So victory there.

• Take a short break and recover my sanity. A few weeks or a month, during which I will start working out again, and begin a face-to-face gaming circle so that I can blog and rediscover my creative spark.

Meh. Not much sanity in 2020.

• Explore not-Kickstarter for crowdfunding (see below)

Didn’t get to do this.

• Launch “More Perilous Journeys” and see it done. Five more books for TFT, plus counters and Decks of Destiny style cards. I feel like I know more about this one, and can do a bunch of pre-work that will save stress up front.

This took a hit. I did launch More Perilous Journeys, but my sanity, workload, and supply chain could not support the cards and counters. MPJ launched in May 2020, and physical delivery stretched into 2021 (still stretching, in fact…but final fulfillment is looking like February.

• I have permission and the intent to make the Nordlondr Ovinabokin . . . the Nordlond Enemies Book. This will be huge. Likely 200-300 monsters and 250-300 pages. Hardback. All-in for art and awesome. But it’s going to take some serious funding.

All of this is still true. I didn’t launch it in 2020 though.

• Break the 600-backer threshold; I need that to really do the kind of work I want to do, and also take more steps to making Gaming Ballistic truly self-sustaining.

More Perilous Journeys eventually reached 565 people. That is likely not enough to really keep the lights on on a sustaining basis.

• I need to consider moving my eCommerce platform away from WooCommerce and on to something else. I don’t know what.

Still true. Still slow. Still no good options.

• I will look hard into migrating from Adobe to Affinity Publisher and Photo in 2020. I was putting that off until a few features crept into Affinity Publisher…but then to put together Forest’s End I found ways of doing what I was waiting for by other means. That’ll save me real money, which might be better spent on an eCommerce suite that is less painful.

I’m still on Adobe for now. Scripting and automatic span columns are too useful at this time.

The implicit goal of 2020 was to sustain and extend the profitability of Gaming Ballistic that I achieved in 2019. I haven’t done the math yet. I know that Nordlond Sagas suffered from two problems: the big books were priced to be 48-64 and 64-80 pages for the big books, but shipped at 112 and 96, respectively. Also, that was when I discovered my pricing algorithm was based in magnitude on books published in the 1990s and didn’t properly adjust for inflation and market conditions. So I raised about $25K and I know I spent more, and much of the big-dollar spending was in the early part of 2020. On the other hand, MPJ was more successful, priced right, and I’ve been really good (I think) about not throwing bad money at it. Also, the big print costs were in 2021, and the art is black and white, not color…so less money. My gut tells me that 2020 will be a financial wash to a slight loss, but I’ll have to do the math. Tax time is coming, so that is on the to-do list anyway.

Goals for 2021

I got laid off from my Day Job and collected my last paycheck in Aug 2020. I have since decided that I am going to make a go of having Gaming Ballistic be my only job – really run the business as a job not just a hobby. That’s both the means and the goal, then:

• Run Gaming Ballistic as a real business and my sole income for 2021
• Establish a Patreon that helps bring products to market faster that pre-funds the art. Target is 200-250 patrons.
• Complete More Perilous Journeys in Q1 2021
• Launch a new TFT project – maybe two – in Q1 2021; the first is likely the Character Collection project. Follow that almost immediately with a second TFT project.
• Plans for TFT beyond those are fuzzy…and fuzzy does not build product
• Firm up my supply chain for cards (done!) and counters (eh….) in Q1
• Publish the Bestiary by the end of the year. This is a high-effort activity that does not bring in any revenue
• Advance the ball significantly on Mission X: Alien Menace
• Convert some of my existing Dungeon Fantasy RPG product to the Dragon Heresy system
• Invest a bit of time bringing existing pre-written Dragon Heresy material to market in the form of character expansions
• Figure out better UK/EU/Rest-of-World logistics; this may need to wait as Jan-July has different rules than July and onward.
• Blogging needs to increase
• Increase my typical project backer count to over 1,000; if I can hit 1,500 backers per project there’s very little I can’t do
• Lose 30 pounds and get back to more regular exercise patterns
• Increase my stable of working authors
• Be more bold about marketing and getting the word out; the Ballistic’s Report going out weekly is a good start here
• Better project finance tracking on an ongoing basis

Ultimately, I have a financial goal for the year in terms of post-tax income. If I can meet or exceed it, I can keep doing GB as a Real Job. My wife and I have agreed on this target, and she’s supportive of what I’m doing. But this means I have to be very disciplined about continually creating product, and really focus on growth this year.

Most of my work over the last two years has focused on SJGames licensed material. That’s not a bad thing, and they’re great to work with. And I’m not at all tapped out: The last two GURPS-related projects they launched, the Pyramid Scheme and the 2020 PDF Challenge, did 1,500 and almost 2,800 backers respectively. So there’s more than enough market just in Kickstarter to support even 300-page color hardbacks (but in order to do that, I absolutely need those 1,500 folks).

For TFT, the smaller projects like Hexagram pull roughly the same number of backers I do; 500-700. But the Legacy Edition yanked in something like 3,400. Book of Unlife was over 800 and Decks of Destiny wound up near 1,200. So the market is there, if I can please it. With encouragement from SJ, I even have some eyes on a full product line that I think folks will like.

For my own works – Dragon Heresy – I have a good start there. I do think it’s a good system. And I have a lot written for it already. And can convert more.

This is pretty nerve-wracking for me. It’s one thing to have a hobby business that makes a bit of money sometimes, but largely pays for my gaming habit. It’s quite another to make it a going, growing concern. But honestly, if I can make it work, I’ll be much happier than I’ve been in the last five years working for Big Corporate, doing something I love under my own command.

So here we go.