Sizing a Hand-Crafted Print Run

FlickFleet is coming along nicely so one of the many things I'm working on at the moment is pricing and sizing the print run.

As with Zombology, I'm intending to do a small, limited edition run first where I make the boxes by hand and cut out the ship dashboards by hand (though I'll be buying in the wooden pieces and laser cutting the acrylic ships).

So how big a print run should I do? In a perfect world I'd like to do a print run that I can comfortably hand-craft and sell through within a year. The smaller the print run, the more confident I am of both those things. At the same time, the bigger the print run, the better the economies of scale, so the cheaper each copy is to make and the cheaper I can price them (which will hopefully make them easier to sell). Although, of course the initial outlay is higher.

FlickFleet up close

The other thing to consider is the number of pre-orders. For a professional run or a Kickstarter, the more of these the better. For a small hand-made run it's not that simple. Since it takes me time (at this point I'm estimating 1-1.5 hours) to make each copy, and I'm doing this in my evenings after the kids go to bed, I actually don't want too many - it'll just put me under a lot of pressure to get them done and delay building up stock and promoting the game. For Zombology I had 20 pre-orders (on top of the 30 copy run I'd already sold out of to friends and family), which was 10% of the print run and about 15 hours of crafting to make. The Baby was only 3 months old at that point, so our sleep was dreadful (it's still pretty bad!), so that was a lot of evenings and took about a month to complete. Ideally I'd have about 20-25% of the print run spoken for up front, which will still mean a chunk of evenings and probably a calendar month of construction.

The biggest factor for FlickFleet's cost though is the laser cutting, for which there isn't much in the way of economies of scale (you're paying for cutting time which scales linearly with number of copies). One of the options I'm exploring is buying a laser cutter. They are very expensive, but it would save me a lot of cost per game and I would be able to amortize it over the games (and potentially other projects).

At the moment it looks like I could do it for £30 if I do the laser cutting myself and £40 if I outsource the laser cutting. That £10 is a big deal, £40 is a lot to ask for for a hand-made game.

I'm toying with either a 200 (Zombology-sized) or 300 (It's Alive! First Edition-sized) print run. Numbers of pre-orders is probably what I'll
use to make the decision on run size, and they are coming in surprisingly quickly at the moment, considering the fact I've not announced it or even worked out the price!

Hopefully I'll be ready to decide and make an announcement shortly - keep your eyes peeled!