I HATE that bigger companies that could put this stuff up for pre order use kickstarter (if you have the money you don't need the kickstart) but I have found I have to ONLY back those or risk the companies going belly up, and that sucks.
I work in printing, so I don't hold it against bigger, established publishers to run Kickstarter projects; printing is
very expensive, especially given the (mostly) pandemic-induced paper shortages. If a company can avoid over-investing in a product, more power to them - that's just them being smart. If you want them to keep making cool stuff, they need to be smart about their business.
I'm cool with Kickstarter more than Amazon. I just wish more creators would have a bigger gap between releasing PDFs and printing physical books. Give the hundreds or thousands more people a chance to put eyes on the text and spot mistakes so they can be fixed before going to print. Even books with professional editors need as many eyes as possible. I recently backed a project, got the PDF, and in the first dozen pages spotted about a dozen mistakes. But...the text was already finalized because they'd hired a professional editor and the few passes they did was considered enough. Nope. Still mistakes galore. Inconsistency of word usage, art covering text, simple spelling and grammar mistakes...on and on. It's really disheartening. I was really looking forward to the book. Now I think it was a waste of money. I won't be able to read the physical book I ordered without cringing. Maybe that's the curse of having been an editor.
I feel your pain! It's one of the great mysteries of editing that
no matter how many sets of eyes you have on a document, errors will slip through. Art cover text is a doozy, though - I've rarely if ever seen that.
What type of product (in general, not details) are you wanting to get started with? Because almost every RPG product can be done for a very low initial investment. For example;
An RPG book (rules, expansion, adventure, etc) can all be done with zero cost before a KS project is launched. You can have everything written and then just do the KS to pay for art (if needed) and then deliver it digitally. Or use a POD service to print the low quantity books if you feel a physical product is required, which again doesn't require a large number of sales). Sure, POD is much more expensive, but works well for limited quantities.
Just to niggle: none of that pre-crowdfunding work is done at "zero cost". One or more people are investing their time, labor, work-related materials and bills, and the further investment of time, labor, materials, etc that got them the
experience to know how to do what they do.
What has been more alarming is the number of kickstarter creators who developed health issues at some point in the process. It seems like running a kickstarter can take its toll on you once things start going wrong.
In some cases, "health issues" could be a way of saying "lost interest", "didn't know what they were doing", "ran off with your money", etc.
Yes. Though, I would argue that Zinequest is too much. It's a veritable flood now and I'm sure lots of stuff gets lost in the noise. Also, some of these zines (not all) are the kind of content that used to be freely spread out over several posts on a blog ten years ago. Hard to get excited for that section of the things.
I have no problem backing a project that consists of updated versions of what used to be several free blog posts. If the content is something or the creator is someone I want to support, I'm happy to compensate them for their work.
EDIT: Sorry if that sounds snarky - I don't mean for it to.