Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6758344" data-attributes="member: 8461">In which case, there's no point in talking about Kickstarter when you could just as easily be talking about McDonald's. None of these reasons are particularly salient, as shown below.You're stating this as a categorical truth, when in fact it's a supposition that is highly suspect. I suppose some Kickstarters might have backer rewards for a copy of the finished product that are better than what the retail price would be, but more often than not this isn't the case. The books will typically cost exactly what they would anywhere else.There's also the inconvenience factor of needing to wait until the funding period is closed, the product created, the backer kits sorted, and the product finally arriving at your house. I've had Kickstarter materials arrive years - literally, years - after I pledged to them, when I could have gotten them down at the store in fifteen minutes. Which is not at all exclusive to Kickstarter. One can find special promotions anywhere. I suppose it might be nice to pay extra for a book to be pre-autographed, for example, but I can get that pretty easily if I'm at a convention where the authors are.No, it does not expand on nor replace pre-orders. A lot of people think of placing a Kickstarter pledge as being a pre-order, and I think that's one of the worst ways to look at it. Placing money down to fund the creation of something is not the same as placing an order ahead of time, for several reasons, the biggest one being that the book might not fund! This entire conversation has presumed that a Kickstarter will succeed, and that's not necessarily the case - I've pledge to RPG Kickstarters that didn't reach their goal.There's also the issue that you can't order something from Kickstarter if the funding window has closed. As I noted in a previous post, go to any Kickstarter that's closed and try and order a copy of the book in question. You won't be able to. You have to go to an actual retailer for that.Kickstarter is not and has never been a retail platform, and so it's not in competition with other retail platforms, unless you expand on "competition" to mean "anything that costs money."</blockquote>

Verification