So, for Zinequest in February 2024, I ran a crowdfunding campaign for a module in zine format called Curse of Mizzling Grove. My previous zines, Ludicrous Compendium and Tattoopunk Antebible, were both stocked by US distributors, but I wanted to avoid the complications involved commissions and stocking this time around, and so I’d resigned myself to no further Kickstarters and to perhaps trying to find people to publish me.

But, self-fulfilling a Kickstarter became possible when I saw that Lulu Direct, the print on demand online publishing company, has a new crowdfunding fulfilment service. I decided to try to run Curse of Mizzling Grove through this service, as a trial run that hopefully wouldn’t run me into the ground financially. I’ll talk through the finances here, and I’ll be talking in AUD, sorry for my international readers.

Preproduction predictions

The main concern I had with Lulu fulfilment at the outset, is that Lulu wouldn’t give me any shipping prices in advance. This is pretty reasonable, but it made it challenging for me to set prices for my campaign. My predictions and assumptions were this:

• My previous Zinequest achieved 50% digital and 50% print pledges.
• Between kickstarter and taxes, I paid about $800 in taxes and fees.
• My minimum to pay for the print run was AU$1650 based on these numbers.
• I guessed Lulu would charge $6.00 per zine based on my proof prints.
• I guessed based on previous Kickstarters which countries would be making orders, and guesstimated that the postage would average out around $16 per zine.
• I’d need 28 digital backers and 28 print backers to achieve this, with digital backers necessary to subsidise the postage costs for print backers.
• $500 for art

How did the campaign end up working out?

• 48% digital and 52% print pledges
• $300 in fees, however taxes aren’t confirmed until I pay my taxes
• $2780 in pledges total
• Zine printing costs ended up $5 per zine
• Postage was $11.50 and $20 depending on address
• 39 digital-only backers, and 42 print pledges
• Art cost what I expected (+ a free copy of the book!)

Basically, I nailed all of my predictions, except it was a little more successful than I had expected. It looks like I won’t be going into the red on this one, although whether I’ll be in the black will remain unclear until tax time.

The one prediction that I didn’t nail was the timeline – I sent the orders to Lulu for distribution on the 14th of August, and I estimated May, so I was off by 3 months. I estimated the digital version would be finished by March, and it wasn’t done until the end of April. Part of this was just life – I needed a little more time to receive art and pull things all together, as well as iron out the kinks with the digital release, and underestimated. I’ll be more generous next time. But the delay from May to August was all due to issues with fulfillment, so I’ll talk about what happened there. Skip to fulfillment if you don’t care.

Post-production woes

Firstly, before any of this happened, I had to access Lulu and find out what information they needed to fulfil, and then writing a Kickstarter Survey to accept this information. Lulu requires a phone number for postage. Kickstarter surveys are difficult to design, and don’t allow you to put in mandatory fields, which meant that despite my specifically stating in Kickstarter updates and in the survey itself that if you didn’t put in a phone number I couldn’t deliver the zine, a few people didn’t provide one. I’m not sure how to get around that issue in future – I’d love if Kickstarter would allow mandatory fields.

So, the process with Lulu is, you make a Lulu compatible set of .pdf files and submit it to them for review. In order for it to be distributed using their “Order Import Tool” — what you use for crowdfunding — it needs to be approved for Global Distribution. Global Distribution means the approval process is a little more complex, as your zine (or book) has to be suitable for sale in bookstores, which means it has to follow certain rules.

Lulu, sadly, is a little opaque about those rules, and I’m a ditz, so even though I knew a few of these beforehand, I forgot them in my rush to get the zines to backers, and had to go through a re-approval process. More annoyingly, they identified 1 issue and asked me to correct it, then identified another and asked me to correct it a second time. Hence, I had to have proofs sent to me twice, rather than the hopeful once. Simultaneously, I had issues with the postal service – both of these proofs weren’t delivered to my house, and I wasn’t alerted to them being at my local post office. Which meant, a waiting period that should have been 1-2 weeks ended up being 3-4 in both cases, even though I corrected the issues pretty promptly. I’ll get better, I hope, at avoiding these proofing issues in the future, however there was a benefit – I ended up double proofing the book, so I ironed out a few copy errors that would’ve snuck into the final printed version had it not occurred. So, overall there was about a $100 cost in terms of proofing and ordering test copies that I didn’t account for, and I lost 3 months to postage and errors.

Once this was sorted, there was an issue with Lulu not approving it but not emailing me to tell me (which is what they normally do), and not telling me what was wrong (which is normally in the email). I didn’t check the updates center for a while, while I was waiting for this approval to come through, and when I finally went to query it, I realised it was rejected but couldn’t find the reason. I had to contact Lulu directly, wherein they realised it was an error, and approved it.

Fulfillment

Now it was approved for Global Distribution, there was a waiting period (this is so that the printing centers get the final version), and then I could actually put in the orders. The Order Import Tool was pretty intuitive, although the Kickstarter survey export gives you a heap of information that means you have to pick it apart and spend a bunch of time merging things and separating things out to be correct. Mainly painless, though, and the Order Import Tool gives feedback on what errors you’ve made in the submission process.

You can map multiple products in the Order Import Tool, which means you could have soft-covers and hard-covers in the same list, and fulfil them all in the same order, which is very neat, although I didn’t need to use that feature. Once everything is approved, you select the postage type you want to use for each country, and then pay for it with credit card (annoyingly, I’d have liked more options there), and they process everything and post things out. At this point things started printing and being posted out. Two thirds were printed and posted by the end of the first week, and the reminder by the two week mark. All backers (except one, a SEA backer) had their copies delivered at the week three mark. If I’d known that this would be a month-long process, I’d have added another month to the timeline I think.

I was concerned that I chose the most affordable postal option, as I expected there to be issues with tracking, but every single parcel that went out had tracking anyway, so it wouldn’t have been worthwhile it turns out to pay the extra. All the posted zines were delivered, and I haven’t had to send out any replacements. I’d been considering whether the higher postal price would have been more worthwhile, but at this stage it appears that standard post has progressed enough in tracking that it won’t be worth investing in more expensive postage in the future.

Do I think this is something I could do again in the future? Could other creators replicate it? Yes, I think so. I think, now knowing the errors and delays I encountered, I’d give myself an extra month on art, layout and test copies, and then an extra 3-4 months to bring that finished product to delivery, given the delays and rejections and awaiting things to be posted — that is, expect it to take 6-7 months rather than 3-4 months, even though it was fully written and laid out at time of the campaign.

But yeah, Lulu Fulfilment is a great service. I will use it on the next Zinequest, I think. If you’re looking to use it to fulfil, happy to answer any questions (I’ll add them to the end of this post, if you don’t mind). And, it’ll also potentially be available on Amazon and here on the Lulu storefront, if you want a print copy.

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