Baby Bestiary Handbook Volume 1

Background

Project Challenges

• Intellectual Property. Using list creatures that have been featured in official D&D books brought about its own unique challenge, knowing all the monsters, and the best way to portray them and their lore so that they don’t have issues with the Wizards of the Coast legal department.
• Scope Clarification/Creep. When we first launched the project we were mostly making the handbook as an ancillary product, compared to the calendar, prints, and postcards which seemed to be popular on Kickstarter at the time. Upon launch, the audience clearly wanted a book, so we pivoted to focus on content related to the book. The problem with Kickstarter is that once you have pledge levels out there, they’re locked and everyone can see them to the end. So we ended up promising a lot more than we should have with the pivot.  This was avoided in the subsequent campaign.
• Creator Management: This was the first project where I was managing contractors and had to develop a method to manage and check-in with writers, artists, and editors.
• Fulfillment. Being our second project with physical products, we started looking at alternatives to fulfillment as we felt our first partner was expensive, for this project we ended up using Amazon to provide our project fulfillment.