Order of the stick archive
And readers are a lot more likely to spend money on things they know they like than things they hope they will like. "On the other hand, if you give it away first, people will form their opinion of you and your work before you ask them for money. "Unless you have the marketing department of a large corporation behind you, you're not likely to get enough people to take a chance on your unknown property, even through Kickstarter," Burlew said. The author, who describes Order of the Stick as "a fantasy epic that doesn't take itself too seriously while still delivering a good story", believes that the comic's success lies in offering material for free. For $100, there were four magnets on offer, for $200 there were books, prints and autographs available, for $600 there was an original crayon drawing by Burlew and for $5,000, the donator's original Dungeons & Dragons character could receive a walk-on cameo in The Order of the Stick webcomic.
ORDER OF THE STICK ARCHIVE PDF
What I was thinking when I hit the Launch Project button was something roughly analogous to, 'I hope I'm not making a terrible mistake.' As it turned out, I wasn't."īurlew offered fans a variety of options for donations: for $10, they could receive an Order of the Stick fridge magnet and a digital PDF of the original comic story (2,256 people took him up on this). I never thought we'd get anywhere near the response we've gotten, and it's been a daily struggle to keep up with the progress of the whole thing. Yesterday, he closed his fundraising project with 14,952 backers and $1,254,120 raised, making The Order of the Stick Kickstarter's most funded project by a single person ever and the most funded creative work the site has ever seen. When the costs of keeping it in print proved too high, Burlew turned to Kickstarter following repeated demands from readers, launching a project in January to raise the $57,750 he needed to rerelease the books in print. Following the comic fantasy adventures of a collection of stick figures in a role-playing game world as they struggle with enemies and the rules of the game, much of the story is available online for free, but Burlew also began self-publishing parts of it in paper format in 2005. When I talked to him about the Kickstarter and how it kept on shattering expectations with every new stretch goal, Burlew mentioned that cultivating an audience of gamers meant that he was appealing directly to people who were hardwired to want to see numbers rise and unlock new rewards, and I suspect that he was only half-joking.The author of a self-published webcomic about a band of heroes in a fantasy role-playing world has raised more than $1m (£600,000) from fans on "crowdfunding" website Kickstarter to bring his stories back into print, making The Order of the Stick the richest creative work in the crowdfunding site's history.Īuthor and illustrator Rich Burlew launched The Order of the Stick online in 2003. Of course, all that stuff is still there, with casual conversations about +5 swords and plot points based around how many spells per day a capital-W Wizard can cast, and to be honest, it's still a major part of the appeal. Looking back from today, those early strips about weapon size rules and the complexities of leveling up seem almost quaint, if only because the game system they're goofing on has gone through a major revision, leaving the subject matter as the same kind of weird little footnote in the world of RPGs that it is in the sprawling saga that became the focus of the comic. Order of the Stick has the unique distinction of being, in a lot of ways, a parody comic that somehow managed to outlast the thing that it was parodying. When you get right down to it, that was probably a necessary direction for the strip to go in.