Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

The pre-order phase of Save You From Yourself is officially over.

Whew.

First of all, I want to thank everyone who pre-ordered a CD. Really, from the heart. You know, there are lots of cynical people out there who think people like you don’t exist anymore — and I’ve certainly come close to believing that as well over the years. Thanks for proving them, and me, wrong.

Now some numbers, and some notes:

34 winged monkeys
23 pirate kittehs
7 sharks with lasers
2 ninja hoverbots
2 raptors with chainsaws
1 destruct-o-beast

Average amount, Monkey level: 25.78. (Highest amount: 40.00)
Average amount, Kitteh level: 53.83 (Highest amount 75.00)
Average amount, Shark level: 134.77 (Highest amount 200.00)

Total pre-orders: 69
Grand total: $5608.59

Thoughts:

1. I honestly didn’t think anyone would go for the higher-priced packages. But I figured, heck, why not swing for the fences? I’m glad that I did.
2. More than one person mentioned that the choice of animal icon was a deciding factor in what amount to donate. Something to remember.
3. The vast majority of early pre-orders came from website readers and not my mailing list. I think this is pretty astounding.
4. I did no fundraising In Real Life. Everything was done on the web, mostly through this website, my mailing list, and occasional meek postings at MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.
5. I’m pretty sure not a single pre-order came from MySpace. As expected.
6. As far as I can tell, many people didn’t use the cut-and-paste animal badges. I’m cool with that, but I’m wondering what I could have done differently to encourage more links.
7. Some readers asked why I didn’t use a counter or progress bar widget to show how much had been raised. There are two reasons: 1) the animal icons were more fun IMO, and 2) in the case that this bombed, I didn’t want a sad little counter sitting there trumpeting my failure.
8. I don’t really expect to pull this off again :) But then, the whole idea of having the fundraiser now is so I won’t have to do one for the next release. Hopefully by then we’ll have a few hundred more blog readers, in the long slow crawl to 5000 fans.

Tune in tomorrow for part two: What Happens Next.