Welcome back to Crowdfunding Carnival! We’re more than halfway through February, and Zine Month is still going strong. As I covered a couple of weeks ago, Kickstarter’s Zine Quest and Backerkit’s Zinetopia are the key leaders of the month, with Kickstarter’s event currently a little more than double the size of Backerkit’s. Still, you’d be making a mistake if you didn’t check out both.

Overall funding rates are high, with the combined total being north of 70%. Still, there are a number of projects looking to still cross the finish line, and some of them are certainly deserving of more attention. For this mid-month check-in on our zine events, I’m going to focus solely on projects that are still looking for that final push before February is out.

Before we get into it, I’d like to highlight a few non-zine projects: Blades ‘68, the groovy supplement to Blades in the Dark, is campaigning on Backerkit and it looks smashing, baby, yeah! Over on Kickstarter, Free League is bringing the Trudvang setting to Dragonbane, and Green Ronin is campaigning Mutants and Masterminds 4e. Definitely some cool stuff going on, but let’s stay on target, and try to get some zines printed. Every campaign below isn’t quite funded yet, so if any of these sound interesting, consider throwing a few dollars towards the designers. They’ll notice and appreciate your contribution much more than the big guys above.

Welcome back to another Crowdfunding Carnival! It’s not just any Crowdfunding Carnival, though…it’s February. And that means it’s time for Zine Month! And this is a big deal, because for the first time since 2022, it’s actually time for Zine Month, not just Zine Quest. Backerkit has stepped into the ring and it looks like they’re going to stand toe to toe with…wait, I’ve just gotten word that Backerkit’s Zinetopia event is capped at 63 projects? Meaning that if we extrapolate from Kickstarter’s typical Zine Quest growth profile they’ll end up being around 30% of the size? Hm. Oh dear.

It’s not a bad showing, to be clear; 63 non-Kickstarter projects is more than we’ve ever seen from the alternate Zine Event folks since Kickstarter made the confusing decision to move Zine Quest to August. But ultimately there were more Zine Quest projects live even by February 2nd, and unlike Backerkit Kickstarter will let you tag any zine project started in February as Zine Quest, so we’re likely to have well over 200 projects by February’s end, if not even more. It is notable, though, that while the number of projects live in the first week of Zine Month is similar this year and last (around 150), the split is around 60/40 Kickstarter and BackerKit, meaning that a lot of people took Backerkit’s rival Zinetopia event seriously.