Kickstarting for Broke Writers by Victoria Corva #ChaBooCha

Image by 3D Animation Production Company from Pixabay/altered

I recently ran a small, successful Kickstarter campaign to publish my debut novel, BOOKS & BONE (you can view the Kickstarter here).

For me, the cost of publishing was extremely prohibitive. Editing, proofreading, cover art etc all combined to make a sum too large for my wallet. So I turned to Kickstarter in the hopes that, if my novel was good enough, people would help me publish it.

I don’t feel amazingly qualified to talk about how to run a Kickstarter campaign, but if you’d like the perspective of a first-time author and Kickstarter, then I’m happy to share what I learned.

Image from the Books & Bone Kickstarter

A Campaign and Marketing Budget of Zero 

I decided to Kickstart my novel because I didn’t have the money to publish it on my own -- and by extension, that meant I didn’t have the money for an expensive campaign page or any kind of marketing budget. Everything I did for my campaign page was free -- made of free resources, using only my own time.

For me, this meant:

• A textual video with voice-over using stock video footage 
• Borrowed resources - the small clip of video was using a borrowed camera, but if I’d had a half-decent phone camera I’d have used that instead 
• No cover art for marketing - I couldn’t spend the money on the cover until I knew the book would be published. Instead, I got permission to share some of the images from the artist’s gallery as examples of the art quality.

This also meant that my rewards were not physical. I had no idea whether the campaign would fund or not, or if it did, how many rewards of each tier people would want. It made it hard to price up how much things like paperback copies or bookmarks, etc would ultimately cost, and I made the decision not to include them so that, no matter what, I would be able to afford reward fulfillment.

Focusing My Campaign Efforts

Kickstarter recommends that you share your campaign on social media at least once a day. AT LEAST. To me, someone who tries not to take up too much space, that seemed a horrifying prospect. 

As well as a couple different pitches for my project (instead of saying ‘come check out my kickstarter’ talk about what your book is like!), I found that not all audiences are equal. It seems obvious, but the platforms where you usually get the most engagement are the platforms where you will get the most support and backers.

What this means is that if you post about your breakfast on Facebook and everyone shares and likes it and leaves comments to chat with you about it, that’s probably a good platform for you to share your Kickstarter on. But if when you do the same thing on Instagram, you get crickets, you’re probably not going to get much traction with your Kickstarter.

It’s not about follower count, but about follower quality.

For me, I tried my different platforms and then focused on the one where I had the closest friends and most active support network. For me, that was Mastodon, but for you it could be Facebook or Twitter or really anything.

Choosing My Rewards

Your rewards will be a huge part of the success of your campaign. People are more likely to shell out for more expensive and physical rewards, like paperbacks, hardcovers, and limited edition art. But those rewards will also cost YOU more, and covering their cost will inflate the cost of your campaign, leading to a higher goal you’ll need to reach.

I chose to provide digital-only rewards that wouldn’t cost me anything so that I knew I could afford to fulfill them and so that I could keep my funding target low. But I think it’s very possible that if I’d taken a more risky reward strategy with a higher goal, that I would have funded MORE than I did with the safer strategy. It’s really up to you where you decide to draw the line, but remember to figure in the cost of reward fulfillment into both your overall goal and your reward tiers.

If a hardback of your book will cost you £20 to produce and ship to yourself ready to send out, then it needs to be in a £30 or £40 tier so that you’re actually making the money you need to publish your book.

Doing My Research

Check out other campaigns for books of similar genre and category. Find out how much people are willing to pay and for what rewards. It’s a lot easier to make a campaign that people will want to back when you understand how they are likely to make their decisions.

In my case, in addition to paying close attention to other campaigns, I also did a quick survey on crowdfunding books, which informed my decisions. It’s a bit rough but you can find the results here.

Choosing A Realistic Goal

It’s very important to choose a realistic goal. For me, I don’t have a huge network of friends and my family, while supportive, are not rich so I couldn’t ask them to fund the campaign for me.

Kickstarter is all or nothing. If you don’t hit your chosen goal, you don’t get any money. So I chose a low goal - the bare minimum I needed to publish my novel. Then, when I hit that, I kept pushing for stretch goals.

It’s hard to know how successful your campaign will be, so my advice is to choose a small goal that will be enough and then, if you hit it, keep going!

Not Losing Hope

The beginning of a kickstarter campaign is hugely exciting and those first few days are when you will get the bulk of your backers. It gets really disheartening when, a week in, your backers slow to a trickle, or plateau for days on end.

This is NORMAL for a kickstarter campaign, however, and all the advice shows that the important thing is not to give up! Keep posting, keep running special events (I did video game livestreams and microfiction games) to promote it, keep talking about it every day.

If you keep talking about it, backers will trickle in. If you stop talking about it, you’ll get nothing. So keep going! Even backers at low tiers really add up! This was absolutely my experience. There were days where I thought: ‘Nothing is really happening with this anymore. Surely I have reached everyone I could possibly reach’. 

I thought that at £500. I thought that at £800. And by the end of the campaign I had over £1000. 

Okay! So that’s what I’ve learned from my first Kickstarter campaign. I hope you find it useful. It’s a daunting prospect at first, but it’s a truly incredible experience to have so many people behind you, supporting your book, supporting you in your writing. I really couldn’t have asked for a better start to my career as a published author, and I’m very excited to start the publishing process. 

*****

Victoria Corva writes about creepy things with hope and humour. She’s a professional audiobook narrator, an outspoken cat lover, and a known SFF obsessive. Her debut novel BOOKS & BONE will be published April 2019. You can find out more about her and her work at https://victoriacorva.xyz

*****

Give-away

Today's prize is a copy if Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly by Gail Carson Levine. If you are a signed-up member of the challenge, all you have to do to enter into the drawing for this prize is to comment on this blog post. The winner will be chosen by a random number generator on March 31st and announced on the same day.

Announcing the winner of "The Secrets of Crowdfunding" by Sean Akers #ChaBooCha

 

It's time to announce the winner of "The Secrets of Crowdfunding: A Step-By-Step Guide to Getting the Most from Your Kickstarter Campaign" by Sean Akers, the prize that was announced in this guest post.

There were only four entries and the number selected by Random.org was 3, so the winner is:

ghostnapped (Ashley Howland)

Congratulations, Ashley!

How to Successfully Use Crowdfunding for Your Book Project by Emma & Margo Gibbs #ChaBooCha

Image: Copyright Emma & Margo Gibbs

www.mermaiddetective.com

How To Successfully Use Crowdfunding for Your Book Project
by Emma & Margo Gibbs

Crowdfunding, the process of raising a targeted amount of capital through numerous individual donations, is arguably one of the most empowering ways to fund an idea. No other approach enables you to engage directly with your audience while you’re developing, honing and creating your product.

Last year, my mother Margo and I decided to crowdfund for our eBook "Mirabella the Mermaid Detective." The first in a series of eBooks for 7 to 11 year olds base on a story mom used to tell me growing up.

Mirabella is a mermaid who loves exploring, solving puzzles, helping others and going on adventures with her two best friends, Seamese the lionfish and Luna the cuttlefish. Set in the fictitious underwater city of Muria on the Great Barrier Reef, the Mirabella stories are full of fun, color and excitement.

Strong-willed, smart, loyal, caring and passionate, Mirabella is an engaging role model who just happens to be a mermaid.

We’d written the manuscript and chosen a fantastic illustrator, but because we wanted to self publish we needed some financial support. So, we decided to raise some of money that we needed through crowfunding.

After a month of relentless campaigning through Pozible.com and thanks to some incredibly generous support, we were successful. However, we had to work really hard to reach our target.

Here are some of the lessons we learned along the way.

Crowdfunding is not ‘easy money’

There seems to be a misconception out there that crowdfunding is a simple way to raise money; that all you need to do is create a project profile then sit back and wait for the cash to roll in. It’s the opposite. Every day campaigners must think of new ways to promote their project, whether it’s call outs on social media, personalized emails, artful pleading with a media outlet to support your campaign project or a flashmob, there's always going to be something more to do. The projects that fail are the ones that don’t engage with their audience but expect their audience to engage with them.

Connect, don’t broadcast.

One of the mistakes a lot of crowdfunding campaigns make is broadcasting the plea for money. Picture this, you have a campaign you’re running with someone, you're both on Facebook, and the campaign has a Facebook page. Now imagine sharing the same status across those three profiles twice a day, remembering that most of your friends will be connected to at least two or three of those pages. That’s a lot of news feed saturation, which can quickly become very annoying.

The best campaigns call supporters to action, with a funny quip, a meme, or a personalized story. With Mirabella, we released update videos throughout the campaign, and gave supporters a sneak peak of illustrations and the introduction to the book. We showed them what their support was enabling us to do. Find your angle, personalize your approach and always remember to connect.

Plan your campaign.

Crowdfunding takes real commitment. You’ll become a compulsive checker of emails and consume all conversation with talk of your campaign. That’s why it’s important to plan. Decide how much time you can commit to your campaign, without it taking away from actually developing the project you're trying to fund. Weigh-up how long you think it will take you to reach your target, how much time you can commit to promoting it and identify a good end date (Sunday’s are normally bad, as are public holidays).

Identify and create a promotion schedule, establish who you’re going to contact and in what way you’re going to contact them before you get started. Essentially it’s like marketing any product, without a plan you’re unlikely to gain traction with your audience.

For Mirabella, we campaigned for a month. We managed to raise our money and in reality couldn't have campaigned for any longer, but it came right down to the wire because we set our target higher than was necessary.

Set a realistic goal.

Most crowdfunding platforms run on the all-or-nothing model, which means that a campaign doesn’t get anything if it fails to reach it’s target in the allotted time. Whilst this seems like a stressful situation, it has a lot of positives. All-or-nothing means that your supporters have a greater sense of urgency to see you succeed, so they’ll share it with their networks because they love the idea and want to see your success. It’s like a ticking clock device in the movie.

With this in mind, it’s important to set a realistic financial goal. Ask yourself, ‘What is the minimum amount of money I need to do this’? Whatever your answer, that’s the amount you should aim for. It’s really easy to get carried away likening your idea to the huge success stories on Kickstarter, Pozible or Indiegogo, and chances are your idea is probably as good. Unfortunately, there is no sure-fire way of ensuring that your idea reaches as many people or resonates in the same way. Have a realistic aim because it’s always better to be pleasantly surprised, than to be too ambitious and walk away with nothing more than the experience.

Mirabella’s goal was $2,000 more than we originally intended to aim for, and it got right down to the wire. We were expecting the idea to take off and resonate with people well outside of our social networks but unfortunately that didn't happen. Thanks to some really supportive friends and family we got there, but only just. If we had stuck with our original target of $4,000, about 2/3 of the way through the campaign we would have hit our goal, enabling us to gain more promotion as a success story and likely raise more money than we did.

Think about your audience.

Who do you want to connect with and why? Mirabella is for 7 - 11 year olds but it’s very difficult to market directly to them. Instead we chose to focus the parents, highlighting the human interest story of being a mother-daughter writing team, Mirabella being a strong role-model, and also the environmental and reef conservation elements woven throughout the story. Parents told their kids and friends, who in turn told their friends and this ultimately saw our campaign become successful.

As a successful crowdfunding campaigner, few things give me the same pleasure as supporting a campaign I believe in. It’s addictive, because it enables me to see an idea be born and evolve thanks in part, to my contribution. With crowdfunding, I get to be part of something and see wonderful projects succeed.

Crowdfunding is one of the most intense ways to raise capital, because to be successful a campaigner must give themselves to their audience. There’s no third party to be a buffer, no taking time off and no games. If you want to succeed, you have to show your market how much you love what you’re doing by the time and effort you put in. You must make them want to be part of your brand/product/creative story. If you succeed and continue to communicate with your backers, you’ll have an audience of supporters for life.

Crowdfunding is hard, but it is the most rewarding money you’ll every raise.

Emma Gibbs is a Pozible Ambassador and the daughter half of the mother-daughter writing team behind Mirabella the Mermaid Detective.

Margo & Emma Gibbs are a mother-daughter writing team from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, who have been creating stories together ever-since Emma was very little. They both love reading, exploring the magical natural world around them, and secretly both wish that they were mermaids. Mirabella the Mermaid Detective is their first book and you can buy it here.

 

If you are signed up for the 2013 Chapter Book Challenge, and you comment on this post by noon GMT March 28th, you will be entered into the drawing to win a copy of "The Secrets of Crowdfunding: A Step-By-Step Guide to Getting the Most from Your Kickstarter Campaign" by Sean Akers.