Author Kickstarter Becomes Largest EVER! (No, it's not one of mine.)

No doubt you've already heard that best-selling author Brandon Sanderson now has the largest project in Kickstarter history ... and it's still climbing. Raising $16 million on the first day for four yet to be titled secret content novels to come in 2023, the total funding was at around $27 million as I write this on March 9, with twenty days still to go. (By comparison, I raised between $1.6 and $2.6 ... er ... thousand in each of my four successful publishing Kickstarters.

Am I jealous? Sure, even though I know that Brandon is a much better, more prolific writer than I am and has tons of loyal and steadfast fans. Heck, he's probably friendlier and more engaging than I am, being the introverted curmudgeon that I am. (I was in a mass-signing event one year at GenCon when he was the Guest of Honor. The line for his signing was long and stretched far past my own spot a few tables down, which at least allowed me to chat with his fans while they were waiting--a few even asked me to pitch my books to them. Truth told, he was enthusiastic and charming and unrushed with every single fan who came to his table.)

And, I suspect many of you are saying: "Well, sure, once I have millions of adoring fans, I'll probably be able to raise millions, too. After all, $40 (the minimum pledge for the four ebooks) times a million fans is $40,000,000."

But, here's the thing. This huge Kickstarter does not yet have anywhere close to a million backers. Right now, that total is only around 114,000. But, he does have about 16,000 backers who have pledged for the most expensive reward level: $500 to get all four books in EACH of the three available formats (ebook, audiobook, and UNSIGNED hardcover), plus eight swag boxes with unknown items in them. That's right, while some of us struggle to get readers to pay 99 cents or even $2.99 to $6.99 for an ebook, maybe a bit more for print, well more than 10% of Brandon Sanderson's pledging readers are willing to pay huge, super-premium prices to get books in multiple formats from an author they love.

The hard lessons are these. There aren't millions of readers out there, even for many NYT best-selling authors; there are far fewer in reality. And, mostly, they want to read what they already know they like from someone they already know they can trust to produce a product they want.

You need to be that writer.

Just in Case You Want to Do a Kickstarter, Too.

A while back I did a video presentation for the HWG about crowdfunding for authors. You can find it here.  And, if you want to see the video I produced for one of my Kickstarters, you can either find them on Kickstarter by searching for "orphyte" or take a look at the one for Familiar Spirits here and for Frame Shop here.

Here's what I had to say on Kickstarters in blogs from 2014 and 2015.

First, how to set up to do a Kickstarter, from 2014:

The Basics: Once you’ve set up a name and password for a Kickstarter account (if you don’t already have one), Kickstarter has you fill out a basics form to get more information about you so that they can verify you are who you say you are and arrange to make payments (through Amazon) to you if your Kickstarter succeeds.

Now, of course, Kickstarter and Amazon probably have a lot of this information about you already, but rest assured, you have to give it to them again. It’s how they know you are the person you say you are and, frankly, they care more about that question when you are running a Kickstarter than they do when you are paying money for other peoples’ projects or just buying books, cds, dvid, electronics, and everything else in the world.

They’ll also want to know if you are doing the project in your own name or through a company, corporation, or llc. If you are using some kind of entity, they will ask for a bunch of information about that. This can get a bit confusing if you use the same email address for both your personal and entity emails. You’ll also need to send them bank account information, IRS information, and maybe even a piece of mail addressed to your entity.

Most of this may be done by email, but sometimes they will require a fax (which, of course, you can still do electronically through a bunch of different services). All of this can take a week or more, so don’t wait until the last second to do this. Also, don’t believe it when you get an email saying everything is verified. I got a bunch of those before everything was verified—confusing and frustrating me a bit until I chatted with a nice guy at their customer service. Rely only on what it says when you go to the Account page on your Kickstarter project.

The Story/The Project: Here’s where you make your pitch, explain your project, ask people to pledge, explain budgets/timing/processes and the like and talk about things like stretch goals, freebies added to all rewards if certain funding goals are met. They encourage backers to get others to pledge to your project so they get more for their money. (Brandon Sanderson's recent Kickstarter doesn't have stretch goals because, well, it doesn't need them. But you do.) Remember, you can always add stretch goals, so my recommendation is to not set them too close together at first, then see how things are going and add more—perhaps in intervals between the existing goals—so as to spur pledges as needed.

I’ve been a story author in a number of anthologies that have done Kickstarters, so, although I didn’t run those, I have some experience in seeing how those work.

For a book Kickstarter, the author will often have other books or stories than he or she can add as stretch goals, including goals for the first 100 and/or 200 participants to encourage people to pledge right away. Often other writers, especially writers of series, may have a book or story (especially the first book in a series) that they often give away as a loss leader and/or can give away to all participants once a goal is met. For them, it helps spread the word of their series or books and generate more reviews. For you, it gives the customer more value at little or no cost.

Don’t set your threshold goal for funding too high. Remember, you get nothing if the goal is not met. Better to set it low enough that you break even on the project (i.e., you can afford to deliver what you promised), then make money as the goal is exceeded. Projects that blow through their goals also make better press and generate more enthusiasm.

As stretch goals are reached, even a small pledge can get a lot of reading material, so expect the last days of your project to have a bit of an uptick on pledges.

Lots of Kickstarter projects have various add-ons, in addition to the base goals and stretch goals. Buy this book or t-shirt or item for an extra $10 or whatever. These are usually listed in this section. I think they are confusing for customers and always seem to involve a lot of clarifying email exchanges. Accordingly, I made more different Reward levels and avoided add-ons, unless we hit the stretch goal for an audio version of the novella.

Photos are easy to attach to your posting. Make sure they are large enough to be visible on a smartphone read of the page, but not so large as to overwhelm the page or necessitate too much scrolling to get to the text. I set my pictures of book covers in this section at 300 pixels wide.

Kickstarter also recommends you do a video. I made a quick, free 30-second video on Animoto, which I’ve done for a few book trailers, not that there seems to be any evidence they really help sell my books, but unless you subscribe for money, you can’t upload those videos (so you can download them to Kickstarter), although you can post them on YouTube. Friends tell me there are ways to download from YouTube to get around this restriction, but I’m pretty much of a Boy Scout about such things, so I decided to open the completely unused movie-maker software that came on my five year-old laptop and make a video of my own.

Kickstarter says that projects with videos do better, but unless you have a complicated project, I’d try to stay under two minutes. Also, try not to sound forced and unnatural as you read your script.

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