Kickstarter Live
Taking the Leap to Crowd Funding
Last time, I talked about setting up a Kickstarter campaign. Today, I launched that campaign!
EMOTIONS
Emotions often overwhelm people when they hit that GO LIVE button. Their hopes and dreams are riding on the successful funding of the project. I was emotional, but for me, it’s more the terror of trying and failing! What if…
You can fill in that “What if…” with any number of failure messages. But I keep telling myself that my career doesn’t rest on the success or failure of this one project.
SPREADING THE WORD
This Kickstarter is revealing to me the weaknesses of my platform. In fact, I wonder if I even have enough friends and supporters to call my efforts a platform! I don’t post enough on XXX (name our social media account), and I’m enticed by every new platform that comes along. Have you tried TikTok yet? Clubhouse?
For THE PLAN FOR THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE, I’ll do my best. But I’m also resolved to do better in the future and am investigating programs to help me be more deliberate and thoughtful about consistently posting somewhere. Probably Facebook and Pinterest. But I’m looking around at the social media landscape to see if there are other options that will work better for me.
Meanwhile, could you please share the Gingerbread Kickstarter with just one person? Just one.
PREPARED BEHIND THE SCENES
One strength of my position is that I was well-prepared behind the scenes. For a year, I’d been following the Kickstarter platform and learning about successful fiction projects such as Brandon Sanderson’s $6.7 million leather bound edition of his popular book, The Way of Kings. Many people feel that this revolutionized the practice of crowdfunding via Kickstarter for fiction projects.
I took a class on setting up Kickstarters, and they provided a spreadsheet to track expenses. That’s been invaluable, because when you have 8-10 reward tiers, it’s complicated keeping up with what books are being ordered and how many you’ll have to send to whom.
For fulfillment (actually sending books to folks), I plan to use my Shopify/LuluXpress store to send books. (Read about setting up the online bookstore here. ) I understand that if you ask, Ingram will allow you to do a bulk ordering by uploading a spreadsheet. It’s on a one-time, must-ask basis. But I like LuluXpress’s print quality better. So, I’m going to upload my customer list (at least part of it is automated!) and then manually process orders. The advantage of LuluXpress is better printing quality AND I can ship to Canada easily.
29 DAYS AND COUNTING
They say that Kickstarter is a marathon! It’s a full month of sweating out the funding. For the lucky people who fund quickly and easily in the first 48 hours, it’s an exciting time of validation and planning. For those who struggle to fund, it’s an agony of wondering if they are good enough, and trying not to fall apart!
I have a couple things planned mid-month and hope to end with a bang! So, stay tuned!
And if it strikes you as a book for your Christmas gifts, please support the project and share it!