Running a Kickstarter Campaign
One of the things that kept me crazy busy through October was the Kickstarter campaign for They Are Still Here. It was my second attempt at doing crowdfunding. The first attempt failed, but I learned a lot.
One key to a successful campaign is a good budget. The tools that Kickstarter provide to help you with this are useless and the independent advisors don’t give you anything useful unless you pay them (and probably not if you do pay). The way I did the budget is as follows:
- Work out how much everything is going to cost.
- Set your initial goal at twice the minimum amount you need.
- Price each reward at twice what it costs to fulfill.
- Don’t forget to allow for Kickstarter and credit card fees.
- Have postage charged separately after the campaign.
By having a consistent pricing strategy, you can be sure how much profit you are making. If your margin is different on each reward then you will have great difficulty knowing how much profit you are making because it depends on which rewards have sold.
Forgetting the fees is an easy mistake to make, but if you do it can throw a real spanner in the works. I budgeted 10%, and it was very slightly over that.
Interestingly, there are some parallels between Kickstarter and batting second in a limited overs cricket match. You know what your target is (either in pounds or runs) and you know how long you have to get there (in days or overs). So you have a target rate (in £/day or runs per over), but it helps a lot to get a fast start so that you are always ahead of the rate. Once your current rate drops below the starting required rate you are in trouble.
Getting a fast start is all about having a large number of people committed to back you. That is hard for a small press like mine. You need a mailing list of hundreds, preferably thousands, of people. Having a pre-launch helps, and we were at 39% after 4 days, but then things started to slacken off.
Once you are into the campaign, the trick is to keep getting the message in front of new people. You can do that for a while by being relentless on social media. Not all of your followers will see your initial posts, but if you keep at it then they will eventually get the message.
After that it is a problem. By day 13 I had clearly maxed out my own social media following. That day’s income was only £30. The next day was worse. At that point it was obvious that we were in serious trouble.
So I called in some favours. I wrote to a bunch of well-known writers that I knew and asked them to boost the campaign. That worked. We had a couple of very good days, and we funded with a few days to spare. My sincere thanks to everyone who helped out.
I would have liked to do much better. Hitting some stretch goals would have enabled us to offer authors bigger advances. But so it goes. Now we have to make the book.
If you are waiting for news, I will be in touch with all backers this week.