Tips To Crowdfund Your Book + advice, identity, & good news
Seven tips for Kickstarting success; banned books as movies; social media satire; writing identity; new interview coming!; SFWA grandmaster; romantasy; Hugo controversy; good news; tea with a halo
Greetings readers & writers!
I have been knee-deep in marketing the past month, learning the ins-and-outs of crowdfunded publishing (we’re fully-funded now! ahhhhh!) Normally, publicity doesn’t get heavily involved until 4 - 6 month before the book’s release. But as I’ve discussed with students and clients, marketing starts even before a book comes out… sometimes before you’ve written one. That has even more true with this Kickstarter, where even the theme of the anthology (and launch date) was chosen with marketing potential in mind. All the marketing copy, graphics, positioning, and publicity is happening now. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:
Seven important tips for planning for your crowdsourced publishing project:
Know your goal. You know this is where I always start. What are you hoping to get out of crowdsourcing your book project? Do you want to fund a specific cause? Earn money for your writing? Further your reputation or exposure? Collaborate? Any/all of these are valid, but it helps to know what you’re aiming for as it may impact the choices you make around budgeting, rewards, marketing, and fulfillment. It will also help you assess what support you need!
Know where the money’s going. To set-up a Kickstarter, you need to connect it to a back account, which is where the payments will go once your project is funded. Are you a one-person-band so it’s going straight into your personal account? Do you want to start a business account or LLC to manage business transactions? Are you working with a group and need to incorporate? Only you can make these decisions, but be sure to include this (potentially complex) planning step into your timeline.
Be realistic about your timeline. We knew we wanted to launch in early 2024 and have books to backers by the end of the year. But we had to assess if that was realistic. So the pub team worked backwards, calculating the time it would take for: fulfillment, shipping, printing, proofs, layout and production, design, copy editing, editorial work, crowdfunding, launch, marketing, and set-up. What did we need to have in place before we began? At each stage? This helped us evaluate workload, deadlines, and where we needed support.
OTHER POSTS ON KICKSTARTING AND BOOK MARKETING:
Make your funding goal the minimum it needs to be for the project to pay for itself. This advice comes from pub-team member, storyteller, and indie game designer, Brigitte Winter. Setting your goal to your minimum means it will be easier (and faster) for you to fund, giving you both success and visibility. So have a rock-solid budget. Here’s a very thorough article on Kickstarter’s webpage about budgeting for the various self-publishing costs. You want to know how much it’s going to cost for you to produce your books, so you can set price points and reward tiers accordingly.
Reward tiers vs. add-ons vs. stretch-goals. This took me a while to wrap my brain around:
Reward tiers are progressively more expensive bundles allowing your backers to choose how they’d like to support you. Each successive tiers includes more (a/o different!) bonus items.
Add-ons are a la carte items backers can add on to their pledge, in addition to the items they get in the reward tier they’ve chosen.
Stretch goals are funding goals that, once reached, unlock a bonus item or feature that applies to every reward tier without the backers having to do anything.
So, for example, when we decided to do a bookmark, we settled on making it available as part of (higher) reward tiers and as an add-on, rather than a stretch goal, contingent on funds-raised.
Decide how you will handle fulfillment. I’m still learning here, but it’s important to have a sense, even from the beginning, of how you will get the final product to backers. Will you include shipping costs before or after funding? Will you ship books from your basement? Use a pledge-manager like the built-in Kickstarter one or Backerkit? Use a third-party fulfillment center or online store? For example, pub team member, Alec Marsh, who has experience publishing and crowdfunding with an indie press, and helped us determine that, with our accelerated timeline, we should forego merchandise that might delay our fulfillment schedule and increase shipping costs.
Make sure crowd-funding is the right fit for your project. As you can tell from this quick primer, as with any self-publishing venture, there’s a lot of work and planning that goes into a successful launch. I have mad respect for folks who take on a project like this solo — I don’t think our project would have been nearly as successful without the contributions and enthusiasm of all 22 of us. Make sure you have the time, energy, funds, and support to make your project a success!
More questions about this process? Shoot me an email or drop it in the comments!
Writing/Marketing Resources:
‘The Color Purple’ and 30 Other Banned and Challenged Books You Should Be Watching {PEN America}
The absolutely too true words of Rebecca Solnit: How to Comment on Social Media {Lit Hub}
I found a lot of food for thought in Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s take on how a writer’s identity impacts the reader (and publishing) experience in “Inside the Fiction Editor’s Mind: Does the Writer’s Identity Matter?” {SWFA Blog}
Marketing means finding ways to cross-promote! Author and podcast host Claudine Wolk from
was kind enough to interview me last spring, so I’m extra thrilled to host her this month for an interview on some of her favorite pro-marketing tips and the intricacies of marketing a marketing book!Industry News
SFWA Names Susan Cooper as the 40th Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for her contributions to science fiction and fantasy literature. She is most well known for her Dark is Rising sequence (which is a personal favorite).
A “new” genre is taking social media by storm: What is Romantasy anyway? {PBS}
The Hugo Awards faced a lot of controversy this year when several well known authors and pieces of media were deemed “ineligible” for no specified reason.{Astrolab} This has also resulted in a number of resignations in the WorldCon organization that hosts the Hugos. {Publisher’s Weekly}
This year’s Best Novel Hugo went to T. Kingfisher for her book Nettle & Bone. You can see the other award nominees and winners here.
So this isn’t about publishing, but I found this comprehensive list of 66 Good News Stories You Didn't Hear About in 2023 to be an ideal tonic for all the heartbreaking world news right now. We are doing some things right. Also, the article art is by the delightful Oliver Jeffers, from his luminescent picture book, Here We Are.
Tea
From my recent David’s Tea haul, comes another favorite: Headache Halo Organic Tea. I came for the hint at medicinal qualities and stayed for this gulpable, drink-all-day herbal that is neither too floral, nor too minty, but just the right blend of nutty rooibos and soothing herbs to be flavorful without being overly vegetal.
Now that the anthology is fully-funded, we’re reaching for our stretch goals. I hope you’re stretching yourself this week, whether that means going for a walk, trying something new, or starting an unfamiliar project.
~Allison
Writer & Marketing Coach
Keep Writing, Keep Connecting! Substack | Facebook | Website | BlueSky
New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention — now live on Kickstarter!
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