A Roll of the Dice
Reflections on Funding a Project through Kickstarter
Image by Dawn Larder
Introduction
After successfully crowdfunding my first ever solo audiobook through Kickstarter earlier this month I thought it would be useful to share my reflections and learning from that experience. Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform which has become increasingly popular amongst creative writers in recent years. For example, it’s often used to fund the standard production costs of artwork, editing and formatting, or as a means of releasing limited edition high-quality illustrated hardbacks. Author Brandon Sanderson has famously used the platform to phenomenal success, raising an astonishing $41.7 million in March 2022. Backers are able to choose the level of financial contribution they make to a project and they receive rewards in return for their support.
In 2023 I was involved in two separate successful Kickstarter projects. The first, where I had a more hands-on role, was the fantasy horror anthology The Anatomy of Fear. I was also a contributing author for The Advent of Winter fantasy short story collection. Those experiences got me thinking about my own objectives for 2024. One of them was moving into the audiobook market with my debut novel Hall of Bones. I knew I wanted a professional narrator, rather than trying to narrate it myself or use a computer programme, which I felt wouldn’t have the same emotional impact or connection with the audience. Having worked with RJ Bayley on The Anatomy of Fear, I knew he had the range and skill to be able to handle the large cast of characters involved in The Brotherhood of the Eagle series. However, the up-front cost was an unavoidable issue and so the option of using Kickstarter to raise the required funds was something we discussed at some length.
Choosing to run a Kickstarter campaign
In making the decision to go down the Kickstarter route it’s important to understand the risks you are taking. Kickstarter publishing projects only have around a 40% chance of being successfully funded. Audiobooks are notoriously difficult on this platform since a lot of backers want something physical in return for their money. Audiobooks are by definition a digital reward and the high production costs mean there isn’t much money left in the budget to throw at physical rewards without setting your funding goals unreasonably high.
That initial funding goal is key, since Kickstarter is an all or nothing funding platform. If you don’t hit that initial goal, you don’t receive anything and no one is charged. Obviously, that also means the project doesn’t happen. I know a lot of creatives take the approach of setting a lower funding goal than their planned costs, effectively putting in their own money to fund the project unless it reaches further stretch goals.
I wasn’t in a position to do this for my audiobook, so instead in setting those initial targets I looked at ways to reduce the costs. At that first funding goal (the one I eventually reached) the finances involved a lower hourly rate, which was combined with a royalty share arrangement between me and my narrator. Had we reached the first stretch goal I’d have been in a position to switch over to a higher straight hourly rate without the royalty share arrangement. Thinking about the costs of your project and how you can make it deliverable is a key decision. Before embarking on a campaign you must be confident you can actually fulfil your project and provide the promised rewards to your backers without putting yourself at undue financial risk.
When working out the finances you need to factor in that Kickstarter’s combined fees will come to around 10%, which they will deduct from the money raised if you’re successful in reaching your target. In addition, I allowed a further contingency of 5% to cover the risk of dropped backers and shipping costs being higher than expected.
Preparation
Once you’ve crunched the numbers setting up a Kickstarter campaign is relatively straightforward, but it still takes time. I looked at other similar successful projects before starting my own, seeing what rewards they offered and how they structured their campaigns. Kickstarter has its own following, and backers tend to be drawn to visual information. As a result, I prepared a lot of graphics and banners, including having pictures for every available reward and add on.
On the Kickstarter campaign page your story (basically your pitch to potential backers) also needs to be compelling. Backers are investing in you, so explaining who you are, who else is involved and why the project is important to you all need to be covered. I gave a lot of prominence in my campaign to RJ Bayley as the narrator and to Dawn Larder who was providing the artwork, as the project was about what we were hoping to produce as a collective creative group.
I kept my reward tiers as simple as possible, as I plan to fulfil the whole project myself. Companies can do this for you for a fee, but this is another cost to factor in if you go down that route. Essentially my rewards ‘stacked’, so for a larger contribution a backer received everything at the lower tiers plus something extra the higher they went. I was advised to make sure there were higher value tiers, which in my case ranged from £150 to £500, to make it easy for people to give me money if that’s what they wanted to do. In the end, the £25 tier was most popular, for which backers received the Hall of Bones audiobook, plus a mini-short story collection called A Roll of the Dice in both eBook and audiobook formats. The key thing here is to provide a range of tiers that cater for every budget.
You’re advised to include a video on your campaign. I had some help here from my friend and fellow author HL Tinsley, who made me a short video which I used not only on the Kickstarter page but also on social media to generate interest both in the build up to launch and during the campaign.
Building the whole campaign took me about a month from December to January. If you want to see what it looked like as well as the campaign video you can find a link to it here.
Marketing
Raising money on Kickstarter is not easy, so you have to be prepared to market the project extensively and shout about it on social media each and every day. This wasn’t something I was wildly keen on, but after spending so much time putting the project together I didn’t want it to fail. Consequently, I marketed the Kickstarter more extensively than any of my previous book releases. This involved:
Exclusively announcing the campaign on one of the prominent fantasy blogs.
Doing a combination of pre-recorded and live podcasts.
Contributing written interviews for a number of fantasy blogs.
Preparing and using various social media graphics and videos to keep the campaign message fresh (I must have used around 100 images in the end, although I have to thank HL Tinsley here for helping create a good proportion of these).
Targeted posts in relevant Facebook and Discord Groups, and asking authors and book reviewers I was friendly with to do the same in groups they were active in.
Offering free short stories as an incentive to backers as we passed various milestones on the way to the first main Kickstarter funding goal.
Doing newsletter swaps with various authors and other Kickstarter campaigns to increase my reach.
Paid Facebook adverts at the start and again towards the end of the campaign. This wasn’t as effective as I’d hoped, and I ended the second advert early as it wasn’t having any impact on backer numbers.
Doing an exclusive cover reveal for backers of the latest book in The Brotherhood of the Eagle series, Broken Brotherhood.
Regular Kickstarter updates through the platform.
Regularly updating the Kickstarter campaign page itself to keep it fresh and current. I did this through celebrating the various milestones reached, highlighting some of the podcasts and featuring certain rewards.
Most of February was spent putting all this in place before the launch in March, so in total I spent two months preparing the whole campaign.
Once I went live the effort of marketing absorbed pretty much all my writing time for the full 30 days of the campaign. I’m glad I didn’t run a longer one as towards the end fatigue began to set in, although I still think 30 days was the right call as it gave me chance to test out what did and didn’t work when it came to attracting supporters.
Being adaptable during the live campaign
You only know how effective all that preparation has been when you launch your campaign. This graphic tells the story of how things went throughout the 30 days mine was live.
I had a great start and after two days I was 25% funded but after that progress was slow. This isn’t unusual in a campaign but by 26th March I felt I wasn’t getting backers at the rate I needed to be confident of hitting my target. I therefore introduced three new reward tiers and gave my family members a nudge and you can see the uptick there on that date, where I moved from 34% to 42% funded in a single day.
The new rewards included a signed set of books without the audiobook rewards at the suggestion of a friend. I was sceptical as the whole project was about the audiobook but when I put this out there someone backed it straight away (it wasn’t my friend!), contributing 5% of my funding goal. I also offered some short story eBook bundles, comprising my own work on A Roll of the Dice together with The Anatomy of Fear and The Advent of Winter. These additions brought in another 8% of the funding needed.
Effective communications
The rate of pledges increased once those new rewards were added but I was still falling short. On 5th April, with five days to go until the campaign ended on the 10th, I was 62% funded but pledges were slowing down. I took the decision it was time to reach out to everyone I knew and ask them for help.
I had messaged friends and family before the campaign started. Lots of people said they would back the project but with a 30-day campaign it was a job which, for them, wasn’t particularly urgent. An impending deadline focusses the mind, so I saw the rate of pledges noticeably increase on the day I put out that call to action.
Family members also contacted me to say they wanted to back but didn’t know how. I think my biggest mistake was I was so focussed on the technical side of setting up the campaign I forgot to lay the groundwork with the group of people most likely to support me. A lot of my family members are of an age where the internet is a mystery, so things like Kickstarter were closed off to them. I got some generous donations from family members that day after talking them through the process and this made the difference, getting the project up to 96% funded in a matter of hours. From there, with the project so close, it created another wave of publicity which got me over the line with another flurry of backers. By the end of the campaign I was fully funded, which felt wonderful.
With the benefit of hindsight, I realise now that I should have been much clearer on what I was doing and how it all worked with my close family and friends as part of that preparation phase. In the reading and writing community, Kickstarter is relatively well understood and people know how to back. However, the reality is that it’s the people you have the closest connection with, rather than strangers, who are the ones most likely to back your project and help you succeed. My communications strategy was the same for everyone, and I hadn’t realised it was completely missing a key segment of my potential supporters.
I think it would have been possible to get that surge of funding at the start of the campaign by taking more time pre-launch to talk to people who were likely to be my key supporters. If those willing to support me had been primed and ready, understanding both the challenge and what they needed to do, perhaps I would have gathered more momentum and hit a higher funding goal. After all, with these campaigns success tends to breed success and projects which hit their funding goal early get more promotion from Kickstarter itself, as it pushes those projects on towards their stretch goals.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter as that concerted push got me over the line and I’m delighted with the outcome. However, if I ever run another one of these again I’ll make sure my communication strategy targets everyone in the most effective way and I leave fewer things down to chance.
Mental health and wellbeing
I want to touch on this before wrapping up, as I think it’s important to go into these projects with your eyes open. I think Kickstarter is a great platform but running a campaign is hard work, especially if it’s starting to look like you’re not going to reach your funding goal and all that planning and preparation has been for nothing. For that limited period Kickstarter really does become your life, dominating every waking thought, and it’s exhausting.
Any author will be familiar with the experience of failure. Whether it’s fewer sales than we hoped or a bad review, these are occupational hazards of being a creative writer. However, with Kickstarter that all or nothing funding model really does become very stark. Remember what I said earlier? 60% of these kinds of projects don’t fund, and I would have been one of those without some generous support from close friends and family in the final days.
I was in a privileged position to be able to call on that support but the crazy thing was I was so lost in my own project I almost missed that fact. As I struggled to fund during the early stages of the campaign I became fixated on the very public risk this might not happen, leaving me with nothing to show for my efforts. That really did affect me, and I wasn’t able to think as clearly as I should as the prospect of failure loomed large in my mind.
There was an insidious pressure all the way through the 30 days of the campaign, where I became obsessed with finding the one marketing strategy which would enable me to break through. Perhaps there was a reward combination I was missing, which people would flock to back if I put it up? Was I coming across well in those podcasts or putting people off? Were those written interviews telling the right story? Should I update the campaign page with something else that was more eye-catching? This put me in a bad place from a mental health perspective, and I really struggled with the pressure as the deadline approached and my funding remained stubbornly under target.
The only reason I emerged on the other side with my (dubious) sanity intact was because of the unstinting support of so many people who believed in the project and wanted me to succeed. This came through financial support, the act of helping to share the campaign through social media, or private words of encouragement and advice. People gave me all sorts of ideas on promotions and new rewards, which was a big help in revitalising the latter stages of the campaign. When things got to the point where I was running out of ideas and beginning to flag, I opened up my emails to find the wonderful HL Tinsley had put together a whole batch of new marketing materials for me. I hadn’t asked her to do this but it was a massive help in that final week and it re-energised the campaign.
Honestly, I was so moved by all those acts of kindness, which collectively helped me get over the line. Thank you to each and every one of you who played a part in making this happen.
What happens next?
It’s important to realise the work doesn’t stop when you’re funded. In fact, it’s only just begun as I now have to fulfil the rewards for my backers. Right now I’m working through scheduling details with my narrator and developing the character summaries he needs to begin work. I’ve also commissioned the refined artwork for A Roll of the Dice.
A Roll of the Dice will be in eBook and audiobook format, so alongside the Hall of Bones audiobook that means I have two separate projects in production. That’s on top of releasing the final novel in my four-book series later this year. It’s a lot to do, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. 2024 promises to be a productive and exciting year and I’m looking forward to seeing all these things come together.
Going further
I know this is a long post but I’ve only scratched the surface of what you need to consider when setting up a crowdfunding project. If you want to go even further then I recommend watching this episode of the Paper Tiger Podcast. Hosted by Delilah Waan, I took part in this discussion earlier this month with fellow authors MT Zimny and Steve D Wall to discuss the Kickstarter platform and what we learned from our experiences on our own projects. This is a two-hour podcast so it covers a lot of ground but it’s an invaluable resource for other authors if you’re thinking of starting your own project. If you are, then I wish you the very best of luck. Just remember to prepare well and do your homework so you can shift those odds in your favour!
