Other People’s Kickstarter Problems…

I Was Sent Two Campaigns Today…

The owners of the campaigns wanted me to look at putting them here on my blog to promote. A new feature I am doing weekly, but I was clear I would not put up any campaign that I did not support or like. My blog, my rules.

Both campaigns I got today were first campaigns and both were ambitious for single books, which is good, unless you try to cram in everything including the kitchen sink. Then information flow in the story is a major problem for backers.

Both had that problem.

Both had art that any 6th grader could have done better.

And both wanted far, far too much money to fund, so neither one will fund I’m afraid.

If either one had sent me the campaign ahead of time I could have helped them get to a successful campaign. But I will say nothing publicly bad about anyone’s campaign. So I just wont list them.

So let me give a couple guidelines for writers thinking of putting up a fiction campaign.

1…Your “ask” needs to be between $200 and $500 unless you have been around a very long time and have thousands of fans on your email list. Then maybe go to $800.

You want to fund very quickly so that Kickstarter will help you promote to their people. We have done 8 campaigns so far this year and only one took longer than an hour to fund. Most are 20 to 40 minutes. One thing backers look at is what percentage of funding are you at. I look at that as well when doing searches. If a campaign is over 400% funded, I will check it out at once.

2… Kickstarter says to not go over 30 days. I suggest you keep it under that. All of ours are 9 days. Longer Kickstarters just have longer dead zones in the middle.

3… Bright, PROFESSIONAL art, make the books look like books, not some electronic device with a picture on it.

4… Audio has 1/10th the audience of electronic and paper, so always focus on electronic or paper, offer audio as just something that is also there.

5… Never have buyers pay for shipping later… No one likes to pull out a credit card twice and I will not support a campaign that does that. I pay for shipping in my initial pledge, never later.

6… Kickstarter is not a place for sales. It is a discoverability place to help fans and readers find your work. No need to give discounts, but also watch the upper side as well. Market value.

That’s just a few suggestions.

Again, I will be glad to look at your campaign before you launch. Or if already up, send it to me to see if I will include it on my weekly talk about Kickstarters.