The Good, The Bad, The Ugly Kickstarters…

Oh, No, I Got a Question…

Yup, got a question after yesterday’s Kickstarter Friday post and this question was pretty simple with no real simple answer.

Question: “Why do I not promote fiction Kickstarters focused mainly on pretty books?”

My base response is that no one reads really beautiful, pretty books with all the bells and art and colored edges and white ink on black paper and so on and so on. When done by a real designer with fantastic illustrations, these books can be works of art. And not one person will ever read the book. It will remain as a collector’s item gathering dust or sold to other collectors.

But Dean, that’s why they also give out electronic reading copies. Yup, I know. And that helps a little, but readers are not the focus.

But then there is the rest of it… Let me try to explain and this is where it gets complicated.

Reasons to do a fiction Kickstarter…

• Get more readers for your work… (Kickstarter gets your books into places and to people who would never normally see it.)
• Promote your books. (Even if they don’t buy your book on Kickstarter, just doing a campaign and passing the word around promotes your book to readers who might want to read it.)
• Makes you some money while promoting your book and Kickstarters are free to do. 
• Have fun. They really are fun.

But like everything these days in publishing, you have to do it right. And granted, doing a beautiful, collectable-book-focused campaign does maybe get you a few more readers and promote your books, but not as much as a reader-focused campaign would by factors.

And the real kicker is that last point about money. Beautiful books, signed books, cost a ton more to deal with, time to produce, time to get to backers so they can put that book on their collectable shelf. (Trust me, over the decades, I have had thousands of beautiful books on shelves, from some rare Ellison to the Don Grant editions of Stephen King books. And we sold them for a ton of money over the years. Collectable.)

So what do I consider the good, the bad, and the ugly of Kickstarter campaigns.

1… The Good.  Reader focused, story focused. Some paper and hardback books included, but the focus is on readers. Electronic book not priced too low or too high, paper books priced to give a really nice margin of profit.  You should be making 75-80% full profit on the campaign. And yes, that is after Kickstarter’s 8% fee.  So a $5,000 campaign will make you about $4,000 net profit.

These campaigns tend to have a real design and book focus, and clearly a human behind it who loves what they are doing and will interact with the backers as the writer can do. (Some writers are not made for that, but they still put their personality in the campaign and it has a clear theme.)

2… The Bad. Kitchen sink campaigns, so much stuff, so complex, no backer can ever wade through it all. And most writers I see in kitchen sink campaigns have not calculated the profit margins on anything. These kind of campaigns will go into detail on the exact shipping in the story, explain every reward as if the backers can’t read the reward column, and after thirty or forty different things, most backers just glaze over and decide to come back later or just take a flyer at something. I have seen some of these campaigns have items that for every one sold the writer will lose money.

This kind of campaign often has no real focus, no theme, and the author is so afraid of the process, they just grab stuff to put in and worry about it later. You sometimes see these campaigns asking far too much and not fund, thus playing even more into the author fears of not doing enough.  Many of these, if lucky to fund, will have profit margins down in the 30-40% range and the writer will not count the extra time doing all the work for all the extra stuff tossed in.  So on a $5,000 campaign, the writer will be lucky to make $2,000 net.

3… The Ugly. These campaigns focus only on the beautiful books. And they spend a vast amount of time showing the collectors, who are their buyers, what beautiful stuff they have crammed into their books. As I said, done right, some of these books are works of art and should be put on a shelf to look at. The story is just secondary.

Big problem on this is massive costs. The authors seldom will figure ahead what their price should be and feel on the price a downward pressure, even though the book costs and shipping are going upward.

I saw one campaign last year that was a combination of a kitchen sink and beautiful book that grossed about $80,000. You would think, wow, right?

Nope. Three or four other Kickstarter experts and I watched the campaign, did all the math on the costs of every item, and we figure the campaign lost upwards of $20,000. That’s ugly.

So to answer the question asked, I don’t promote pretty book campaigns only focused on the pretty books unless there is a major push on the reading side as well and the pretty book is just riding along. And I won’t help an author promote a campaign that will mostly just lose money in the end.

As I said, good question, no simple answer.