For Authors! How to Crush Your Next Kickstarter Campaign

Hey there, igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourpassion.com. I wanted to let you know that I have a new book coming out called Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. And so it's part of our series that I'm doing with Russell Nolte. We are doing a series called Book Sale Supercharged. There are a number of books out in the series already, but this book is really special because we are not just putting out the book, but we're also launching it specifically on Kickstarter. So very meta of us, but it, it was kind of the only platform that made sense because we wanted to bring visibility to Kickstarter in the indie author community. And so we, we really had to be willing to put ourselves out there on the platform itself. So we're doing this book, Get Your Book Selling, on Kickstarter. It's number 9 in the series, and they're kind of publishing out of order. So the first, the first 8 books, definitely at least 3 of them are done at the time of this recording, and there will be more shortly, I'm sure. So possibly by the time you hear this, it will be even more books done. So I just wanted to go through what our Kickstarter is really about, and I wanted to tell you about some of the success so far. I wanted to give you some behind the scenes of what we're doing, and I also just wanted to talk you through some of the, you know, reward tiers and other stuff that we're doing. Alright, so if you're not familiar with Russell's work, the first thing I should say is that he is an 18-time Kickstarter success story, and he's done all of his Kickstarter projects in either comics, anthologies, or novels. And so he is really well-versed in doing Kickstarters in the publishing category. He's an expert. He's got $250,000 raised through his 18 publishing projects, and that is quite a bit of money. He, you know, it's, um, I think the average is about $14K per campaign. So now some of his campaigns have been up to, you know, $35K, $40K, somewhere around there. Others have been as low as $1,500. So, so he has a range and you can see that. So I don't have the exact numbers, but you can go to Kickstarter and you can look up Russell Nolte and you would be able to see all the campaigns that he does because Kickstarter keeps record of that. They don't let you delete things from their website. So you can go see all the campaigns he does and get some of the stats on his different campaigns and also see what he does on the different campaigns. So the way that this book came to fruition is that Russell has a system. So we decided that we were going to document the system and we were going to mix in some of my frameworks that I already have around publishing, book launching, 10 stages of audience, psychological triggers, and some other stuff that we're doing. We have a bunch of frameworks that we're putting in that will kind of be a container for a lot of the knowledge that he has. And what we really wanna do with this book is show that it's not really a book about Kickstarter. So it is, like you'll get all the details of doing a launch on Kickstarter for books, but it's also like not about that because there's so much more. And we realized, you know, Russell is a pretty hardcore sales guy. I'm a hardcore marketing person and we're both like decent at the other one. I mean, Russell's actually really good at marketing as well because he does a lot of online marketing. I'm not as good at selling. I'm very much more on the marketing side. I'm not a trained salesperson, but my background is in marketing and copywriting and that sort of thing. But combined, we basically have like all the knowledge about how to do marketing and sales because we've both studied it so much. We've both done it across many different categories and we, yeah, we just, we have both been pretty successful with it. So that's also what's gonna be in the book is we just wanna show you some of the basics of just how to sell fiction in general, whether you're doing it on Kickstarter or not. So we think it's a good book about Kickstarter. We also think it's a great book about just launching a book in general. And we also, you know, we think the campaign is really fun to watch because you can kind of see some of the stuff that we do in action during the campaign. So we've so far raised a little bit over $12,000 for the campaign. We are less than half of the way through. So our campaign was 40 days. As I'm recording this, we're on day 23. We have 372 backers. Russell's typical campaign is usually, you know, around, around that, I would say. Sometimes he's a little bit lower. So, you know, he does campaigns where there's only like 200 backers, for example. I think his highest one was a little under 1,000, or maybe it was a little over, I'm not sure. But basically, this is, you know, a pretty good number for us to have at this point in the campaign, and we hope to increase that. We hope to get a couple hundred more backers during the campaign. We hope to, you know, maybe even push past $20K during our campaign. So we'll see how it goes, but that's kind of where we're at right now at the time of the recording. The campaign ends on November 13th, so if you want to back the campaign, you can go to kickstartyournovel.com. And if you want to see what I'm talking about as well— so let's say you're listening to this on the podcast feed Or, you know, you could be watching this on YouTube as well. But either way, if you want to like go see what the campaign is at right now, you can go to kickstartyournovel.com. So I will go through some of the other information that we have about the campaign. So basically, we've— we're doing this thing where we do backer perks every single week. And what they are is they're typically workshops that are based on one of the books in the Book Sale Supercharge series, or it could also be books in the Productive The Novelist Series, which is my series. And so the backer perk right now is Discover Why Fans Love Your Work. We'll be doing a couple more backer perks. I know we have one on BookBub ads. I know we have one on email lists. And I know we have one on book launches, just like general book launches. So some of the ones we've done already, we've done some Amazon algorithms, Facebook ads, The Psychology of Building a Fandom, and then our current one, Discover Why Fans Love Your Work. And so we're doing about, I think there's 7 of them total. We're changing one every week. And what it is, is that we'll do some of them live. And I mean, we'll do all of them live, sorry, but we'll do some of them during the campaign. And so we'll actually, like, as you're backing the campaign, you can actually get some of these workshops. Ahead of time before the campaign ends. And then for the people who are eligible for the backer perks, at the end of the campaign we will send you the information on it. So it's kind of cool. Um, so the other thing we're doing— that's the backer perks. Uh, the other thing we're doing is stretch goals. And so right now we have unlocked one stretch goal, which is that we will break down this campaign in detail. So the thing you're watching here is just an introduction, but what we're going to do for the book is we're adding a bonus chapter that breaks down the campaign in detail of like what happened every week, what we did every week, what we learned, all sorts of things. And then we have two other stretch goals. One is for— right now we have one that's for $13,500. It's about using Kickstarter with Patreon or Substack. So, you know, a lot of times Kickstarter gets compared to Patreon. Especially, and, and Patreon kind of wins almost every time, it seems like. So what we want to do is just offer some education around that, because Kickstarter is very much like a one-time, uh, payment versus Patreon, which is a subscription payment. And it's the same with Substack, so it's a subscription payment. And so those are two— they're kind of like, even though they're both fan-based platforms and direct sales platforms, they're kind of like night and day in terms of buyer psychology. And so that's a lot about. That's a lot of what that chapter is about, is that you, uh, you want to think of them differently even though they're the same. And then the chapter is also about how can you use Kickstarter to bring people into Patreon, how can you use Patreon to bring people into Kickstarter. And so we're going to talk about that in this chapter, um, if we hit the stretch goal, which we are, um, a little bit— let's see, it's $13,500, we're currently at $12,100. $1,250. So we've got a little bit over $1,000 actually. So it's not, it's not actually that much. So you do have to be at the $10 reward tier or above to get this, to get all 3 of these stretch goals right now. And the reason is because it's gonna be a part of the book. So you have to at least be backing the book. You can back the book at the digital tier for $10, and that is the price that we'll launch it at. It's $9.99 regular price when we launch it onto retailers, which will be about mid-2022. So then the second stretch goal we have is for 400 backers. We're currently at 372, so we're getting really close on that one too. We're actually pretty close on both of these stretch goals, so I'll be curious to see which one we hit first. And I'll definitely need to be speaking to Russell to clear like our next stretch goals and make sure he's good with them. So the next stretch goal is the $400 backer one. This one is how you can use Kickstarter with book retailers. And so this— and it's another bonus chapter. You again have to be— you have to like at least buy the book or else you're not gonna get the— you're not gonna get the bonus chapter because it's gonna be in the book. But this is another stretch goal about using Kickstarter with book retailers, uh, and You know, this is, this is for like if you are really heavy on the Amazon side, for example. So if you are in Kindle Unlimited and you use Kindle Unlimited and like that's your jam, how can you add Kickstarter to your arsenal as part of your, um, as part of your platform mix so that you're on many different platforms and finding readers in many different places? And so that's what that chapter will be about. We actually have a number of other chapters that we've added since doing this Kickstarter, since we published this page. So, um, let me go through like what the chapters are to begin with. Um, all right, the table of contents. So Chapter 1, why you need to be using crowdfunding. Chapter 2 is a little bit more about Kickstarter and why it's ready for these publishing projects. Chapter 3 is how independent authors use Crowdfunding. Chapter 4 is 5 Pillars of a Successful Kickstarter Launch. Chapter 5, Designing Your Kickstarter Campaign for Profitability. Chapter 6, Maximizing the Buyer Psychology of Kickstarter. And so this one, this is like a chapter I'm super excited about, and you can tell because I've done 2 different backer perks based on it. So 2 different rewards here, or rewards for backers. And so one of these things is what gets people excited excited about Kickstarter? How is it different from a retailer book launch? How do various categories of psychological triggers improve your campaign? How can you use buyer psychology to make your campaign as sticky as possible? So we go into kind of all of that, and it's, it's a really— it's gonna be a really fun chapter. And there's so much good stuff here. This is— I have a little graphic for it as well, which you can see if you're watching this on YouTube. If you're listening on audio, you'll want to go to the page kickstartyournovel.com to see this. But, um, yeah, it's, it's the buyer psychology of a Kickstarter. And so this is, uh, these are things that I've been, um, studying for a really long time, for over a decade. And so I'll be diving into those, uh, just in general. They're just kind of like these general psychological triggers, but diving into how they apply to Kickstarter, how they apply to fiction. So this chapter is going to be amazing. Um, then, you know, we do some like, how do you set up your Kickstarter? So this is just like the basic stuff. We also talk about what your Kickstarter looks like as it's live. So we have the first week, we have the dip. I called it the dip, Russell calls it the dead zone. If you back with us, you can look at the behind-the-scenes update number 4 where I talk about what do you do in, you know, during the dip. I'm like, what types of promo should you do? What kills your Kickstarter campaign during this time? What's the psychology? How do you manage your own emotions during this time? Then we do the Kickstarter last last days and kind of talk about what the promo is to end the campaign. So then after that, so now we're on Chapter 12, Sending More Traffic to Your Kickstarter. So we talk about like how you can use the 5B x 3 book launch framework/formula, whatever you want to call it. And I have, again, I have a graphic. You can see this if you go to kickstartyournovel.com, or you may be looking at it on your screen right now. But yeah, this is a really cool framework that I use for my book launches. I have this framework in my book Plan Your Book Launch as well. So that's really cool. That book is not necessarily available right now. It'll be— it should be available in the next couple months. So you could— you'll be able to read about that separately. But we also talk about it in this book. So we have that. We also have Building Your Email List for Your Kickstarter Launch, where What do you want to send to your email list? And for this one, you know, Russell gives his full 17-day campaign plan, I guess you want to call it, or schedule, like what he sends to his list every single day. And then I will, you know, we'll be giving those for, I think it's like the 10-day, 17-day, and 30-day campaigns. And we also just talk about like how you can figure that out, like how often can you email your list? What do you say to them? You know, because you can't just keep saying like, hey, back my Kickstarter. You have to be sending different messages to people over and over again. So how do you manage email list overwhelm? We'll be talking about that. We have a chapter on how to advertise your Kickstarter, if you even need ads, if you use them, what should you do, how much should you spend, that sort of thing. And then we talk about the 10 stages of audience. So then there's a chapter on delivering your Kickstarter. There's a chapter on keeping momentum going after your Kickstarter. And then like I said, we do the— we have several chapters on just the 10-day, the 17-day, and the 30-day Kickstarter plans. We're adding a number of other chapters just based just about things that we need to talk about. So some of the limitations of the platform, I know that's a chapter that we're definitely I don't know if we're adding that or if we're just like adding that section to one of the other chapters. We haven't decided yet. But anyway, this is, this is a pretty good overview of what's in the book, but it's not the full overview. So again, if you want to see that, especially if you're listening on audio, go to kickstartyournovel.com for that. So, um, what else can we say about this page? Uh, Basically, we have a couple different reward tiers, and I think that's kind of the next place to go. And I'll talk about which reward tiers are popular and which ones are like not working for us at all. 'Cause there's lots to learn in both. So we do have a $1 tier, and with that $1 tier, you can get Russell's, course called, um, it's How to Build an Audience from Scratch. So that's a cool course. It normally sells for $27. He also has 31 Best Kickstarter Tips, and you can do the behind-the-scenes campaign updates that unpack our process, and that's been really cool too. So again, like I said, we have 4 behind-the-scenes updates. Every single behind-the-scenes update gives you like a ton of bonus content on Kickstarter. And then we also have the admin updates, which— so there are like 10 updates total, but there are 4 of them. So 6 of them are admin updates, 4 of them are, you know, the, the really like deep content on Kickstarter and kind of they really do take you behind the scenes. I'm basing every single one of them because I'm usually the one who writes them up. I'm basing every single one of them on conversations that Russell and I have had behind the scenes that like, you know, just our private conversations. And so it kind of tells you like what we've been talking about. So it's a pretty awesome tier just by itself. And we do have some people at that, about 30 people. Most people are backing at either the ebook, which is at $10, or the print book, which is at $25. And so there are no additional charges if you are in the in the US on the print Kickstarter book. If you're not in the US, unfortunately, there are shipping and handling charges because it's so expensive to ship things right now just with this global pandemic going on. So we do have a lot of people at that one too. And so then we have— so that's kind of like our main tiers. We have a tier that is the $50 or more one. So that's a Q&A call with us. It's 90 minutes. It's a VIP coaching Q&A call, and it's a group call, just to be clear. So people keep asking that, like, is it like individual or is it group? You know, no, we can't give you— you know, it's a $50 tier, so no, we're not doing an individual call with anybody at, you know, for 90 minutes at that tier, because that would be $25 each for us, and that would be— would actually be a lot less, but like we wouldn't be able to profit off of that. So yes, it's a group call, just to be clear. Um, so, and then we have this creator interview series, which is really cool as well. So we just have people who have had successful Kickstarters, we just like interview them and ask them why it was successful. Um, and then we talk about their— we talk about their campaigns as well. So then we have, um, so we have all We have a lot of our tiers, we have them as digital only. So if you want like the Q&A call, for example, but you're international and you don't want to pay shipping on the tier, you can get that too. So we have a number of people doing that, especially if, just if you're anywhere but the US, it kind of makes sense to do. So we will give you extra copies of the ebook that you can then share with friends or whatever, or gift to friends, however you wanna think about it.. And there's not— we don't really give you much else, but the, the real benefit of it is that you don't have to pay shipping and handling. You can still do a lot of the stuff, which like the majority of the stuff we're doing is digital. So hopefully that makes sense why we have these digital-only tiers. It's really for the international people, and you can definitely back it if you're like, I don't like print anyway, like just give me the digital one. That's fine too. I'm totally fine with that.. So we also, um, this is kind of like our most popular tier. It's the Kickstarter Sprint with Us tier. And so what it is, it's $100, um, and you get all the previous tiers. That's kind of how like these things work. So you got all the other stuff too, but you will also get to join us for a live sprint. And so what the sprint is, is that we're all launching our Kickstarters in January. And so as we launch our Kickstarters, Russell and I are going to be recording, uh, just our setup and behind the scenes and our thought processes and all that stuff. And so you can set up your Kickstarter side by side with us, and then we'll all launch them together. And so there will be like a nice community of people who are launching together and just supporting each other. There are over 30 people in the, and right, it says on the screen that there are 13 backers, but you'll see there are a bunch of other backers because again, you get all the previous tiers. So there are over 30 people in this already. We expect to have, you know, maybe at least like 50 people in it because it's really just such a good deal. That's why people are just signing up for it. So you'll be able to chat with us. We actually have the group going already and we've been answering questions there already. Russell's actually been posting about his November campaign that's coming up that he's running. So he has posted a couple of videos about that. So it's really, it's a great resource if you're doing a Kickstarter like tomorrow. You could, you could really learn a lot already from this tier. So this is, this is kind of one of our most popular tiers. And this is kind of the next step up, I think. If you're, you know, if you have a smaller budget, then yeah, grab the book. Digital or print, whatever works best for you. But if you have a little bit more money to spend, this is kind of the most popular thing right now is that we're doing this Kickstarter sprint with us. It's a ton of group consulting for only $100. It's like a really, really good deal. You get a bunch of stuff with it. And so we recommend that one. And so the other thing is that you can do it, you can gift this to somebody. And we've had 2 people who've done that. So if you wanna just give somebody a scholarship, then that's cool too. Like maybe you're not interested in Kickstarter, but you are interested in sharing Kickstarter with other people. We also have the digital-only version, which people are backing at kind of what I've already talked about. So then we kind of consider the other tier a kind of like Sprint With Us Plus. So it's like the deluxe version of Kickstarter Sprint With Us. And what it is is that It's the, um, it's Russell's course, Crush It on Kickstarter. And so for $50 extra, so for $150, you can get the sprint with us, and then you can also get the course, which is normally like, I don't even know, like $400. But for that $50 extra, you can also get the course and you can go through it kind of step by step the way Russell does. It's a really good course. I've taken it multiple times. For obvious reasons because I'm helping Russell write this book about it. So I've taken it a bunch of times. It's a great course, I highly recommend it. And then you'll also get to do the sprint with us. And so we have the digital-only version of that. So then outside of that, the other popular thing is this consulting stuff. So we, we've been doing consulting. It's mostly Russell and and this is kind of all we've promoted so far, is Russell's consulting. I'm also offering consulting, and the consulting that we're offering, it's on Kickstarter. So that's kind of, you know, who has signed up for it so far. It's just people who want consulting specifically about Kickstarter. But Russell and I also have other things we consult on. So I've been talking to my audience this week about, it's, you know, where it's like, hey, if you want consulting on like story structure, I can do that too. I'm only offering it through the Kickstarter campaign. And the reason why I'm doing that is because I'm not— I don't do consulting very often outside of that. And for the next several years, I will probably be focused elsewhere, like outside of the, I guess, Monica Leonelle brand, if you want to call it that. So I'll be focused on some of my other pen names. So I won't be doing this this for at least— you know, I, I don't want to say like I definitely won't be doing it for several years, for the next several years, but right now there's no plan to do it for, you know, the coming several years because I'll be focused elsewhere. So this is kind of the last chance to get some consulting from me if you've been interested in that or if you want that. And it's also a really good time to do that because January 2022 is coming up. So if you have big plans for your author career in 2022, this is a good chance to book because I will be— I'll be doing my consulting hours. You know, I'll be doing all that stuff in starting, you know, probably in January, maybe in December, but probably in January we'll be starting this. So it's a really good time if you're just thinking about planning your year, like let's do that together. And so this is, it's $500 for 3 hours. And so I have a couple packages. I'm gonna do separate videos about those packages. So that's the other popular one. So then there are a couple other tiers that you can look at. So another, so then we added some stuff to this group of what I just talked about. And so we added stuff for authors who are not— they don't know that they're ready for a Kickstarter. They don't know, they kind of just don't, you know, they're kind of like newer authors, I guess. So we're calling it the Craft Track. And so I'm pulling it up here. The Craft Track is really for— it's for newer authors. And there are 3 tiers that we think are pretty awesome on here. One of them, you know, has been up for the whole campaign basically. And that is this $250 tier. And so the $250 tier is basically our entire digital library. So my entire, like, for me, for Russell, you know, all of our books. Russell has his Crush It on Kickstarter course. We have a couple other courses that are writing courses that are included, and you get all the other stuff that's going on during this campaign.. So you can kind of check that out as you want. But we, you know, it's kind of like everything that we have in digital version. So that's the Author Digital Library. We also have two, two other, I guess, tiers that we just recently added. So one is a $20 tier and it's basically the Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter book, but you also get the digital eBooks for Novel Writing Prep and the 8-Minute Writing Habit. Which are my two most popular books for newer authors. And then we have the upgrade, the deluxe, and that one is again for newer authors, but we've included our— we've included the Novel Writing Prep Companion Workbook. So it's a PDF printable. It's a brand new book for me. It's also available on retailers. And it's, I mean, it's a really, really cool book. It's 270 pages. It just helps. It's kind of like a coloring book, a bullet journal, a workbook all in one. And so it can really help you figure out your story. And then we have the, we have our two courses about it. So Russell's course is called Write a Great Novel. My course is called Finish Your First Draft. And so these, these courses are available as well. So that's the Craft Track. I'm going to see if I have those pictures posted. Um, does not look like it. Okay, so yeah, so I have some really great graphics for that, but I don't have them on the page, um, so I can maybe add them. Yeah, I don't see them. Okay, so the— those are the additional tiers, and that's That's pretty much the whole campaign. You know, you can go check it out again. It's at kickstartyournovel.com. There's lots of cool stuff happening during the campaign. If you're interested in the consulting, feel free to message me. You can message me on Facebook in the Messenger. It probably helps to friend me first 'cause I think Facebook hides that if you don't. It hides it if you don't. Have that. And, uh, yeah, I think it's, it's, um, it's just a good chance to talk about consulting before you book it. And so you can also message me on WhatsApp or Telegram, I think is the apps— the what the apps is called. And you probably need my phone number to do that. So if you need that, you can check my email. I send it out in the email today. Um, so you, you You should be getting that in the next couple days, and then I will also post it on Facebook as well. So you can get my number that way. That's, that's pretty much it. It's a really exciting campaign. It's doing really well right now. Super excited about the campaign and lots of really cool stuff that's going on during the campaign. So definitely check it out, kickstartyournovel.com. That's all I wanted to share today. Thank you so much for listening and watching if you are watching. I do also wanna say that we have a lot of other content on Kickstarter. So if you're not interested in Kickstarter for some reason, which we think you should be, but if you're not, that's cool. Just know that we have more content on Kickstarter that's coming out, it'll be out on our podcast feed or on this podcast feed. It'll be out on the YouTube channel. And then at some point the campaign will be over and we'll switch. So it's totally fine. So, but just know that we have a bunch of, you know, just questions that we get from people. We're kind of answering and addressing all of those on the podcast and on the YouTube channel. And so we're really happy to do that, but if it's not your jam, hang out for a couple weeks. There will be new content that is not Kickstarter on these feeds. The other— okay, sorry, I said that was, that was the end, but it's not. The other thing is that Russell has done some of the content, so I will typically do an intro for that, but if for some reason you are listening and you're like, this "Whoa, this dude just came on. Where's Monica? Where's Monica? It's like a dude's voice." That is Russell. So it's Russell Nolte. He's my co-author on the project. He's awesome. He has so much great stuff to share with you. And he will be doing some of the content on the feed and he'll— it'll be solo. So he will be by himself. I will try to do an intro to it. If I don't get to that, that, then you may just hear from him and just leave a nice comment for him if you can. Just be really welcoming and encourage him to share more and we will be sharing all of that with you too. So hopefully this has been helpful to you. Thank you so much for listening and watching and have a wonderful day.