How an Author Who is Successful On Retailers Can Use Kickstarter

Hey there, igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Today I'm going to share my story about Kickstarter, why I'm excited about it, uh, and give kind of a contrast to Russell's story. So Russell shared his story on the YouTube channel and on the podcast feed, uh, pretty recently, a couple episodes back. And so I have slightly different story. I would love for you to check out Russell's story and what he experienced. I'll kind of reference it a of it, just so you know, in this piece of content. But I definitely wanted to share my story as well and why I am personally excited about Kickstarter. So Russell's story was basically that he had some books that he was excited about that he had written and invested a lot of time into, and he launched them on Amazon and it was just a struggle. He was struggling to find his readership on Amazon and he felt that he needed other resources in order to succeed there. And so what he did is he pulled those books from Amazon, he took them to Kickstarter, and he was able to make them profitable on Kickstarter. And so it's, you know, I think it's a pretty common story in the industry. It's one that a lot of people are gonna say is not very common, but I think it's probably the majority of what people experience, which is that they try to write a book and they're super excited about. They're super proud of it. They put it on Amazon or any other retailer. We're not Amazon specific here, but they put it on a retailer and they try to sell it and it kind of, you know, it maybe sells a little bit and then it kind of dies. And they try to continue the series and kind of the same thing. And so they experience this for sometimes years at a time. And they don't really know what's going on with it. So they finally get into some indie circles and some indies tell them like, hey, your book's not written to market, your book's not written to market, so it's not going to sell very well. So as a result, you should kind of start over and find a market that you're excited to write to and write those books. For your readers or for your customers, and then you'll finally be a success at indie publishing. Maybe it's kind of like a massive maybe because you also still have to do all this other stuff correctly. And if you don't do like— if you don't do every single one of these pieces correctly, then you probably are still going to have some sort of struggle or you're not going to make enough or whatever. And so this is pretty much the story that a lot of us encounter those first couple years, uh, trying to be indie authors. And it's not that it's untrue, it's just that it's disheartening. And not everybody wants to, you know, write to market, or like write to a large enough market so that, um, selling you know, on retailers is useful. Not everybody wants to do that. And my belief, being that I'm, you know, wide at all retailers, being that I've been in nonfiction for a while, and so a lot of my beliefs come from the nonfiction side, I apply them to the fiction side, but they're from the nonfiction side, my belief is that you don't have to do that. I don't think that you have to write to market, just to be successful, uh, in the sense that a lot of people talk about it. And so that's what makes me excited about Kickstarter. It's not Kickstarter as a platform specifically, it's that Kickstarter is a platform where you can do a lot of direct sales. And I think direct sales and some of the other cool things about Kickstarter, I think that those are the things that make Kickstarter great, that make Kickstarter useful to us as indie authors, and that will ultimately help us break free of kind of this— I don't know if there's nothing really traditional about the success path, but this, um, this map to success that indie authors believe is, you know, kind of the only way, or one of the only ways, or at least the most common way. So my story with Amazon is that I happen to write books that work for Amazon and that work for retailers in general. And so, like I said, I write nonfiction. The series that— and probably the series that you know me by if you're watching this. So The Productive Novelist, that series has been around for 7 years. So it's been on retailers in some form. Since 2015, and it started out being called Growth Hacking for Storytellers. In the past couple of years, I've been redoing all the books and like updating them, cleaning them up, making them more evergreen. And that series is The Productive Novelist. It sold 60,000+ copies, which is a lot for nonfiction. It's priced higher. There are so many things about it. Like, you know, it sells well in paperback. I'm able to kind of extend it to workbooks now, something that I'm working on. And that I've been able to extend the series as well. And it just, it works really, really well for Amazon. Nonfiction doesn't sell, you know, it sells orders of magnitude fewer books than fiction can. So I want to make that clear where, you know, 60,000 sales is not very much for fiction or for, yeah, for a fiction book or for a fiction series. But for a nonfiction series, it's a lot. And I expect it to sell even, you know, significantly more in the next 10 years. And so that, that business, uh, it just, it works really well on retailers. It's the same. I have a second nonfiction pen name that I started within the last year, nowhere near as successful as the Monica Leonelle brand, if you want to call it that, but, um, kind of just following the same playbook, and it's building, and you know, it's gonna be pretty similar to this someday. Uh, again, this— the Monica Leonelle brand has 7 years of investment put into it. And so it's, uh, the other brand doesn't have that, but it's got me. I know how to do this. I've done it once before, so I'll do it again. And so I've got that that's doing, again, pretty well on retailers. So then when I look at my fiction, it's also pretty, you know, it's It's basically contemporary fantasy. It's, you know, young adult, but it kind of borders on adult as well. It's, you know, I said contemporary fantasy, so I do some urban fantasy, I do some paranormal romance. It's kind of like right on the line, kind of similar to The Vampire Diaries or, you know, something where it's like, yeah, it's a paranormal romance, but there's a lot of urban fantasy, like, world-building elements, and, you know, you've got this big cast of characters. So that's kind of the same thing that I do in my books, and I basically write about princesses who are having #princessproblems as they transition to queens. And, and that's kind of, you know, the, the character archetype. So people So like Serena van der Woodsen from Gossip Girl. She's not, she's not a princess, but she kind of is. She'd be a good example. So somebody who's already, who's already like chosen and, you know, special. And they know that they're, they know that they're like beautiful and smart and charming. And then that's, they have like extra responsibility. And so they're kind of being brought into becoming becoming a queen, whatever you want to call it. And so, so like Sansa Stark would be like the, like the perfect example. Margaery Tyrell as well, if you watch Game of Thrones. That would be two examples of people who are kind of, you know, they already know that they're great, like they're ladies and they're, they're desired, but they— what they actually want is You know, they want to figure out who's loyal to them. They want to figure out how to protect themselves in like a patriarchal world. They have, again, hashtag princess problems. So these characters are really common across fiction. They're pretty popular. And so as a result, retailers also happen to like them. Readers happen to like my books. And so again, it's easy to use retailers to find those books. So a very different story from what Russell has experienced, where he writes kind of a— he basically writes fantasy horror, and he writes a lot about monsters. Even, you know, a lot of his characters are monsters on some level. He also writes a lot of psychological thriller. He kind of writes horror and gore and humor, but like dark humor. And so these books I mean, I think they're great. I backed a couple of his campaigns, but these books, they don't have kind of as obvious of a home on a retailer because, you know, especially in fantasy right now, the books that are popular are really kind of more in the, you know, girls in pretty dresses on the COVID paranormal romance, like fated mates type of stuff that just happens to kind of be what's more popular right now. So he, he has experienced that it can be hard to make really big money on retailers. So it's not that he didn't make money, he did, but he wasn't making like six-figure income, that which, which, um, you know, was an amount that he needed to keep his business running and invest, reinvest in more content, more creations, that sort of thing. And so he he just realized he didn't, you know, it wasn't like paying off at the level he wanted. And so then he did Kickstarter. He pretty much raises about $10K per novel campaign that he does now, and he's pretty much applied his system for comics to novels. It works really well. And so he's able to make quite a bit more money, uh, with a launch of the books on Kickstarter, and then he's able to turn around and to put like put some of that money into advertising or whatever when he launches his books again on Amazon. And so that's kind of his strategy, which I think is a really cool strategy and one that I want to use as well, even though I, you know, I can also just launch on Amazon and kind of not have as hard of a time with it. And so the reason that I would use Kickstarter even though I could just use retailers and be okay financially and succeed, uh, succeed. Um, there, there are 5 reasons. So this is why I'm excited about Kickstarter. One is direct sales. Like I said, I'm a really huge fan of direct sales. I think it's just so important for indie authors. Um, a second thing is fan relationships. I think it's so important to have a direct connection to fans. And while I do I think you can do this, uh, there are lots of ways to do this while you're using only retailers. So you can have like a Facebook group, you can do an email list, and you can stay connected to your fans. I think it's really cool to have that deeper connection to your fans through something like Kickstarter or Patreon or some other fan-based and fan-backed platform. And you know, my belief about building fans is that The kind of the only way or the, the easy way to build a fan is to ask for a deeper investment. And I think that's what a, I think that's what becoming a fan really is. It's making a deeper investment into something or someone. Um, and that's at its base level. And so that investment can come in time, it can come in energy, it can come in following you on like multiple platforms. So like hanging out in your Facebook group, but it can also come in just spending more money on something. Something. So if I'm spending $5 on a book, on, you know, an ebook on Amazon, and that's kind of sitting like zeros and ones in my e-reader, um, it's very easy to forget about, right? Like, it wasn't a big investment of money, it's not a big investment in time because I forgot about it. So I invested like very little time in it, uh, and I think it's just kind of different on Kickstarter because you're probably spending more money So maybe you're spending $25, $50, $100. You're getting— usually getting a physical package at your home, which is huge. Now you have a physical object in your home that's like in your, in your reality that reminds you constantly of this investment you made. And then you also, you know, you made the bigger investment, so you're more likely to engage with that thing because like, I don't know about you, but I spend $5 all day on things that I forget about. I do not spend $100 on things I forget about, at least not as often. So I think it's a really great way to encourage some people to invest deeper. Now, not every fan has, you know, a ton of money, or— and, and that's perfectly fine. Like, your fan doesn't have to have money, um, but it is a way to help people invest deeper because Then they've bought the thing. Now it's in their home. Now they're more likely to read it or open it, and then they're likely to buy something else or to tell somebody else about it. The third thing is the ability to sell non-book items. This is super important to me in my nonfiction business. I do mostly sell books, but I'm also starting to sell workbooks. And, you know, every once in a while I pull out the coaching or like the program or whatever. But a lot of what I do is you know, I'm selling my writing, but I'm selling it as like a big bundle. I'm selling it through Substack right now. And so, uh, and, and there's like little things that I don't do often, but that can be add-ons. So if you look at our Kickstarter right now, for example, we have a number of add-ons that are not a book. Uh, we have— and we do have a lot of book stuff, like most of the stuff we're selling there is still books, but we also have like our Kickstarter sprint with us. And so that's where people can join us and watch us as we do our own Kickstarters in January of 2022. Like, that's something that we are never going to do again. So it's special. And it's also a way that you can engage with us and engage with our book at a different level. And so that's how I think about Kickstarter, even for fiction, because I know there are going to be people out there who are like, nonfiction is different than fiction. I mean, it's a little different, but the concepts are the same. Like, you, you want to give people a way through Kickstarter to engage with your work at a deeper level. And so maybe that's different for fiction of how, you know, maybe you can't do a sprint with us, but you could do like a book club. You could do, you know, out loud reading. You could do, um, yeah, all sorts of stuff. You could let people in on your process for writing your book. You could do character names, you can do story stuff. Like, there's so much stuff that you can decide to do. You could even just have a party that was like— you'd sell tickets to like an in-person costume party, or even like a virtual costume party where people get to hang out with you and talk about your characters. There are so many things that you can do. And it's, again, it's a way, you know, sometimes people are like, well, what do I offer? It's like, well, offer something that helps people engage with your books at a deeper deeper level. And that's, that's exactly what we did on the nonfiction side. We did— we're not— I mean, we have a couple things that are just random one-offs that people were like, oh, could you do this too? Like, yeah, we have a tier for that. But for the most part, we looked at the book that we're promoting and we said, how can we offer people a way to engage with us deeper on this book? And a lot of our tiers are that. And so again, you can, you can look at our Kickstarter. It's at KickstarterYourNovel.com. And let's see, number 4, more revenue per customer or more revenue per reader. You know, on a retailer, you can get $5 for a book, $10. You know, maybe if you have a hardcover, you're at $25. If it's a special edition hardcover, you're at like maybe $50. But that's kind of it. Like, that's kind of the end of the line. You can start to bundle books together, which no retailer allows you to do very well at this point. They don't allow you to say like, hey, you know, let people buy like these 5 books at once. And so there are some ways they have series pages now, but it's not, you know, it's not the same as like an actual reward tier where people can do that. And so just being able to kind of give people You know, because I think that's something that fiction authors struggle with, is like, how do you give people a chance to give you more money? Like, you're really only giving them a book sometimes, and it's like $5 or $10, and maybe they would love to spend $500 with you because they just love your stuff so much, but you're not really giving them a way because all you're doing is putting out book after book, and it's going to take them 100 books to spend the amount that they actually want to spend with you. So more revenue per customer or reader. Russell typically gets between $25 and $40 on average per backer. Right now, our Kickstarter campaign, I think it's at $32 average per backer, and it's been going up. I think it started at like $26, but because we're starting to sell the higher tiers, it's going up and up. So then the last thing is the one that I think it may surprise people, but I think You know, Kickstarter is great for celebration. It's great for visibility. I was telling people because a lot of people are like, well, if I do Kickstarter, it's going to eat into my Amazon sales. And I'm like, you know what? My Amazon sales are up this month. So we're, you know, we're, we're doing this Kickstarter. We started at the beginning of October. We're ending in mid-November. And my— yeah, my sales are up on Amazon, like significantly, like 25, 30%. You know, my sales and then, you know, obviously sales up on Kickstarter. Our Kickstarter is currently at like $11,500 right now and it's projected, you know, to be, well, significantly higher than that. I won't say because I don't— I don't know if we'll hit it, but it's projected to be significantly higher. So we expect to get quite a bit more than that. But it's already at like, you know, I'm already having Like we're mid-month right now when I'm recording this. And because of Kickstarter, we're already having like a 5-figure month for basically, you know, we have 300— I think we're at 350 backers or 360 backers right now. And that's, you know, that's like if I had just launched this book on Amazon, we wouldn't have gotten 350 people to buy it right away. People would have bought it when they needed it. And then we also, like, we wouldn't be making what we are. Like, we just wouldn't have made that much money off of it so far. And so, you know, for, for Russell and I, this is, this is a pretty good payoff, um, already. And, you know, there may be authors for whom, like, you know, over $10,000 is not exciting on a book. Like, okay, that's cool. I would say, like, for 95% of indie authors, that's not chump change. Like, that's that's like pretty important money and not a joke, not a joke amount to receive. So, but anyway, my point is that, you know, you'll have a lot more visibility. I'm seeing a lot more sales on Amazon. I don't know if— I don't know that Russell is because he doesn't do a lot of nonfiction, but I'm just seeing my sales are really up quite a bit. And I think it's just the visibility, people seeing the book and maybe they're not getting, you know, maybe they're not doing the Kickstarter, but they're— or, or maybe they're seeing a bundle that they want and they're buying it somewhere else. I'm seeing a lot of that for the Kickstarter during the Kickstarter. And so for me, even though retailers are pretty good to me, they treat me pretty well financially, I would say that what I'm hoping to use Kickstarter for, my plan is to do Kickstarter 4 times a year. Again, I have 2 nonfiction pen names, so I'm hoping to do 1 campaign per year on the 2 nonfiction pen names and then to do 2 campaigns for my fiction pen name because I only, I only have 1 fiction pen name and that's kind of a different story. You may have known me when I had like 3 or 4 pen names, but I've consolidated all the pen names. Into one. So, so I want to do two campaigns about six months apart on the fiction side. And I think it's going to be a great chance to be really visible on these different pen names. It's also for me, the four campaigns a year is a really good pace because the way I see it is you have, you know, one month where you're kind of preparing for the campaign. So that's month one, getting a lot of the marketing stuff into place. The second month where you're like pre-marketing the campaign and doing kind of some of the marketing legwork, and then the third month where the campaign is actually going. And then the fourth month you'd be doing fulfillment and then you'd also be essentially like planning the next campaign. And so this to me feels like an easeful schedule, especially from what I've done with my campaign where I'm not spending, you know, not having to do like everything at once. I'm not having to like market market all the time or think about Kickstarter all the time. It's kind of just like another promo tool, and maybe I'm spending like a couple hours a week on it because I've, you know, been doing, doing the planning and the marketing and the pre-marketing and all that stuff kind of as I go. And so the way I'm seeing it, I'm really looking at it as another retailer platform for which I can launch a couple of projects a year that are relevant to my audience that they're excited about. And the other thing is I'm launching those projects kind of like as preparation for something else. So like next year for this pen name, I'm hoping to do essentially like a story structure or like an outlining type of campaign. I already know what it is, but I don't want to say just in case things have to change. But doing that, you know, in like July or August, that will kind of roll me right into Preptober and into NaNoWriMo and into, you know, into like college kids, you know, thinking about writing their stories during the semester or, you know, thinking about what they're going to do over their, their winter break or whatever. So it's going to kind of roll into that. And I think it's a really good way to get my marketing for that started early. And, um, kind of— it's kind of like the launch before the launch in many ways, because I do— I typically do, um, a Preptober challenge every year. So that's how I'm kind of seeing myself using it. Uh, so bottom line, I do think it's a great opportunity for authors who consider themselves successful, if you've been successful on retailers, on other platforms, I believe that there's actually a huge chance to be really successful on Kickstarter as well without, you know, something I think people worry about is like, well, I'm going to cannibalize my success on another platform. So if I launch on Kickstarter first, I'm going to cannibalize my success on Amazon when I launch. And I don't think that's true. I just, I don't see any evidence of it. I think any time you're launching, it creates a ripple effect. You know, people find you in all sorts of places. You find readers everywhere. And those readers, they might back you on Kickstarter. They might go look for your backlist on Amazon or other retailers. And it's all good. Like, it's all just more visibility for you. So I don't, I don't think it's going to be— I don't think, I don't think that's going to be an issue for most authors. So I don't know. I think it's a good opportunity for really anybody who's, you know, who wants to do more with their fans, who wants to do direct sales with their fans through Kickstarter or through their own, you know, through whatever else. I think, you know, another A couple other things that people use Kickstarter for: funding different formats, so like audiobooks, translations, even just reformatting like paperbacks or hardcovers or anything like that. Getting merchandise ahead of time, like paying off your print run for, you know, events that you might be going to this year or for direct sales through your website so that you can turn up Facebook ads instead of having to put the money into that now, like which usually comes from your profits or what should be your profits. You can, you know, do a Kickstarter run of it and get your print run paid for. And now you have your merchandise sitting, you know, at your house or at your warehouse or whatever. And now you can crank up the volume on your Facebook ads to your direct sales. So I think there's a lot of really cool uses for it. I'm excited to experiment in the next couple of years with it. And I just think it's a, it's a new and exciting platform for authors. There are lots of different ways to use it. So if you're excited about anything from my story around Kickstarter, definitely feel free to check out our campaign. Kickstartyournovel.com. If you're watching this afterwards, then you can probably get our book, Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. The book will be available at retailers around mid-2022, so check that out if you missed our campaign. That is another good opportunity to just learn a little bit more about what Kickstarter is about and make an informed decision about whether you want to to start using the platform or not. So we'll be doing a ton of videos on Kickstarter over the next month or so. So be looking forward to that on my YouTube channel, on my podcast channel. You'll be hearing a lot from me. You'll also be hearing a lot from Russell. So if you see his videos come out or his, um, the audio, you know, pool of those videos, definitely try to leave him a comment and just welcome him to the channel, to the podcast feed, just so that, you know, he feels welcome and good and appreciated. And he'll be sharing a lot of cool stuff about Kickstarter as well. So I will, I'll try to do intros to that, but it may not happen. So if you just see like a random video from him, it's, it's okay. It's just, it's, you're still on the right feed. It's still me, but I'm just hosting Russell's videos. For the next month. All right, that's all. Thank you so much for watching and listening. I hope you have a wonderful day.