How Kickstarter Saved Russell's Author Career (Kickstarter Series #1)

So I want to tell you a story about how Kickstarter saved my life and my career. I know that might sound like a hyperbole, but it's absolutely true. It's like the hardest story that I have to tell, so I might stumble a little bit. I have to backtrack, but I'm gonna try and do this one time in one take. So, um, the year was 2018, and I was really getting into writing novels seriously. I'd written some novels before, I'd launched a couple of novels on Kickstarter along with some anthologies and some comic books, but I was not really in the novel writing scene like I am today. I certainly hadn't written more than a couple of novels compared to where I've written over 30. I think I'm writing my 35th novel right now. And so I've been consuming, you know, all of the things that you consume when you're trying to learn how to break into writing. I'd been a successful comic book creator and editor for a few years. I was working the convention scene. I really wanted to get out of it, and I really wanted to figure out sort of what the best practices were for writing novels. I had written— I spent a long time, so I was in the middle of writing 18 books in 18 months, and I think they ended up being 20 books in 20 months. And I just, I wanted to know what the best way was to get these books out here. And I read dozens of books from all sorts of authors, and I read all of the Facebook posts on the various groups, and I had consumed just a ton of podcasts. And one thing sort of became abundantly clear was real authors don't launch books on Kickstarter. Real authors launch books on Amazon, and they spend a bunch of add money on it, and they do rapid releases and all of the things that, uh, you know, I think we had all heard. And so I bought into it, and I decided that after my launch, um, of Cthulhu Is Hard to Spell, I would not launch books on Kickstarter anymore. I was just going to launch books on Amazon, and I had this big rollout strategy, and you guys probably would recognize it if I had showed it to you, but it involved like rapid releasing and ads and stacking of the newsletters and newsletter swaps and all sorts of things. I mean, it was very elaborate, one that I had built from all of the combined knowledge of thousands, hundreds of thousands of authors who had come before me. This is not to say that those things don't work, what I'm going to say, or that you shouldn't follow that information or anything like that. So I had this series of books called the God's Verse Chronicles. I had 3 trilogies that were interconnected and they were all in my universe that started with Katrina Hates the Dead, the comic book, and continued with Pixie Dust, the comic book. And they had been my two most successful properties up until that point. So I decided I would write this 12 sort of book series in three interconnected universes, an interconnected universe that had trilogy. I mean, it was literally like by the book of what people tell you to do. And, um, 2019 came and I said, okay, I'm not doing Ichabod anymore. Ichabod Jones Monster Hunter, one of my most popular comic books. I'm not going to do the Cthulhu books anymore. I'm going to do novels and like this is going to work. And my goal was to break even on the first book and then sort of slowly build from there. And what ended up happening was I launched the first book and it did break even. Then I launched the second book. And it did worse in the third book, and it did worse in the fourth and the fifth. And by the sixth book in this slate, I think I sold 5 or 6 copies of this book from the hundreds that I had sold for the first one. So it was literally going in the opposite direction. And, um, come about June 2019, like, I was in a really bad place, like the worst place I had been since probably since the very beginning of my career, before I was— when I was sinking money into comics and books and not making any money on it, before I ever launched a book on Kickstarter, before I ever had an audience. I was in a really, really, really, really, really bad place. A couple of things didn't go my way or went the other way, I may not even be here now. But I— everything that I had, that I had put my whole life into, my whole career into, was falling apart in front of me. And that's when I realized that I wrote in a genre that wasn't super popular. I was writing in a way with tropes that, like, weren't too marked. I wasn't writing to market books. The thing that you can do when you are writing for market books, which hit all the tropes and catch whatever the hot wave is and like have great SEO is like you can ride the wave exactly as all of these things are telling you to do. You know, you can, you can do all this stuff and get your rank up and it really works, but it does not work. For most authors. And the more I talked to authors, which is what I had not done so much before this, but the more I talked and I drilled down and really talked to authors, it wasn't working for most of them either. Even the ones who were following the two-market tropes and all of those things, like, they weren't making enough to quit their job. They weren't making enough to have a career that could that could support them without working 40 hours a week on top of that. And I kind of realized that it was broken. It was a broken system that worked for some people, and it worked really well for a lot of people, especially if you wrote in very specific genres. I'm talking about romance, thriller, crime, space colonization/military sci-fi, there's a couple of really hot tropes, and those tropes change over time, but really hot tropes or underserved markets, or you're doing the K-Analytics and you're doing all of that stuff and you're following all of those trends. The things that I was hearing could really work for you. Or if you were really lucky, it can work for you. Or if you were willing to write just a book a month for a really long time, it could work for you. But it was not working for most authors. And again, I want to be clear, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with doing any of that stuff or any of that advice. That advice does work, but it did not work for me. And sort of realizing that there is no good way to be an author. The good way to be an author is to write the things that you love or the things your audience loves, or hopefully both, and find them in a place that they want to buy. And so I had been successful on Kickstarter but never really with novels. I'd released two novels before, My Father Didn't Kill Himself and Spaceship Broken Needs Repairs. They were easily my two least successful launches, but the thing that I couldn't get over with that launch is— so I launched a book, my third book ever was called My Father Didn't Kill Himself. It was the third thing I launched on Kickstarter after launching Hickabud Jones Monster Hunter, Katrina Hates the Dead, two comic books. And so I launched this book and I made $3,400 from 150 or so people. And it was my least successful thing until I launched Spaceship Broken Needs Repairs, which made like $1,800 from 75 or 76 backers or something like that. I thought those were monumental failures, and I realized that most people don't make that amount of money ever with a book, and I was making it before I ever did a launch. So by the time I brought my books to Amazon, they were already wildly popular. They were already broke even. Like, I could never sell another copy of either of those books and make— I have made a killing on them comparatively to what most people were doing. And I could never get that out of my brain when I was launching these books and like they would sell a couple hundred copies and I'd be like, wait, I only made $70 on these couple hundred copies because I'm selling at 99 cents. Or I'm selling it at $2.99 and I'm making like $200 for 100 copies of this book. I sold 150 copies of My Father Didn't Kill Himself and I made almost $3,500. Something is broken here. At least with the way that I was thinking about how I launch books, which is I don't launch books for a quantity. I launch books in very niche audiences that I know very specific people, specifically people in my audience, really love. So maybe there's 500 people who like a book or 1,000 people that like a book, but like, I'm not going to be selling 50, 20, 50, 100,000 copies of a book. So again, I know plenty of authors who this strategy works for, but it was not working for me. And I realized that if I continued to do it, my career would be over. So I decided to go back to first principles that worked for me, which was finding the books that my audience loved and making those. And so I went back and I made another— I started doing Ichabod Jones Monster Hunter again, which was a book that people had asked me to do for years. And I just said, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I decided that if we raised a bunch of money So I told them, "If you really want Ichabod Jones Monster Hunter, more of it, we need to raise $16,000 to reprint book 1 and to release issue 5. If we can do that, I will make volume 2 and volume 3 and volume 4." Which is a great way, I realized, to use Kickstarter. It's like, "Hey, if you want more of this book that's a niche book," You need to prove to me that you want it by putting your money where your mouth is. And if we can raise this amount of money, I will do more books. I've talked to a ton of people who have used Kickstarter for exactly this, for a book series that was not selling well but had a rabid audience. They decided that they were going to use Kickstarter to try and jumpstart either doing audiobooks or a comic book or just more books in a series. That people have said they wanted and testing the market. I decided to do a second volume, and we're in production right now on a third volume of my anthology series, Cthulhu is Hard to Spell. And that first— both of those books sort of saved my career in a way, but the thing that really saved my career was what I did with the Godsverse Chronicles. I decided, first of all, to pull all of the 6 books down. And then also not release the final 6 books. Because I know there was an audience there. I knew it. I knew it because people had bought books at shows. So I'd gotten the omnibuses of 2 of the series and I brought them to shows and I sold them. They sold perfectly well at shows. They were just not selling on Amazon. And so I said, okay, so what if I think about this differently. What if I, instead of having these 4 different series, I made these 1 series and this was now a 4-book series and I brought just these 4 books that did not sell on Amazon. And again, I was not a novelist. My success came from comics and anthologies and not a lot of those people crossover. Enough of them maybe, but it wasn't like I was super successful with novels on Amazon or something. This was a brand new thing for me even when I had success on Kickstarter. So I repackaged the books into 4 of the books you see behind me. 1, 2, 3, and 4. These 4. And I brought them to Kickstarter and I said, God, I need like $10,000 to make this not be a massive disaster for me. Because I had spent— not only did I spend a bunch of money on the editing, but I spent tons of money on promotion that didn't work and covers that I had to redo. And I mean, I spent so much money on covers for these series. I mean, maybe you can sympathize with me, but like I literally spent like maybe $12,000 and I had remade $3,000 on this series. And so I was like in a deep, deep, deep hole. And I was like, God, if we— if I can make this, just get me out of this hole. Like I need to just dig myself out of this hole and I will never, ever, ever break even on this series. If I don't have something else to go my way, if I can't get a big chunk of money. And that was my goal. My goal was literally to just break even on this series, or at least make a big chunk, and then I could make the rest of the money at shows or some other way. And so January 2020, 2 months before— like, there were no shows, so I literally couldn't have even carried out that strategy if I didn't— I put the books on Kickstarter. And I made a $2,000 goal, which I thought was reasonable because I was putting 4 books in. I usually say, you know, $500 is a good starting place for a Kickstarter, and so 4 books times $500 is $2,000. And I just crossed my fingers, please, please, please, please, please, please, please make me, uh, just, just, just let me stem off the disaster. And we raised almost $10,000. Not only did we raise enough to break me even on that series that had not sold on Amazon, but we raised enough to make a fifth book. Like, we literally made enough to make a fifth book. And I said, if we hit this number, I'll write a fifth book if you guys really love it that much. And then that 5th book became a 6th book and a 7th book. I brought those 3 books to Kickstarter in January 2021, and they raised even more money. They raised $11,000. And suddenly, instead of being at a deficit, I was in a— I had a profit. I think I made a profit of like $3,000 on those 7 books at this point. Something that I was in the hole for like $6,000 a year before, I was suddenly like in the black, like $3,000. And it went so well that that first Kickstarter went so well that I'd also made a whole bunch of other series that kind of were disparate. They were— there was a dark fantasy and there was an invasion and there was a fantasy, like adventure fantasy, and there was It was like a weird satire that I had all written. And again, these were all books that were like I had written off, that they would never sell because standalones don't sell. So I brought those books to Kickstarter in June of 2020, and they all earned out. They all literally earned out during that Kickstarter. 4 standalones in 4 different genres all earned out on Kickstarter. Books that would never ever, ever sell. On another platform, suddenly they were selling. And they haven't become great sellers for me. You know, they're not burning up the charts, but they broke even. And suddenly there was a path. There was a way forward. And what I've heard from hundreds of people in entrepreneurship and in courses and is once you have a path for profitability, everything changes. And so I decided to do a new series exclusive to Kickstarter, and we brought that to Kickstarter in June of 2021, and it raised almost $12,000. And like, literally, it's come to the point that I can I mean, I'm not making a ton of profit. I'm not saying that like I'm not making $50,000 in profit. Some people are, but I am not. My goal is to break even on the production of the book and start building up a war chest so that when I go and do these launches on Amazon or in other platforms, Amazon and Barnes Noble and Kobo and Google Play and all of those, that I can spend the amount of money necessary, the marketing budget necessary to make those break even. But even if it doesn't work, even if it doesn't— even if I use all of that marketing budget and it doesn't— and somehow we aren't making money by the end of it, it will have all been profit instead of going onto Amazon and having to make $1,000, $2,000 to break even on top of marketing costs. I'm going into these launches and saying the Gods of Earth Chronicles is a profitable series. I know it is a profitable series because I have run 2 campaigns for it and made $3,500, plus we made a profit on the graphic novel that I just launched in September of 2021. We made profits on the other 2 graphic novels that I'd launched before. Uh, I believe I, I made something like $58,000 overall, and just on Kickstarter. And that led to, you know, I'm hoping $5,000, $10,000 of profit by the end so that I'm going into a launch with a war chest, which is the exact opposite of how I went through my launches in 2019, which was at a massive deficit. I went into those launches $10,000 in debt, I think more, I think it may have been closer to $15,000 in debt. And suddenly, I'm now in a profit of $10,000. It was almost a $25,000 swing, which allows me to do so much more. It allows me to spend more on ads, to be in more places, to do more info, to newsletter stacking, to do different kinds of ads, to, to, to, to, to have more books in a series that can be profitable. Because, you know, generally you're not going to be profitable the first book or the second book or the third, but it usually takes somewhere like 4 or 5 books to break even on a series through ad spend. So suddenly I have like 7 books. After the next launch, we'll have 11 books in this series and the ability to spend a whole lot more money to acquire any person. And again, it's all been profitable. It literally changed my life to realize that. To know that you can make money in a genre that does not have the audience that romance or thriller or crime or something else has. To know that even if I do have a romance book or something like that that's in an off-genre of the fantasy that I normally write, hey, I could bring it to Kickstarter and maybe there's 50 or 100 people who'll buy it, and I can still make money. I can still test these things out. There are so many reasons why Kickstarter is amazing and, and, and, and worth using, one of which is you can go into the launch on the other platforms profitable, and not just profitable but with a potential war chest on top of that. But also you can build up books. So for instance, with our— my new Obsidian Spindle Saga, I have— I'm planning 12 to 16 books that are all going to release on Kickstarter, never touching any other platform. And then I'm going to be able to rapid release or, or release it over a long period of time, or wherever I want to release it, with having 12 books ready and all profit. All profit on all of those books. So I'm able to just do so much more because I have such a longer series and so much more books to make a profit on. Um, and none of that would be possible without what I learned on Kickstarter. Is it for everyone? Absolutely not. But I think it's for most people. I think it's for most people who want— especially if you're wide to have another piece of the puzzle, a place that you can make money before you ever launch a book. Matt Hawkins, who is the main writer at Top Cow, used to say, "You know, Kickstarter is a place people want to buy books. Why would I not bring it to Kickstarter? Why would I not have that as a place that people could buy books if it is going to bring revenue into my company?" We don't run None of us run on a massive profit. I mean, maybe some people do, but most authors are not running at a big profit margin, and it's often a war of attrition. And if you can find an extra $1,000 here and $300 on Patreon and $5,000 on launching a book, and, you know, it's often about just compiling all of these things together, and that's what I learned. Like, I cannot state highly enough that the books that I launched not on Kickstarter were absolutely miserable failures. If I had not gone back to Kickstarter and learned, figured out how to make Kickstarter work, those books would never have found an audience. There never would have been a book 5, a book 6, a book 7. Book 8, 9, 10, 11, there never would have been a Black Market Heroin graphic novel. I would have probably stopped writing, at least at the level that I do right now, altogether, because it just was not profitable. I would have— and so many authors out there, maybe you are one of them, are the same. Like, they are making books and they're releasing books that are unprofitable to to them. They're doing it out of love, or they're stopping series, but those series may have a massive audience or a devoted audience who wants more books and is willing to pay for those books, or they may want audiobooks or a board game or any of the other ways you can use Kickstarter. But it changed my life, the course of my life forever. And while it may not change the course of everyone's life forever, I know that there are people like me out there who had the same experience with Amazon and with the other platforms and may be disenchanted, maybe wondering if all of it is worth it. And Kickstarter might be the answer for you. And even if it's not, there's no risk in trying it. Kickstarter takes 5% plus, uh, plus fees, so somewhere around 8 to 10%. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If it does work though, it could literally change your life like it changed mine. And that is why I'm so passionate about using Kickstarter for authors for creators of any kind because it's literally life-changing. It's a way to make decent money, if not good money, from your most ardent fans and deliver something that they are going to love forever. So that is the hardest story that I've ever had to tell. I hope that it resonated with you.