Kickstarter Q&A Livestream with Russell Nohelty and Monica Leonelle

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So, so if you can see us, drop a comment.

Yeah, it also takes a couple of minutes for this to actually go live places when it says that it's live.

So yeah, that's what— that would be my assumption.

Yeah.

Oh, we do have one viewer, it looks like. This is— so for anybody out there, since we're not doing anything yet, um, StreamYard is super easy to use if you want to use it for a Kickstarter campaign. So Russell recommends, uh, doing a live something— doesn't have to be in person, but like doing something live, uh, during your launch week and during your end week. So StreamYard's a pretty good tool to do that. Oh, and there goes my computer. All right. Oh, I see 3 people now. We must be going live more places. Hello everyone.

Hi.

You can see us, add a comment.

Yeah, comment below. We should be able to see all of your comments show up in our feed and then we'll answer them. And honestly, like, this is for y'all. We don't need to— we've talked a lot about Kickstarter the past 2 weeks and honestly since September. I literally have been on Kickstarter after Kickstarter after Kickstarter plus this since, since September, I think. I think we— I started my last one, my September one, in the end of August. And then we went straight into this. Then I did the 30-day countdown for the thing with another campaign. Then I did another one in January and then another one in February and then this thing. So like I've been I know all about Kickstarter, so this is really— and I know Monica kind of feels the same way too. So like we can chit chat with each other and like not live like all day. We literally spend— we do that all day. I mean, literally 8 hours a day in a Slack channel, just the two of us chatting about this stuff. So like, it's true. Yeah, if you have a question, please, this is your time to talk about it.

Load this up with questions and we will start going through them.

So I do have a question.

Oh, good.

Before we get started, because like I— so I'm just going to give you the inside baseball thing that Monica posted in the Accelerator group, which is like she just sent me another check for like $2,500, which means I made like $6,500. From this, like, not this, for this one book campaign that we did, and we kept 70% of the revenue of this campaign. And that doesn't even include what we've done for the accelerator. So, like, how are you feeling right now being able to retain 70% of the money for the campaign and just with what, what, what? I've never had this happen before. It's like, I'm just asking what?

Yeah, no, it's crazy. I mean, it is crazy. So, yeah, so we did the campaign for Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. Kickstarter. It was a solo book. We had higher tiers, but we weren't like, oh, and let's launch a course with it. We never, like, literally, and we're the type of people who would say that, but we never were talking about that with each other. We were never like, and we're going to end up launching the Kickstarter accelerator and it's going to be this huge thing. We kind of were just like, Russell's like, oh, I have an idea. Let's do the sprint. And I was like, okay, cool. I'll add it to our list of things to And that's kind of what we did. But during the campaign, we were testing stuff and we realized that the sprint was like the thing that people were most excited about. So even though it was a book, we actually pushed, we started pushing that program and we got 70 people in it. And then we were freaked out because then we were like, well, now we're like super public with this and we have to test this with all these different people. And so we were like, are people going to fund? Like, we were freaking out to test the system with people. And I mean, we had good game faces, but it was a lot of pressure to put people through that. And the people who are in the core group, the first group, we love them so much because we don't know how they did that too with us because we're all just scrambling for like 2 months to try to get these campaigns launched and funded. And they did incredible with the chaotic way that we had to teach it because we didn't— we weren't really ready to launch a full-blown course, I would say.

Yeah. Well, and on top of that, multiple people, I know there was at least 2 people that were like, I was already launching a book, so I guess I'll do this. And one of them ended up making $3,500 and the other one made $2,200 with a simultaneous launch to Amazon as well. It was it was, it was so we had done a lot of like split testing with the book. Right. But like we'd always looked at past campaigns and like we'd always had like the, like things that we had that we thought were best practices. And so seeing 60 people or 70 people run through like, and two dozen of them launch.

Right.

And then you're like, oh, No, this really works. Like this really works. Like we saw so much. I remember when Brian launched his campaign, Brian Cohen was like the first one. And I was like, he came to us and he did some private one-on-one coaching as a tier. And like, I was like, oh my God, what if this still only makes like $5,000? Like what if like all of our things? And then he made like $20,000 and I was like, oh, thank you.

I know I didn't worry too much about Brian because he's got a really good audience. So You know, it's like he's one of those people where like he would have done well either way. Um, we hope that we helped him, you know, maybe not even double it, but we hope that we helped him like increase significantly what he could have done. Um, but, and, and, you know, he, if he plans another one, if he decides to plan another one, we hope we can help him like really optimize it, um, now that he's done like a really big one. But yeah, I mean, it's It's interesting when somebody has a big audience because that's when the optimizations— I think that's when this work becomes actually even more important because that's when the optimizations are like, well, you optimize all of this stuff and you can get double what you were getting or you can get triple what you were getting or what you would have done. And so I think that's working with somebody who has a big audience is really interesting and working with someone who has a big audience, that's when you really want to be able to optimize for profitability because it's like if you're making 70% of the campaign, then all the effort you pour into it, it's just like, it's like so much more money where if you have a small campaign, you're making, you know, if you're making 50% or 70%, that can be not that, that not like, that can be like, you know, $1,000 or something, but it's not like $10,000, $20,000.

Yeah. So people always tell— always ask me like, why do your camp— they're like, well, someone even said this, like a $40,000 campaign isn't very much. I see million-dollar campaigns all the time. And like, those are the people that should be teaching. And I was like, here's the thing about those million-dollar campaigns. Like they are probably not profitable or like barely profitable. And like, so I could do a lot of stuff with my campaigns that made way more money, but they'd also make— have way more cost and make things way more confusing.

Right.

And so, you know, when you make $20,000 and you get to keep $13,000 of that, like, that's a huge difference from like spending $40,000 and making $40,000. We just were talking about this with someone last night or with each other like last night, this morning, where like we saw a campaign that did pretty well and we were like, oh, they have like a— their book tier is like, there's no way that's profitable. And so we're like almost not— and they didn't have that many digital tiers. So there was just like, there's the cost that they were spending was, had to be almost exactly what they were making.

Right. Yeah. And that's, that is the problem is that if like, if you're not profitable, then your expenses multiply too. Like it works the other way. And it's like, you have to be very, very careful. Like the more audience you have, the more careful you have to be with the profitability piece. Yeah.

I was very surprised in a, like, I've done a lot of Kickstarters before, but I was surprised at just how well that worked and then how that transitioned to this accelerator that we're doing now.

Yeah, we didn't realize at all. We were talking about this. We were like, go ahead. Well, you go ahead.

I was going to say, just like, I don't know if I'll be honest and say courses have never worked for me before, ever. The most successful ones is I do my Crushing on Kickstarter course I used to do. And then, and then we had a Build Your Rabbit fan base and like those two made me some money but never in like a launch webinar scenario. So I was like very, very surprised that like it just how I don't want to say it's easy because like I don't think that's true, but like how I don't— I'm going to say effortless because like how natural it was. 'cause when you're usually, when I'm usually doing course launches, it's like, okay, now do the webinar. Now put the money into the advertising and like then like get really tense that week beforehand because you just put like $3,000, $4,000 into advertising and then like it all is kind of flushed down the toilet or maybe you make your money back. So like that, this had such an engaged, wonderful audience of people who'd read the book and we were able to send them the book and they had it in their hands and then they were like, yes, I'm excited for this thing. And we had this pilot group who went through and was successful and was super like excited was like, it was like night and day. It's like night and day.

Yeah, I think a lot of it is that we don't— like, I've never had anything that was so, um, the results were so tangible too, you know? Like, like, it's like, yeah, like, you know, teach you how to write a novel, now you have a novel, I guess. But it's not like— I mean, with Kickstarter, it's like, okay, this person did like a $6K campaign. Like, that's that's like a very like immediately tangible, like you understand the true value of that. Yeah.

And even for like audience building, I've done a lot of audience building and people are like, yeah, you have a 10,000 person audience. And it's like, what does that mean? And you're like, I don't know, you got to now run up. But when you're like, can run a monetization event and that's the end thing, it's like, oh, it means $6,000 or $500. And now you can grow from all of those numbers. Like, I know I'm a data, we're both data nerds. So like it's It's really nice.

Yeah, you more than me.

But yeah, I'm definitely a data nerd. Maybe Monica is data curious. You want to go through some of these things?

Yeah, I feel like we should answer your questions.

Sure.

Yeah, just talk about our thing. Okay, so here's the first question. How can we budget time for the Kickstarter? And if we spend 40 hours pre-launch, what should we expect during the campaign?

Wow.

Yeah, pre-launch is a lot.

It's a lot. That's more than we spend.

Yeah, I don't know that I spend that much.

So there's highly leveraged activities that you can do. So like pre-launch, you should spend your time, A, building out the campaign using the system that we have in the accelerator and in the book. And if you do it that way, then it becomes systematized for every campaign. Almost every campaign will look and feel on some level, you'll be able to just be able to do it. Like, I can do a campaign outside of, like, adding all the add-on pieces in, like, 2 to 4 hours, like, depending on the complexity. And often it's cut and copy.

Yes, you've built a lot of your stuff though too. So if you're doing, like, a campaign— so I think that that's the thing is, like, Kickstarter gets faster, Kickstarter gets easier because, like, Russell, you have a campaign that's, like, maybe in, you know, books 9 through 12. Coming up, I think. And so you probably can copy and paste a lot of the stuff from the previous campaigns to that. And so, and like, that's Russell, but like, that's also everybody. So like, as you build your campaigns on the platform, it's going to get really fast.

But also, I did a campaign earlier this year for Dragon Strife, and like, it was very easy to be like, okay, what are my 3 questions? Where is the blurb? Where— what does the world look like? What are the characters? They are all of the things that we talk about in the book and building it out that way as well. So even when you're doing a new campaign, if you're using the framework and it becomes much easier because you're like, okay, where am I lost? Okay, I don't have the world. Oh, I don't have this piece. I don't have that piece. Oh, I added this piece. I don't need this piece. Or like, oh, I really need a transition between this piece and this piece that I don't need on this other campaign. Campaign, because everyone's going to be a little bit different, but they all psychologically are the same thing. So yeah, you probably did spend 40 hours pre-launch because we talked for like 100 hours. We do talk a lot.

Yeah, we talked a lot. And Russell had to spend a lot of time. I think of myself as his protégé, basically. My first mentee and he spent a lot of time explaining stuff to me. Luckily I got it kind of right away-ish, or I got like 80% of it somewhat right away and was able to execute it because I just think of like, man, if that could have gone really poorly.

I was so worried when you hit that button. I was so worried. I can tell you now because we didn't get the pre-launch page up until about 3 days before the campaign went live. And I was like, I can't. I was like, what's gonna happen when we hit that pre-launch? What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen? Like, I'm gonna— I just trained Monica to like do this whole thing using every piece of the system, and what if we only make $5 grand? It's turned out to be a silly fear, but like, it was a good fear.

I mean, now that I know like how hard it can be to get— to get followers, like, luckily I didn't understand that because we got to 150 very quickly, but Like, literally a day. Yeah, within, like, a couple days. But, like, if I had known how hard it was, I think I would have been freaking out.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I would say, like, I don't think I spent 40 hours. I probably spent a good 10 hours on the page, and Russell spent several hours on the page as well fixing it, so that could be why. But, like, 10 hours on, like, the page, the design, the campaign design, which wasn't perfect, like the image pack for it, the, um, the video, like putting all of that stuff together. Like with a video, you gotta have images for that too. So that was probably 10 hours. And I mean, it was, it was a rough 10 hours for me because it was between like, well, basically my dog was dying and then my child was having a second birthday party, and then we have people in town. So like I was kind of doing it at like 3 AM sometimes. Um, but it, it all got done barely. And Russell was like, he— like, I remember I asked you a question, like, should we do this? And you were like, you haven't even gotten the page up. Like, you were like, so you probably like wanted to kill me.

But, um, well, now I know. And then I know when you're like, I'm gonna do— I'll send— I was like, I'm gonna get it, I'm just gonna get it at like the last minute, but it's gonna be really good. And like, you have to know how the other person works. Yeah, I think like That's what I've learned a lot in the last 6 months too, is just like how to deal with people's differing schedules who like all are both like motivated and such. So I would say like you'll probably spend 10 hours, like even you're not going to spend less than Monica to get the system right. Like just it's going to take and even then you're going to have to duplicate and duplicate stuff and like add a bunch of pieces and find it. So you're probably going to do 10 hours. Which is why I like Kickstarter being a renewable resource, because you learn how to do this. 10 hours, 20 hours it takes you the first time, it like will take you less. And by the time you do your third or fourth campaign, you'll be, you'll know all of this stuff. So I would say you need to spend 10 hours, let's call it 10 hours on page. Yeah. And you need to get it approved 4 weeks before you need to have it. You had to need to have the approval for the page because you need to do your pre, you need to get your pre-launch promotion page up. And they need to spend at least a month systematically driving traffic to your pre-launch page because you will see how many followers you have. And for me, that's how I track things. I'm like, okay, for me, and I'm, if I'm doing a novel campaign, if I have 100 followers, it means about $5,000. That's what it means for me. And so I know the metrics. I don't know what they mean for you. With my, our comic campaigns, it's more like $10,000. Maybe with an anthology page, it means more like $15,000. Like, I don't, not 100% sure exactly like what it will mean for for you, but that's why we're running a test. That's why I tell you to keep the budget low at the beginning because we don't know, like 33 people on your list. Well, we just had someone with 87 people raise $6,000. I've also seen people with 150 people raise $2,000 or $1,000. So we don't know. And so we need to run really after the first campaign, you're only gonna know some of it because there's gonna be an artificially inflated number of people who will back you, whatever, because you just have a new project. So then you need to run a second campaign that's like, okay, who is going to leave? Who's gone now? Who's like the gone people? And what does this mean? And then you can sort of build from there. So like you need to spend, and it's not that much time, you know, once you have the pre-launch page, everything funnels to the pre-launch page. So your email sequence, your everything else kind of. And so I spend I mean, not even 10 hours, I don't think, in the next month, because I set out. But you might need that amount of time to— as one of the bonuses for this, you get my actual copy center. So like, hey, if you use just the copy that I wrote tailored to your thing, like it's going to take you an hour instead of like 20 hours to figure this stuff out. And then you can track everything that you're doing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think, I think with our program, I mean, So we're assuming you're going to be a student in the program. So it's like you're going to have to watch all the videos. So that's like another probably 10 hours or so. There's like way more than 10 hours of video in the program, but you're probably going to be watching like hours and hours of video first. So you want to give yourself— if you're going all out on this, you want to give yourself maybe double that time because you got to watch the videos and then you got to do the work.

Then you got to post about the work.

And then you post about the work to let us know. So a couple more things to say about this. One is that even though you're spending 10 hours getting your Kickstarter set up, you're actually building all the assets that you're going to use later anyway. So like the same exact thing is going to be your email sequence when you launch on Amazon. And those are things that a lot of people just don't even do for their Amazon or other retailer launch. But these are, these are things you should be doing anyway. So you're building a lot of assets around the series. So I mean, to me it's like you're just spending 10 hours now doing it and like you get to test it now and then you're more prepared for the retailer launch. So I don't see it as like necessarily even more time. Learning the system is more time, but like doing this work, like you should be doing it anyway and it's going to make your retailer launch better.

Yeah. Yeah. And if you know, you'll know if copy doesn't work because people won't be converting and to change things like now, like you you basically have, like you said, a test for the copy that you're using. I can tell you that I used to— I've done Kickstarter for a long time. I went to do an Amazon launch just like they tell me, just like they say, like with the exact same amount of emails and everything, and it blew up in my face. Then I went back to Kickstarter and I started sending like all of the warm-up emails and everything telling people why I love this series, and I got response after response after response like, oh, It's so nice to see you care about a series again. Like, they literally just— like, I didn't even try to get that other series because, like, I didn't think you cared about it. So, like, literally just taking all of that stuff is gonna be valuable to you forever, especially if you do, like, 4 books in the series or something on Kickstarter. Like, the more you do, the better it's going to get by the end. So I think we've kind of fully beat this dead horse.

Yeah, we've exhausted this. Okay, so Dio Martone asked, how many new people are to in the accelerator group? This is a good question. So we are over 50 new people in the group. There was, of course, like, well, we got 70 during the campaign and then I think we were up to about 90 before that. So we're at like 135, 140, somewhere around there. And not everybody has joined the group yet from the, you know, from getting into the program. But I do want to say there is a bonus ending. So I guess we'll let it go through this call and then after that we're going to end it. But it's for a workshop called Plan Your Book Launch. And it goes through some of the Kickstarter numbers that we're talking about, like how Russell uses the following number to figure out the launch numbers, possible launch numbers, to figure out the dead zone numbers, to figure— and like it kind of just goes through all of that. So if you saw our webinar, we talked about the numbers then, but the workshop goes through more of that. And then we do have some stuff we'll announce that maybe at the end of this, some other stuff that we have ideas about. But that's where we're at. Yeah. So we hit the first— forgot to say this. We did hit the first group bonus. So we have a group bonus going on. The group bonus was a May mentorship call. For just the paid members of Kickstarter Accelerator. And so we did end up hitting that. So we are doing that call in May and it's usually a really good like advance call because it's all paid people who like, they're not asking kind of the starter questions for it. So that will definitely be happening. And then we have another group bonus and should we talk about it now or later?

We're going to talk, let's talk about it many times throughout this.

Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it over and over again. Okay. So that one is because we have more weeks of this launch period, which we weren't even sure if we were going to do. But since our thing doesn't start till May, we're just going to close it, you know, April 30th. So we're, we would like to see like 50 more people join the accelerator because it just makes the group stronger. Like, like ideally we'd like to see thousands of people in the group eventually, like all doing Kickstarters. But for this launch, we're hoping to get like another 50 authors to say yes to this. And if we do that, then we're going to do— Russell is going to mentor me in the group, which I'm, I'm pretty excited about actually, because I love Russell's mentorship. It's always really good. So basically we're going to take my upcoming campaign and we're just going to like see if we can optimize it a lot more than I can do on my own. And we're just going to get like Russell's you know, sales mind on it, thinking about it, and he'll be kind of coaching me through it to see just how high we can go. And the campaign is a fiction campaign. It's a pen name that I have not updated. I haven't put out a new release to it since 2017, so it's been 5 years. So I'm reviving that pen name. We have a page for it. There are 33 followers on the page as of like a couple days ago. I haven't checked. And then I'm launching it probably mid-May. So we're going to give it probably 3 to 4 weeks of pre-marketing. And so I think it'll be really interesting because a lot of people are starting at that audience of zero. And that's kind of where this project is. It's like at, well, it's an audience of 33, so I guess that's good, but it's kind of an audience of zero. But we're just going to see if we can hit a big goal on it still. So it should be really fun. Um, and we'll do it if, if we get to 100 people, we'll do it.

I should say, we'll pro— me and Monica will probably do it like regardless.

Like, we're gonna have to start recording it.

Yeah, like, I'll do it with her in private, but like, you want it in, then like, please go and tell other people in, uh, to come into the group. Um, We were talking about this in, I think, the webinar thing a couple of days ago, but it's like the more people we get in, the more excited we do, we get, and the more we give. I don't know how we can give more to like the accelerator group, but like I just thought of a new thing that I'm going to record like today or tomorrow. I record, I've basically recorded something new every day this week. And so I'm going to keep doing that. Maybe not every day, but like, I get excited for this stuff when people are excited and when you— when I get questions that I'm like, oh, that'd make a good video. So the one I did yesterday was a lot of people who came in this, this, this cohort asked me the same question, which was like, I think that this book has to cost $75. How do I get it there? And like, I, so I recorded something called The Stack, which is like how you stack rewards to get someone to pay for $75 of book. And like, guess what? It's the secret. Like it's one of the big secrets of how I've gotten to be as successful as like, how do you make a stack without while still being very profitable? So like those are the kinds of stuff earlier this week I made like the case for your book, which I think is a transformational video in and of itself. So yeah, we've got to the 50. We want to get to the 100. And I think that the more people we get in also, the better.

Like, just as you said, there's more cross-promotion and everybody grows together. We've even seen that with our first cohort of people, which was 70 people. We had lots of people who were very brave souls. We love them to death. Like, I cannot believe they, you know, they launched in January and it was hard. It was very hard for everybody in the group to launch in January, but they did it. And so that group, they did, you know, like if we looked at the average backer amount, average backers and average, you know, amount raised with that group, it would've been, you know, whatever it was, a couple thousand dollars is probably the average.

Like 2,500 probably.

Yeah, like somewhere around 2,500. So then lots of people watch that group go through and then launch, you know, February, March, even into April. And those people, you can see that they're doing like almost like 2X. Yeah, it's like already 2X. So like if you looked at just like the people who are launching now, like they're all hitting like $3,000 to $7,000, like somewhere around there, I would say.

And I just went to, I just went to one of the pages today that we were worried about at the beginning. Monica was like, oh my God, this has been up for like hours and it's only got like 3 backers. And then I looked this morning and it's like either 3,500 or almost 5,000. I forget. I think it's almost like, I'll look it right now.

Yeah, it's like a mid, mid 4 figures campaign. And all, I think all the ones that are going right now, um, that I've been kind of watching too, I think they're all mid 5 figures or 4 figures. Sorry.

So there's 3,647 backers. So like, you know, people are learning to stack a little bit better. And like, often, you know, let's be fair, like Monica and I like had names before we did our campaign. Like people are like, oh, roll their eyes. Like, yeah, you did $10K and you might be sitting there being like, oh, well, Monica's probably going to do $5K just because she's Monica. And like, even though she's only got 3 people, you know, like it's like you've been doing $10K for like ever, like this is for you. But like when you watch literally someone come in from scratch and go, oh, you have nothing and like look at what you did, like it emboldens you. It emboldens you way more than me and Monica doing it because like we're supposed to be doing it.

Like we're supposed to be good at it. Like, like our whole thing is like we just can't fail now. Like there's so much pressure to like always succeed at it. But like, yeah, like to see people who are like, yeah, they made like $5K. And they've been, you know, and they legitimately don't have like they have a, you know, email list of 100 people or like.

And I'll tell you, like we've watched people also launch because I have a lot of friends who do books and a lot of people who just did the book and not the accelerator. And a lot of them, they go and like it just doesn't go as well. And more important, part of the reason that we had somebody that was like on a friend of mine on track to like do their goal. They just canceled the campaign and like they like kind of freaked out in the middle. And I was like, wow, I wonder what you would have done if like you had a community of hundreds of people or hundreds to say like, hey, this is normal.

Yeah. Yeah.

Or just to say, try this, try this. Or like he goes, he's like, and I could see it's like I like maybe he was like, you know, I just don't have any way to do cross-promotion or anything. Like I feel stuck and like, well, if you've got like a whole group of people and one of the, one of the things that we don't talk about a lot Maybe we should probably start doing it, but I have an indie exchange. I'm gonna try and pull it up here, which has like just dozens of books in it that you can use. And like, it's a massive resource of just like people who are willing to cross-promote. We have posts that are like, who wants to cross-promote? Who's launching on this day? This day. And now that we have like a bunch more people in it, we're probably going to do this monthly, which is like, who's going to launch?

Who's launching this month?

You know, people think it's valuable. We can do like little group chats in like Facebook about like, you know, who is launching so you can get that. And like, these are invaluable pieces of the puzzle that you probably don't have now. In fact, if I just take the the average human who is messaging me as any indication of everyone. Like, y'all don't know anyone who uses Kickstarter, or like, you may have used it for a board game, but you've never used it for a novel or something.

So it's, yeah, sometimes like, you know, somebody who's doing Kickstarter, but you're not like, you're not really friends with them, or like, you try to talk to them about it, but they're getting inundated with questions, or, you know, it's not— I just think, um, there's like definitely a camaraderie within the group of like, hey, like, we're getting— like, people are actually getting to know each other and each other's businesses because we go through so much of it. So, um, you get to know the people, and then you've actually made some friends basically in the author community who are like like-minded in that they're excited about Kickstarter.

So Monica puts, uh, agrees to have this shared. Oh yeah, yeah, show you too.

Yeah.

And so it's just like one, one piece of it.

Can you explain like what people would use these books for?

Sure. I think that's— so let's go to one of my campaigns and I'll show you. So every week during my campaign, what I do is I have these I hope it's still up. I don't think I changed it. I have these perks that people just get. They're all digital, that people just get these perks for backing. And I send them— I just got done uploading them all to BackerKit either this morning or yesterday afternoon. And it's just people get these books as bonuses for backing on top of everything. So it's like, OK, well, why would I buy your book on Kickstarter? Well, like for these reasons, and it doesn't cost you anything, it's just an extra value add. And I know people who also say like, hey, if we get 50 backers, you get this extra one. I tend to not do that as a stretch goal. I try to do it weekly and we talk about that in the accelerator. But like, so you could put these packages together through all of these books. All of these people are people who use Kickstarter. Basically, you, you offer your own, one of your own books that people can use for free. You have access to all of these books and the thing grows. I think I've put 5 or 6 in there in the last, in like the last week alone. It just keeps growing more and more powerful with every cohort. And that's what I mean by like, hey, 50 more people, it's going to be so much more powerful.

It's going to be more powerful with the cross promotion especially. Okay, so we've, we've chatted about that a lot. So we'll go on to the next question. Oh, and I see there's more. Okay, um, my biggest question is literally not knowing where to begin, what to choose to do a Kickstarter on. Um, okay, yeah, we, we definitely, we talk about this quite a bit. We did in the challenge. Um, so I don't know, Russell, do you want to—

Yeah, there seems to be more of this question.

So yeah, there's, there's a lot more of the question. Two pen names, mystery thriller, contemporary romance, 6 books in one, 7 books in the other, more in the pipeline for both. Mental block is trying to figure out precisely in my current setup what would be good for Kickstarter. I already have paperback and large prints out for the mystery. Are you ready to—

No, I'm got— I got to go to this person's thing, so I'm trying to find it. I'm trying to find it in the—

Oh, it's at the top. Yeah.

Is it in the— Is it in the Excel? I want to find the rest of this, uh, message. Here we go. All right.

Okay.

Until Block, I already have paperbacks and large prints, and the romance side, they're all novellas, so not really viable for single paperback versions. Well, um, what if you, uh— I don't want to go to you. I'm not going to go to your page and just— usually I would just go and see what your pen name is, but here's some options. Um, okay, so you have 6 novellas You could do a special edition box set for the romance novellas as like one set if they're— or two sets. You could do—

those are kind of expensive though because this is her first campaign for sure.

Yeah, I want to do what I would like, omnibus more. Well, depends on how long the novellas are, right? Like if they're 15,000 words, then doing 6 of them would be like 80,000-90,000 words. That would would be a fine length. Like, that would be like a 300, 400-page book, which would cost you about $7, $8, $11 if you're in, if you're in hardcover. So like, you can definitely do that. I would not do them as a single thing, but what I would look for is— this is what I told, this is what I told somebody. We did a video, and you should, if you're in the group, you should go look at this video that I did for, I think it was Kimberly Gordon, which was like, I looked their page. And if you put your Amazon page, I'll look for it also. Like, I'll look at it and like, I'll tell you. But what you're looking for is, let's say you have an anniversary coming up. Let's say it's been 5 years since you published your mystery thriller. Be like, hey, it's Detective Jana Brown's like 5-year anniversary. So like, we're doing a special edition 5-year hardcover where like, we're just doing Like, we're going to have the first book and I'm going to put an interview in there and like, we're going to do like all of the bells and whistles and like, I'm getting a brand new special edition cover and we're going to do like a book box. And like, that's the thing is for one book. So people often say, like, people take the thing that I say about trilogies and they say, oh, I have to do a trilogy the first time. And I don't think that's true. The difference is like, Uh, whether velocity to market versus most amount of money made. And so I would say try and find something you can do relating to, um, an anniversary, or, uh, do something that is, um, like the first in series, or just do a slipcase, just a slipcase campaign. What I mean is like you— they, they can spend $50 to get like just the slipcase for all all the books that are out.

Yeah. Which is a, it's basically the case that goes around the, like the series of books. So it's like a box set, it's a box set, but without the books in it, basically.

Yes. And you can offer the books as well, but like you don't have to. But yeah, I would, those are the two things, like find one book. So here is, here is like the best piece of advice probably of this. It's like you want to do a $500 goal, like not because, not because like you can't hit more, but because we don't know. It's like, I'm going to train you how to do a $10 grand camp. We're going to train you to do a $10 grand campaign. Then we're going to put you out and say like, okay, test your first book. It's kind of like when you take a Facebook ads course and you're like, what, this one's going to have all the magic. And they're just like, here's all the steps you need to take to optimize it. Now go test. And you're so angry every time because you're like, no, you're supposed to give me the secret. But the secret is like optimize and then go test. So I want you to do a $500 goal because I don't know how many people in your audience will convert. I just have no idea. Could be 20 people, could be 100 people. And I don't know how much they will spend. They might spend— there might be 100 people who spend $20. There might be 30 people that spend $100. I don't know. So you want to do something that is small at first to test.

Yeah, I mean, this is like, like basically you've been selling hot dogs, um, at like a hot dog stand and now you're like going and selling like a 3-course meal at like some other place. Like, it's like, yeah, you know how to sell food, but do you know how to sell like something that's like higher price, you know? Or does your audience translate like the person who eats hot dogs. They're not like trying to get a 3-course steak dinner somewhere else. So like, it's kind of like that. Like, a lot of things are going to transfer in terms of what you know already. But if you've been selling like $5 ebooks, um, and that's mostly what your list buys, then how do you know if they're gonna buy a hardcover book? And so that's, that's kind of what Russell's saying for the, um, just like being conservative to start out because You don't know.

You don't know. And it may— we're hoping it go gangbusters.

But, um, another thing that a lot of people are going gangbusters, like, to be fair, like, a lot of people are. And we're— and we are also learning to teach it better, and we're getting more resources so that people get it faster. And like, we're able to help people more because we just see like all these different scenarios now of like what's going on, and we were able to like fix things more easily. But yeah, we would like you to stay at like a 500 Um, so here's what I'll say, Deanna.

You said that you've done this for a while. There's probably a book that you've done that has not sold well, like a standalone book that you're like, man, I really love this book, but like, it just did not hit. And like, honestly, that's the one I would choose because like, it's probably standalone. It's probably not in either of your series. It's probably off market. It's probably very weird. And you probably are in the red on it or barely broke even. So like it will not cost much to recover the book and like put it out again. Or to do a, I don't know, a crossover mystery thriller contemporary romance with each of your like main, the main character from one of your mystery novels and your romance novels or a side character. And like, uh, uh, Krishan does this really well, which is like, here's this other thing that's happening over here, like, The third main character from this book has like a cozy mystery romance with like the fourth main character from this book over here. And like, this is really a cozy mystery story, but it's set in my world. So like, if you're doing a novella, like maybe something like that would work for you, but you're really looking for like, I say like, like I have a book called Worst Thing in the Universe, which no one ever buys. It's to me my best book. And no one buys it. And so that would be the one that I'm like, okay, if you're a huge fan of my work, this is one that I want you to look at or take an extra thing at. And I'm willing to spend a month convincing you to do it because this was not, this was something, this is, this book is better than the sales numbers indicate. So I don't know if any of that resonates with you, but that's, those are kind of the 3 options that I would give you.

Yeah. Sorry, did you say, um, cause she was, she writes two genres where they're probably standalones. So, like, you could also just do, like, you know, book 7 as a standalone. Like, you could probably get away with that without doing the first 6, I'm assuming, because if, if it's standalone. So, um, you know, you may have better luck with that too, uh, as like just do you like your next book, just launch it on Kickstarter first, or your first book, just go back. Yeah, or the first book.

It says you have paperback and large prints. You don't have a hardcover if you have paperback and large prints, like you don't—

well, and or you like don't have like an audio commentary or like there's probably some people on your list who haven't gotten it.

Yeah, so I'll tell you what we're doing for this, for this new launch is we're doing, um, we— I went back for with book 9 to 12 or 8 to 11 because there's a book 0. So really like 8 to 11. And I recorded audio commentaries for all 11 books. And I was like, you can now get the ebook or the audio commentary for all of our books. And, you know, it doubled our audio. We did the audio commentary for 5. We normally do it for 10, but because there were 11 books, I was like, I'm just going to do it for 5 because like, whatever. Like if I get 11, if I, if I can get $55 from these people Awesome. Like, that's— I love that. So, and it took me like 2 days to go back and record all the stuff for. So if you say we're going to do like a special edition hardcover of book 1 with an audio commentary and it's going to come in like a really cool new cover and it's going to like have a special, like it's going to be numbered or like whatever the thing is, like I'm going to sign it special for like you guys and it's going to have a special short story in the back. I'm telling you from experience, people who have all of the versions of your book will go buy it. New people will go buy it. Like there are people that will just get the $5 ebook, but you can do a lot with like literally pick any, any book. That's why I said the anniversary one is really good because if it's been, you have some, that many books out, it's probably been 5 years. It's probably been 5 years or 3 years, or there's something that you can be like anniversary of this pop, pop, pop. We're doing a special edition.

Yep.

All right, cool.

So I wanted to say hello to Nadine and to Terilyn and to Laura. Thank you for saying hello to us at the beginning. Okay, 44 minutes in. Hello. Okay, so this Facebook user says, I still need to read the whole book, but I'm wondering, does it work for nonfiction?

Yeah, if you're still here, then I will go back and just say, like, go back and listen to the first, like, 10 minutes of this thing. But like, Monica and I did a series for— did $20,000 for one book. And that book now, when it launched on Amazon— Monica, of all of the books that in the Bookstars Book Sales Supercharge series, which one is the most popular book?

It is. So yeah, we're selling that book. Pretty well right now. I mean, it's still small numbers in terms of indie authorship. Like, I think we're selling probably about 100 books a month, which is not a ton on a book in general. But this is a $9.99 book. It's, you know, it's very niche. Very, yeah, super niche. And we're not doing ads and like— Yeah.

And also, like, it already came out in the market. Place.

Yeah, like we, we had already sold like over 500 of them. Yeah. Um, yeah, so, so, right. Um, so yeah, it's doing pretty well and like those numbers have been consistent. It's not— it probably won't stay there, uh, without us pushing it. But yeah, we just, we put it out basically because of, um, because we had some interviews coming up.

So yeah, we had what, uh, we had, uh, we kept like of the 20,000, like we were able to split like 12, 13,000 plus everything that happened afterwards with this group and everything. So like, if you are nonfiction, there is a 100% chance you should be in this. She should give us $500 now because we are developing a thing that's going to cost like $3,000 that is going to like specifically speak to how we've done with the nonfiction thing and raised, I mean, we've raised on this one book like like $40,000, $50,000 in— it's like $50,000 almost since we launched the thing, if you include all this other stuff.

Yeah. And I wouldn't count it— like, I think at this point, it really was just a book, but I think it's kind of expanded into— the other thing is it's expanded into a program. So that's like part of why it's doing really well. But then I think the other thing is we don't really do much one-on-one coaching. So if are, you know, if you're a nonfiction author and you have a one-on-one coaching or consulting practice, because neither one of us are that into coaching and we just, you know, we do the mentorship in the group and we just try to funnel people into the group because we're able to talk to people and get people through it. Yeah. At scale, I guess. But yeah, if you have consulting, I don't under— it's like, just get in this group as a nonfiction person. So I'll say that. And then I'll also say, if you have a backlist of more than 10 books, you should just be in this group. And I don't want to say I don't understand why. I do understand why you might not be in the group, but I do just think you'll be able to make your money back.

I'm just going to show the last campaign that we did again. Let's see. Do I have to like do a—

do I have to do— oh, there.

Yeah. All right. So this is our last campaign. So the thing that, that, that people in KU specifically complain about is the hamster wheel. If you know what the hamster wheel is, then you know. If you don't, then it's the need to write new books once a month or once every 6 weeks, or sometimes once every 2 weeks to like keep up with the algorithm. So I'm just going to scroll down here. This is a back This is all back catalog stuff. That is, uh, except for one new book. It's one new book. It is all back catalog stuff otherwise. There's two people that paid $1,000. There's one person that paid $750. There's, uh, there's one person— there's four people that paid $475. So I mean, I don't even know what, uh, $475.

Yeah, like plus, yeah, about like $750,000.

It's, uh, between $4,000 and $5,000. It's $4,700. Uh, and then you have, uh, this, uh, someone paid for, again, back catalog courses. So there's more. There's over $5,000. Uh, we have a retailer tier. We had, uh, it just keeps going. There's 9 books. That's, that's another $1,000, $1,100. So like, it just keeps, it just keeps going. Down and down and down. This is all back catalog books. This is no— this is one front catalog book. Everything else is back catalog. And if you're like, well, that's like your biggest campaign ever, then like I can take you to, uh, other books, campaigns that have made— I mean, you can look through my whole account and just see like that's— there's so much in the back catalog that like if you've got 13 books, like like, yeah, yeah.

So like, um, Deanna Hart had posted earlier, she's like, I got this pen name, I got this pen name. Like, here's the thing is like, you focus on one of the pen names, sure, and it's romance, but also like put your other books— I mean, as long as there's crossover between your two genres, like put your other books for sale as well. Because that's— this is something about retailers, and I'll— and it's specifically about Amazon. Amazon very, very good at, like, the super niche targeting. But what that means is that they are not going to show your books to, like, if you have a cozy mystery, cozy paranormal mystery, and you are, you know, promoting it or whatever, and you have a separate pen name for, like, I don't know, paranormal suspense or something. And, like, those are two somewhat different genres. But Amazon will only show your cozy mystery book to other cozy mystery books. And then your paranormal suspense is only going to go to other paranormal suspense readers and against other paranormal suspense books. So, like, that's great. And so then that teaches— so, like, everybody in the whole indie author industry is like, oh, cozy mystery readers only read cozy mystery. And it's like, it's actually true. It's because that's how the one place where everybody sells books works, is that they purposely work to niche you down into the cozy mystery. So you actually do probably have crossover, and on Kickstarter you can embrace that crossover. And so you'll have people who will buy the book. Like Russell sometimes sells nonfiction stuff on his fiction campaigns and people still buy it. And it's like there is crossover, it just, you can't see it in the data on retailers.

And if you're a nonfiction person, you probably have courses or things you've recorded that you can bundle together, or like a group that you can do. Like we did the Sprint With Us group. Like you could do Meditation For Us or Knitting With Us or whatever the thing is for premium options. So like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it works just so well. And in the Kickstart Your Novel, in the The Kickstarter Novel Facebook group. I did a video yesterday of, like, literally just an hour of going through different projects. So, like, yes, if you're a nonfiction, you should join this thing because, like, we have learned— I mean, it is— it revolutionized everything for me, this launch. So, like, yes, 100%.

Yeah. Okay. So Laura says, my debut came out in March. I sold 220 copies in the first month. I have Big Dreams. Congratulations, Laura. I'm assuming you mean on retailers. You could mean on Kickstarter, I don't know. But congratulations, that's awesome. Um, yeah, Kickstarter can help you go even further.

Like, this is where you can— yeah, you can do the limited edition hardcover. Like, now it's time for limited edition hardcover campaign, Laura. Like, that's exactly what—

awesome. All right, so this Facebook user says, would you recommend splitting a Kickstarter for the audiobooks from a Kickstarter for the ebooks and hardcovers? It's a trilogy.

You want to take this or should I?

Oh, I'm assuming that I am the moderator.

No, you want to do ebook, hardcover, and audiobook in the same campaign. And here we go again, doing a screen share. So I'll just screen share this over here and I'll go to this campaign. Nice thing about having, like, so many campaigns is just you have access to all of your previous, all of your previous things that you can look at. So I did this. This is what I would recommend. This is a great graphic from, I think, Cover Vault, but it was for an exclusive hardcover and audio drama. So I had, I put the script for the audio drama in with it, but we did something exclusive and we sold it at a premium. But this is the thing, one book at a time. If you're doing audiobooks, one single book, if you're doing this strategy, do not do a trilogy.

Yeah, unless you're Mallory Cooper, who did like 7 audiobooks at once. So our friends Mallory and Jill, they did 7 books at once. And it was like right as the pandemic was starting, I think.

Yeah.

And they raised $10K, but they have a very big audience, so, um, they would have raised so much more. I know, so much more. Yeah, yeah, we've talked to them and we're like, I mean, so first of all, we think they did amazing, um, but secondly, you know, if the pandemic had not happened, and then also if, you know, if they had done like some optimizations, and they're in the program as well, so. So if you join the program, you know, they may be, I don't know if they'll post their stuff, but anyway, so we've talked to them and we're like, we think we can help you optimize some of this stuff for your next campaign because, you know, I think the pandemic hit the campaign and a couple other things, but yeah, we think they could have done well a lot more to have funded. And this is a $10K campaign. So I wanna be clear, they did an incredible job. Yeah, 10K is like, it's a lot of money on a campaign.

So yeah, so, and I'll tell you that when I do audiobooks, assuming I do audiobooks for the Godsverse Chronicles at some point, I'm going to do them one at a time for sure. Because like, if I get 10 grand for one of them, I'll just be like, okay, cool, I'll put 2 and 3 in production right now. Yeah, like there's, there's no reason for me to go hard. And also, if I want to do 2 or 3 or 4 campaigns a year, I'm just like, cool, for the next 7 years I'm doing a Gods— for the last 10 years I'm doing a Godsverse Chronicles campaign. And maybe I'll do it for 2 or 3 at a time if I, like, have it. But for the first one, split it up, but split up the trilogy. So you're doing audiobook, ebook, hardcover.

Yeah, that's good. All right. We have a question from Nadine. Question for you for more— this is more for in the future. She wants to use it for a book. Um, what could be— wait, sorry, I've read that wrong. Could it be good— what, what are good ideas for Kickstarter for merchandise?

Uh, figurines or other? I mean, uh, my friend just did $500,000 in like a week for her plushes. Plushes are great. Pins are great. There's a lot of pin campaigns, audio drama or podcast starting to become a pretty good category, prints or art books, world of books, and things that have— what you're looking for for merch is something that has a 10x profit margin. So like a pin, like you don't want to do it for— can't always do this. Like BookBox is probably going to get you like a 1 or 2x return, but like if you spend $100 on it and it just gives you $200, like, that's a— $100 is a good return on that kind of thing. Um, so you want to— but that's what you're looking for for merchandise is like a pin is great because it has a lot of value and it does not cost that much to get 100 of them. Um, yeah, challenge coins. So like those are the things, things that are special to your world, and like you'll know it's this is going to be hard to hear if you're, like, at the beginning of your author journey, but, like, the best thing to do with merch is to wait until people are bugging you incessantly for specific kinds of merch and then do a campaign for that.

Right. I think scale is so important with merchandise. You know, like, if you are going to do pins, I think you— I don't even know if you can order them in less than 100. So I just think like looking for those high margin items, which most of the print on demand merchandise is like extremely low margin. Like even like just like having, you know, a site on like, or having like a store on like Printful, like you're making a dollar or two per like shirt printed or whatever. So trying to get those shipped to you and then shipping them to your backers, you're already in the red. Um, so you, so you really need to look at like what is not like a complete print-on-demand thing. Um, we also have a list of vendors in the Kickstarter Accelerator that Russell, um, not, not all of them Russell's used, but, and, and it's like lots of people from the group are starting to contribute to it. So, um, we have that. But yeah, I think we talk more about that in the group too.

Yeah. And like these, like something like a collector card, like Drop cards, really good. You could do just the collector thing and charge $20 and it comes loaded with the ebook or audiobook or something like that.

Like, yeah, a lot of these things are, you know, from like cons too. So like, as an author, I was like, what's a drop card? Like, what's a pin? I did not know what it was. So, but I—

go ahead. You don't have to do a, um, you don't have to do a, uh, um a, like, a hard— a nice hardcover enamel. I started with, like, these soft enamel, which is a lot cheaper with no epoxy on it. You can go to Sticker Mule and they have some pins which are even cheaper than that options. So, like, you, you don't have to do— like, these ones cost about $3 a piece, but I charge $20 for them on a campaign, and like 20% of people take them. And so like, it's very— I'll get like $100 extra, $100 extra just so I can sell them at shows.

Yeah. All right, um, the next question from Taylor: Is it a good idea to run a Kickstarter campaign to get a cover or two for the other books in the series?

You always want to have the COVID at least done. Like, it is a good idea to have an exclusive cover for Kickstarter, but like, you don't want to— like, you want to have that cover. You need to have the mock cover available.

Yeah, I think like maybe— so you can clarify, Carolyn, what your question is, but I am wondering, is the question also like, you know, should I fund books 4 and 5 of a series with a Kickstarter for books 1 through 3? Since like 1 through 3 are already out or whatever, like maybe books 4 and 5 are not going to come out until, you know, until it's profitable basically. Like, should I, should I like do the first 3 to like get, get 4 and 5, which you've done?

So it's like masking, right? Because everyone is using every, every company that you have ever heard of is using money from today to pay for new stuff. But no one is saying like, go buy a Big Mac so you can fund our like chicken nuggets. Like, that's not how marketing or sales work. So like, you can run a campaign for covers and like you always will be doing that. Like the books that we are, we are releasing today are paying for for production of books that are happening in sometimes 2 years from now. But like, you don't want that to be the thing of your campaign. You want to say, we're doing a hardcover exclusive, la la la la la, and then just like silently funnel that money into getting new covers. The other way is like doom. No one wants to help you buy new covers. They all want a cool book or something. Like that, and like, they will buy that. But all of those new cover campaigns, really, like, they're very, very poorly trafficked and one of the biggest mistakes that publishing books on Kickstarter makes.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we actually— so we've been seeing it less, which is good, but we've definitely seen those campaigns that are like, more of like a, yeah, like, help me, like, pay off my credit card bills type of campaign, or like, like, um, like publishing my new covers or help. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so we're seeing less of that, so that's good.

Yeah, but like, nobody has, uh, no— some people will have sympathy for that, but like, people will just want to buy books.

That's what they want. Um, I want to jump in here real quickly and just say that, um, kickstartyournovel.com/accelerator, if you are not in the program already, you can learn more about it there. And there's a bunch of bonuses. So there's 3 bonuses and, and they're on the page. So there's, and I don't have the page pulled up, but there's 3 bonuses for that just for joining the program. There's also 2 bonuses for the painful and some of the stuff that we talked about. So like one is, one is like the vault, the copy vault of Russell's campaigns, previous campaigns, and we give you like a prompt template, which is really cool. Yeah, yeah, Russell can go through this. All right, so this is the page. So yeah, so the bonuses are the audience building course. So this is for if you are a— if you're starting at zero, kind of similar to me with my fiction stuff. But if you're starting at zero, this kind of gives you the gist of like how to, um, how to get started with your audience building. Because you, you know, Kickstarter is not a magic platform. You do have to bring some people to the campaign to start out with, and then Kickstarter can usually match you, um, you know. So if you bring 25 people, Kickstarter can bring another 25, is typically what we say. But, um, yeah, this is the audience building course. So we also have, um, the the digital version of the book. If you haven't done that, that's bonus number 3. If you— so a lot of people will have already had that. And then we have this other bonus, which is really cool. So people— a couple people asked about budget. Um, we have our Kickstarter budget spreadsheet template, and then there's some instructional videos about how to create the profitable reward tiers. So, you know, again, a lot of, um, a lot of people are a lot of authors are starting to launch projects and, um, they, you know, you can put up big numbers, but is it profitable? And that's, I think, something that we talked, you know, we talked about it at the beginning, and we also teach like how to be more profitable, and we're leaning into that more too, especially after seeing the possibilities with the last campaign, um, whereas Russell has really never seen like a 70% profit campaign on Kickstarter I'm used to 30% being good, but like, I really, really, really believe in—

I really believe in profit first. Like, so I— my, my profit and no hassle. Now other people make a different thing, and it's like, I want to use— my friend does these big $100,000 campaigns, and he's like, I will just— and buying extra inventory for the holidays. So like, okay, whatever. Like, that's your thing. Mine is like, so. It's not like you have to do mine, but I very, very, very much want to be able to do my fulfillment in one day.

So yeah. So then the two painful bonuses, Russell's books. So it gives you an overview of his career. He has How to Become a Successful Author, How to Build a Creative Career, and you get them in ebook and audiobook. And then the second one is the Kickstarter Copy Vault, which we talked about. So you get all his marketing emails. It's literally like almost 200 pages from what he sent me. And we're going to kind of break them down so that you know how to adapt them to your own series and then how, you know, how often to send them. He's got a whole schedule and we showed that on the webinar. So definitely check out the webinar because we gave some hints of that. We also, yeah, we talked about in the book too. So it's, so it's there, but we're going to organize and get it way better, super helpful.

And one of the most important things that people said were like, what is— what are examples? And so these are the first time we're going to give like actual, the literal comp, the literal example.

Yeah, yeah. And so this is the group bonus that we had talked about. This is bonus number 1. We already hit this. We've not put up the new bonus. We had talked about it earlier though. So We've already gone past 50 people. We're a little bit past 50 people. And then we will, if we get to 100 people, which is kind of our cap, like, I don't think we even want more than 100 new people in it because we are super hands-on in the group. But 100 is kind of the max that we can handle. And it's the most beneficial for the whole group because there's probably someone in your genre or a a nearby genre who's going to be launching within the same months as you. So that's kind of our goal.

Yeah.

So you can— and then if we do that, then we'll unpack my whole campaign, which we have— we've never done. The only campaign we've really started to unpack in the group is the one that we did together. But for Russell to mentor me on something that I haven't done in 5 years, That should be pretty interesting and unpacking. I consider myself somewhat marketing savvy, and so I could probably get to a decent amount on my own. But with Russell's help, we're really going to look at how can we take somebody who has no name, basically no fans, no audience, how can we just make it a much larger campaign than really it should be?

And plus, two things. That we should mention now, which is we have another bonus which is going away at the end of this call. So, like, whenever we're done with this thing, like, it's going away.

What is that one, Monica Leonellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellelle through how to do a book launch is basically what it is. And I talked about it for retailers to some extent, and then I also gave a lot of Kickstarter numbers on it because a lot of people were there for the Kickstarter stuff. So, you know, even if you're not doing a Kickstarter right away, you can actually use the framework for how Russell launches, also for how I launch. It's kind of like blended together there, and you can use that framework on retailers, and it's kind of translated to make sense for retailers. It could be also be helpful to you if you're really good at retailer launches. It translates it back to Kickstarter launches, and so you can see the numbers for that for Kickstarter. So, um, that bonus is— it's for everybody who's already joined, um, the, the group this time around, and then it's also for, um, anybody who joins before we get off the call. And so we're gonna— the reason we say that is because We're going to keep answering questions, but we will have to cut ourselves off at some point.

And so, yeah, so that's going away. That's a $97 bonus, I believe. And then the final thing, I don't— I'm just going to spill the beans, I think, on this one, which is like the course is going up. Yeah.

Next week, the end of next week.

Early bird pricing is ending. Early bird pricing is ending. The course is going to go up to $799, right? $799, I think, next Saturday. So yeah, well, next Wednesday. Next Wednesday. So yeah, like, so in a couple days. So like, on, on Thursday, you come and get it, it's going to be $799 with none of these bonuses. If you do it now, however, not only do you lock in all of these bonuses and this price, but anything else that we unlock will also be something that like you get into as well. And there'll be other unlocks throughout the course of this thing.

I'm telling you. I mean, it's us. Yeah. I mean, like, we're talking to somebody who does this on Kickstarter, so you can see some Kickstarter remnants in our launch too.

But yeah. Yeah. So what was really cool is also Kickstarter will train you how to do a sales page. I'll train you how to, like, do launches other ways. Like, we use a lot of the Kickstarter stuff. If you look at the accelerator page, is like stuff that can be incorporated there. Like it's a lot of the same stuff, testimonials and bonuses and like the sections are broken up with like nice big text and like, so all of those things are transferable.

All right, we're gonna get some more questions. Yeah, let's do some more questions. Okay, so we are onto, All right, how about this one? So DL Martone, with minimal newsletter subscribers and social media presence, how many followers to a pre-launch page would you want before actually launching?

Sure. So I would say, like, again, my, my numbers show me that 100 backers, 100 followers is $5,000. I don't know what that will be to you, but that would mean like if you want to raise $1,000, you would need 25 to 30 back, the 30 followers. If you want, if you want to raise $2,500, you need 50. And so the reason why you do a month is because you want to see, oh, like Monica's had her campaign up, her pre-launch page up for a while. She said 33 people to it. Like, that is a very, uh, distressing number for me. Um, but I also know that she's been focused on this stuff, so like, yeah.

But, but it is like, okay, so I did want to talk about this, so I'm sorry I'm interrupting, but, um, yeah, so I have 33 followers. I actually have like 5,000, 10,000 people on my email list, but like, that's like a reality check for me. I had hoped that I would get like a little bit more more. And I've sent out a couple emails on it. And so what that tells me is that before I do my launch, I need to find, like, I need to A, find new people who are actually interested in this, and B, like, do a lot more work to try to convert my email list. And so there are ways to do that, but like, it's just showing me like how much work I need to do. So if I had just launched the Kickstarter instead of doing the pre-launch page, I wouldn't have known any of that information and I couldn't have fixed it ahead of time. Um, and so, so that's one thing we would be— that's probably what Russell and I will work on is like, how can we fix that and get those numbers up, um, before I launch this? And then, um, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's why we have the— and in the group we have, um, I, I have a video for the exact pre-launch sequence. And just like why we have— we have a template. I know like if you send those 4 emails and you've only got 20 people launching, like in the exact way that I say, like that's a big problem. If you send it and you, if you send it and you have 200, well, and you have 10,000 people on your list, like that's a big problem. That's just me.

Like that list is dead. That list is over. Yeah. You need to reengage it. You need to, or it's just like, it's not working somehow.

Yeah. But if I have 200 people, then I know, oh, like this is exciting to people. Like this is gonna be like a good robust campaign. Like, my, my copy's working, my, my pre-launch is— and what I'm doing is often pulling copy straight from the page and showing it and seeing how it converts to, like, actual followers. So, like, maybe it's, oh man, I gotta work on that copy, or, oh man, like, I need to do more, or, like, whatever that thing is, um, you know. And sometimes it's, oh, well, you really just need to send reopen. You just send people who didn't open after 40, like, I don't know, but like, I do have a sequence that I send you through in the group that like, if you do it and you don't have the track, then like, oh, that's going to be an issue. And that's where we're going to work. And it might mean going and doing book funnel promos. It might mean, uh, it might mean launching this one at a very low number because here's the thing, Monica might have 33 followers and that might lead to 50 backers, but those backers might be $5,000 because I don't know, like usually the people who are— when you have very few followers, it means like you've got— those are the rabid people and they're willing to spend a lot more money than like when you have 200, you've got a lot of like casual fans probably in there who are going to spend $5 or a dollar or like whatever, or they back all of your campaigns but they're not doing anything at like— so I also don't know, like We had somebody who got 87 followers, and that was 87 backers, and that was $6,000. So we just don't, we don't know. There's two pieces. Like it might be you have 33 followers, you launch, you hit $5,000 and it's awesome. You might have 100 followers and it's $1,000. Like you might have 200 backers and it's $12,000. So there's multiple things that we have to test. Once you're like a month out from the campaign, it's really hard to find brand new people. So I would say, well, how do we get you into more promos? But also, how do we book you? How do you get booked on live streams? Where do you have access to people that you can do cross-promotion with or things like that?

Yeah, I mean, I think so in our group, a lot of people did not do the pre-launch page. So I think think some of that was just not having time to do the pre-launch and the full promotion sequence that we recommend. Um, and so that's— we're kind of slowing the group down a bit and doing that as like a whole month to, um, encourage people to do it because it will improve their campaigns. Um, but I also think there's like a big fear with putting out that pre-launch page, um, that, uh, we don't necessarily think of or address. And I think it's just like it's a reality check, right? It would be much easier to just launch and hope, cross fingers, hope for the best. But the pre-launch page is a reality check. And there's a lot of those at every point in Russell's system. He spends a lot of time reality checking himself. And so we teach you how to do that too. And the reality check for him and for me now, it's a good thing because it means you can change things, you can fix them. And so I think, but I do think like, you know, it's very easy to launch a book on Amazon. You can literally just post it and like, like it could, like it could be not be doing well and like nobody's going to say anything. Nobody's really seeing it. Like where with a Kickstarter, you're putting yourself out there. There's like a big, you know, money, like there's like a dollar sign at the top. There's a number of backers at the top. And there's a lot of fear that comes with that. Yeah, it's true. So let's, um, so we got one from, uh, I think Chara Summerlin. Uh, what if you've never published anything, you have no prior experience using Kickstarter or Amazon, would this be a good place to start?

Okay, so I, I think me and Monica are going to have different answers this one. Do you want to go first, Monica Leonellelle?

Sure. So I think, I mean, I think without having a book, so you can do like a group project, I guess, like an anthology, which is a lot of work to kind of start building your stuff. But I don't know. I feel like without having a book, I don't know that I would do Kickstarter.

So now Russell's gonna tell you to do it. I think that the, the simple reality is people that launch on Amazon are generally garbage at doing sales. They are also terrible at marketing and like, even doing basic email sequences, they are atrocious at as a whole, like 99.9%. Most people, even when they launch a book, They'll like put their ads on, they'll turn them on, and then they'll turn them off and they'll send an email. And like, that's their— if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And then they're off to write the next book. And like, that's so such bad marketing that like, I like literally shiver thinking about it. Now people make $40,000 at launch, like doing this thing. So like, that's like, I'm not saying that you can't be successful doing it. What I will say is is if you have never had experience on Amazon or Kickstarter and you take our course and you take our accelerator, like you will learn how to market and sell. You'll learn how to sell from me. You'll learn how to market from Monica because Monica is amazing at marketing. I am very good at sales. We each have like 50, 50% of this. And which is a thing is like, I am not very good at doing marketing.. So Monica will look at me and say, well, this is a ridiculous thing that you're saying. And I'm not saying you cannot be successful doing this, but I am saying sales page, buying triggers, copy that works. You have to do it on Amazon. You have to do 250 words. You have to be very good at copy if it converts in this little bit. But in order to build the case, people, I guess that's really the thing that people on Amazon struggle with, building a case for why your book is cool.

Like, yeah, I mean, so it really comes down to like, it's like retailer sales and direct sales are just very different, um, I think is what it is. Because like Russell's saying, with direct sales you have all the space to make your case, and you have to make your case because you don't have a retailer, um, supporting you in your launch. Whereas if you go on the retailer, they own most of your sales funnel. And so it's not that I would, I would, um, and I know Russell doesn't mean it this way. He's not saying like all authors are like bad at marketing because like that's not, that's not really what it is. It's really just that, um, authors going on to, you know, if you've done like mostly Amazon, you haven't had to own most of your sales funnel because Amazon does a lot of it. All you've had to do is get Amazon to promote your book, which is also very, very hard. It's a different kind of marketing. It's a very different kind of marketing style, like catalog sales versus, like, we call it like retailer catalog sales versus direct sales. And so we see people all the time, like, they're like super marketing savvy, they're like great on retailers, and then they come over to Kickstarter and they struggle with it because Kickstarter does not own your sales funnel. Like you own your sales funnel and you have to do all the parts of your sales funnel. So then you have to learn how to do all those parts of your sales funnel that you typically have done by retailers.

Yeah. Okay. Maybe we can agree to this. I'm going to twist the thing. People are very— authors who launch very well on retailers are often very bad at getting people to buy into them as a brand. Yeah, like, and their work. And what Kickstarter shows you is how to build a super fan. Like, it's very— it's like finding casual readers is like— I just did this mastermind with that, with, uh, with Monica and her people, and I still am like, I still don't know how to get casual readers just like, I guess I'll try it. So like, I'm doing all of this new stuff to find casual readers. What Kickstarter shows you is like how to build a super fan. Yeah, someone who's like, yes, I want to spend Yes, they want to spend $100. And maybe those are the two kinds of marketing.

And I think people that are doing Amazon are not great at that piece of it. Yeah, yeah. And I think like some people are. So, it's like not like everybody on Amazon who isn't good. But like, I think as a whole, the indie author industry is learning how to go deeper with their fans. Through Kickstarter and Patreon and some of these other platforms and direct sales, which I think all of these platforms fall under. And I think that's where you can learn a lot from Russell because he's been doing direct sales this whole time basically.

Yeah. I was really shocked going down to this mastermind with 6, 7-figure authors that we were in and they were like, I've never done direct sales. I don't know how to do. And I was like, oh my God, like, like you are one of the most successful authors in the category you're in. And like, you do direct sales, like you have a huge, like you have a huge like author community, you have a huge like reader community and stuff. And still like you're still basically just sending these people to like Amazon. And so yeah, I'm going to recant all of the things that I said before because like it was like, like, and make them more directed, uh, messaging, which is like what Kickstarter will show you is how to build a fandom in yourself that you own the, the, the whole supply chain of communication, right? And one of the keys with Brandon Sanderson's launch was he has the infrastructure. Like, John Scalzi wrote a post that's like, I can't do what Brandon Brandon Sanderson does, did ever. Because Brandon Sanderson has a bookstore, he has a distribution channel, he has 20 years of sending out stuff in a distribution funnel. And so what people are like, how's he going to get 4 books out? It's like, he literally owns a bookstore that does a lot of business. He does merchandising, he does all of this stuff. And it meant that people were more comfortable getting that. From him.

So yeah, I'm walking back all the stuff I said. I don't think you have— I mean, I think like we kind of clarified, and like we want, we want authors to be doing both, right? Like we want people to be super successful on retailers, and we also want them to be super successful with direct sales. Like Brandon Sanderson is not quitting traditional publishing. He's like collecting two checks, you know? And that's what we want for indie authors We want you to collect not just 2 checks, we want you to collect 15 checks. But we want you to be able to do that so that you have a long career. Yeah, we want you to have— Yeah, making a lot of money, that's something that is kind of a revolution for authors to do. And when we make money, we pour it back into other creative endeavors and other creative people's careers. You know, we show that creativity is like something really valuable. We pour it into our families. Like, we're all, you know, we're all like good people. Like, we should be making more money. Well, I won't say we're all good people, but like, I've never— I've not really seen like a creative get a ton of money and not like pour it back into the creative community like Brandon Sanderson did.

Yeah, we saw that. Yeah. And just, I mean, like, if you were— if you were like just a person who was out for money, like, you should go do something else because, like, there's way better ways to make a dollar.

Like, this is like— all of them are like, yeah, like, most people leave if they're in this to make money. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cool.

Okay, so, um, all right, this Facebook user says, um, I read your book, watched the webinar, loads of stuff about Kickstarter. Sounds super exciting, and I'm so Tempted. Would love to join, but I'm in the EU. Is it viable for postage costs to the US?

So I'm gonna pause. We have comics. This is more a comics thing, but we do have people that do, um, that do, um, comics stuff in the EU and ship to, um, the US. Now there's a couple of options that you have. Uh, one is, um, you find a friend who is in the US and you do a swap where like you'll, you'll do their fulfillment in the EU and they'll do your fulfillment in the US. I don't know if I said that right, but you know what I mean. Yeah. And then the second, and then you'll just ship it from the, the, the US Ingram or Mixum to like their house and like pay for their thing and whatever. For their time and all of that stuff, and then they'll do it for you as well. You know, you don't— you want to do a relatively similar campaign. There's also places that are professional, like ShipBob and others, that will fulfill for you. They tend to have— need a bigger unit price, but that is possible. And what you would do then is you would ship all of the merch, and all you would ship is book plates. So you would print book plates in the EU you would ship the bookplates to the person, and that's the only international shipping that you have.

Yeah, because assuming you're gonna sign it, you could also do unsigned copies, but assuming you're gonna sign the bookplate, ship it, and then somebody else is gonna pack it for you. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, this is a question we get a lot. I also think that, like, as we grow our group, um, like our Kickstarter accelerator program, and, and like other people are doing stuff too, and that's cool. But there are just definitely more authors using Kickstarter, and I think that solutions will— like, we kind of got to show as a community that, like, we are using Kickstarter. And then what happens is companies come in and they see, like, an opportunity to do some of this stuff, and they start to solve these problems. Or, like, a company that already exists in the community is sometimes like, hey, like I'm seeing this real opportunity over here. And so I think that's where, you know, within a couple of years, this is going to be a solved issue for a lot more creators. For now, I think that our group is one of, you know, it's going to be one of the places where this is solved more because there are going to be people to exchange with.

And there are a lot of printers that will, like there's a printer in the, in Florida that will fulfill your Kickstarter for you. This is in the comic book space, but, you know, printers print other stuff. So like there are some, there's a company called Black Box that will do it, usually for large run orders. I have a friend who does it who's told me I can only give her information out to people in the Accelerator group because she's getting so busy. So that is, that is a person I'm about to add another one Literally, right as we're talking, I'm remembering other people. So I'm literally going in as we are asking, being like, oh yeah, I just have a vendor list open so I can just keep adding things to it. Yeah.

Yeah. And there's going to be somebody in the community who's more kind of like more of a PA or services position or wants to be more in a PA services position that's going to say, hey, I'm going to start fulfilling these Kickstarters for people.

Oh, yes. Especially if we can have a If we have like people to funnel them, yeah, then why would they not do that? Like they're already making, like they're already doing that.

So yeah, yeah, totally. Okay, so then first campaign relying on people I know in the EU, would you have to pay VAT on top of Kickstarter tier prices? Yeah, you do. So we are not going to give you tax advice. Like people have asked us about that. Well, first of all, neither of us are even in Europe, so we don't— we're not even that familiar with that. But you gotta talk to your tax person. But, um, yeah, like, you— this is, this is a direct sales channel, um, so like you gotta think about taxes. This is, you know, like, like a retailer will take the taxes out for you and handle all taxes for you. Uh, you need to figure out taxes when you're working with Kickstarter.

But if you go for— if you ship in, if you send your books from the US to a fulfillment place in the US, like then it's just US, I believe. So like there, you want to ship them in the US and then you want to ship them in the EU with EU, UK people, and then Australia maybe even like that. And again, like as we grow, um, you know, if you join the group, then like there'll be people that like are in the Australia and in the EU. And we have this happen in I have— I'm in another group for specifically comics Kickstarters, and this is what happens. Like, they'll be like, hey, like, does anyone want to give me their EU shipments and I'll do the ones in the US?

Or something like that.

So yeah, and you can also do a digital-only campaign. That was the third thing. You can just do digital only and do— there's a lot of cool stuff you can do digital only. Um, audience audio commentary can be digital only. Uh, uh, a special edition of, especially ebooks, signed ebook can be digital only. Like, there's a lot of stuff and there's some people that are doing some really cool stuff with digital only campaigns, especially out of Australia. They end up being much smaller, but like, you also have no fulfillment cost.

Yeah. Yeah. And so if you're watching this and you have a question, make sure you— so it really cuts it off. So you can probably see that on our screen. It cuts your question off. So So try not to type a novel, you know, try to, try to keep it at like 1 or 2 sentences because then we'll see the whole thing. Because I have no idea where this comes— I guess, I mean, it's on Facebook somewhere, but that could be like 5 different places because we're streaming to a bunch of them. So we don't know what the rest of this comment says. So sorry. I think we— hopefully we answered your question though. Okay. So this comment is I'm looking for examples of audio commentary for fiction books. I'm having trouble finding examples. Can you talk more about what you include and discuss in yours?

So I'm not going to do this outside of the group, but like, I will tell you that there is an audio commentary inside the group and a book inside the group. You can go to the files. I believe we talked about this earlier today when you asked the question in the accelerator group. Like, you can literally just go and listen to the one that I've done, and there's a video on it in the Accelerator group.

So yeah, I think it was someone else who asked about it in the Accelerator group.

Maybe— sorry, then it's— maybe it's just a bunch of people at the same time.

Yeah, I think people, um, they—

yeah, I think people were confused about that because we've been listening. I will show you if you're in the Accelerator group where, uh, where to go. Um, okay, are you sharing the screen? Yeah, so accelerator group. Accelerator. We check, so don't just look at this and like be like, oh, I can go there now. In the files there is a— why did it not get updated? Well, oh wait, I do know. Final print, I think then there's an audio. I was in like comments or something. Yeah, I uploaded it. Oh, maybe it's in the videos. This is maybe why people are confused because now I don't know where to go. All right, better question than I thought. I definitely uploaded it. I uploaded a lot of stuff.

So yeah, so videos. Um, yeah, here's the audio commentary since he— since they asked.

But I, I do not see like a—

do you hear it? I don't hear it. Is it playing?

Oh yeah, videos. Oh, okay. All right. So I'm now going— I'm now going to go to files and put it right here where it says edit post. Ah, I did put— so you can find it in media videos. And then it's this one. That says in media, videos, right here, this one right here. Dragon face. It's, it's paired right there. We're gonna do it better in the, in the, in Teachable. Yeah, in Teachable, we'll do it. We'll do it better. But yeah, you, there you can, you can see it. You can listen to it. You can follow in love with it or be like, wow, really? People are willing to spend this much money for this kind of thing? It's totally very easy. So I will take a book. I'll show you very easy. I'm going to show you.

I said I wasn't going to show you. I know. I was going to say, are you?

I'll take a book and I'll say, welcome to the audio commentary Dragon Scourge. I'm gonna walk you through in case you don't know. I'm gonna have the book in my hand. I'm gonna call out chapters and page numbers when I can. Sometimes I'll forget, but I'm gonna do my best. And so then I'll be like, okay, so chapter 1. All right, so this first— this first "Today I Will Die" was a really easy one for me. Like, it was— it came to this first— first lines are like so important for me when I write a book. Uh, I, I like— I, I— unless I have the— for that, unless I have the title, usually a cover, and a first line, like, I won't even start a book. And so, "Today I Will Die" was something that came even before I know— and what happened with the COVID before then is like, uh, my, my— I had a cover designer and she posted this cover I think it said the dragon. I think it might have even said the Dragon Scourge. It may have been this exact cover. And, and like, I was like, I have to buy that cover. I have to, I just have to do it. And like, then I had the COVID and that's when I came up with the first line. So anyway, I'm like, I'm not gonna go through the whole thing. But like, that, that, that's like, what. And then I'll go through. And I'll be like, okay, chapter two, chapter three, and I'll go through it. They end up being about 30 minutes to an hour and 20 minutes, depending on how much information there are and how long the thing is.

Yeah, I do want to say more about it, but I shouldn't because we said we weren't going to say more about it. But cool. So we have a couple more questions. If you have a question, definitely drop it now because we're kind of closing out the questions and we're going to close up the live stream. But we do want to let you know, kickstartyournovel.com/accelerator if you want to join the program. We did have a couple of people who did join. So here's one Facebook user. So I know who this is, but since it's not showing, I won't say. But yeah, thanks for answering our questions and signed up. Okay. Excited to have you. Um, okay, so here's the question: if I enter with the plan but I want to pay in full to have the bonus, is it possible? Yeah, so, um, we've had a couple people ask that. So what I've been doing is, um, like, just email me at ignitersTV@gmail.com. Um, so what I'll do is I'll just refund, um, your payment plan and then, you know, you can purchase, um, and I'll, I'll follow up if you don't do it within a couple days, basically, um, because we'll, we'll pull you out of the group and stuff, um, if you don't have a plan with us or a payment with us on file. So, but yeah, yeah, you can do it, um, you can get the bonus, the all the bonuses, the painful bonuses, um, if you do that. So definitely. Yes. All right, um, have a couple. So we had this, um, international author friends interested interested in joining, but they're concerned about fulfillment and shipping costs. How would they approach this? Yeah, I think we, we answered this question, I feel like.

Yeah, if you still have questions specific to it, please ask.

But like, since I know you've been here this whole time, or most of the time, I think this was in the queue before we answered it. Yeah, we still have them though, please. Yeah, so, um, yeah, actually we are completely done then with our questions. So if you have more questions definitely, um, drop them below. Did you want to share anything?

Oh, did we want to talk about objection, you know, some of the objections people have?

Or—

yeah, I mean, so I think the one that is the most— so there's a couple that are most common, I think. Um, I, I'm gonna leave the pricing one to the bottom because like we can— like there's a lot of stuff we can say about pricing, um, but Like I wanna, I think the most important one to get through is I've been part of a lot of courses and they're all terrible and why should I spend money on your course? And I will tell you, Monica and I have probably been in all of those courses, like between the two of us, we've probably been in all of those courses and been sorely disappointed.

So Monica, do you want to talk about how this is different before I chime in? Or, uh, yeah, so this— okay, so here's the thing is like I had, I had kind of quit even like doing courses because I was like, I'm not very good at them. Like I'm like mildly okay at them, they sell fine-ish, but like I, I— and I like doing them, but I don't love it and I'm not clearly not like naturally good at it, so I'm going to quit doing courses. And so I went to, like, I only did books for, like, the nonfiction or my nonfiction stuff for the author audience and was not doing any courses. So then we kind of stumbled into this course model that I had never done before, but it was basically, it's basically like unpacking what we do through a series of videos and mentoring people through the same steps. So we started out doing these accountability posts and having people actually post their little portion of whatever, like we asked them a question. It's very similar if you did the 5-day challenge. We do that, but just for 4 months with people and we just say like, post this. And so we really like, we break down your Kickstarter project into these tiny little chunks and then you post them, you get feedback on them. And as you do that, like even if you just did the 5-day challenge, we kind of know a lot about your business already at this point. Because we actually like probably looked you up or like, you know, we looked at your project, you know, we looked at these like 5 elements of your project. And so I think that's what's different about it is just that we are there doing, like, really giving you personalized feedback. And these are, like, long comments. Also, the other thing we do is if we see people, like, we do it as a cohort. So then if we see, like, sections where people are struggling, we go back and we really correct. Like, we say, like, oh, these are the patterns we're seeing where people are hitting a wall.. And then we just make sure it's kind of like a no Kickstarter creator left behind type of thing where we make sure that you're, you're kind of on track.

Well, I think it's really important that we do the cohorts because it means other people are. So for me, the problem is a lot of the time, like, people will have a community associated with their course and it's bad. And it's bad. Maybe not. I mean, I've done it and I have one for one of my courses and it's a very bad community because like, A, there's like 11 people in it and B, like nobody ever posts. So like one of the things that really makes it different is like people actually post in our group and like there are tangible things that we're all going to because like a lot of these courses are kind of more ephemeral in the like, hey, we're going to help you build your audience, where this is like we're We're gonna— you're gonna run a Kickstarter, it's gonna go one way, and we're gonna help you make it better. And so there's just a lot more things that we can optimize also than in a normal group. I mean, I think I've done— like, I'm the same human that was doing the other ones, and I was like, I can't pay people to post in this group. But this one, people are like very engaged because it's like a novel concept. It's also like a learning— it's almost like a learning to do direct sales thing. Like, we're being very sneaky about teaching you how to be aggressively wide, which is like our real thing. Like, our real thing is like aggressively wide. Uh, Monica has a bundle that's like the Aggressively Wide Bundle. And if I— when I think of aggressively wide, I'm like, okay, so you're on KU, that's KU, you're wide, you're on retailers, maybe in Scribd and all those other places. Aggressively wide is like, nope, I also got a Patreon and a Kickstarter and I sell on my website and I go to conventions and I do all of this other stuff. So Kickstarter is great because there is an engine. There's an engine. There's an engine you can game. And it's honestly a pretty unsophisticated engine. So like, it's like Amazon 1998. I don't know, like a long time ago as far as sophisticated. And so, and also it has personal curation. And so there are actually a lot of things for authors to get excited about. But what they post a lot is like, you said audio commentary, but like, what does that mean? And then I go, here's what it means. Here's an audio thing. Here's this thing. Here's that thing. Here's the other thing. I— or like, it's a lot of translation things. And so— and also just the community. Like, I've been doing this a long time. I've done a lot of communities and like, I've done a lot of these courses that are bad and good and nebulous. And like, they're always like, when you have the community is so easy, like they're so great, they're so loving, they're doing all this stuff. And I was like, I've never had a community like that. Um, and like, yeah, like, yeah, it's even my reader community on Facebook was like kind of dead except when I posted funny memes. I was like, it was never about like a focus of my work or anything like that. So like, I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. I like— so I closed most of my, most of my things. And then we did this one. I was like, what do I expect? And like, literally from day one, like, people were in there, they were engaged, they were excited. Like, they were asking a lot of us. Like, they ask way too much of us sometimes, but like, they want so much and that they're so committed that like, that makes it different. And that is what makes the— that is what makes the Facebook group work. Honestly, it's the people that are inside are like all very motivated.

So all in. Yeah. And I think, I think when— I mean, it's not— I don't think it's that people— so yes, like people ask more of us than we thought it would be. But I think we also like, again, we really like— I know people say this, but like we did not think we were doing this like Excel Kickstarter Accelerator. Like we— that was not our plan. Like we We were literally like, we're going to do a Kickstarter on this, we're done. And it's dead. We're not going to sell anything else after that. But I think what we saw is that there's a lot to learn to do a Kickstarter. And the people who really— that's why I'm always like, wow, I can't believe these 20 people actually went all in and did this. Because when I look back at it, I'm like, wow, there was so much to learn. And so the good thing is that we've heard all these questions we have created. And every time there's a question, Russell pretty much just makes another video about it, to be honest. He's done like 20 bonus videos or something. Even though he's like, this is the last bonus video. Or upload.

It's not the last bonus video. I think I just stopped doing that. I think I just stopped saying the last one, but like, or I'll upload something to the— someone was like, what's an audio commentary? And I was like, well, you can go and buy— and I was like, no, I'm just going to upload it. So like, I'll upload a thing or like something that'll help, that'll do this. And like, I think we have a pretty good— we've done really well also making it practical now. I think when we— I think the book is very theoretical. There are practical moments in it, but like it's a very theoretical book and you get— it's huge. It's like 400 pages. It's way bigger than, uh, uh, than, uh, Monica. So Monica used to chastise me for having a 250-page book. Um, and we have a 400-page book. So like there's just a lot there and like there's a lot to get through and like being part of the group like makes sense because there's so much to get through and like we, we try to do the best we can drawing the dots between on paper, but like it's very hard to be like, this is how this connects that you read in chapter 10 and then, then come back here and do this thing. Whereas with the videos, I can just be like, okay, part, this is from part 3, part 4, part 6, and part 8.

And like, here's how we all combine this into doing like a super stack reward. Yeah, that is another thing. Like, people— because people have asked us, like, what— you know, like, I have the book. It was 400 pages. You made it sound super easy in the book. And, like, it is a very theoretical book. There are very little, very few case studies in there. And I think something that people— like, the problem with the book is that it's almost too good at convincing you that you can do a really great Kickstarter project when, like, there are, like, 100 things that you have to do well. And, like, and people have done okay with it. Like, I want to be clear, people have done okay with the book. But, like, every time, like, almost every time we look at somebody who were like, we know that they have the book because we have a list of people who have bought the book, and they, like, backed it, and, like, we know that they're not in the group or they're not in the group yet. Like, a lot of the time that person who did the book, like, we can see like, oh man, they would have doubled it. Or, you know, if they— because, because they— it convinces you that you fully understand the material. And even I feel like I don't fully understand the material all the time. Like, I still— like, even me, I still feel like I can go deeper on the Kickstarter stuff and like understand more about it. And like, even when, like, when Russell posts a new video, sometimes I'm like, holy shit, like, I never, like, I never connected this.

And so I, I just think, I think that's it. Yeah, like, like that, the connective tissue is the thing that the group gives you, is like, you look— I've looked at a lot of campaigns. I just made the— this connection whilst you were talking is like, what the people that have the book have is a very technically correct campaign. It like has the pieces that we want, but like there is no connective tissue to the psychology underneath that undergirds everything. There's just like, I saw Russell had a $40 book, so I'm going to have a $40 book. I'm going to have a $20 this. And like, there's nothing wrong with that, but like the thing that the group gives you is like The psychology of, whoa, like, oh, I, you do this for this reason. And once you know that someone does this for X for Y reason, you can say, well, I think that it would work better for my audience to do this instead. And we had to go back to Inez's, Inez, I think was the person like she, when we were doing the point for the, for the imagery, I think it was her that posted like a completely off-the-wall thing that I would never said. It was like just like legs. Yeah. And like in grass. But like it was so compelling because it was clear that she understood the psychology part of it. So that when I said X, she said, oh, well, I have an A. I have an image that goes really, that would would work really well to fix this particular point. And that's what I'm going to use instead. And we find a lot of like, frankly, dead-eyed imagery, like where it's like, technically this is looking front and technically the eyes are looking at you and tech, but like there's nothing behind you. So there was one, um, not to call out this person, there was like a Civil War one that like was just like, there was grass behind this person and like they weren't standing out from the background. And like, but technically they were on a horse looking forward. And I was like, that's not like—

that's technically correct, but that's not actually doing the thing that we want to do. Yeah, yeah. And, and like, um, and as like— so she's like, she's definitely like a superstar. Like, she's a very, very market— I mean, very, uh, you know, very savvy author. So I do, I do want to say that, um, And like for her specifically, just knowing her work, like, and she's, you know, she's in the program, but I'm like, yeah, totally go off book because I know that you know what you're doing. But like, you know, I will say like for, you know, Russell has like a huge, you know, like extensive sales background. I have an extensive marketing background, like we're talking like decades. In these fields. And so you're not going to get everything we're doing from a book. You're just not going to get it unless— and that's why we are so hands-on in the program. We literally are not even really ready. We can't hire somebody yet. And we hope maybe someday we could hire somebody to help us comment on stuff and all that. But that's why we're so hands-on in the program. That's why we're only doing 100 people at a time, because we have those backgrounds that make a real difference. And he and I were speaking the same language on this stuff too. And we're pretty much on the same page. Rarely do we disagree.

And then when we do, I'm always like, just do what Russell says, or do which one feels best for you or something like that. But yeah, I mean, that's like, we are also doing like my opinion. So I did this video called The Case for Your Book, where the case for your book, which was like the whole pre-launch and like, it's something I've been thinking about for years and I was like, how do I, and it finally all clicked and like, they only clicked for me of how to make that video or how to talk about it. Like, 2 days ago, and then I made a video for it. So like we wrote the book 6 months ago and, you know, Monica has always told me the reason why you don't want a very long book is because people then think that they have the entire program that you need and you— and we bucked that trend because there was just so much to do in there and we wanted it to be great and we wanted like we wanted this to be like the definitive thing for like people launching books and we wanted you to be able to say, read this book and like, that's what you need. And to be able to go to our YouTube channel and to pick it all out and pick it, pick all of the little like pieces out from it. But what the course does is allow you to say, hey, on chapter 12, you said this. Someone said this the other day, actually, she bought the course. She bought one of my other courses and was like, hey, so this says this and the answer to this test question says that, like, which one is right? And like, uh, it was a question I'd never gotten before and I was like, oh well, like, this one is right. And it gives you that immediate— well, within, within recent immediacy, uh, like, response to saying how does this work for me, which is like the dot dot dot, because it gives you the play-by-play of how it works. Like, the book gives you the play-by-play for how it works. But like, every campaign— I've never seen a campaign that like everything was the exact same from a different campaign. Like, every audience is different. The words you use for your audience, like, you know, you might call them igniters and I call them wannabes, or like whatever thing. Like, you might have different bonuses Like you might do pins and be like, pins are terrible. Like I'd never do a pin, but I like, it's a brooch that I need. And like those little eccentricities are like what you get in the group. And the reason that we charge money and why it's going up in like Wednesday and then going up even more for the next cohort is like there's, there's like so much that goes into this. This is almost the reason the book's 400 pages is like, it's literally teaching you how to do direct sales. Like, it's our guide kind of to do. And when Monica kept telling me like, oh, it's 250 now, I'm not even close to done.

It's pretty— no, it was, it was a tough project, let's say that.

And we got it to 400. Monica got it to 400 pages, and like, that's so many pages. But it's because like we kept having to add things to teach you direct sales. So from this course, you're going to get a lot of like how Monica said it great in the webinar, or wherever she said it last, uh, I think it was the webinar. She's like, now I know how to do direct sales like on my website, and I knew da da da da.

Yeah, yeah, you're gonna— it, it really is. It's like you're actually learning direct sales, launching, and then marketing and sales funnels and product funnels too. Like you're kind of like getting a crash course in an MBA but for digital stuff, which I have an MBA in, like corporate, like corporate whatever. And Russell's got like, he was a sales manager and like, so, so you're, so it's like we, we have that, those backgrounds too, but you're getting like the crash course of like sales and marketing business in the, in this program and it's wrapped up and packaged as like do well on Kickstarter. So we So, which is a good thing. Like we gave, we're giving a container of like an actual project because you'll learn much faster. But like once you do your first project, you're going to be like, oh, like I get how to do direct sales, I get how to do marketing. And we're seeing that with our, our people now too. Like, like one of our people just did a, you know, a $6K campaign and she's basically like, ah, I understand how to do like a 10K campaign next time, and I understand how to do my marketing on Amazon better, and I understand how to do direct sales, and I understand, you know, and she— and like just a lot of stuff is connecting for her now. And I think, you know, I think to some extent, like, it can be the start of your career, like, in many ways, or like a turning point in your career. And we've had multiple people in the program say that it was the turning point. Like, not maybe not the definitive turning point in their career, but it is a turning point in their career where they went from like, you know, $50 to $100 a month. And now they're like, I know how to make thousands of dollars a month and I know how to grow from there because the foundation that we're laying in this program is so, it's so strong in all those areas.

Yeah, we've had people say, you know, this is the day my business became a business. Because I now know how to break even or make a profit at launch on projects. But more, but also it's people that have done well on the hamster wheel. Just keep calling it the hamster wheel because like I like that, that, that like they're doing very well or they did well 2 years ago and suddenly it like dropped off and they're like, I don't know, I just spent 5 years building my business on Amazon and now Amazon doesn't work. Or like, and there's been people in the groups being like, I have to go all in on this because like I know that I can bring my audience here. Like I know that I can like make $50 grand making the books I want to make. And like, so even if you're using, whether using KU and like maybe it's not working as well, or maybe you're like, I really don't want to write a book a month, or you have a backlist or you have a weird project that you just like kind of want to write. Like the book I'm writing now is like an esoteric metaphysical screed, and I'm very bitter about almost dying a couple months ago, and like I'm putting a lot of anger into that. And like, like 100 people are going to, to, to buy that book maybe. But like, this— I mean, I want to show one— I do want to show this before I go. Yeah, like there's a, there's a, um, I'm just going to keep going to my— and granted, I, I know my audience really well, like really, really, really well. And like I know the floor of what pretty much— like, I could put anything on it, like, and they would back. You mean on Kickstarter? Yeah, I put anything on Kickstarter and, like, they would buy it. Like, yeah, because there's some people that love— and, uh, hey, we've all got authors like that. Like, we've all got authors that are like, I'm gonna buy whatever they do. I have an auto-buy for, like, anything that Melissa Albert or Alex Barrow or Stephanie Garber or, uh, Charlie Jane Anders, any of them put out, like, I'm, I'm there. But like, okay, so we had this audio campaign which raised, uh, $5,000, which like, I think, uh, that's, that was like to fan fans, but like, I think there was still like some overlap. But like, I'm gonna show you this project. So like, this project is a book that I drew, two books that I drew. Um, like, it's a sci-fi, not fantasy. I don't think I've ever sold one copy outside of, like, this Kickstarter or convention tables. So, like, I drew it, um, over the course of, like, a year. Um, I drew— I drew another one, this other one. Like, it's got a lot of comedy and it's funny and, like, it's got, like, a lot of absurdist things and, like, I love it. Um, but, like, this is clearly for super fans who like— I don't— I, in fact, I only ran it for 5 days because I didn't want anyone to find out that was not a super fan of mine. Like, I did not want this to be the first thing that they have of my work. But like, like $3,500 we raised for this book from almost 200 people.

That's incredible. Like, I thought that was your 1K campaign, but now I'm like, whoa, it's the 3.5K can't be.

Yeah, and I, I wasn't even going to do this book, but at some point, um, we were— I was working on a book with Camry Lapka, and like, I was like, you know, I, I want to test you to see if you like— if we can work together for long term. So how about you letter this book? And she ended up doing the, the work for Black Market Heroin. She did a great job on the lettering for this. So like, it was like kind of a test, and I was like, I'm just going to run it. It cost me like $750 or something like that to get the lettering cost me like another $200 or $300 to get all the stuff. We did a— we did this cool 2— um, we did this cool, um, 2-inch pin, and like we sold it all for like, uh, $40. And like, for— it's like $40, $42. And like, you know, there's— there's like not tons of backers for it, but we had people who bought sketches from me and commissions. And just like, it was definitely a fan service campaign. But like, like, that book would never work anywhere ever, ever, ever. Like, maybe if—

and it's— they're not— I think it's a cute book though. I actually really like that book. But I mean, I haven't read it. I, I just like that you drew a book and like illustrated it yourself.

And like, they're really cute characters. And yeah, I, and I think that anyone can do stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, this is the— this is the series that Monica messaged me.

We've known each other for years before. This is why we are doing this.

This was where it started. Yeah, because me and Monica had known each other for years before this, and then I put this campaign up and, and it, uh, it went gangbusters, like $10,000, almost $10,000. And it's 4 books in 4 different genres, um, uh, for 4 different audiences. And like she messages me and it's like, how are you doing this?

Yeah, I was. I— it was— it's true. And like we were talking to my, uh, like one of my groups of friends, um, at this thing we were at recently, and I was like, do you remember? I was asking one of the women, do you remember that I was— I was like talking about this for like an hour on our call? And she's like, yes, I do. I'm like I'm like, see, Russell, like, I literally was asking like everybody like, what is going on here? Because the reason why is because— and I talked about, you know, if you read the book, there's like a little anecdote about this, um, campaign specifically. But I was like, these are 4 different books. Like, I mean, like, not— like, they should not— like, people should not be buying them next to each other. Um, and that was, that was something that, um, I realized was incorrect. Because obviously Russell proved this completely wrong. He raised $10K from this. And, you know, I think that's why I was saying earlier that, like, because the indie author community is so entrenched in the way retailers work and the way retailers sell books, we have this belief, and it's common sense, like, you know, best practice or whatever, that, you know, a cozy mystery reader is like a cozy mystery reader and that's all they buy. And it's just completely like, like, there probably are many people like that, but there is like such a good chunk of the market. And I think so many authors themselves are these people, are part of this like larger market of people who don't— like, they don't even know genre. Like, I have been a lifelong reader and I don't think I even knew what genre was until I was in my, like, mid-20s and trying to, trying to be an author at that point.

Yeah.

Um, so there are people who just, they don't know genre, they don't care about genre, and there's lots of, um, there's lots of money for authors in that. And so I think, you know, the focus on retailers and the way retailers work is actually pretty damaging to, um, so many of us in terms of, like, our our finances because there's this whole other— there's like this whole direct sales channel where people don't care. Like, they don't—

they like—

they're not like, oh, I'm a cozy mystery reader. They're like, I, I like books, like, I like mysteries or whatever. And they're just like— they're just very basic. Or like, oh, I like when the— when there's like talking cats in the book, you know. So I read, um, what was that, uh, that one you know, young adult. It was like, uh, Philip Pullman's book, um, and it got made into a movie, The Golden Compass ones. The Golden Compass, yeah. So there's like— I don't know if there's a talking cat, but there's like familiars in that book, um, essentially, or like the concept of familiars. So like that person, you know, they read that young adult fantasy book, um, that's— there's kind of like— it's not really dark, but, um, and then they read like some cozy mystery book and like they're good with that too. And then they read some thriller thing that's like contemporary. And like, there are so many of those readers, and retailers don't really encourage you to sell to those readers. So if you write cozy mystery, retailers are only showing that— those books to cozy mystery readers. And you, you have readers that are outside of cozy mystery that will like your books that you're not selling to, and that you basically can't sell to on Amazon because Amazon doesn't let you.

So, yeah, so So I was very confused about this for a long time. Monica literally for years was like, you need— I didn't learn about, realize it until I started putting books on Amazon and being like, oh, this is not how it works. Like on Amazon, because like for me, I put whatever I want and like people buy it and like, I'll show you. Cause, cause what always happens at this point is people go like, yeah, Russell, but like you've been doing this a long time. Yeah. The $40,000. This is my first 4 campaigns. Okay, so this is a post-apocalyptic book, Ichabod Jones Monster Hunter, which we since have gone on to do, uh, 4 volumes of. But, and it raised, uh, $5,400, which is pretty good, but like definitely did not break even on the production cost. We got like a print run out of it. I don't even think the print cover is that good. Um, uh, but like it was apocalyptic, it was the first thing. I spent like 5 years building the audience for this. So just so you know, like, I went to every comic thing that I could find and like started talking to people. And like I've made friends and like I've built a community of people who like believed in this book from 2011 to 2014. And also we had a launch on another publisher. Um, but like, like this is— it's gonna be a little— like you can tell, like this is like a monster book. It's like kind of gory and gross. And like, I don't think this cover is even the best. Probably would never do this cover. Like, as far as the image goes right now, here is campaign number 2. We grew from there. This is like, this is a, this is Monsters Apocalypse. This is Monsters Apocalypse. So like we did $8,700 for this one, but like it is a kind of different style. But like, watch this. Like, this is a mystery novel told all in blog posts. Like, it is literally nothing stylistically, genre, nothing like the first two books. And we did 155 backers, $3,500. And just look at this image. This image is so bad. It's so bad. Doesn't even have the name, full name for the book on it. Like, I love, I love this cover. Like, this is one of my favorite covers of all time, but like, it is a terrible Amazon cover, um, because very small, it looks like nothing. It's supposed to look like a diary, and it does. And like, I love this artist, but like, this is not a good Amazon cover, and it's still raised like, yeah, $3,500. Others in a very different genre. And then finally, the 4th— this was actually the 5th one because we did like a— I also did— I guess I have to do all 5 because I did the 4th.

So the 4th one—

I remember this campaign. The 4th one was a kid's book about tooting. No monsters in it at all. I just was like— and I was confused as to why we were going down from like, now I know it's like, dude, put monsters in your books. People will buy it if it's a kid's book. If you're going to do a kid's book, definitely don't make it about farting. Make it about, or make it about monsters farting, not just farting farting. This is also a book I didn't write or do the art for. So like, and we still raised $2,000 for it, like breaking even on the production cost as well for this one. Um, then We did this book. Now this is like, just like, I'm ashamed of this campaign, uh, and this cover. Not because I don't love the COVID I love this cover, but it is so off-brand. It is so off-market. It is so— it says spaceships, there's barely a spaceship in this whole book. Like, people have got on me for years until I changed the name to Sorry for Existing. In fact, it brings me to— I have to like— I have to show you the actual cover for it now. Like, this is the contemporary YA cover that we came to for Sorry for Existing. Like, I've got to show this so you know that like I know how to do covers, because that's so— it's so bad, so off-brand. So like, uh, so like, I didn't know, but I did not know then what I— what I know now. So like, this is the COVID that we went with. And again, I love this artist, but like, I still raised $1,800 from 75 people for this book about like contemporary book about abuse and like loss. And also there's kind of an alien in it, maybe. And so like it— and like this cover is not a good— and it's not a good cover. Like, this is not a good image. Like, I mean, this is not like— look at the videos, they're not very good. Like, I don't even know what— why there's like— was there fog in my, in my thing? Like, did I just breathe on the— like, why, why, why, why? But like, it had some elements that were good. Then why? Yeah, exactly, why? Um, but it did— it was not— tech is technically correct, which is my favorite kind of correct, but like This is 5 different books. 1, 2, 3— I cut the tooting book— 5. And like, this one became this book, and it's our best reviewed— that's our most reviewed book with this cover. And like, I love this cover because like, I have a thing for purple. But yeah, like, it's not like I always came out of the room knowing this stuff. Even, even though I had been a sales manager for years before, uh, before I did that first campaign, I still had no idea what worked on Kickstarter. I had no idea clearly what worked on Amazon because you, like, I completely unironically put those covers on Amazon expecting them to sell. Um, so it's, it's, uh, and I don't— that's not me crapping on— like, I love the covers, they're just not to market. So, and I still made money on them. I don't— so anyway, like the long and the short of it is like, I think there is like a place for you as well. And I think you can do this. And like, if, if like idiot Russell can make like $3,500 from 155 backers with like a cover that doesn't even show the name, full name of the book, like with our help, you can do so much better than than that.

Yeah, yeah, and that's the truth is that— so we are going to wrap this up. So again, if you want to check out the program, it's at kickstartyournovel.com/accelerator. We'd love to have you. The bonus is going to go away like right as we close this call, so make sure you get in if you're going to get in. And then the price is going up on Wednesday, so really Tuesday is the last day to get it at the current price. So right now it's $499 and $49 for 12 months, $49 payment plan for 12 months. And a couple of people have asked us, you get access to the program beyond the 4 months. It's actually, we're calling it lifetime access. We don't mean like your lifetime access. We mean lifetime of the program access. And so if we decide to end the program though, We'll, we'll send you a Dropbox with all the, all the videos probably. So you can download if you want. But we, you know, so, so anyway, so lifetime access. What else do we want to say about it? Oh, the price is going up to $799 on Wednesday and a $79 per month payment plan. So make sure you're, you lock in your payment plan um, early if you're going to be at that price.

And, um, what else, Russell? What am I missing? Yeah, like, okay, so if you watch this video all the way through and you're like, crap, I need 2 hours to like get all of my ducks in a row, just like email ignitersTV@gmail.com and like remind us that we're on. We're not gonna do this like tomorrow or like 3 weeks from now, but like, if you're like, I need, I need my husband or wife or business partner to like watch this 10-minute segment and like in a replay, like, I think we can probably like, uh, give you some grace because you're watching it.

Yes.

For the bonus. Cause you're watching it like now, like you're clearly watching it now, but like, if you watch it at 10 o'clock at night and you like then do it at midnight, like we're not gonna—

Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, because there's like a replay, you know, or like it's recorded or whatever. So, um, yeah, so we'll give, we'll give a little bit of grace, but like, yeah, I would say get in.

Yeah, because we really want you to. We really want you in it. And honestly, like, I mean this from the bottom of my heart, like, the thing that makes this Kickstarter community so great is because it's filled with people who are initiative takers and who are like go-getters and will like say $500 is a lot, but like I'm going to get $5,000 from this. And like, even if I like, and like that is what makes it great. Like it does not, is not filled with fence sitters.

It is filled with, with, with, with, with, yeah.

Or freebie seekers. Yeah. It's filled with people who want to do this and see the value. Value in it. And to me, that's the value. I mean, I don't— like, outside of like the, uh, of, of us being in there, um, which I think is worth way more than the $500 or $800, I think that, um, it's, uh, it's filled with people who like want this to work, who desperately want it to work because of something that is wrong or right with their business. They've tried everything. I can't tell you how many people have messaged me. It's like, I have never had anything that anyone has told me work except for this thing that you taught us.

Yeah. Yeah. Or if they have a huge audience, they're just like, I want this to work because I know that I can make a lot more money with this. I know I can be making a lot more money off my backlist. List, or I know that I want to explore this new thing, or my, my fans have like been talking to me about this one thing and I'm just like, I don't want to do it, but I'm going to do it through Kickstarter. So yeah, like the people in it, like, I think that is a big reason why it's an active community because people paid money to be there. And it's like, you need to, you have to actually do the campaign to make your money back. Like, like you can, you can be in there just for fun, but like, you need to actually do a campaign to recoup the investment that you made. And so people are like, how? Like, they're literally like doing their campaigns and like asking questions as they go.

Yeah. And like, that was something that really like can light a fire at you, you know, like, hey, yeah, give us $500 and like, you've got 500 reasons to like do the campaign and make it work. And like, we have 500 reasons to like to make it work and make it work 10 times better because we're going to do this again. And I'm telling you flat out right now, it will be $1,000. Yeah, it will be $1,000. And it might also have a yearly fee associated with it. Like, it's going to go up because I know for sure we can get you $1,000 back in that first campaign.

We've done it every single—

like, almost every person we've done has made over $1,000. Yeah. I mean, we do one tweak and people are making hundreds of dollars. So I know. And I mean, we've been pretty good about not hard selling it because like we just know, but like I'm going to make one hard sell, which is like it will never be this cheap again. Literally, you will never get as many bonuses as you get today. Like tomorrow? No. Like it will then the value is the best literally right now, this minute. And it's on Wednesday, I'm going to tell you it's going to be the same course with less bonuses and more expensive.

That's the only difference. And it's very underpriced right now. We do want to say that because we wanted to get more people in, basically. So it's still really underpriced for what it is. And I mean, we, we have people like say, like, like people who are in the community, they're just like, we get it, we know. Like, and so some of you are, you know, you may— there's 11 people still watching this, so some of you may still be on here. Um, like, yeah, like, we get it, we get it. But like, it— yeah, like, we, we just see people who we, we don't, we don't actually know like why they're, why they're not doing it because, um, we look at their stuff and we're like, you should be doing this.

Yeah. The only thing that I can think of is like, it's very hard to come up with $500.

I get it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's very hard to come up with $500. Like, like I've, and often and almost all of the time that it's ever happened in my life, like I've been burned by it. Like it's very rare that I've not been burned by spending like that kind of money by like, oh, well the value was not there.

But it's like, that's like a, I just want to say that is like, so there's trauma from like having scrape together $500, not you, but just in general. Yeah, we all have trauma around all these things we tried that didn't work. And so it's like you can choose to let the trauma of that drive you forward or you can choose not to. But yeah, and then I would also say, well, actually someone just said this, there's the payment plan. So forget about the bonuses, do the payment plan. If you need the payment plan, that's why it's there. And if you end up raising a bunch of money on your first campaign and you can pay it off, we will let you do that. And like, I would be happy to give you a bonus if you wanted to do that. So if you're like 3 months into the program and you have a Kickstarter campaign and you like, you made the money, like, I don't know, I haven't talked to Russell about this, but like, we're kind of, yeah, we're like, great. Like you, you've you, you know, you use payment plan for a couple months and then you paid in full, like, sure, like, we'll, we'll give you the bonuses, the painful bonuses, um, for paying it off early.

So yeah, I mean, we want you to succeed. We're so interested in you guys succeeding because when you succeed, we succeed. Like, when Monica first came to me with this, I was like, awesome, this is a book to make publishing better, and then it's going to benefit me because then I can and like run bigger campaigns. And like, I still feel that way because like my heart is in like fiction. Like I love— I wrote 24 books in the last 26 months. Like this is a thing that I'm doing to help make the fiction Kickstarter community and the Kickstarter community of all better. Like we are invested because Monica also loves fiction and wants to run better fiction campaigns and wants to be able to do fiction more and be able to like carve out things for fiction along with doing the nonfiction stuff. And like, uh, we kind of don't understand fully like what is happening with this group as far as like what we just did. Like we woke up this morning and we were like, did we just raise $50,000 in like 6 months? Like for this thing? And I was like, and we were like, yeah, yeah, about $50,000. And like, that's the thing you hear on like Pat Flynn and like like John Lee Dumas sites, and we're like, people don't actually— and we're like, wait, we did, we did all of that stuff. So we are very invested in giving as much back to people as possible. And you just, you don't get that. You can get the technical information from non-Kickstarter, like for, from not doing this accelerator. You can do— and we have, we literally have a whole YouTube channel devoted to like a playlist devoted to all of our stuff you can watch. Like, we have books devoted to— we have— I have literally hundreds of hours of stuff you can comb through. Or you can give us $500 and you can just say, Russell, I don't want to comb through all the BS, like, what is the thing?

And I'll be like, this is the thing. Yeah, yeah. I, I definitely think that, you know, it's, it's such an active program, like um, you know, it's 4 months of your time and your life— like, not, not the whole time devoted to it, but like, you're gonna be doing like the exercises or whatever. And then you have a project, and there's like money attached to that project, and you actually receive the money, and then you actually fulfill it. And so it's like this very tangible thing to do, um, and so it just— it makes sense to do it with people.

I don't know, like, yeah, I mean, I think if you're gonna do a—

if you're gonna do a Kickstarter, like, you're gonna go all in. Because I do think people do the Kickstarter, but they're not like going hard, like, they're not like all in, like, I'm gonna do this like the, you know, as well— they may be saying I'm gonna do this the best I can, but they're not like, I'm gonna do this at the level that like Monica and Russell can teach me how to do it.

Yeah, and like, look, I mean, like Monica said, like, In 6 months you could have a campaign up and running and pay this money back. Like theoretically. I mean, we've all done it. Like we've all done the thing where we couldn't afford the thing and we paid for it anyway. And like, we just hope for the best. But like, you are like, there are videos in that thing that like, you give me 30 minutes and I'll be in and you, it will literally change everything about like how you do this. I think the case for the book book one by itself, like, is enough to be like, yep, that blew my mind. Yeah, that's worth $500 right there. So anyway, like, we are not hard sellers. We love this community. Like, we, uh, we think that you should join it, um, come, come April 30th. Like, we're not gonna offer it again for a few months, like, probably till the end of the year. So like, if you want— if you plan on— even if you plan on doing a camp a campaign in September, like, you want to be in now because we're not—

we're not—

this is the time to be in. Yeah, we cannot continue doing live streams. Like, we are— this is way too much effort. Monica's got a kid. Like, I've got, like, bad health issues. Like, we have been very, very committed for, like, a long time to do this stuff. And, like, we need to spend the time in the group. So, like, we are not going to offer it. We're not going to do webinars. We seek sneak it in, like, at least for a few months. Like, we are not— you have until April 30th. And on April 30th, the only thing that will change between then and now is you'll be paying $799 instead of $499, and you will have less bonuses to deal with.

That's the difference. Yeah, we do have a couple more bonuses that we're going to announce in the next couple of weeks too. And so everybody who's in it now, you'll get those bonuses too.

So if you're like the person who wants all the bonuses, now's the best time to join. Now, in like, you know, by this evening, by, by like, you know, we want you to be able to sit down with your whoever you need to make decisions with and like eat soup, talk about this, you know, watch a moment, go through the bonuses. So like, it's not like this minute because I really do want you to be comfortable. Comfortable doing this. Even if you are uncomfortable with the money, I want you to say like, this is the right move for me, even if you are shakily hitting that payment plan button. Um, but yeah, like for sure, by the time we wake up tomorrow, if like there's not a thing, like no more bonuses.

Okay, so with that said, are we ready to end this? So thank you so much for everybody who stayed, who came, who watched for a portion. We went to 2.5 hours as we apparently always do. So thank you for hanging out. We had a lot of fun answering your questions as well. So, all right, see you later. Bye. Bye.