Should Authors Use Kickstarter or Patreon to Sell To Fans?

Hey there, Igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Today I'm going to be talking about Kickstarter versus Patreon. It's a question we've been getting a lot during our campaign, which you can see at kickstartyournovel.com. We are doing a Kickstarter for our book, Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. And if you're wondering who I'm talking about when I say we, it's myself and my co-author Russell Nolte, who is an 18-time champ at Kickstarter. He's raised over $250,000 through comics, anthologies, and novels. And so he's just kind of a rock star at the Kickstarter publishing category. He's just— he's fantastic. And so we've co-authored our book, Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. We are co-hosting, handling, co-sponsoring. I don't know. I know what we're co-doing, but we have a Kickstarter. It's at KickstarterYourNovel.com. And so you can back us. Until November 13th, 2021. So if you're watching this afterwards, that's okay. You can still get our book. If you're watching this before that, you can back us on Kickstarter. All right. So like I was saying, we have been getting a lot of questions about Kickstarter versus Patreon and which one should you do? Well, you know, all sorts of stuff about it. And so the first thing that I want to say about this is that You can do both. They are two different platforms. There's no exclusivity, non-exclusivity. You can do both. So if you want to do a Kickstarter, you can do it. If you want to do a Patreon, you can do it. So that's number one, is that you don't have to choose between Kickstarter and Patreon. Uh, the second thing we want to say, or really I guess I want to say— I did talk to Russell about this beforehand, so I feel like it's something we want to say, but I should probably just stick to the I for now. So the second thing I want to say about Kickstarter versus Patreon, or Kickstarter and Patreon, is that they are two really different platforms. So Patreon is a subscription platform. So even though you're trying to get fans on both of them, Patreon is about subscriptions. So people pay based on, I think it's like monthly There may be a yearly one, I'm not sure. I think they can also pay based on updates. So if you want to do, you know, like ebooks, for example, and you don't put out an ebook every month, they can pay based on like, you know, an event. So essentially like, okay, I put out an ebook, and so you paid another amount, another pledge of whatever you were pledging. So I believe that's how Patreon works. At least I know that's how it's worked in the past. I haven't, I don't have a Patreon right now, so I don't know the exact details or if things have changed, but that's kind of the way Patreon works. And so when you think about this, Patreon, it can be a challenge because typically people need to be pretty invested in your work already to join a Patreon because this isn't like a one-time thing that you're asking them to do. You're asking them to pay a small amount month after month. And so you may be giving them a lot of cool stuff for that, but that is what you're asking them to do. And so then the other thing about subscriptions is that you have to keep putting out content. So it's not gonna be enough that like month 1, you have all this awesome content and like it's a great deal and blah, blah, blah. And so like everybody back to you, Well, every single month somebody is essentially like reevaluating their purchase. So even though it can be automatic, you know, people are still looking at it. And when they're looking at their finances and looking at their bills, the first thing that people cut is subscriptions. And it makes sense because you can cut a subscription that's like $25 a month and you know that you're saving, whatever that is, like $300 a year. So that's kind of what people do. You know, that's why people are— they cut their cable bill, they cut their phone bill subscriptions, you know, especially, you know, less important subscriptions. Like, people are probably going to cut their, their, you know, subscription to like Joe Schmo before they cut their subscription to their cell phone service, for example, or to their water bill. So, you know, that's going to be one that they cut more easily than some of their other subscriptions if they're— if they suddenly encounter some financial difficulty that they need to pay for. So that's a challenge with Patreon. I'm sure there are ways you can work around this. I'm sure there's lots of great stuff about how to work with that, but it is a challenge. And so You know, when, when I hear from people about Patreon, there are some people who have really successful Patreons and there are also a lot of people who they don't like. They have a small number of fans. It's bringing in like less than $100 a month and they have to constantly put out content for it. And so this isn't a diss on Patreon. I just want to be clear. It's, it's still a great— it's a great platform to find your fans, to build fans, all of that stuff. But, you know, there are limitations to it. So if you're making less than $100 a month, for example, you're making less than $1,200 a year for whatever efforts you're putting into Patreon. And so for something like Patreon, you need big— bigger numbers to make it work usually. So in order to, you know, to be making like $500 $1,000, like something that, you know, just feels like better and more substantial and like kind of makes the platform more worth it, you're gonna need either really high subscription tiers or you're gonna need more fans who are willing to do a monthly subscription for you. So that's Patreon. When you look at Kickstarter, it's a kind of a different thing, and the biggest difference is that the person— like, what you're asking people to buy is only a one-time purchase. And so people, for whatever reason, they're often willing to buy like a $50 thing on Kickstarter or wherever instead of signing up for a $5 subscription. Just the psychology behind that is really different. And even though it's, you know, roughly the same amount of money,. And I mean, I guess we could say like a $60 thing if we want to make it the exact same amount of money, but it's like people are kind of willing to do a one-time thing more because there's not this added commitment later on. Um, and then on the creator side, it's kind of the same thing. You received money for something, you delivered it, and there's no ongoing commitment. Uh, you can you know, of course have another Kickstarter. You can sell your books elsewhere and you can ask for, you know, you can continue the relationship with the reader there, but you're not asking them for more money in that same like purchase that they're making on Kickstarter. And so the same is true for retailers. If somebody buys the first book of your series, there's really no obligation for them to keep buying. They get to make that purchase decision every time. And so it's the same for Kickstarter. And so the way that, uh, the way I think about Kickstarter is that it's a chance to make, uh, you know, really a larger sum of money all at once by increasing the revenue per customer or the revenue per reader. So I, you know, I've said this, um, before in a couple other videos, and I'm sure Russell has said this too, but the average backer amount that Russell gets is somewhere between $25 and $40. So when you look at a $10,000 campaign, he really needs under 500 backers to make that work. The same is true for our current campaign at kickstartyournovel.com. We have our campaign going. It's over $10,000 at the moment, and we're, you know, not even halfway through the campaign. And We also are seeing that we have about, you know, a little over 350 backers and we have about $30, $31, or $32 per backer. And we expect that to increase as the campaign goes on. As we started at, I think like $26. And so it's just been steadily going up. So, you know, basically we're making quite a large sum of money off of a small number of people because we're just increasing that rate revenue per customer, basically. On Patreon, you can do that as well. You can get people backing at like a $25 tier or a $50 tier or a $100 tier even. You can get that, but that's, you know, that's a big ask because it's not $50 one time or $100 one time. It's ongoing. So those are— that's, that's what we see is like the buyer psychology differences between the two platforms. So some of the things that we hear are that, you know, people are like, well, I'd rather invest in Patreon because, you know, I know I'm going to be getting that money every month instead of investing in Kickstarter, which is like a one-time thing. So one of the things that Russell teaches is really that you should not use Kickstarter as just a one-time thing. So yes, every campaign is its own thing, but Russell actually runs like 4 to 5 Kickstarter campaigns a year. And he, he basically does it to cover production costs of his books or his series. He pretty much raises at least $10K on every single one. I think his highest was like, I don't know, I think it was over $30K, maybe up to $40K. I don't know. But you can actually go look. So I'm not going to worry about not having that number because Kickstarter maintains records of all that. So you can just go look on Kickstarter, Russell Nolte, type it in, and you can see what his biggest campaign was. But yeah, he, he uses it regularly. And so, you know, yeah, he's doing like a new campaign every 3 months or so, but he's making, you know, $10,000 plus off of each campaign. And he— the way he does it is pretty hands-off at this point. So now he is an expert at this. He's very good at his— at what he does and at his system. So he's he's able to be very hands-off, but he really doesn't spend much time marketing the, the Kickstarter during the campaign. Like he'll, he does a lot at the beginning, a lot at the end, and then in the middle part he doesn't really do that much. And I've kind of found the same to be true for the campaign that we're running. We definitely took, you know, the first week of the campaign, we hit it hard. The last week of the campaign, we intend to hit it hard again. But we have weeks 2, 3, 4, and 5, which is when I'm recording this, And we're not doing that much every day to keep this campaign going. And we're still seeing, you know, usually between $250 and $500 backed every single day of our campaign. And a lot of people might say like, that's not very much. But I mean, as far as I'm concerned, that's, you know, it takes $333 a day, on retailers to make us make a 5-figure month. Um, so for us, you know, we're essentially hitting like what would be considered a 5-figure month every single day on, uh, on Kickstarter right now. And then at the beginning and at the end, you know, we're having like multiple thousand dollar, like multi-thousand dollar days. Um, and so we expect to see that. That's kind of how Kickstarter's trajectory of launching works. So, um, yeah, so we don't, you know, we think that you should do multiple Kickstarters, especially if you have multiple pen names. It's a great way to, uh, to have, you know, kind of another whole stream of income that doesn't really affect your retailer income. So I haven't seen that for myself. I've seen my retailer income is actually up this month that we're doing the Kickstarter, even though I'm doing nothing to increase that retailer income. It's just, it's just way up, like 30% up. So that's kind of it. If you're looking at Kickstarter versus Patreon, so one, I think you should do both, first of all. And two, you know, I don't think a lot of people think that Patreon is worth investing in because there's this ongoing payment, but the ongoing payment isn't guaranteed. And it's pretty hard to actually get people into that ongoing payment for the buyer psychology reasons that we've talked about, where with a Kickstarter, it's a one-time thing. Russell really doesn't spend much time on his during, during kind of like the dead zone of the campaign. He spends time on the launch, he spends time at the end, but he doesn't spend a lot of time promoting in between. So it's like, you know, I can't— like, it's probably like a week of your life too that you would dedicate. So if you did 4, you know, that's like maybe a month. But the income stream that he's receiving and that he's been able to create, I think he's made $58,000 on Kickstarter thus far this year and only in October. We're only in October of this year. That's not counting our current Kickstarter, for which he's going to make a sizable— he's going to add a sizable amount to his, his earnings on Kickstarter. And then he's also doing one at the end of November that again is going to be another thing. So $58,000, that's a pretty— it's a large amount of money. For some people, that would be a full-time income. So then I think last year he made over $70,000. So I don't have the exact numbers, but it was a lot of money. It was, it was not money that you would say is not like a good amount of money for publishing, especially so. And then, yeah, with Patreon, I'm sure you could figure out how to make that much. We, you know, I haven't seen a ton of examples of that in the indie author space. I've definitely seen huge Patreons like Shirtaloon, for example, has a huge Patreon subscription. I think that, that writer like kind of was only doing Patreon. That was kind of the main thing that they were doing. It wasn't like a side gig, but I haven't seen any authors who are making you know, $50K+ on Patreon the way that Russell is making it on Kickstarter and the way that we've seen other authors. You know, Russell's not the only author who is doing like a $10K+ campaign. We had a friend recently who did a Kickstarter and he, I think he raised almost $13K on his campaign and it was just for a trilogy. And then he went and launched them on Amazon like a couple of weeks later and he was making money on it there too. So he was doing really well with it. So we, you know, we think that like we certainly think everybody should be doing Patreon too. Like I'm all about any type of direct sales that helps you deepen your relationship with fans. But I don't personally think that Patreon is like better than Kickstarter in any way. I actually think Kickstarter is probably easier because of the buyer psychology of the one-time purchase versus the buyer psychology of the monthly purchase, which is it's hard to get that person to sign up to begin with. It's also hard to keep that person. And there's like definitely, definitely a lot of extras that you have to do kind of on an ongoing basis versus with Kickstarter. You do it once and hopefully it's— hopefully, you know, you, you complete your campaign and then you can decide if you're going to do another one. So those are my thoughts on Kickstarter versus Patreon. I hope it's been helpful to you and it's okay if you disagree. I'm sure there are people who are going to disagree with me out there, but I wanted to get this out and just give people another way to think about it. That I think is really relevant and helpful. So the last thing is that we actually have essentially a chapter in the book. It's a stretch goal, but hopefully we'll hit it. We can hit, we can hit the stretch goal with your help. But basically what we're going to be talking about is how you can use Kickstarter to find fans and then how you can move them over to Patreon. And so we're going to give some of our ideas around that. Russell has a lot of great ideas. I have some ideas too. And so we're going to be doing a chapter on that. So this is— if this topic is of interest to you, if you're struggling to get Patreon fans, if you're struggling to decide if you want to do Kickstarter, really, if you're struggling with either platform, we are going to be talking about this because they are both fan-based platforms and we think there's a lot of synergy. Synergy, maybe, is the word. We think there's a lot of synergy between the two platforms because they're both fan-based. And direct sales base. So we'll be doing a chapter on that if we hit our stretch goal. So come on over to KickstarterNovel.com and help us out. Check out the book. The chapter, of course, is going to be in the book. So if you are interested in this chapter, first of all, help us hit our stretch goal. But then second, you know, help make sure you get the book so that you can get the digital tier or the paperback tier. That's all for me. I hope this has been helpful to you. Thank you so much for listening and watching. Have a great day!