The Path to a $10,000 Kickstarter with Russell Nohelty

Hey there, Igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Today we're talking about Kickstarter again, and Russell, my co-author on the book Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter, is going to talk about the path to a $10,000 Kickstarter campaign successfully funded. Russell has done this a number of times. He's done it in comics, he's done it in anthologies, he's done it in novels. So if you do any of those types of projects, then this is going to be really interesting to you. And so Russell, um, I've been working with Russell on our campaign, which is for our book Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. We are launching it on the Kickstarter platform, so you can back that campaign until November 13th, 2021. It's at kickstartyournovel.com, and you're able to get the book in digital or print. There are lots of other reward tiers that are really cool. There's consulting. You can get our whole digital library. You can get Kickstarter, our Kickstarter Sprint With Us package, where you get to watch us do our Kickstarters. And we're going to record it all. And we're launching those in January of 2022. So there's a lot of cool stuff. Again, go to kickstartyournovel.com if you're interested. And Russell, again, he's done these $10,000 Kickstarters. Our current campaign, as I'm recording this, is a $10,000 Kickstarter for a book, and he really has his numbers down. And so that was something that was very soothing to me as we went into this campaign, is Russell knew, you know, at this hour we're going to need this many dollars, and at this hour it's this many dollars. And so he talks about that from his perspective and how he figured out some of this stuff, how he plans his campaigns, how he tracks his campaigns to make sure that they are on track as they start to go into the last week of the campaign. So I think this is going to be an amazing video, an amazing topic, an amazing audio if you're listening on the podcast. I am kind of surprised that Russell is just giving this away. So without further ado, I'm going to turn the mic over to him and he's going to tell you all his secrets about his $10,000 Kickstarter campaigns.

Okay, so one of the things that I always get asked about Kickstarter is how could you possibly raise $10,000 in a campaign? And I know $10,000 is a lot of money, but I want to kind of break it down for you. I want to show you some ways that you could think about how you raise $10,000. You might raise $500 in this campaign, but I want to kind of visualize how you could get to a $10,000 campaign. So here is our last campaign, our last novel campaign for the Obsidian Spindle Saga. We also did one for— here's the one for Black Market, for Obsidian Spindle Saga. We also did one for our book Black Market Heroin, which is a comic book. And this one is what we have going live right now, which is our nonfiction book Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter, which isn't quite at $10,000 yet, but you can see we're almost at $6,000 with 36 days to go. So we're in a very good position to get to $10,000 by the end. And for me, that's how I think of campaigns. I'm like, okay, am I going for $10,000 or $20,000? I break it down like that so I can chunk it better. And To me, $10,000 is like, that's enough for me to spend 2 weeks or a month of my life raising funds because, you know, raising, spending a month for $500, it just doesn't get me as excited as $10,000. Now, if you're doing your first campaign, you know, $500 is a great goal. I actually usually tell people start between 5 and, sorry, $300 and $500 for your first campaign just so you can kind of get your sea legs under you. Maybe do a campaign for a book you've already put all the funds into, just to sort of— you want to see kind of where your barometer is. But I want to break down what $10,000 really means. I'm going to go back to my Obsidian Spindle saga campaign because to me, this is a novel campaign. Most of the people we're talking to in this book, you know, are novelists or are doing some kind of publishing project. Where the ebook is about $5 and the print book is about $20 to $25. And so I wanna bring you really into this campaign. So we raised $11,884, sorry, $11,884 from 312 backers for this campaign. And that's a great amount, but as you can see from this, that's That's $40 per person. That's not that many people for $300, for 300 backers. So if you had 300 people buy a book on Amazon, you would not get anywhere close to $11,000. So the real value on Kickstarter is that you can build in all of these extra things to up the backing, to up the pledge level. So one thing that you will see here is we launched 4 books at any point during this campaign. And usually when I launch a series on Kickstarter, I'm launching 4 books, 3 or 4 books at a time. So you can see from this, for instance, Gods— this— God's Verse Chronicles, this was which was 3 books, and we raised just over $11,000 for it. So what I have found is that my audience does not like having me release one book every 2 weeks or every 4 weeks. So generally what I do is I launch my book to my audience on Kickstarter, and then once the book is out, then I can release it on Amazon or anywhere else, or I could just hold it back to try and build more interest for the series. So First thing that, uh, you can look at for this is, you know, that's $11,884 but over 4 books, which puts it right around, uh, $3,000 a book. And that puts it in line with my first Kickstarter I ever did, um, My Father Didn't Kill Himself, for a, for a novel, for a, um, Father Didn't Kill Himself Kickstarter. There we go. So this book, all the way back, um, in 2016, I ran and I did, uh, $300-$400. So a little bit less than that on a per book basis. But the reason I do multiple books at a time is because I want velocity of being able to release later. Uh, so if I did one book at a time, it just would take me a lot longer to build up the catalog that I'm trying to build to plan these big massive releases that I'm doing. So, um, When you have $10,000, I chunk this down to the biggest pledge levels. So for me, the big pledge level is for digital is $20. So what's 10,000 divided by $20? $20 is 500 backers. That's a lot, but this is all profit for me. So for me, that's good making $20 in profit, or it ends up being about $18 after Kickstarter takes their fees. The next thing I look at is the digital— the physical pledge. So for me, the physical pledge is for all 4 of these books is $100. So for me, 100 people take this pledge level and we've made $10,000. So, so if you can do something like this, that's 100 and that sort of breaks it down to, okay, I don't need 500 people. I don't need 1,000 people. I don't need, like when I'm selling a book on Amazon, not 99 cents, that's 35 cents. You know, what's, how do you make, that's 3 sales almost for every dollar. That's almost 30,000 books to make $10,000. Well, if I'm spending, if I'm spending a month to make 100 to 500 sales, that sounds a whole lot better than trying to make 30,000 sales to me. Um, so, and even if you're selling a book at $4.99, uh, you know, $4.99, uh, times 70%, which is what Amazon takes, is about $3.50. So, you know, what's $10,000 divided by $3.50? You know, that's still over almost 3,000 books you have to sell on Amazon or on the other platforms in order to get to to get to $10,000. But for this, you know, we're able to get there from 300 books. One of the cool things about this is it's not just these books that I'm launching. So I also make all of my old back catalog stuff available. So you'll see that $35 right here, You get all of my Godsverse books. So the Godsverse is my big mythological fantasy universe that I showed you here. And then also at $40, I have a back catalog of all of our back catalog hardcover books I have in my garage and some other of our softcover books in my garage as well, 7,000 or so books. So I offer hardcover books from our other series also. So if you have other series, you know, I know people that have 50+ books. If you have other series, you can offer back catalog books. We do pins. I have a whole collection of pins and other merch that are available. And, you know, you can get multiple of our hardcover books. This is all of our ebooks. That's $85. So imagine people that have never found your work and want to go back to all of your catalog. Now, if you charge, like, if you have 50 books and you charge $3 for them each, that's $150 you can put this. And I do that. You'll see here the complete digital novel collection, that's all of my digital novels, courses, complete digital library. So to get everything of my books, that's $175. And one backer took this up, but that's a huge number. I mean, imagine having one sale on Amazon and getting $175 for it. So you sort of start and then you can see also this is our Obsidian Spindle books plus the graphic novel. So you start bundling all of the things and these are all things that I've already paid for. All the things that are in my garage are already prepaid for by Kickstarters, really Kickstarters or shows that have earned out or something like that. So all of this stuff is literally just bonus backing. Um, and so, so, uh, you know, I have this All In pledge, which is basically everything. That's $500. No one took it this time, but, uh, I believe someone took it on this campaign. Um, let's see, 4 backers for this campaign that went all in and paid $450. So that's That's almost $2,000 from 4 people. That is how you kind of chunk this up. Look at this. This is $11,000 from less people than the Obsidian Spindle Saga. That is because they have 7 books in this series instead of 4 that I'm launching in the Obsidian Spindle Saga. And then this one had considerably more because instead of the average pledge being $100, The average pledge was $25. So for this, we only launched one book, $10 because it was a, because it was a comic. I can charge a little bit more, so I could charge $10. Maybe you can charge $10. And then the main book was one book for $25. We also had a pin. And so all of these things start chunking up and you start realizing that $10,000, when you start adding all of the stuff that you can offer, is not that much. It's not that many people that you need, you know, especially if you have a back catalog, especially if you do pins and prints. And we did one of these pins and prints, and this became the one I was really pushing throughout this campaign, which was this $42. You got a book, you got the print, you got a sticker, you got a pin, you got an audio commentary. Audio commentary is great when you have just one, or when you have one book. And it just increases the average pledge level of these people. So you're making $40 instead of $3.99 from a person. I want to show this campaign as well because you can see 225 backers. The average pledge is $26, but we have some people who are pledging all the way up to this, I believe this $500 level. Uh, it's $500 level, which is consulting, which is you have one person taking up. Now I've already talked to a couple of people who want to upgrade to the consulting or get the consulting. So we literally are sort of saying, okay, so let's say 5 people take the $500 level. Okay, that's $2,500. Okay. And let's say that, uh, you know, 20 people take us up on this, which is sprinting with us. We have a little Facebook group where we can do sprinting with us, and that's another $2,000. So now with 25 people, we have raised almost half of the number that we have. And are we going to get to 20? Probably gonna get to 20. Maybe we'll get to 5 people taking us up on the, on the other, on the, on, on some level of the, of the, of the, of the $500. You know, I'm not 100% sure, but when I'm sort of planning this out, what I'm doing is I'm saying, I'm opening Excel. You know, I'll say, okay, so how many people— let's say my all-in is $500. Okay, let's say 2 people take that out. Okay, that's $1,000. Um, $100. Okay, that's the 4 books. So, uh, usually about 50 people take me up on that. That's $5,000. Okay, so we're at, you know, $6,000 already. 20, and then, and then, uh, $20. Okay, we've usually got about 200 people that take me up on that, and there's $4,000 right there. So like, that's $10,000 right there from 250 people. Now you're not going to get to keep all of that because, you know, Kickstarter takes their fees and such, uh, and, uh, then you got to pay for shipping and printing and all of that stuff, but If you can sort of take this number and just chunk it down to, maybe you're looking at $25 a person, maybe you're looking at 2,500 or raising $500, but instead of saying, wow, that's a huge amount of money, if you start getting these rewards, which are really compelling, a super combo for my fans is a big deal. For, you know, getting a bunch of pins again for my fans is a big deal. And by having all of this stuff, okay, I'm going to have 4 series and I could put in this campaign at different levels and then I could put them all together in a big bundle. You know, all of that stuff starts to add up. And even if 1 or 2 people take you up on it, if it's compelling, it sort of breaks down this $10,000 number into something that is very, very doable. Whether you have, you know, one book like Black Market Heroin or Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter, or you have 4 books, or you're releasing a whole series, or you're doing a special edition hardcover, you know, whatever, whatever it is, you know, it's important that you, you sort of take that and you don't have to say every reward, but just how many people do I think will buy these 4 books at $20? How many will I— will spend to get to our big reward? How many? And then if you don't have enough, How can I make something compelling for $1,000, for $2,000, for something that people will want in those high tiers so I can get us over the edge and over the hill? I had one— I've never done this before, but for our last Ichabod Volume 3 campaign, we were real short of my goal, which was $20,000. Which is a huge number. It's a huge number. And you'll see, we got there from only about 50 more backers than our old, less than 50 backers from this Black Market Heroin campaign. But I had to add this thing, which I've never added before, which was a year of mentorship by me, which means I was willing to put like 24 hours of my time on the line for this and one person took it, but that took us from 19,000 to, to like 22,000 by itself. And so there are all of these things which can work in your favor when you're doing these campaigns to chunk down and break it down so that you only have, you have far less work to do than you really need to. And if you're low, if you say you only have 2 people here, you know, one person here, like, okay, how can I make this compelling to get one more person? How can I search down one more person to get that $500? Finding one person to get $500 ends up, you know, psychologically being a lot less mental effort than maybe getting 30 people to back at $20. So that's sort of how— that's sort of how you can, how you can start thinking about this. So that it sort of breaks down a $10,000 or a $20,000 or $200 or a $2,000 goal so that it is eminently doable for you. And I hope that helps. And if it does help, make sure to go to kickstartyournovel.com and I have all these amazing other tips, me and Monica do, in our campaign. Thanks so much.

Hey there, it's Monica Leonelle again. Thank you so much for listening and watching. We hope this has been helpful to you. Don't forget, you can back our campaign until November 13th. Just go to kickstartyournovel.com. We would love to have you as a backer. There is so much good stuff going on in this campaign. You can get the book, get your book selling on Kickstarter, and you can get so much more. We have weekly perks, we have flash perks, we have stretch goals, we have all sorts of rewards. So make sure you check it out. Again, it's kickstartyournovel.com. We would love to have you backing.