What Makes These Successful Kickstarter Projects Successful? Kickstarter Expert Tells All (#3)

Hey everyone, it's Monica Leonelle. I'm here with Russell Nolte, and I'm so excited because we are gonna go through a number of Kickstarter campaigns that have been successful. Russell really doesn't have much idea of what I'm throwing at him. The pages— I just sent him the pages, so he's going to be looking at them fresh, and he's going to tell us what he thinks they did to make the campaign successful. And so we're going to start with one of his campaigns, or a couple of his campaigns, and then we're going to go through, and we have We've cleared, we've gotten the okay from everybody to talk about these. So really excited to hear what he's going to say.

I am really excited too. I don't know if it's fair for me to start with my own work, but I'm going to do it anyway. So this is the last fiction campaign that I ran in June of 2021. It did 302 backers, almost $12,000. So again, that's not— the thing that I always want to bring to bear with Kickstarter is it does not take very many sales to make a lot of money. So I'm not saying that you will make that amount of money from a campaign, but let's see, this should tell me $38.09. Also, this is a little plugin called Bigger Cake, which can plug into Google Chrome, which you can put in and it will show you all of the tracking data, uh, for all— every Kickstarter. You can also go to a campaign, a place called Kicktrack, like kick somebody and track without the— without the K. Um, and is that right? Uh, it's with a Q, I believe. Kicktrack. Yes, kick and then track, and it will show you every campaign. But you, you have— and it gives you more data for Kicktrack, but you, uh You get— you don't have to leave the page for Bigger Cake, which I like.

Yeah, so you can go spy on people basically, spy on how their campaigns did. That would be really helpful.

Yeah, this is the best part about Kickstarter is, uh, every campaign that's ever been live is archived. They don't take anything down, whether it's successful or unsuccessful. So you can do searching, and maybe it's— maybe it works, maybe I should show this because most people don't know you can do this. So I— you can, in order to— if you want to track stuff, you can go to just Discover up here on the corner, and then you can track by project. We Love is kind of like the Kickstarter recommendation engine. I'm just going to go to everything really quickly, and you can show all categories, projects in an area, especially if you're running It's probably not going to be a thing for books, but like, if you're running like a cake shop campaign, you probably want to run— like, check it against the place and sort by popularity, just newest, end date, most funded. If you click here on more filters, you have a lot of options. You can go to just live projects, just successful projects. So you can see there is 208,000 successful projects. You can go to a category like publishing. And then it gives you all sort of the mini categories in publishing, so you can go to fiction and see there's been 3,000 of those 208,000— 3,000 of them have been successful in publishing. You can sort by most funded. Yeah, I mean, like, imagine doing this data analysis on Amazon.

Yeah, I mean, I, I just want to say there's only 3,000 projects on Kickstarter that are fiction that have been funded successfully, and I don't think that that's a bad number. I think it's a great number because there's really not much competition is what I'm getting from that. I could see how people were like, oh, like there's not a ton of successful projects. There's nobody in fiction using it. That's why. So it's like, yeah, like you could do really well at this. I mean, you can.

So, uh, I will— there's something else I want to show you, but I for I forgot what it was. Let's see if I can just do this again. So everything, so all in all, I showed you that there is, there was publishing, just in publishing altogether, 54,000 live projects. That's what I wanted to show you.

Yeah.

So right now there are 325 projects on Kickstarter. That means that are live within the 60-day funding window, because you can only have, you can have a campaign for one day. All the way up to 60 days, but you can't have it more than 60 days, which means every 60 days basically everything resets, and usually it's every 30 days or less. So these are all of the publishing projects that are on right now. If you go, you can go to fiction, there are 50 projects in fiction, including my buddy. My buddy, uh, my buddy Matt Harry's got one, um, and you can do this, you can see what's working now You can go to a campaign and see, as we will in a second, how many people— here, I'll show you Obsidian Spindle. You can do this even without being logged in, but you can see exactly how many people back at every pledge level. You can see I'm not signed in, so you don't have to even have an account to do this. I'm going to put Baker Cake up there. So you can see every— now they have this sort of included what the tiers are. Like, you can do all of this data considering that Amazon algorithms like update every hour and every 15 minutes and every 5 minutes sometimes. Like, it's really hard to see like what was successful on Amazon.

Yeah, I just wrote an entire book on Amazon and their algorithms. So yeah, like it's really not— well, I have so many things to say about that, but basically you can't really tell what's going on on Amazon. The bestseller lists are not an indicator of what's actually selling.

Yeah, it's very hard to find historical trends. It's hard to see if that person just had a book bump that day or like how long they've been at the top without using other data. Well, with Kickstarter, you can see, okay, here's a campaign that over 17 days raised this amount of money, and you would need to have the plug in or to see exactly how many days it ran, or, or use Kicktrack. But you can see, oh, this campaign raised this amount of money. Their most popular— here you can look and see, oh yeah, $20. This is all 4 books. This is their most popular reward. So I mean, it's just really easy to do market research. Like, you know, I would— you— I know you used to work in corporate America. Like, I would— like, any business would kill for this level of market research, right?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, I also worked in tech startups, and yeah, they would scour this.

Let's just go through and I'll show you a couple of things that I did, I think, right. And what you don't see is the lead-up to this. So one thing that I always do with the campaign is I send emails every week before the campaign goes live for about a month. So I always try and finish my campaign a month early So I can sort of build up the profile to get about 200 backers, 200 people that are following the page, and I can show you our page so I can see this once you can start your— So this is ours right now. It's got 160 followers. We're launching tomorrow. By the time you see this, it will have already been launched and will already have been massively successful, I hope. Um, but I try and get to 200 followers. Uh, I don't know why that's the number. I just, I've not never tested against getting 300 or 100 or 20. I just like, I like the number 200, just like I like the launching on a Tuesday and doing it at 9:00 AM Eastern time. Like, I just like those numbers. Uh, I've never tested differently. Uh, so I don't know if other times are better for me. Um, but I like to have a month lead up. Where I can tell people what— why the campaign is special, uh, why this series is going to be great, and why we're doing a Kickstarter. I ask them to point out any errors on the page, and I just try and like build the hype as best as I possibly can in that sort of month lead-up. So, um, things that I think I did well are I think the campaign image is killer. I think that if you like YA fantasy, like it fits all of the tropes of that kind of genre. I think that the pitch is really good. Like at the beginning it says fairy tales are real, so you originally, you immediately know there's going to be like fairy tales and fantasy in here.

I think you also, I mean, one thing that you do is just, you kind of play this something that is very real for people right now with, with the diabetes and insulin. It's a narrative in our culture right now, for very good reason, because it's true that these, you know, and it's not just this, but this is one of the narratives that where there's a lot of question around the US healthcare system and there's like an undertone of capitalism in some ways to this. And like, you know, it's, it's very real for a lot of people. So even if they're not diabetic, if there's something else where they aren't able to get the medicine that they need, that's, you know, near and dear to a lot of people, or even if it's somebody that they, that they know. So I think that's, that's definitely a You know, I mean, you're very good at like cutting to the core of your story. Like you are really far better than a lot of fiction authors at this. So like your blurbs are always like massively on point anyway. But I think this narrative is also just, you know, something that's kind of trending, especially during a global pandemic and—

Yeah, I really do— thank you for that. But I really do, like before I do a campaign, I, I want to know the why, and that's the most important part. Like, not my— like, my why is important, but like, why should you care? And why should you back this book? And why— how in just a couple of sentences can I get you invested? And so that's why I always start kind of with like— it's always like, yes, if you like these things, you're going to fall in love with this, and here's why, and here's sort of the blurb. Yeah, I think that the imagery that I use throughout the campaign is like effective for, for sort of getting the vibe. I mean, I do have all of these, all of like the books' covers throughout here. I did, I usually launch like 3 to 4 books at a time in a, and I find that also really effective because they get a big chunk of story. One of the things that's great about Kickstarter is And I'm not saying you have to do this, but like if you have a story that has cliffhangers or like it's chunked into trilogies or something, like you can put it all there and be like, hey, you're not going to have to wait. Like you're going to get it all at the same time and read it. And that's been very effective for my readers. You can see the sort of like just the imagery that I use here is just getting you in the mindset of, the vibe. I do a lot of— when I don't have so much imagery, I try and just make it feel like what it's going to be like, like give you an experience imagery of how you're going to feel reading the book.

Yeah, I also think like it's worth saying that Kickstarter is, you know, it's a lot of work. Like, do you want to do a lot of work for one book, or do you want to do a lot of work for like 3 or 4 books that you, you know, like if you're gonna do a month-long campaign, or, you know, even like a, you know, you do like a 3-week, a 17-day campaign is kind of your most common one for novels right now. But it's like, if you're gonna do that, then you need to have a bundle that can support that in terms of your time and energy. So I think like having 4 books or 3 books is pretty important. And what we've seen, what from the ones that I've studied and You know, Russell's backed like over 600 campaigns, so he like, it's like if anybody's a super user, it's Russell. So he just has like massive amounts of data just like plugged into his brain on this. But yeah, from what I've seen, like having a trilogy or having some sort of bundle of books does seem to work kind of like a lot better than just having a single book, at least in fiction.

So one of the things that I found when I— because I originally released the Godsverse Chronicles, which is in this series, it's the series that brought me back to Kickstarter, as ones, like one book's like every— I was trying to rapid release them. And what I found from my mailing list is they were like, you got to stop doing this. Like, it's too much. And so I found if I— when I package them together, all together as like one thing, I'm like, hey, what if I just did one launch with the 4 books that I was planning to release, like, in the next year, and then you could get them early, and then I could do my normal launch with them later. I ended up kind of revising how I do that, but it seemed like, hey, if I'm gonna hit my list a lot, which is what you have to do— you have to, like, you know, do your mailing list a lot and, like, almost burn out your list, like, hitting them so much, which you normally wouldn't do with an Amazon launch, but, like, you're doing this special launch for them And if you do like a bunch of books, it's— to me, it's better than doing like 12 launches a year in that same manner. Because even though I do 4 big launches a year, it's still less than doing like literally just constantly launching all year long to like my list and doing these big promotions.

Um, yeah, no, I think once a quarter makes so much sense.

And, uh, so I wasn't always this human, uh, who does these campaigns and does 4 a year. Like, this is my least successful campaign. So, um, I'm gonna point out that like the, the, this, this image is hideous. It's so bad.

I, I really love it. I'm sorry. No, I, so I mean, just like, so great.

So what makes it not great is all of the text. On here. Like, I think that if I had just done the image, it would have been better than having this text here. Because text usually is like a killer for, for like people clicking on it. So like, I would never say do text. This image, so it's like a contemporary sci-fi, which is a weird thing to, to like try and sell anyway. But like, this makes it feel kind of like a kid's book. It's very off-brand for what the book is, and I still raised almost $1,900 from 75 backers. So like, it's not, you know, I would not, uh, if someone brought this to Kickstarter to me, I would say, this is, please, we have to like fix this stuff. So it's, so it looks more, I mean, just look at the two back and forth to each other. Um, cause that's another thing. It's like, it's not that this is a bad image. I love this image. Like I commissioned it when I got it, it was great. I was very young in my career and I didn't realize that, like, branding matters with your book covers. I was in the stage that most authors are where it's like, it's my cover, people are going to get to come here for me, which, I mean, I wish was true. I really do. I'll show— so for instance, this is the COVID for it now.

Oh, fun. Okay. Can we talk about that? Could I just say something about this? So you, you have gotten really strong at taking your story and getting it into the single line. Because this—

the—

if you flip back to the other page, the story that you had, you know, you talk about like the abusive father, disabled boy, but like the, the thing at the core of this line is the boy befriends an alien, and like it's their relationship, right? And then when you move over to this other cover, it's like you've honed in on that, right?

Yeah, so this would probably be— and like, it's literally about this kid who is disabled for his whole life and like feels like he's a burden to everyone and meets like a girl who's an alien who like sees that he has value and shows that he has value in the world and like So I mean, it's my favorite. It's generally people's favorite book that they read from me, but no one ever reads it because it's a stone cold bummer. But you can see, like, even with this cover, which did not nail it, though I love this cover and this artist, it still, like, raised decent money from, like— I mean, I didn't even know until I went back to Amazon, Monica, literally, that you would— that you could— that you launch books at a loss. I had no idea. Like, when I started doing that Amazon launch, which I talk about in the YouTube video about how— and what's on the Kickstarter page, you can, you can find it— about how Kickstarter saved my career. I had never in my whole career launched a book at a loss, ever.

Yeah.

And doing it for Amazon, like, was a harrowing experience that I never, I'll never do it again, like, if I could help it. So like this is, when I was like, yeah, I made, I don't know, I broke even on this book, like this, I would show the original cover of the book, like this was the original cover, which like is adorable, but people would be like, wait, this broke you even? On Amazon? Like I couldn't imagine running an ad on Amazon where like this broke even to the kind of audience that likes this book, just because it's, not on brand for the thing, not because I don't love it.

Yeah, well, I mean, and to be fair, so breaking even on Amazon and launching on Amazon, once you have your audience, like, you can launch really nicely. But for most new authors, you are not gonna have an audience, so you are gonna launch at a loss for kind of a while. I hate to, you know, I hate to say that to people, but it's like And even if you're not spending money on ads or marketing, you are probably doing like 99-cent books or perma-free books. So it's like, you need at least a trilogy or like, like usually you need more than 3 or 4 books to start, you know, making really any money. And it is hard to hear as a new author, but yeah. So like, yeah, I don't, I don't launch at a deficit now, but It's been like, I've been publishing since 2009 and I have an audience and like, I have my algorithm, you know, Amazon's algorithms start to work for you more organically once you have a bigger backlist, but until you have that, and that's why people also say stay in your lane. So what Russell's talking about, this book is kind of off brand for him in some ways.

Yeah. I mean, I'll even show you that, like, okay, so this is the First book I launched, this book, like you can see like the genre of this book, uh, like this is the book, it's like a dark fantasy psychological horror. Then this is like a, uh, uh, action adventure fantasy, like action adventure fantasy horror. Uh, then I did this book, which I didn't show because, but it's there. I mean, it's available. It's, it actually was more successful than the, but Still, this is the same artist, and again, a cover that I absolutely love. A mystery novel. So like, it's not like I was— and then I released a kids' book, which I'm called I Can't Stop Tooting. But like these 3 campaigns and then this book.

Yeah.

So it's like, these are all very like, different. It's so different. But because I had an audience, like, it was good. It was okay. It ended up okay for me.

Yeah. And I mean, this lane— so like, people say stay in your lane. Well, what if your lane is just Russell? Like, you're in the Russell lane. I can't say that you're in any other lane with these 4 books. Like, you're not doing mystery. You're not— you know, this is like lane Russell. And so like, that's why you know, you have the fans that are kind of coming from project to project, it seems like, because they like you and they like your— the unique thing that you're vibrating out there.

Yeah, and so this is a great point because a lot of authors want to do whatever the hell they want.

Yeah.

Sorry, whatever the heck they want at any one time. And like, I certainly— I've moved into like a faint— like a lane now because like you kind of have to, like when you have a bunch of books. But like one thing that this was able to do by having a mystery novel and a kids' book and a, and a, and a this book, a contemporary sci-fi novel, and like two fantasy, two like horror fantasy comics, like by half, by like I was able to line up. And I talked about this, I've talked about this all a lot in my career, like the reason that like the Melissa the Wannabe is our mascot and the reason we know our fans as well as we do is like partially shows, but partially we launched like all of these books that had very disparate audiences, and we looked for the people that had like backed 3 of them at least. And we were like, what, what is it about you that like resonates with me? And so while, you know, if you're writing fantasy and all fantasy, it's great. Like if you write other stuff and like you want to kind of just like have a vibe of whatever you want to do, Kickstarter is great because it will kind of show you who really resonates with your stuff. And, you know, we were talking about real successful authors, uh, before Monica and why they would use Kickstarter. But like, I've never met a successful author that doesn't have a series that they wish sold better, or like that like completely was off-brand, or like that they wanted to do but they couldn't.

Yeah, no, every 7-figure author I know, they have series that failed them, and a lot of times they don't know why. And that's extremely frustrating because they're like, I, I know I can create like this massively successful series. I don't know why the series failed. And I think a lot of it is what you're talking about because you were able to figure out, um, there's actually a book out that, uh, right now, not to promote someone else's book, but it's by Theodora Taylor and, uh, it's called Universal Fantasy. And everybody in the indie community is talking about it as we record this video. But I think that's what you found, Russell, is you found some of the universal fantasies, the tropes that you love, and there are people who come back to those tropes no matter what genre it is or like what style it is. And I think, yeah, I think that's kind of what we're talking about here with like finding your— because it's like, yeah, you know, if you're starting out as a novelist, you want to pick a lane, and usually that's genre related, but Eventually, you need to get to the lane that is like Russell Lane or Monica Leonelle. Like, you have to carve out your own lane within this genre. It's not enough to just be in the lane. Like, I can tell you what's different about my books from all the, you know, all the other ones that publish in the same space as mine. I know exactly why people like my books because I, well, because I've been doing it for a while, but like, when you get a book from me, it is Monica flavored. It's not because you like, you know, author books or whatever. It's not just because you like author books.

Yeah, I was— I'm reading Stephanie Garber's new book who did— I can't believe I forgot. It's like one of my favorite Caraval series.

Oh yeah.

And she's reading and she's like, she's doing it. She did her fourth book, which is like in the same world, but not with the same characters. And I was like, oh, It's a big like mythological, it's a big like a castle that's full of fantasy and like weird corridors and stuff. And like it's just like her other 3 books. That's the thing. It's like this like beautiful girl who like is whisked away to this like magical place that is like full of like intrigue and magical things and like beauty everywhere and wonder everywhere. And I was like, oh, that's her thing. So okay, so we kind of had a long divergence there. But like I think it's a good divergence because it, Like, it kind of— this, it was not— this was our least successful campaign, um, to date, uh, but it's also one of my most successful campaigns because, like, it kind of showed, A, oh, I gotta stop doing this.

Yeah.

But B, it gave me— and but it also gave me an infusion of cash when I needed it to, like, make all the other stuff happen. Um, so some of the things I did well, I think I did these— I do these weekly challenges Now, like, this was like, I will eat a layer of an onion for every $1,000 or something we raised.

Oh my goodness.

One of them was, I'll make it— I did an a cappella challenge. I did, I think, like, I'll do dog tricks for a week, but like, I just made it kind of fun. And I didn't take— I stopped taking myself so seriously and the campaign so seriously during this campaign. And I think like, when you're having a not successful campaign, Sometimes people will just back to watch you hurt yourself. I think I did the ice bucket challenge for this one. Um, like they were just, they were things that had nothing to do with the campaign, but I was like, hey, maybe you'll like me making a fool of myself. And, and it ended up, uh, working pretty well. You know, I think that the imagery is not quite as strong in this one, but like, I still, like, I still wanted to like get the vibe of what I was trying to do, like this one, for instance, it's a lot. It's about a boy who meets a homeless alien and has to help her rebuild her ship. But it's also about like a disabled boy trying to come to terms with his own power, relationship, how you can see somebody, an abusive person, differently than everyone else does. Like there's all this stuff going in there. So like I was like, I know it's a lot of stuff. So that's where this image kind of came from. You know, I had other book imagery. I don't think this is my best, but I tried to keep like imagery front and center. And just again, kind of like the vibe. I don't think I did a good job with the vibe on this one. I more went with like cards on the table and like very on brand Putting Cards on Table, when I was talking about cards on the table. You know, it's very on the nose, like here's a gift, like you put a gift in there. You know, it was not as vibey, but it still kind of like gave a sense. And it did, you know, I think I had a pretty good $1 reward, which was our first book in PDF. I like having a nice $1 reward to get people on the mailing list. I also had the free preview up here, so I got some people who may not have backed the campaign but joined our mailing list because of that. Yeah, I mean, this is not my strongest campaign, but it shows that even with a strong campaign, if you can see, I don't have the questions at the top. Like, I'm not, you know, I just have like what it's about. But I think I was very clear with like this is what the book is about, and here is why you should back it and like me.

Yeah. I think you do have a thread, because like, I mean, you know, you write about people who are, it's like they're kind of like underdogs in the world, I feel like. And I think that's like something that's thematic within your characters. And so it just, I think it makes sense why people, have, you know, why people back this. Like, yeah, it's like a cool contained story as well, but I think it's like you've got like kind of a, yeah, like it is, I don't know, universal, I mean, fantasy is not the right word, but like it's like you have like, you can see like the markers of like where you've come to now, you know? Like all of this is like much tighter and like, cleaned up and like the Obsidian Spindle Saga is like gorgeous, gorgeous sales page and gorgeous books. And this is— but this is like a foundation of that still. And you can see like the threads kind of going backwards in your career in many ways.

Did you know I did this book series called the Summer Slate? Summer wannabe press?

Yeah, I remember that one.

Summer Slate Kickstarter. And literally I made this pitch. So like, let's say you have kind of These— so Spaceship Broken and My Father Didn't Kill Himself were foundational books, but I had this series, which I literally— I had gone way past this series. Like, I'd been— I was like releasing much bigger books, but— and I had never released these 4 books. And I said, this is a foundation. These are the foundational books that like made me the writer that I am today. And so you might have standalones, maybe even that are available on Amazon, but like, you might have series that like are vastly different. Like this is a sci-fi satire, this is a fantasy which is pretty on brand, this is a dark horror which is kind of, but this is an alien invasion, nothing to do with any of my other work. But I pitched it as like these are the books that make Russell Nolte Russell Nolte, like as a writer. Like if you want to go back into the archives, you can do so with these series. And yes, this was, very much like a fan base. Like, this was a nod to the fan base. I don't think you can do this when you're first starting out, but it's definitely a strategy that if you have like standalones— like, these are 4 standalones that like they shouldn't sell. Like, marketing says don't make standalones. Yeah, you know, I was able to not do much better. No, I wasn't able to do much better than break even, but like, that's $10,000 on 4 books. You know, that's, that's pretty good. Like, I would take it, uh, considering that they would never have likely made anywhere close to that on Amazon, like up on Amazon.

Yeah. And I just need to say this, um, so I studied this campaign that you just showed, the Summer Slate. I studied it and I, I've talked to a number of people about it, um, where I was like, hey guys, you know, hey, six-figure authors that are my friends, I just want to show you this Kickstarter because these 4 books should not sell, um, according to everything we know about indie author publishing. And I was telling them, I'm like, these 4 books are completely different. I don't know how he sold these. I was like, he's like a marketing genius in disguise. Like, nobody knows that he's this marketing genius. And like, you just explained it within you know, like a paragraph why this worked. And it's like, I think people need to understand like how powerful this platform is, but also just like, I mean, this is an incredible accomplishment by, you know, I think most people who are very, very successful in the indie author community would look at this and be baffled as to why this worked, but you saw you knew why it worked because you have so much data. You go to shows and you just know your fans and you know your audience. But this is super powerful and a six-figure author needs to understand this because there's a lot of money for them in this. This is like, they could do really well. And we're going to talk about that as we continue.

Sure.

I think, I think we're going to have to, yeah. I mean, we have some examples.

We have a bunch of other campaigns, but like it is true, like some things that I'm talking about right now will like not be relevant to like younger authors who like only have a couple of books. Like you might be at the spaceship broken, needs repairs level. But like, like you said, this should not work. In fact, I stared at these books for a year. Being like, how am I going to sell these 4 disparate books that have almost nothing to do with each other and have nothing to do with my current work? And that was the— so this is certainly an advanced campaign. I have one other one that I'll show you, which— to invade Earth Kickstarter. How, uh, like, this campaign was, uh, art that I drew as a comic. So like, again, not that many backers, 171 backers though, $3,500. But like, look at the art. Like, look at the art. Like, this is a campaign that like I ran to my fans to say I literally ran it for 5 days. I was like, I don't want anyone who's not a fan to have this be the thing that like they come at me for.

Yeah.

But because like I think it makes sense if you're a fan of Russell Nolte, like you'll understand it, you'll enjoy it, like it'll be fun to get like a behind the scenes thing. But like someone random out there like is never going to understand this. So like this is another thing that you can do. Like I drew 2 books. Of which, like, they would not— these would never sell in comics, like, except for, like, in, like, an alt niche community that I'm not really part of. So, like, this was completely made up for fans. Like, this was completely for fans. And, like, we did the one printing. They're not even available on Amazon. They're only available, like, through my backend. But, like, there's all sorts of stuff you can do and say, like, hey, I wrote these short stories. Thinking I was going to be a thriller author, or thinking I wanted to try thrillers, and I like these books, but they're not books that I can do. I don't do these books. And like, I have a friend, I'm literally thinking of like who does, who like has this experience, and like finished a book and was like, you know, I like it, but like I'm probably not going to be a career thriller author, so I'm just going to shelve it. And like, you could be like, hey, fans of my work, Like, I have this book, like, I'm never gonna put out there. It's just in my thing. I think it's really good. Like, I think it, like, has a lot of themes, but, like, it's a psychological thriller, not a dark romance. Like, yeah, here.

Yeah, I mean, how many of us suffer from burnout, um, especially if you've been doing this for a while? You've been producing and staying in your lane and, like, serving your fans, like, But like, it's like one thing is you can serve your fans much deeper. Another thing is like sometimes you need to switch in order to avoid burnout. So maybe instead of starting another pen name that you're not going to like have time and energy to invest, you know, a ton of, ton of energy into, maybe you do write the thing that you want and, you know, you make however much off of it that you can. And it's just kind of like a backlist thing. And it's It's totally fine. And yeah, I just, I think that there are so many reasons for authors who have been at this for a while to do this. And I think, you know, the other thing, Russell, is you have built, you've built like an, like, I don't know what it is, like a mythology around yourself in many ways is really what you're talking about, which is why your fans are so dedicated. Because, and a lot of authors A lot of the authors I know, we build mythologies around our characters and everything else. We don't do a good job of building that mythology around ourselves also.

Yeah, I— because of how my career started, it became very important for me to create a mythology on me, not just on the books. But even if you only have a mythology around your books, you know, there are writings that you've done in the past. Like, there are scripts that you've done. There are things that you've done that, like, influenced the thing that you— are. So like, I wasn't BSing where like what was saying like those 4 books were like the foundational books, because while I was writing my like Godsverse Chronicles, which is like my most popular series, I was doing those other books to, to either learn a little bit more about writing mythology in the case of Worst Thing in the Universe, or with the case of like The Void Calls Us Home, it literally has a direct correlation The Marked Ones, Invasion, Void Calls Us Home, and another book called Anne in the Dark Place are literally the foundation books that created this universe because I did not think that I was a good enough writer. I don't think I had enough experience with like romance and other aspects to like write this series. This series literally came from those books. And so like it's not a lie to say that they were foundational books. They literally were. Because I was writing them while I was— like, I would write a Godsverse Chronicles book and then, like, Invasion, and a Godsverse Chronicles book, and so I would, like, go back and forth between them because, like, I knew the kind of style that the Godsverse Chronicles was, but I didn't know, like, how to go from what I had to writing this until I wrote those in-between books. Let's stop talking about my books.

I want to keep going.

Well, we could do another video on that.

Yeah, we should.

Yeah, we'll timecode like where you can find like just the stuff on other people's if eventually you're like, Russell, enough about your work. I want to see other people's books. Okay, so this is our friend Matt Herron who had never been on Kickstarter before. This was his first campaign. He raised almost $13,000 for this trilogy. I don't know how successful of an author Matt is. Is he like a ragingly successful 7-figure, 6-figure author? Or like, is he—

I don't know. I will look right now.

Because there's certainly— and we're going to look at Brandon Sanderson's campaigns later, and we can like in Michael Sullivan's campaigns. But like, you know, uh, if you're not a household name but you write good books, which I think is most of us— and most of us write good books, we're not a household name— um, 3 books, you know, Matt, uh, Matt was able to, uh, backing 9 campaigns and creating one, make something that resonated with, uh, with people. And, uh, the things that I like about this campaign right off the top are the image tells you exactly what you're going to get, and I like the, um, I mean, I call it ship porn.

Like, yeah, that's, that's pretty much correct.

I would say that I would like to see, um, what would happen if he had something more like just one main image like this, um, instead of having the three covers. But it's great because it's It says— what happens when you look at Kickstarter is it'll show the image and then it'll show this title and then it will show this. And so saying, here's the trilogy, this is the Relics of the Ancient trilogy, here are the 3 books, is a very effective way to— and then I like the background as well, like pulls you into the series.

Definitely.

Sci-fi, space opera is a great category on fiction. You know, there's not a ton of people browsing the categories, but like on Kickstarter, publishing as much as like comics or board games, but like space opera is a big category, and he's certainly used it to his advantage in this campaign. I'm not going to play the video. Oh, I think that this is a really good— I mean, I only read the first two, but like this is a really good— beginning to a blurb. Uh, I, I mean, it tells you exactly what you're going to get right there within— yeah, um, you know, so what you normally do is you'll start the campaign here, and then like over the course of the campaign, you'll add like what the updates are kind of above the fold here, or like what the new things are. So like when the campaign started Like, this is what people saw. And Kickstarter backers are very used to, like, after 2 weeks of a campaign, they may have to go scroll. Oh, they met the scroll a little bit to get the thing. But like, when he built the page, this was what you started to. And I mean, it's not the greatest, like, first 2 paragraphs ever, but it is very succinct and effective to tell you exactly what it is.

Yeah, no, I think, um, where, you know, Matt really knows, uh, his genre, right? Like, like he knows what his genre wants. Um, so I think that's kind of what you see here is that they want a trilogy, they want the space or the ship porn. Um, they want to— they want something that matches like, you know, these, um, yeah, like it's kind of like Star Wars, but you know, it's more like Battlestar Galactica, like, which is different.

Battlestar Galactica, Honor, and Star Wars. Like, okay, like, if you like those things, like, you're probably going to be in.

And I think it makes a lot of sense because, like, so I like space opera as a reader, and I remember asking him, I'm like, so are you, like, on the Star Wars side, or are you on, like, the military sci-fi side? Like, what do you mean by space opera? Because that matters to me. So I think what he's doing there is really just qualifying because what he told me is he's like, you know, I'm kind of, like, in the middle. And so Battlestar Galactica is the perfect thing to say there because it's like, yes, I'm like kind of Star Wars, I'm kind of military, like I got both of those in there. And if you like, you know, if you like Battlestar Galactica, then that is like right in the middle of like Star Wars and like hardcore military sci-fi.

And I really like what he did here with couching it in also a book series because a lot of times people just say Battlestar Galactica, StarCraft, and and Star Wars, and you're like, okay, but like, I'm here to read books. Like, give me a book series that like— so I really like, uh, even though broke the three, the rule of three, like, I like that he added that here. And I really like this: Starfighter going for a takeoff. Like, I literally, in 5 words, 6 words, yeah, like, know what is happening here, you know?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And he used the word that I know, like, I know The Last Starfighter. So I'm like, okay, I get it. Like, I get that thing. Like, it's ingrained in the world. I mean, I really like the— I like how we did this. I like he has a sample here. I usually like putting the sample higher at the top.

Yeah.

But yes.

And I think this follows the Amazon product page pretty strongly, I would say, because sample is you know, it's kind of at the top, but it's definitely like, what do people do there? They look at the COVID If they like the COVID they click. They read the blurb, the description. If they like that, they download the sample. So that's like one of the paths. And then the other path is they go to the reviews. So instead of samples, some people are reviews people, some people are sample people. So he's really following like kind of an Amazon product page, I guess, workflow.

Yeah. And I really like his why Kickstarter area too, because he didn't just say, I'm begging. He did say to recoup production costs. Like, I don't think that there's anything problem with that. Like, I'm trying to recoup production costs, but he didn't say like, you know, please buy my book because like Amazon is being mean to me or like, I can't make the money. Like, he's not saying that. That sort of thing, which is so prevalent in like sub stories. Yes. So like he used it in like a positive way. I really like this Kickstarter is fun. Like that's the most important reason to really be on the platform because like it's a fun way to engage with backers. A test run. That's like all of these things are really, you know, he does reviews. It's a really, I would like to see more imagery on this campaign page, but it's just really subtly put together. Um, and I can see how like there's a narrative thread running through the campaign and there's a lot of thought putting into breaking everything up. So when we were launching our campaign, when I went through and we did the video on like, like what you did at the beginning was like you smashed everything together in like one big, like mess of paragraphs. And what I really like about this is he broke it up really nicely. Like if someone is just scrolling this page and goes, all right, here's the thing. And like, oh, I want to know about the books. Like you can literally find it so easily.

Yeah. Yeah. And this is something that Lauren, I forget his last name, but he wrote the book on crowdfunding. And we've talked about this book probably, but he talks about this, how you want to do imagery headlines Basically. So it seems like Matt has implemented that here and I think it works pretty well.

Yeah. You could also do it how I do it. Usually I have a piece of image above the headline. I don't do that in the thing, but it serves the same purpose. So you don't have to be a, we don't have to be a, uh, like a, here's a good example. So like image and then new category. So you don't have to necessarily do it. This way. It's nice. I don't want to go through the effort, frankly, to like do this thing and like be in Photoshop for like days doing all the different reward things. So I chose to do it this way, but it's the exact same thing. Like your world is going to scroll for an image, look for the image, and then, and then look for what's right underneath it. So like I, if I also I also used to do that with these, the digital book tracks and like the tracks. I used to have them all in like one big graphic, which is going to be much better as far as like prettiness. But I found that I added too many reward tiers throughout the campaign that I was literally spending dozens of hours doing all like redoing it throughout the course of the campaign. And I got so sick of it, but People often say they would like to see like the imagery here.

Yeah.

So it also saves you a lot of— you only have so many characters with a Kickstarter page and it saves you a lot of characters you can use other places if you do it through imagery. Okay, so I like all the— I like the rewards. I like all this stuff. Like overall, like I've no— I completely see how this did really well. I mean, it's in a category that like the, the covers are really good, you know, like it's very on brand, it's very much in the genre, like he starts strong. I'm sure he has a good video.

So there was one thing that, um, I talked about with him where he was saying he did a really good job of getting people up into new tiers, and one thing that he launched was a model spacecraft. I'm wondering if we can find that because— oh yeah, that sounds pretty, pretty damn cool.

So here it is, and you can see it looks literally exactly like the COVID of the book. So like, yeah, you know, this is a really cool tier. You can see it's, uh, very, very cool tier.

Like, how could you, how could you resist getting that tier? I mean, aside from like, you weren't going to be able to buy groceries that week if you got that tier, but maybe even so, if you like spaceships, like you're going to get that tier.

And I'm sure that this is probably, he might do a little bit of an overprint, but he's probably not making more than this. So like, it's a thing he probably is only offering during this campaign or with like a small overstock, which is what I usually do for our pins. And such.

Yeah.

Um, cool. All right, should we move on?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, so, uh, this is our friend Krishan, uh, who I love so much. And she is doing this, uh, uh, it was a campaign that I don't know if I remember well, but I remember, um, like, I remember that, like, she was doing it, um, and, uh, and I remember seeing the imagery of it.

Yeah, the imagery really stands out to me because I remember seeing this and being like, this is cool imagery. I don't read cozy mysteries, but if I did, I would back this because I was like, I love the imagery. I love like the beauty bubble. Like, sure, great. Like, I don't know, it's like, like, yeah, like, of course I want a beauty bubble. Like, I don't even know what a beauty bubble is, but I want it.

Yeah, exactly. And like, you can see this one raised It's not as successful as Matt's ones, but like, I know that Krishan was very happy with how this turned out. This is her. She also did this other one, which is, which was successful and had, you know, you don't— so this is less backers than I had for that Spatial Broken campaign, because I had like 75 and made $1,800. She did almost double what I did from 60% of the backers. 60-70% of the backers.

Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting because, uh, she kind of like turned it into— I'm assuming Beauty Bubble is like something within her world, but she basically just took it and like did some handcrafted soaps and stuff. Yeah, just— and like the COVID looks like it, you know, looks like a soap cover as well, or like, you know, kind of an artisan thing. And I mean I would buy it just for the soaps. Like, I feel like she really does the audience.

Yeah, so, so here's the thing that I know about Chrishawn, um, she wants to expand out from just from, from her series. And so she was really interested in is getting products and merch and other things. Not that she didn't want to fund the series, like we all want to fund this, like we all want money for this. Yes, but like she wanted to do pins and soaps and all sorts of other things. And so like, this is the graphic that I was talking about, you know. You can see it, like it's all presented in the, in like, like it looks like a cozy mystery reader would like this. Like they usually like, you know, they usually like handmade kind of like personal, like, you know, present things. Like, it just looks like the kind of world that you would, as a cozy mystery reader who does, like, who does, uh, more paranormal cozy mystery than, like, straight cozy mystery, like, it's very much a thing that, like, I'm like, oh, when I need a comforting— like, I read cozy mystery when I'm like, I need comfort. Like, yeah, you know, some people read romance for comfort. Like, I tend to read, like, paranormal cozy mystery, which often has, like, romance in it for for comfort in that same way. So, you know, you can see where the money's going. I really, I always like this one. I always think it makes you look super professional if you can show where the money is going, even if like you're doing a POD run and you don't know exactly how many you're printing, just saying like, if I make this money, here's where the money's going. Here is where like, or like you can say, this is how much it's gonna cost to do, 'cause this is what I do often. So like I'll do at the end here, like I had a $2,000 goal, but like I said, like it's going to cost really $9,000 to make this book series, not like $2,000. So like you can do the $2,000 and what the $2,000 will be used for, or you can do like kind of this, I'm not going to do the full, I'm not, I don't know if I can make $10 grand, but I know I can make $2 grand. Grand. So like, here is the whole thing. Yeah. Uh, the first time I did a Godsverse, the Godsverse Chronicles campaign, I brought it back to Kickstarter. I actually did a dollar campaign because I had no idea. I had no idea. The novels weren't selling on Amazon. Uh, Kickstarter does not like dollar campaigns. They will almost— oh, they will flag your campaign and make you manually review every time. I talked to the, the people at Kickstarter about this, and that is what they told me from their own mouths. But sometimes you have literally no clue. I tell people usually $500 is a good number at the beginning, but like, I— we end up raising almost $10 grand for that series that was— that didn't work on Amazon. But you just have no idea.

I think this is a really good campaign to study if you are like a romance author, because I think, I think romance authors, they kind of think like, hey, unless I'm paranormal, I can't be on Kickstarter. And I beg to differ because, you know, a lot of the freebies that romance authors use, like recipe books, and it's like, what do you already use to drive traffic to your books or like, or even to just engage with your fans, which romance authors are great at. This is because this campaign really appeals strongly to women. Like, this is not a campaign that's trying to appeal to men, I don't think. I mean, I think it's like, you know, it's got a lot of like pink and like full woman, full female team, like cozy mystery, which is heavy on heavy readership with females. So I think, you know, Shaman States Shorts, I don't know.

Well, she has a whole Shaman States of America thing where like that's her whole, her brand. Her brand is kind of Shaman States of America, which is her, like, world of magic and takes place in the United States, but it's not the United States. It's a whole different thing. And so she did some shorts here. I mean, I'm agreeing. I totally agree with you. I mean, it totally resonates with me, but like, I like pink and like girly things.

You can see you are wearing a pink shirt right now. I mean, like, well, things that are ready for this.

Yeah, things that they traditionally say are like meant for women. I tend to resonate with that thing. So I'm very much like into this and I love how she did this. But you're totally right, like, you know, a lot of romance authors, especially like they do book boxes. They'll like do like a thing for like their readers when they come out with a new book, often at a loss for them. Like—

Like candles, like, yeah, like bath salts, I don't know.

Yeah, like all of that stuff is, uh, is great for— and I love that we're using this because that is what Krishan, unless I totally got the words that came out of her mouth wrong, are— is trying to do with like the Kickstarters, is she's trying to— she had another one here that, um, yeah, she's trying to like build her— that like, that like is like, look, look, this is a loot box. So she wanted to like— she was like, she's gonna make 100 loot boxes.

And this is a, this is very different branding than the other one.

Yes.

Just to point out.

Absolutely. This is more, and this is more what she normally does as far as her branding goes for most of her books in her series.

Gotcha.

So like, there's not a ton on this page that like necessarily will appeal to somebody that doesn't already know her brand. But like, if you know her brand, like she's trying to do like a book, a box of stuff that is more than just, more than just like the series in and of it, like the books in and of itself. And so she wants, she loves pins and all of this other stuff that you can probably go find on her site now. So in that way, it's been very effective, I know, these Kickstarters for her.

Yeah.

All right, should we go to the next one?

Yeah, let's do RJ.

Yay! All right, so RJ is a dear friend of mine. At least I am— she is my dear friend. How she feels about me is like— is, is, is, uh, I'm— I won't put words in her mouth, but like, I love RJ, and I've watched— I've been friends with her for well before she was ever R.J. Blaine, this like super paranormal fantasy, like rockstar indie author. And so I've seen her do these campaigns and I'm honestly, and to get like, I never knew she ran a campaign. Like she does not talk about them often. Like she's not always rah, rah, rah out there. I remember this campaign I saw like when it was over and I was like, how did I not know you ran a camp. How did this happen?

Uh, like a— it looks like a paranormal romantic comedy with a body count. So she's, she's, uh, swinging over into, uh, cozy mystery, I'm assuming. So a mystery of some sort.

This is her, uh, like she invented this genre. She will— I believe she will tell you— of like magical romantic comedies with a body count. Like this thing, like this like idea is like— now there's a lot of people that do it, but like, this was like the thing that she like invented this category. And they're all like shifter romance, like romantic comedies, like with a bunch of murder in it, or like action murder. Like, and I love her books, I love RJ, uh, writing overall. But like, she, uh, does— never has had more than, uh, like 100 or so backers, but like 51 backers, 60 to do $100.

Yeah. And they're spending a lot of money.

33 backers, $2,500.

Yeah. That's like $75 a person. Whoa.

106 backers, $32,000.

$32,000. Wait, okay. Just to be clear, that's almost, that's over $300 a person.

And so like RJ Blaine has always been RJ Blaine to me, but like she be— I would say she became the RJ Blaine that like most people like, the massively successful author between these two campaigns. And like one thing that she does with these campaigns is she will offer just all of her books. Like you can see like, literally $1,500 to get all of her books, and like 10 people took her up on that. Wow, that's crazy. So that by itself is $15,000.

So half her campaign came from 10 backers, just to be clear.

Here's another 7 people that took both series in trade. You know, that's 7 backers. So there's another—

What's a lot?

Uh, $6,000, $5,600. There's $20,000 back— not backers— $20,000 roughly between these two categories. Yeah. Um, you know, then there's three people who did the Magical series. And this is one thing that, like, I love about this series, uh, because she just did everything. She's just like, you know, for authors that don't do a lot of signings, this is a great way to use Kickstarter, because for me, I will only sign books that you buy on Kickstarter. Like, that's the only time I sign books. I often sign books when you buy it from my online shop, but most people don't do that. But when you buy on Kickstarter, like, you get them signed. Like, that's the advantage of doing it. Like, I'm just not gonna sign books. Like, they're roughly the same price you will buy them online, and like, they come signed with like a of the extra swag. So RJ's campaign, I'm actually surprised because every time I've ever seen her speak, she speaks, she writes to the public in her cat, the voice of her cat, like her website is the Sneaky Kitty Critic. So I'm surprised that she actually put like her own name here.

Oh, it's, I mean, To be fair though, she wants to, uh, also appeal to cold traffic, right? Because that's—

yes.

So maybe that's why.

It's possible. But she's— so this is, this is what she said. She's like, just, this is, this is certainly to appeal mostly to her fans, of her audience, but maybe not fans who are on her mailing list. And maybe she's changed her branding since, like, in the years that I've known her. Like, I can't say that I've followed her like her website or anything much since then, but she's— why is she doing this campaign? She's asked repeatedly if they will— she will do trade paperbacks instead of hardbacks. And this is why she's on Kickstarter. It's not a, like, super, like, making an audiobook reason or, like, doing some crazy thing reason. Like, she wants to— people have asked for mass market. And she's like, yeah, I'll do mass market. Like, pay me and I'll do it. Like, this campaign is how we're going to fund it if that's what you want.

Yeah. Well, yeah, and it's the— it's just, I mean, it makes sense. She's talking about formatting, you know, covers do cost. You have to reformat all your covers. You have to pay, you know, whoever, IngramSpark, to, you know, upload all these books. It does make sense. It sounds like she's got mass market, she's got hardcover, and people are like, can you please just do like the paperback that everybody else does? And she's, yeah.

And then she's kind of like doing, she gives a couple of examples, but not all the examples of her most popular books in the series. And then she breaks down the cost and then she says, here are the books. I mean, it's a very simple campaign. And so if you're a new author who like doesn't have a fan base yet, like, don't do this.

Yeah, you can't do this.

Like, she is just a ubiquitous author in the paranormal. I mean, I don't know, maybe it's because I know her, but like, it feels like she's like, she's like a ubiquitous author, so like she can do a very frank short campaign without saying, you know, she's basically being like, hey, You want these things, I got these things, but you gotta pony up the dough. And boy, did they. And she has some stretch goals. And so what I like about this campaign the most, uh, is it got the books in mass and it did the thing. Like, it's a very simple campaign done by a very successful author who had one very specific goal in mind, um, but it does not Yeah, and she says trade paperbacks of these novels. It is very simple. And if you're— and she's always done this, like she's always done this very simple campaigns that are targeted specifically to mostly to her fans. Like she's not super interested in getting new fans. She knows that they're not going to be a ton of people who are interested, but those people who are interested, I mean, will spend $300, $400, $500 on her books. Books, $1,500 on her books. I mean, that's a bananas amount. This was a new series I remember her coming out with a couple of years ago, and she was, she was testing, uh, she was testing this series and seeing how it was going. Uh, this one was to get them in hardcover. So these ones were to get them in hardcover, these ones are to get them in paperback. So like, and this campaign, uh, again, 51 backers, but like 6,000 $6,000, you know. I mean, when you have so many books, like, you don't need that many books. Like, this was 10 novels, so if she had double that amount of books, you probably would have raised over $12,000.

Well, the nice thing about this is now she's paid for her formatting costs, um, to do this, and those books are available now. So it's all profit, kind of like what Russell does. It's all profit from here on out. So yeah, I, I have to retract my Former hypothesis. So it sounds like she's just kind of like, you know, the reason she's not in character, on brand, or whatever it is, is because she's like, let's just get this done. Like, here's the info, give me the money. That's it.

And, but here's the thing that like she does really well in this campaign. I mean, she does it in the other campaigns, but let's focus on this campaign. It's like She's just very direct. Like so often when you're doing Kickstarter or you're on a sales page, like you're meandering between all this stuff. Like you're like tiptoeing around it. And she's like, at first glance, first paragraph, you want— her thesis, you want large form paperbacks, 6x9. The answer to, if you want that, this is how you get those. I usually do mass market, but if you want those books, I will do them, but you have to buy them. Uh, and then she says, this is why I'm coming to Kickstarter, because with 19 plus 9, what is that, 28 titles times $150, like that's $4,000 or $5,000. Like, I'm not going to do that. Like, I'm not just going to do this if 3 people want them, right? But if, if, if $5,000 worth of people get them, even if it's only 100 people, like, sure, I will do them because why would I not do them? Like, so she's really delivering and then she's saying why it's going to cost that much. And, um, she's giving the— and just in case you don't know the campaign and come across it, she's giving a couple of things, but she gives the breakdown, she gives the titles that are going to be part of this. And then she's out. And it's, it's not like a super flashy campaign. Like, I would not tell you to do this, but like, RJ is a very no-nonsense human, uh, and she is delivering something that her audience wants. And this is one of the things, especially for a successful author, is, man, like, you're delivering what you— what the audience wants. Like, they've been asking for these things, and like they will be happy that you're listening to them, you know. I can't tell you how often I get an email that says, I don't know if you respond, if you even look at this inbox. Like, I don't know if you're like, if you're even seeing this message, you know, when I send some missive out or something. But like, you are looking at this. And like, this is a way to show your fans, oh, you want audiobooks? Well, here you go. Oh, the audiobook's unsuccessful. Sorry. Like, you know, I did it. I did it. I wanted to do it. In fact, I did that for this campaign. This campaign, my fans wanted a volume 2 of Ichabod Jones Monster Hunter, which boy, did they, because now we're on volume— we're going to be launching volume 4 next year. But I said, all right, guys, I'm— if you want this book that you've been bugging me about for 3 years, 3 or 4 years, probably 4 years at this point. Um, I need to raise $15,666 to pay for it. And if you do that, I'll make the books. Like, I'll do it, but like, we have to do this together. Like, I can't do this at a loss. And, uh, it took till the very second to last day, but like, we raised $16,000 for this campaign, beat it. Um, it was real hard. Like, I'm not just doing a $16,000 campaign for for one comic book before, but I needed to, and you can look down here, I said, I said my campaign pages are long. I'm not gonna lie to you, like they're long, like probably may not need to be that long, but I always think I would rather have it longer and have people find what they need than to not have it. So I said basically I needed to reprint volume 1 and print volume 5 and print volume 6 and pay for production on volume 2. So that was how I said we needed all of this money. And, and, and it was not clear we were going to get it. Like, I thought for sure this was going to fail like the first week of the campaign. Like, it took some very sneaky ingenuity to do that, but This is not saying, like, but this is a great way to use Kickstarter if you have a series that, like, you're not sure is going to be successful. Because, like, Ichabod is a very weird series. Just because it's my most popular comic series does not make it any less weird. Like, it should not exist. I'm very proud that it does. But if you're, if it's, if you don't have to, if it doesn't have to exist, then bringing it to your fans and saying, here is a book. If you want it, if you're gonna, if you'll stop you complaining about it, or like, if I can do this for, if you can raise this money, I will do this thing for you, but we have to be in it together, which is a thing you can't just put a book on Amazon really and do that.

Yeah, definitely. And we may want to go to Mallory's one next.

Yeah, that would, that, this is great.

Oh, that's, that's the next one.

Here we are.

Perfect. I was just thinking about the audiobooks, uh, that— because this one is specifically for audiobooks, which I know people— this is like a campaign a lot of people want to do, is to raise funds for audiobooks, basically.

Yeah, and you can see, uh, let's see if I can find a better picture. Here we go. $10,000, almost $11,000 from 150 people. That's not a lot of— that's not a lot, but Funded, and it looks like $10,000.

Like, it's like she needed the— she needed the whole, you know, it was not a $1,000 campaign.

So yes, and again, like, this is the kind of thing that you can do with Kickstarter that you can't do on Amazon. Like, you can't put a, a, uh, pre-order book up and take it down then without getting dinged by Amazon. But you can say, oh, we only made $9,000. Okay, uh, with the first— with the first Godsverse campaign that I did, I had a goal of like $10,000 to— and I'll write the fifth, a fifth book in the series, which kind of like— it was like a team-up book, something I'd always wanted to do with the Godsverse. And we hit like $9,935, and I was like, that's close enough. I'm going to do the book anyway because there's clearly enough interest for it. And then I did 2 more books and we launched the next campaign, which raised like over $11,000. So there's all sorts of cool ways that you can expand series and do stuff on Kickstarter. Let's see.

Yeah, so it sounds like— oh yeah, this is good. Even when the series is doing well, the audiobook narration is a daunting expense, and then you get small royalties. Yeah, so I mean, I think this is like a pretty typical use case for authors.

Yeah.

Is that they, you know, and I think the same is true for translations, but translations is not really a— thing I think would work on Kickstarter very well, but audiobooks is. It's like, and the commonality between those two is that they both need a lot of money before you make any money, and like you're kind of restarting and rebuilding your audience. So even if you have a popular series that's doing well in ebook and paperback, it doesn't guarantee that you can drop $4,000 on a translation and it's going to do well. And then you actually need to drop like $12,000 on a translation because you probably need 3 books to even like really get started in that language. So yeah, there's, there's a lot to this. Even very successful authors, which if you don't know Mallory, she's, she's a good friend of mine and she is really successful. She has I think over 100 books. They're all in the Aeon 14 series, or like larger world, and, you know, maybe there's a couple different series within that. But yeah, she's like extremely successful, you know, six-figure author. And she also, she has her, her and her wife have The Writing Wives on Facebook. So they also teach a lot of this stuff. But yeah, it's like, you know, you can be a very successful author, you don't have pockets for days, you know. You, you often, especially if you're making a living off of this, you need to keep most of your profits. You can't afford to put this money into something else, but the asset that you do have is your audience. And so your audience can fund these new formats to help you build your career and extend your reach.

Yeah, I've never made an author, successful or otherwise, that didn't want something else to do with their book. Like, no matter if you have audiobooks, it's games or comics or, or a movie or a visual novel or like a, a, a interactive game or something. Like, there's always— I've never met an author who was satisfied with how much content there was or how much merch there was, which is why I'm glad we did the Krishan's, uh, one too. Yeah, I mean, This is way too, this is way too good a deal on Kickstarter. Like $30, I mean, $30, $30 for 70, uh, for, for 60 hours. Like she easily could have charged double or triple for this. Uh, and, uh, probably made like all the only difference would have been, she would have made triple the amount of money and probably made like $30 grand instead of $10 grand. So like, Oh, interesting. I really like it.

She would be very happy to hear that.

I mean, I really like this campaign. Well, if you think about like, okay, so she says 60 hours, right? 60 hours of, of something like 6, uh, this is like, oh, here it is, 60 hours of amazing storytelling. You know, like a 10-hour book usually goes for like at least $20, so you're looking at like, you know, 6 times more than that. So, you know, you could be talking about $120 $20 to $150 that she's giving for $30. Like she could have done a great deal and like not done $30 and done like, you know, it would have been like $50 like that. I would think it would be $50, $50, $100, probably could have done $100 and not lost any.

That's a ton of backers. Yeah. That's really interesting. Cause it's like the people who wanted this really wanted this. Right. And there are people who read the ebook, clearly on some level, or maybe they're like her audiobook fans from this other series. But it's like, they really wanted this. So, you know, they're willing. And the other thing is like, getting something made is different than buying an audiobook that's already made. Like, that's really important to understand is like, people may be willing to chip in more than you would charge for the audiobook in order to get it made. Because it's not going to get made without them.

Yes, the only difference is like if she was going to charge this amount of money on Audible later, then like it kind of have to charge it now.

But yeah, that's fair.

But I mean, I like this page. It's really, again, this is like a— this is why you can't look at just the page and say I'm going to model that, right? Because like I think if you look at Krishan's page, you know, that is a very different page than than RJ's page. If you look at my page, see, I always assume that like nobody has ever heard of me before. And so that's how I like have done every campaign forever. But if you are a more successful author, like I wouldn't, if you went to this page and were like, I'm going to model this thing, like you would get your ass handed to you because like it's just, you don't have 100 books and like, and like, you know, hundreds of thousands of sales. And like Amazon's not— like Amazon pays her to speak and like brings her in to speak on stuff. Like, you know, she's like the— one of the like ad gurus. Like, you know, I've met with her for ads. Like, I'll— so like she's a ubiquitous figure in independent publishing. So like—

Like you wouldn't not know Mallory in independent publishing if you're part of— you know, a stronger part of the community, like, you would have come across Malkyrie at some point.

Whereas, like, I think if you're in a Kickstarter community, you probably would have come across me. I still want— for sure, like, I still want to assume that you've never heard of this series before and give you all of the details. So probably I could make a campaign this, this, uh, this short and not lose that much. But, like, I want you to assume— I'm assuming you've never heard of this series or any of my books before you come to this page, even if you've read everything thing that I've ever done. Um, but what I like about this is, again, very direct. Hey, I like— we didn't talk about this— like, I like this.

That looks— it's a kick-ass—

like, I love this image. Like, it's such a cool image.

Uh, and this is, this is Mallory's niche. She does hardcore military sci-fi with female— like, almost an all-female cast. And If you like that, like, you know Mallory, you know her series. Like, this is— yeah, it's like, it's like, um, both of these, RJ and, uh, Mallory, they both like have found their own lane within staying in their lane, if that makes sense. Like what we talked about earlier.

I mean, there's a lot of text here. I probably don't need this part that says Rick is Marauders because it's literally right here. Uh, and I would like to see what would've happened if like it didn't have any of this text, but like she's successful, her campaign was successful. Like that's the only thing that I can see, like at the top here of like, just, I, you want it to be as clean as possible, just like you would want like a Facebook ad as possible. Like I like this part over here. Maybe I would just take this part here. Out, especially because it's clear that it's for—

this is for existing fans.

But like, she talks about, I love audiobooks, and then she gives you like the pitch very succinctly at the top. You know, I like that she has this here. I just don't like it in the image, this first image, because this is like probably what you get from the audiobook. This is probably how the audiobook cover will look.

Yeah, it says, yeah, audiobook cover.

Yeah, so, oh yeah, sure. So it does, um, it gives—

I love the—

yeah, example, like a sample, you know, how much more— if you know, if you know the series and you can get here and you like what you read and what you listen to, um, like how much more do you need before you click and say yes? Um, uh, you know, collector's items are good, like all this other stuff, like If I were doing this again, the thing that I would tell Mal is like, A, this is way too little money. I mean, this is way too little money. I mean, if you look at RJ's books, like, she's not giving a discount for all right. She's like, if you want this, here's how it costs $150. This is how much I'm going to charge for it. How I do the books also is I say, this is how much it costs. Like, you are here to help me make this book series, and here's how much they cost. So That's the only thing that I would say about, uh, about this series that I can say stands out in the, in the negative part. Because like, I look at this and I'm like, how did she only raise $10,000? And like, you know, she probably could have done $100 for this amount, assuming she was going to charge it that much on Audible later, and probably not have lost anything.

And that's the problem is for audiobooks, authors are not able to control their pricing. So you look at an Audible membership, for example. If you put an omnibus on Audible, like if you put the 7-book omnibus on Audible, somebody can get that omnibus for a $15 membership credit. So like, I kind of get like why she, you know, what you had said earlier about charging. It's like, well, if she wants to do the omnibus, like sure. If she puts each book up there separately, then absolutely. It's like very clear, you know, the $15 membership fee or whatever on Audible is kind of like where the audiobook tends to land is like somewhere in the $15 to $20 range. So yeah, like if you do that, then sure, that's $100 for those 7 books. So that's another thing is like, I don't know if she has the omnibus up there, but I know she was trying to get them all made at once so that it was all the same narrator. And, um, yeah, she might have— sure, she might have like decided to put the omnibus up there, in which case like maybe you shouldn't do that because, um, if you do that, it could be cutting into your profits then, um, on Audible, but also cutting into your Kickstarter profits.

Yes, and that is something if you launch multiple books at a time, you are cutting your profits down. What you are doing is reducing your time direct to market. Your time to market. So like you kind of have to move those two things.

I mean, yeah, too laborious.

You know, it's, it's, I mean, there's nothing that's a $10,000 campaign. Like, it's great. And like, especially in audio, which is not a big category on, I mean, I think I did a search for audio at one time and there was like less than 1,000 total projects, or I think it was like 300 or 400 total audio that had audio in the title. So You know, but what you can do for this is you could say, let's see if she did it, digital audiobook, audiobook, print book. See, she could have done— she could have done $50 to get a signed jewel case. You know, something that was like, hey, it's $30 to get the this, and like, what it's a jewel case to make, like $4 or $5 to get it shipped out. Like I signed them. I could have charged $80 for that. Like, I don't know, like whatever you could have gotten a, so I have these like drop cards that I talk about a lot. And like, you could have gotten one of these made and signed and then like sent it out as well for like a bonus tier reward. Not that I'm like ragging on Mal's stuff.

No, I mean, this is $10,000 is not a joke. You know, that's not joke money. That's like legit.

I only say that 'cause like, this is more backers. Like this is more backers than RJ had, and like for a third of the campaign. And so like, yeah, you might ask why. Well, like RJ has a lot more print costs, you know, you're looking at— she's printing 26 books. Yeah, like that's, you know, that's $7 a book times 20, that's like $200 for printing, and then like another amount of money for shipping. Like it's a lot more stuff that she has to do with those books too. But I would say like audio is It's tougher. It's tougher, but like, it is generally a like completely like frictionless medium where you are only paying for the like sending the files out to people.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, you know, we've both— so like when I talked to Mallory about this campaign, I was like, you know what, I I mean, this, this campaign, if you were to run another one, you could probably with your audience aim for like, you know, $25K, $30K, because, because Mallory should be doing like a $25K to $30K campaign with her audience. And so we were talking about like, it's— and I think this is so important for six-figure authors to understand, is like, it's really just a couple different levers that could be pulled in different ways to possibly get like 3x, 4x, 5x on your campaigns. And, you know, one of the things that I talked to her about was like audiobook is like, it's a harder one. So maybe you do like a print book, or like maybe you like do the series and say like the audiobook is part of that. Like that's, that may be what you're raising the funds for, or part of what you're raising the funds for, but it could also be just like print books, because I think that's what RJ Blaine did is, you know, Kickstarter loves print books. Like, print books is probably the most popular format of book on Kickstarter. So like, if you pick print books as your thing, you can still do an audiobook from that. And I think that's what MJ, Matt, MG Heron did is he was raising money basically for the audiobooks, I think, but he made it so that it was about the trilogy, even though audiobooks was a massive stretch goal for him and a big part of his success. He decided to do the books exclusive to Kickstarter to start out and made it about the print books. And that, I think that small, I mean, it's not a small thing, but I think that choice really helped him hit a very high number for what he was doing and for, you know, where his career is, like he's, he's like midlist basically, um, in as far as an indie author goes. So successful, of course, um, but not like, you know, not like a— I don't— he may be consistent six figures, I don't know, but he's not like, you know, as much as, uh, where I know like Mallory is like definitely consistently six figures. So it's interesting to look at these because, um, I think hopefully, hopefully people watching can see that like these— there are like some things that you can do differently. And especially as a 6-figure author, it's going to change your amount that you raise drastically. Like, it's so— it's such a, such a, um, big amount of money that you could be raising instead.

Yeah, and the nice thing about Matt's campaign is because it was exclusive to Kickstarter, and the difference between this campaign is like it was already on Amazon. So if you're, if you're a newer author like you can do this thing that Matt does, you could do the thing that Mal does as well. You just, but you're both, you're like, you're like, she's pulling from people who have already bought the book and read the book pretty much. Like, you know, RJ, the same thing. And they're pulling from people who are like already fans of the series and they want another format. Whereas like for mine, like this is an ex— this is a Kickstarter exclusive series right now. And like, these are all the people, like, these are all people. And you notice like 300 people versus like 150 people, you know, it's like considerably, it's almost double to like get the same return as like Mallory did. Um, um, okay. So one more.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely do one more. I just want to say real quick that you're pulling like, um, so many levers. And I think that you have, you're layering your campaigns to hit like kind of all the things you want to hit the fans. You want to hit the cold traffic, you want to hit the Kickstarter audience with the print stuff. And so I think that's really important to say is that either of these really, you know, we've looked at a couple like very successful authors and it's like, read our book because we can show you like a number of these other levers where you just make like slightly different decisions with your campaign and it could do, like you have the audience to to like do just way more. And looking at all of these in a row is kind of hopefully driving that point home.

Yeah, and so for instance, just to follow up on that, like these people, when she's— when Mallory sent this out to people, they would see audiobook here. And if they don't want audiobook, they'd be like, no. She could have said print and audiobook or like something like that because she has this—

Or special edition or, yeah.

She has this like, you know, these like pledges for books and like, so like they may have— she may have tuned out a bunch of people who had never gotten Rika's Marauders and only want the print or only want the ebook, but like, and maybe they're willing to do it this campaign, but, what she might not have wanted to do was tap them for the— because like this is the— like she may have said, I don't want those people. Like I want them to go buy on Amazon these books. Like I only— this, this, this— like I only want to capture people who want the audiobook, who— because like the other people are buying on Amazon or somewhere else. Amazon's been real good to me.

Yeah.

So, and also, you know, if you are, if you are a if you're a KU author, like, you might not be able to do the ebooks. That's true. But you could still do an audiobook campaign. You could still do a—

And a print book.

Yeah. You know, you could still do a comic or a board game or a video game or a movie, like, or a short film, or— there's all these things that are open. And so you might not be able— you might want to say audiobook only or video game. For me, it doesn't matter. I'm wide. Like, I offer everything every campaign. But there is, if especially if you're a successful author, there is some like, you know, it's like, I don't want them to eat here. Like, I don't want them to eat. I don't want print book sales to like eat here. Like, I don't want to ship out print books. I don't want it. I like, I only want people who do the audiobook that are to come here. So that is another lever you have to decide of, you know, do you do soap? Like, and not offer other stuff for anything like that. Okay, so the last one is We've been talking— hopefully we've given you a good set of examples for both like 6-figure authors and like newer authors. Um, I know we— we— I've been coming back around on some of these campaigns to talk about like 6-figure authors, but like I want to show you, um, our friend James, um, did a campaign for, uh, War on Monster Earth, which I was a part of. I have a story in War on Monster Earth, like, and this has been fun. So like, it's, though I didn't make a part of it, like it wounds me that like it didn't succeed because like, come on, man. But he recently relaunched his series and was able to fund. And I wanted to talk about a couple of ways that he was able to fund. So like, you'll notice that he raised more money from fewer backers. Um, but he was— he did the whole trilogy, the complete Monster Earth trilogy, which I'm also part of, I suppose, this campaign too. Um, um, but he kind of just launched it and, uh, didn't hear much about it. Uh, so the thing that he did most, the number one thing, is he dropped the goal from $3,500, $3,300 $2,000. And this is really smart when you relaunch a campaign because you kind of know, all right, $2,140. Yeah, that's probably my floor, probably my floor. Um, so I'm gonna do like below that. And this is a tried and true from so many campaigns is like, if so, if he could do it for $2 grand, like, okay, probably could do it for $2,000 because that's what he put in there. And then he funded, uh, and I was able to like make this book. And he is very, very happy that he was able to make this book. Um, so I have not actually looked at this campaign much, but, um, I'll look at the—

well, he just finished it. Like, it, it closed like a couple days ago. So yeah, some of these campaigns are very recent.

Yeah. And I think one person's put like $1,000 or a huge amount of money into like make this happen at the beginning, not at the end, but like at the beginning of the campaign, like to get them. So like, yeah, I'm going, um, like sometimes you'll get that, sometimes you're like a huge superfan, like where did the superfan come from? I don't know, but like I'm so happy they exist.

Uh, or, or even your family and friends. I think, you know, you can't do that on Amazon. You don't want your family and friends to buy your books on Amazon, and that's kind of painful for a lot of new authors. So it's like, yeah, like Kickstarter, you can have anybody, anybody, a super fan, like your mom. Like it doesn't, it's like, you just need to hit your goal. And it could be a way to kind of launch to your family first.

Yeah, for sure. And get just some, you know, there's people that want to support you and like, it may be your friends and family and a lot of people like, well, what if I just have my friends and family? Like, okay, if they wanna support you, like get this, kickstart your career, like you have to then move on from that and like find other people. But like, you know, my mom still contributes to my Kickstarters. It's like, it's nice. Like sometimes she gets books, sometimes she just does it. Like I tell her she doesn't have to every campaign, but she still does. 'Cause like, it's like I'm 14 to her for the rest of her life. Like, but like, you know, then you find more fans and you, you know, you're using this to like, kickstart if you're new, like, your career, and then have to take that and make what you will with it for your next campaign. But like, like, your mom doesn't— the people who support you, because like sometimes like your mom is not supportive and your family is not support— but like, if you have supportive people, they probably don't want you to have a janky cover when you launch on Amazon. They probably don't want you to have like a book with a ton of spelling errors. Like, they probably don't want this to happen. So like, even if they're like I just gotta let— I just, I just gotta let Monica have like a nice cover. Like, I just, I just want her to like it to look good when it launches so like I can talk about it. Even if it's your mom and she's like, I just want it to look nice so that I want to tell my friends about it, like it looks nice. Like, whatever it is, like, that's, that's good because you will be able to get a better cover and better editing and maybe pay for more marketing, and then that will seed to the next thing. So I mean, I get the impulse to say I don't want to move to get to my family or friends, and like, I don't think you should be Amway, an Amway salesman with this, obviously. But like, I think you, like, you should like, like treasure that support and understand that like they want you to have a nice cover and like a nice book that looks nice. They want you to have developmental editing. Like they want you to like, And if they're putting $500 in there, like, that allows you to do more. Like, don't pocket it. Use it to make the book better. And so they can be proud of the book that you put out as proud as you are.

Yeah.

So there's me right here.

Yay. So can you explain, like, because this is a very different cover than the other one. War on Monster Earth. So did he get, like, a cover?

Yeah, he got a new cover for this one. So this is something that I always recommend you do— have the COVID ready. Like, I know it's an investment of money, but like all of these books had covers made. We did not look at one campaign that did not have a cover made. And like, it just— it's a necessary commodity so they can see— you can see the branding of what you're going to get. And people know, oh, at least you have some um, at least you have some, uh, um, like stake in this thing.

Yeah, so that's a nice cover. He's got great covers. Really?

So like, you know, this is not the best cover of the series.

Well, it says teaser image, not the final cover.

Well, yeah, he only has the teaser image here, and like maybe that's a reason why like he made $800 or $900 less. I, I don't know, but like this cover is a done cover. Like, this is just—

and it's awesome.

It's just awesome. It tells you exactly what you got.

Yes.

And so, so yeah, I mean, I think that the minimum you need is a cover, or at least some concept of a cover. I had a friend who was like, who like was going to launch with his like stick figure, and I was like, just, it's better not have a cover at all because people are going to see it and be like, oh, that's the thing. Even if you just have vibes, even if you just go to deposit photos and take a photo and like do something temp, like something, it's, it's something that like, but I would say it is best to have a cover. Even if you don't have an edited book, like have the COVID have the COVID I cannot stress enough how much, don't like, even like the books that go out. And the reason I say this is because like if a book goes out for like for solicitations. Like, they have a blurb and a cover. Like, they don't have— the book's not done. Like, the book's still in editing, maybe. Like, you know, but they have a cover and a blurb. And I think you need those two things in order to really do this. And, you know, it's going to cost a couple hundred dollars maybe to get a cover. You can get a nice cover for like $200, even if it's not the final cover. At least like put temp cover at the bottom and like give the vibes. Because then you can do mock-ups, you can do all these things that you can't do. And like, don't just do it yourself because you are going to suck. You suck at— I love you, but you suck at graphic design. Like, unless you have a degree in graphic design or spent your life as an artist, you suck at graphic design. Your text is going to look terrible, and it's going to take away from the book. I just had this conversation with an author like this week. Please hire a graphic designer to do it. Like even if it is not the real cover at the end, give the vibes. So, and all the ones that we have seen before have great covers. So like I love— so this is the final cover for The War for Monster Earth.

Those are gorgeous covers.

What do you think would happen if you put that there instead of like this image? I know he was going for like a War of the Worlds kind of thing, because it's kind of like the War of the Worlds image.

And this is not a bad cover. Like, just to be clear, it's not a bad cover. This is a significantly better cover for very obvious reasons. It's, you know, it's illustrated. It's— I mean, it looks like a movie poster. There's action on it. Like, you know, characters in motion is so important in this genre and in most genres, really.

And it just shows how many monsters are there. Like, it's just this bananas crazy, like, time.

Yeah, it's just crazy. Yeah.

Um, so like the creators are listed here, the writers. Yeah, like it's just a real nice— they've got like, he's got all of the, the blurbs for all of the books. Yeah, you know, I would like to see some more imagery here, obviously, especially it's monsters. Like, show me more monsters, man. Like, even if you've got to pull from Deposit Photo or whatever you use to do it, just like get some pictures of monsters, man. Like, go and get like whatever or a Frankenstein picture, or like whatever. But like, show me more monsters. Like, because that's the whole thing. The whole thing is monster earth.

Do you like monsters? Yeah.

Show me more monsters. And I say that, I did a book called Monsters and Other Scary Things. No, that's not true. Sorry. I don't— try not to curse. I did it a couple of times.

I like how you tried to edit your— Your title. It's okay to curse. We did. Actually, both of us curse a lot, but not like—

So like, just look at all the monsters on this page. The book is called Monsters and Other Scary Shit. Just like, look at monsters and monsters. And like, there's a JPEG of monsters, like monsters and monsters and monsters and monsters. And there's just literally monsters all the way down. So like, and this is what I was talking about, about like, I literally did this page this image like 20 times throughout the campaign, adding new stuff in there. And this is the one that broke me, I think, to do it anymore. But like, you know, monster, you just, you see just like every, there's just monsters everywhere. Um, so like that is, if you're gonna have a book about monsters, like go hard on the monsters. Uh, so, but yeah, I mean, I like this campaign. It did, it's, it's simple. But like it doesn't need to be big, uh, especially when you have this thing that's like, what, Monster Earth? Cool, I get it. Like, I get it. Like, I get it literally immediately.

Yeah, um, I, I really love their, uh, branding up here.

Yes, I like this thing.

Got a Jurassic Park thing.

And I mean, look at the top here: one world, three anthologies, 12 writers, dozens of giant monsters.

Yeah. It's like, okay, I get it.

I mean, it doesn't look exactly like mine, but like at the top I'm trying to get you to say, heck yeah, I want that thing. Yeah, this is a very— look, if you like monsters, like, I got monsters. This is what I used to say with this book. It was like, you like monsters? I got monsters. Like, I got plenty of monsters all over the monster books. Like, monsters are monsters. Uh, and I think it does a bit and be like, oh, giant monsters, cool. So this is a kaiju thing, and it does a pretty good job of even though there's like sparse text, like there's a lot of imagery at the top to show you all the monsters and then all the creators. I know I would like to see all of these probably sized better, so they're all like this size. So you can see, in like mine, I like to have, like, I want to draw the eye to, I don't know, we can show like here. I want to picture that is the size of the frame so I can show you who I am.

Yeah.

Um, but it's very effective. I don't necessarily think that this was an ineffective, uh, um, like page. It just probably was just asking too much and not that he couldn't have built this audience, but like when you're doing your first Kickstarter, I really think you should do for the minimum amount you need to fund. And if you cannot, if you need like $5,000, $3,000 to do a campaign, like maybe that shouldn't be your first Kickstarter. Maybe you should just say, hey, I'm going to do— I have this book from my archives that's already edited. Like, you know, like Spaceship Broken, like, hey, I have this book, it's already been out. I don't like the COVID but it's made its money back. Or it's like done all it's going to be on Amazon. Like, let me recover it. And like, I'll just try and raise $300 to pay for the COVID and like, that's it. And like, I'll be happy with that. And then if you raise $2,000, awesome. But if you don't, like, at least you have a baseline. And that is what really we're looking for, Monica. That is what we're looking for with this campaign. Me and her talked about literally right before this, this, this, this, this, this audience, that this, us doing this, that like, we were scared. Because our campaign's launching tomorrow and we have no idea what's going to happen. Now, you will know what's going to happen, person viewing this, but like, we have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow. And it's because we have no baseline. Monica's launched a lot of books but never done a Kickstarter before. I've never launched a nonfiction book before. I told her, I was like, if this was a fiction book and we did all the planning and we had all these things, like, I would think we'd hit $10,000 like tomorrow or by Saturday at the latest. Like, that's where I would put all of our stretch goal markers for like $10 grand. But having— and like, usually when I launch a novel, I launch like 4 books at once. So like, I don't know. I haven't launched 1 book at a time in so long that like I'm— I just, I'd have no idea. And tomorrow—

We're going to find out.

Yeah. And you will. We will know. And you, and we set the goal at a, at a place that like, we will be very disappointed if we only reach that number.

Yeah.

Like we'll be exceptional. It is like a 10th of the minimum number that we want, but we figure, hey, if like everything goes like, like belly up, And like, all of, like, we literally, Facebook is down for the next month and a half. And like, our emails go down. Like, we can probably still raise $1,000. And so I'm, when I do my novel campaigns, I usually do like $2,000, or, but I've done as low as a dollar. I've done twice, My Father Didn't Kill Himself and The Godsverse Chronicles #1, I did a dollar campaign. And they will hate me for saying this, because like they don't like doing $1 campaigns. Like they are not fans. Uh, so maybe I would not do this, but like you can do as low as $1 if you don't, like, if you just are trying to set pace, you can do 5 days, 10 days. You don't have to do 30, 45, 60 days. Like you, if you, you know, you're probably not going to lose any, if you're just trying to gauge your audience's interest, you can probably do that in 10 days. Now, if it goes bananas, like, you probably are going to lose out on some sales if you don't do at least 17 days. Very little difference between 17 and 30 days unless you are, um, unless you are really, uh, like doing a lot of active promotion and mailing list swaps and like going on interviews on shows and stuff. You're probably going to lose much between 1 and 17 days— between 7— sorry, between 17 and 30 days. So you can try a 1-day campaign. I don't know. Just say, I'm having these books on sale for a— I mean, even if you're in KU, you got to understand, like, promo days, like 5-day promo days. Like, these are all things that, like, we know as authors better than most other categories on Kickstarter, or maybe even better than anyone but, like, maybe comics and board games and a couple of others. Like, but if you don't have a baseline, you're in very good company because Monica and I currently have no baseline. And every time I start a new series, I also have no baseline. Like, when I, when I'm doing— I, when I did that Obsidian Spindle Saga a couple of months ago, like, I had no idea. It's like, it's probably gonna raise $10 grand. Like, I'd be very surprised if it didn't, like, have 300 backers. But like, I had no idea because it's a brand new thing that I've never really done fairy tale stuff before, that it's a thing I really love doing and like a thing that is like my favorite thing to do maybe, so, besides mythology. And so you kind of are always, and, you know, as authors, we're always like launching books with no baseline really, you know? You have a successful, you're a successful author, you start a new series, like it might flop.

Yeah, it could totally flop.

You know, you have no idea. So, This is another—

you just miscalculate. Like, maybe you can figure it out later, but you miscalculate.

Yeah, and you don't know how many people on your list love you enough to set up a Kickstarter account and like then do it. And I realized we didn't talk about Brandon Sanderson's campaign, but like, it did well. It did $2 million. There's probably nothing wrong with it. He probably hired a big $35,000 or $50,000 company to run the campaign for him. Uh, you are not going to be Brandon Sanderson. There's literally never been a million-dollar Kickstarter campaign in the publishing category before him in the 10 years that Kickstarter has existed. Don't use him as a model, but take some of the things that he modeled well. And that's my Brandon Sanderson pitch there. You have Brandon Sanderson thing.

I don't even know if we have the campaign. We can look at it at some other point. But yeah, it seems like we're kind of wrapping up this recording or this video. We hope that you've just gotten a lot out of it. I feel like I got a lot out of it, even though it was talking for parts of it. But like, um, yeah, it just— it gave me a lot of clarity on some of the things that we're seeing in this space right now. I think it gave us a good overview of like what are indie authors actually doing right now in this space in the last couple years.

Yeah, I mean, and it's, it's really a lot.

So much.

Like, it's so much more than is happening even on like Amazon. You know, like there are some tools that exist that like didn't exist 2 years ago for Amazon. But like, aside from some tropes, like the things that were popular on Amazon and being done Amazon 5 years ago, like are being done today. Like, look, you're paranormal, if you're a paranormal fantasy author writing, writing shifters 5 years ago, you're doing real well, probably.

You're doing fine now.

If you're doing fine now, it's the same thing. Like you may be adding audiobooks or some other things to it and and like moving away, but like compared to Kickstarter where like people are raising for illustrated novels. We didn't even talk about like just adding like a special edition illustrated novel. My friend did that. You're not— we didn't even talk about like board games or comics or just expanding the space out here. We didn't talk about— we talked about audiobooks, but not translations. So like, you know, our friend does German translations, and like, you know, she's just like, I don't know where to go next. I'm like, I don't know, maybe if you got some French people on your list, or I don't know, Spanish speakers on your list, I don't know. So it's just there's so many options of what to do that I really have a hard time believing that any author that has ever released a book, including the estates of authors who have died, could not find something to use the Kickstarter platform for.

Yeah, yeah, and I will say that if you are struggling, I'm going to bring you back to Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter because we're going to be covering all of that. We're covering all the different types of campaigns you can do, we're covering, uh, just book launches in general, we're covering Russell's 10-day campaign, his 17-day campaign, the 30-day campaign. So we're covering all of this stuff. What to send your email list. Russell has generously shared his 17-day email sequence that he does. And so, you know, Russell, I mean, you know all of this, like you've literally backed 600 campaigns plus, 600 or more campaigns, which is crazy. And you've also run 18 campaigns your campaigns will, you know, I mean, I won't say always, but they hit around $10 grand for novels that are not on Amazon right now. So if you have novels on Amazon, you know, you can take a lot of what Russell's doing and apply it to yours, and you may see even greater success, really. And, you know, so there's, there's just so much that Russell has given to this book that it's like, if you are even like slightly interested in Kickstarter, even if you're not sure you want to run a Kickstarter yet, like this is a really important book to read. And it can just give you so many ideas, so many ways. You know, Russell, you run 4 to 5 Kickstarters a year. Even if somebody wanted to run 1 or 2 Kickstarters a year, like an extra, you know, $10 grand, like depending on where you're at in your career, $10,000, maybe it's $25,000, whatever it is, that is not chump change. Like, that's, that's significant. That's a significant income stream for you as a publisher and as an author.

So $1,000 too, like, if you literally— yeah, $1,000, like, that's, that's— most of my books cost between $1,000 and $2,000 to produce. So like, if you can make $1,000, you've probably paid off production on your book and Yeah, I mean, I, I think I'll add another thing, uh, before we get out of here. But like, I think it's not just a great book for people that, that, that do Kickstarter, but like if you're launching a book in any way, because one of the things that we're really going to talk about is buyer psychology, like customer journeys, like what people want to see in a book launch. And like, even if you're only going to set up your own sales page on your own website and like just have information, which I've done for campaigns before, like this is still going to be a good template just to have, oh, these are the things I need to think about to like get people to want to buy, to like engage with my page, to, to move myself through the, the buying journey. Because Kickstarter, the, the main thing that I always tell people on Kickstarter is this is a, uh, this is a sales page and it is, it is no, very little difference functionally than an Amazon page. Yes, the page is longer. Yes, it's more complex. Yes, there's more imagery.

Uh, you can do more with it is really what it is. It's not, it's not like, like Amazon doesn't let you do those things. They don't like to sell those things.

They're, they're, they're experimenting with that A+ now, but like still still, it's not like, it's not well known. And like, there's only like maybe 3 or 4 images you can get away with really without like overblowing the reader. You know, there's just so much you can learn about sales pages and selling a series in this book, even if you say, I have no interest in ever running a Kickstarter.

Yeah. I mean, the other thing is like Russell's content is very well tested. My content is also very well tested because the frameworks that we're talking about, they are in books that have sold like tons of copies and that like have launched people's careers. So it's like, no, we're not BSing you anywhere in this book. Like it's all real. It all works. We've tested it extensively and it's, it's good stuff. So definitely check out our campaign, kickstartyournovel.com. Um, we will be launching— we'll be launched by the time you see this, but we are launching officially Tuesday, October 5th, 2021. And we would love to see you behind the backer wall.

And then anything I want to say, like, if you just come to the campaign page and see how we're doing, just come and see how we're doing. Like, hey, like, this is what I just watched, the 2-hour video, and like, this is how it's going. The literal launch is happening, like, in progress. You know, even if you're just coming for that, Kickstart Your Novel is great because you clearly, if you've listened for 2 hours, have an interest in Kickstarter or book launches or the two of us, and this is a thing we're both very passionate about. So I hope to see you over there at, uh, and you can get the first 2 chapters for free.

Yeah, it'll be, yeah, it's probably a few more chapters than that, but yeah, yeah, it's a good chunk of the, um, yeah, good chunk of content for that. So, but there's content on the page too, so definitely check that out. Backers, backers updates, there'll be content. So we're excited, so come check us out, kickstartyournovel.com.