Why You Should Use Kickstarter if You're Already a Successful Author with Russell Nohelty

Hey there, Igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Today I'm turning the mic over to Russell Nolte, my co-author on the book Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. So what he wants to talk to you about today is the many different reasons you can use Kickstarter even if you're already a successful author. So if you have a great indie author career and maybe you're doing well on retailers like Amazon and Apple Books, or maybe you're doing really well in Kindle Unlimited, All of that is great. There's lots of opportunity to use Kickstarter in your business still, and lots of opportunity to make money. And in many ways, you may have even greater success than somebody who is turning to Kickstarter because they have, you know, unique or quirky or very niche books. So because you're already doing well on a retailer, you you may have some great success off a retailer as well. And Kickstarter is a great direct sales platform. So this is a way to get into that and to interact with your fans. So Russell's gonna tell you a lot more about this. If you're not already aware, Russell and I have a new book coming out called "Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter." We are actually launching it on the Kickstarter platform and you can back the project until November 13th, 2021, All you have to do is go to kickstartyournovel.com to see all the different reward tiers, all the cool stuff we're doing. We would love to see you behind the backer wall, and we think it's a great project. If you're interested in Kickstarter, then this is the book to get. So again, it's— the book is called Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. It's by myself and Russell Nolte, and you can back it at kickstartyournovel.com. If you're not familiar with Russell's work, he's raised over $250,000 on Kickstarter through comics, anthologies, and publishing. And he has done so across 18 campaigns. His campaign average is about $14,000. And his novel projects specifically, they typically back at around $10,000 or usually a couple thousand dollars over. So I'm gonna turn it over to Russell now. He has a ton of great stuff to share with you. And here's what he has to say.

So I've talked about, uh, some of the basic ways that you can use Kickstarter, but I wanted to spend a couple of minutes just talking about sort of the advanced set. Uh, so this is sort of, uh, if you already have an audience, uh, if you're already making money on, uh, on your books, how you can use this to really expand and grow, uh, grow your author business. Uh, so, uh, the first way, and probably my favorite way to use Kickstarter, is at the head of a launch. Uh, so at the front end, before you launch into KU or you launch your books wide. So I'm going to give an example specifically for KU, but this can also be utilized wide as well. So imagine you're in KU, you have a pretty big audience, which I don't— I guess you don't have to imagine because this is you if you're resonating with this. And usually what happens when you're in KU is I call it the Lindsay broker. Where you have a Patreon and you release your books a couple weeks early to your Patreon people, or you release it on all of the other platforms and then after a couple weeks you pull it down and you send your email list and say, "Hey, if you're not in KU, the book is available right now and it's only going to be available for 2 weeks and then I'm going to pull it down." Well, instead of doing that, you can launch a Kickstarter. And instead of having a Patreon or just uploading your books to all of these places. Now you're launching a book on Kickstarter a couple weeks or a month before your book goes into KU. You're maximizing the dollar because people on Kickstarter are going to be paying you more, and you're going to be getting 95— 90 to 95% of your revenue, as opposed to 60 or 70% of your revenue on other platforms. You're making more money, and, uh, you're able to give people in all of these other platforms— and also KU people who want to just buy the book and own it outright the option to buy the book first and foremost on Kickstarter. This takes out all of the upload and other platforms. It takes out the Patreon, and you're able to then deliver the book, and then after it's done, put it right on, right, right into KU. Now you can do the exact same thing if you're, if you're doing a wide launch, and just, and it's even better maybe as a wide launch because you don't have to take the book down. It's just one more place that you can have your book live, and then you can also put it up into all these other places later. And again, you're maximizing the dollar because instead of, you know, paying for the print costs and then paying the wholesale rate for print books and only getting 60 to 70%, on Kickstarter you're getting 90 to 95%.. And now, yes, you can do this on your own website too, but Kickstarter has an engine that helps promote your book to other people in the Kickstarter community. So you're getting the advantage of getting all of the people, uh, selling directly and getting people, uh, through a recommendation engine that Kickstarter is using. And you're not using any part of the cliff, the Amazon cliff or the other platforms cliff that exists., to eat up those precious days at the beginning of your launch. Uh, okay. So, um, that's the first way that I like using Kickstarter, sort of the advanced set. The other way is, uh, to build up a series before a rapid release. So if you look at my series, The Godsverse Chronicles, we've now done 2 Kickstarter launches for the novelizations of, uh, of my comic book series. Uh, but only 4 books are on Amazon now, and those were the 4 books that were on Amazon before we even did, um, the Kickstarter launch. Uh, so I am not putting any new books on, on Amazon or anywhere else until the series has finalized through Kickstarter, and that will be sometime in 2022. We'll finish it, and then I will have 11 books. I'm going to take those 4 books down, and I'm going to reload, relaunch them with, with fresh ASINs as 11 books, and I can smash through 11 books in 11 weeks, in 11 months. I can do them. If you're going for an All-Star bonus, maybe you can do 4 books month 1, 4 books month 2, 4 books month 3, and maybe you can hit 3 different All-Star bonuses. But you are, instead of only having 1 book, you have so many books and you don't have to necessarily, uh, even, uh, run advertising for the Kickstarter. I don't run advertising for any of my Kickstarters, and they're all earning out. So I am going into my launches on Amazon completely free and clear with no debt, and that— and also a nest egg. So right now, so far, we've built up about $5,000 of marketing budget to do this big launch. And hopefully with the final launch of these books, I'm going to build up another $3,000 to $5,000 of launches. So I'll have $10,000 on top of what I'm just going to put into that launch. So I'm not in the negative, I'm not in the red, I'm in the black on Kickstarter having spent no marketing money. And I'm able to smash all of the— and smash all of those books on Amazon, uh, uh, very, very quickly and, and, uh, rock it up even higher in the charts. Or that's my theory at least, and that's what I've seen, uh, uh, before. I'm doing this also with The Obsidian Spindle Saga, which is a book that I launched on Kickstarter this past year. And we launched 4 books. The series is planning to be 16 books long, and I'm going to keep it off of Amazon completely and off of all the platforms completely until the entire series is done, so that I have literally 16 books that I can spend an entire year launching very, very quickly on Amazon and all of the other platforms. And hopefully with the huge marketing budget that we've already, that I've started to accrue, already $4,000 of profit on one launch. If I can do that 4 more times, that's almost $20,000 just in profit on this launch that I can use to smash through all of the goals that I have and stay sticky on Amazon and all of the other platforms for a whole lot longer because I'm not in the red during my campaign. I'm already in the black and significantly in the black, and I know that these series is, these series are profitable because I've seen them make a profit on Amazon already. The third way I like to use it is to bring new formats into the world. I've never met an author, no matter how successful, even if they're pulling $1 million a year, that was happy with the expansiveness of their universe. Everyone wants to get into audiobooks or translations or board games or video games or movies or something else.. And while Kickstarter, I think, is amazing for fiction authors, uh, to, to, to make money for on fiction, it's also an amazing place for board games, for comic books, for, uh, uh, for movies, for music albums, and for all sorts of things that can expand out your world. And so you don't have to come free from the profits of your own, uh, out of your own profit, uh, pocket. You can test these things on Kickstarter. So I know if you're a successful author, you've got people saying Hey, where are the board games? Where are the pins? Where are all of this other stuff? And Kickstarter is a perfect place to say, okay, like, you want this? If we raise $10,000 on Kickstarter, I'll make this board game. Or if we raise $20,000, like, I'll do this short film, or whatever the thing is that your audience is craving for. Instead of testing it with your own money, you can actually test it through Kickstarter. Set a goal of you know, whatever it would cost you to make this, uh, to make it viable, to, to spend time on it and see if your audience really loves it. I did this with our book Ichabod Jones Monster Hunter, uh, Volume 2. I did, uh, I had people asking me for a second volume for years, and in 2019 I said, okay, put your money where your mouth is. I need $15,666 to make this book. If you raise that, I will not only make Issue 5 I will make volume 2, volume 3, and volume 4 of this series. But they needed to make a very high goal of almost $16,000 on a single-issue comic book before I even— before I would even do it. And so, and the— since then we've done volume 2 and volume 3, both of which have smashed through $20,000 each. We've already finished production on volume 4, which is the final issue. The final volume, and we're going to launch that next year. So we have all of these, uh, all of these goals for ourselves and all of these things our audience are asking for. And Kickstarter is a great way to test all of this stuff without coming out of your own pocket. The same thing can be said for merch. I've seen people do pins and book boxes and soap and all sorts of cool things, uh, creating maybe even like a monthly box for your fans. And instead of saying, hey, I don't know if my fans are going to want this monthly box or whatever this kind of odd thing is, you literally can go to Kickstarter and say, hey, I have this idea. You guys have kind of been asking for it, or like I want to test if it's worthwhile. So I have a goal of $5,000. Like if that many people, if 100, 200 people sign up for it, like I'll do it for a year and we'll see how it goes. Sometimes I wish I had done this and I didn't, to my detriment. So we launched an app. It did not go very well. If I had tested on a Kickstarter, I would have known it was not going to go, go well, and I wouldn't have spent several thousand dollars putting it together. So I regret it now because if I had just tested it with my audience on Kickstarter beforehand, I would have known that it wasn't going to work because there was just not enough interest there. And I know we all have these stories of things we've tried and failed and sunk lots of money into. So Kickstarter is a great way to not, uh, do not have to sink money into things that your audience may not want. Um, and finally, the, the, the reason that I love Kickstarter is that it's a way to give a fantastic experience to fans that they can't get any other way. So I use Kickstarter as like a fun, exciting experience where I can give fans like cool books that I like, that I get from my friends, and I'm able to distribute, um, cool merch that I'm not— that I don't make other times, and just kind of have a little party online. And a lot of people, uh, focus on sort of the fact that Kickstarter is a, a lot of work, and it is a lot of work, but, uh, I choose to focus on sort of the excitement that I get from giving fans this kind of experience a few times a year, or I can do VIP calls and I can, and, and, and, and I can, you know, bring them behind the scenes. And it's something that I don't do, uh, uh, regularly, uh, except during my Kickstarter campaigns. And during those campaigns, I'm able to really like bring, uh, bring up, bring a light to these universes and the fans and really celebrate them. And so there are some ways, sort of, I call this the advanced set because there are all sorts of ways reasons to use Kickstarter, uh, other than this. But if you are a, a, a, an author who's making a good living on your books already, I wanted to give you some reasons to try Kickstarter as well. So I hope that helps. I hope to see you behind the backer wall. If you want to check out our campaign, it's, uh, at kickstartyournovel.com, and our book is Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. And I hope to see you again behind the backer wall.

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