Kickstarting the Guild
A Kickstarter retrospective
During the summer of 2020, when we were all stuck at home, something amazing happened. Brandon Sanderson launched a Kickstarter campaign for a tenth anniversary leatherbound edition of The Way of Kings and it absolutely exploded, raising nearly $6.8 million from 30,000 backers, and becoming the most funded fiction Kickstarter of all time.
Earlier in 2020, indie turned trad turned indie author Michael J. Sullivan wrapped up the back half of a six-book trilogy on Kickstarter, raising $136,000 from 3,600 backers, gaining 1,000 backers between books 4 and 6.
Seeing these successes (along with other fellow indie authors) got my wheels turning. Should I join the ranks and launch a Kickstarter campaign for the NYC Questing Guild series?
Although the first book in the series had been well-received, it was a struggle to advertise and sell to a reader audience on Amazon that didn’t know quite what to make of my quirky urban fantasy with no werewolves, vampires, or sarcastic hard-drinking private investigators. Maybe Kickstarter could help the series find its audience and build it as I released successive entries, I thought.
Prepare to launch
But what to launch? Book 1 had already been out for a year and book 2 wasn’t yet finished. And launching a second book on a new platform, requiring new readers to buy two books upfront seemed like a tall order. I wrestled with offbeat ideas, like writing a new short story/novella and interspersing pages of a short comic book I would write.1 In the end, creating a special edition of Guild of Tokens checked off a bunch of boxes. It would allow me to use my existing book and short stories, along with a new cover and a new novella, to essentially relaunch the series and find a fresh audience.
I researched and planned my campaign last fall,2 and with trepidation, hit the launch button on the morning of January 26, 2021. Thankfully, my preparation had paid off, and the campaign funded on the first day and then some, and it was named a Project We Love by the Kickstarter staff soon after. We blew past my four planned stretch goals within the first week, leaving me scrambling to keep the momentum going by creating new stretch goals on the fly.
By the end of February, the campaign had hit 360 backers and over $12,000, funding six stretch goals. Over the next several months, I finished the new novella, worked with my cover/interior designer to create a new paperback and hardcover, and started pulling together the various parts of the stretch goal extras.
Fulfillment lessons
My bookselling prior to the Kickstarter campaign had all been digital: selling ebooks and audiobooks on Amazon and other platforms. But physical products are an entirely different beast. Not only did I have to figure out where to print the books, but also where to source/print the character cards, the art prints, the bookmarks, the bookplates, and postcards.
Then there was the matter of actually shipping the books. What few number of paperbacks I had previously sold had all been printed and shipped directly through Amazon. But now I was responsible for not only shipping out some 200-odd books, but making sure they arrived in pristine condition. I began another period of study, cataloging the various Kickstarter and other packages I received, and noting how the books were wrapped and what they arrived in.
Next came postage.3 I decided not to use a survey tool/manager, and instead fed my spreadsheet of addresses into Stamps.com and within minutes I was printing out postage labels. Because I was shipping books, I was able to send my packages via media mail, and marveled at how some packages made their way across the country before others were delivered to locales nearby.
So as not to overwhelm my mail carrier, I wrapped and packed books at a clip of about 12 a day, and by mid-way through, I was the proud temporary owner of several chic postal bins.
When the last books went out a few weeks ago, I breathed a sigh of relief and shifted to the next phase: selling my remaining stock via my online store and preparing to launch the campaign for book 2. But first, I needed to take stock of the positives and negatives of this campaign in the form of the below three questions.
Was it worth it?
Absolutely. After treading water on Amazon for a year, this campaign showed me that there was an audience that wanted to read this series and would even pay for a hardcover of a book from an author they had never heard from. I now have a base audience for the launch of the campaign for book 2 and more importantly, I know who these backers are and can email them when the time comes.
This is something critical to direct sales that selling on Amazon and other platforms does not give you. Even if you have a sign-up link to your newsletter in the back of your books, you still won’t end up capturing all of your readers, which leaves you at the mercy of your retail platform to hopefully show your new book to those readers when you launch.
The campaign also allowed me to not only fund the creation of a new cover and interior design, but also a ton of additional artwork. My goal with this series is to create an immersive story and world, and seeing the characters and world come to life thanks to some amazing artists was incredible.
What wouldn’t you change?
My goal with this first campaign was to keep the reward tiers and stretch goals fairly straightforward. That meant nothing bigger than what could fit in the bubble mailer with the book and nothing more complicated than art printed on paper. While it would have been cool to do poster prints, enamel pins, or real-life tokens, I didn’t want to overly complicate things by introducing new types of vendors that I had never worked with before.
I also debated before the campaign whether to offer a paperback or both paperbacks and hardcovers. I’m glad I ended up choosing the latter, as hardcover proved to be, by an overwhelming margin, the most popular format, despite the higher price.
I also included ebook versions in the reward tiers, which necessitated taking the book out of Kindle Unlimited.4 It turned out to be a great move, because I was able to net 75 digital-only backers and also give backers a lower-priced tier to start at and then potentially upgrade to a higher-priced tier by the end of the campaign. It was also a great value-add for every higher tier and had a distribution cost of zero as a bonus.5
What would you do differently?
Although I was incredibly happy with how the campaign turned out, in terms of backers and funding, there are a couple of areas I think I can improve in the next campaign.
First, I would finish the campaign page earlier, so I can get the pre-launch campaign link earlier and promote that for longer.6 Doing so would have allowed me to bring in more people during the first few days of the campaign as well as attract more Kickstarter superbackers who may be browsing upcoming projects.
Second, I would do more cross-promotions with concurrent campaigns, even if they weren’t in the Fiction category. A cross-promotion entails posting a link to another campaign in your Project Updates in exchange for that campaign sharing your link in their Updates. I did two cross-promotions during my campaign, and they were both successful in bringing in new backers, but I should have expanded my outreach, especially because there are usually not a lot of Fiction campaigns running at any one time.
Third, I would have scaled back my Stretch Goals slightly. I spent a lot of time during the campaign planning and coordinating new stretch goals. While I was able to fund the two additional stretch goals I added mid-campaign, I wonder how much these added stretch goals led to more backers.
Finally, I would have finished the new novella I wrote for the special edition before launching the campaign. My original plan was to finish it by the end of the campaign, but the scope of the story kept expanding and I ended up finishing it well after the campaign ended, which slowed down the entire production process. For book 2’s campaign, I will not launch the campaign until the final text is done (and if possible, not until the interior formatting of the book is done minus the Backer Acknowledgements).
I hope this was an interesting look inside my Kickstarter campaign.
If you’ve run a Kickstarter campaign before (in any category), what are some takeaways from your first campaign that you’ve applied to future campaigns?
The idea for this crazy literary concoction came from Kieron Gillen's Wicked + Divine 1923 one-shot, which is described as: “Basically, a bunch of 1920s gods based on major modernist figures stuck in the middle of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, done in a comics-prose hybrid that's clearly trying to start a fight with JONATHAN HICKMAN. (Yeah, you heard, Jon. Come at us, bro.)”
If you’re interested in planning and launching a Kickstarter campaign for the first time, I go over all the details here.
To save on headaches and streamline things, for international backers, I shipped individual copies direct from the printer and separately mailed the extras. With global shipping now in disarray, this ended up being a prescient decision, and also saved me from having to figure out how to fill out a Customs form.
If your ebook is part of Kindle Unlimited, Amazon's monthly all-you-can-read subscription service, it must be exclusive to Amazon (i.e. you can not put it up for sale on other retailers or sell it yourself or even give copies away for free).
I recommend pulling your book out of KU (if you are doing a special edition of an existing book) when your three-month period is up, and then you can always put the book back into KU after you fulfill your campaign. If you are launching a new book, then you can include the ebook, fulfill the campaign, and then out the ebook into KU when you launch on Amazon.
A pre-launch page has your campaign image, a short blurb, and a Follow button. If you hit the Follow button, you are notified when the campaign launches.