Full Free Book! Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter - Monica Leonelle & Russell P. Nohelty

Summary

In today’s digital age, authors are finding innovative ways to finance and sell their books. Monica Leonelle and Russell P. Nohelty demonstrate in their book, 'Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter', how using Kickstarter as a platform can revolutionize an author’s business model. Through personal stories and experiences, they lay out strategic plans for launching successful crowdfunding campaigns. They emphasize the importance of community, marketing, and the unique opportunities that crowdfunding offers, which traditional platforms might not support. Their insights provide invaluable guidance for authors aiming to leverage Kickstarter to reach their financial goals and deepen their relationships with fans.

Highlights

• Russell's journey to fund his books on Kickstarter after struggling with traditional retailers showcases the platform's potential. ✨
• Monica and Russell's book provides a step-by-step guide for authors to launch their campaigns. 🗺️
• The pair shares how Kickstarter isn’t just an additional income stream, but a way to attain creative independence. 🌟
• Russell and Monica reveal Kickstarter’s ability to build a thriving community around niche content. 🎭
• The book breaks down complex strategies into actionable plans, ensuring every author can participate. 🔍
• By funding through Kickstarter, authors can avoid some of the financial risks inherent in traditional publishing avenues. 💸
• Their strategies highlight how Kickstarter can complement rather than compete with other retail channels. 🔄

Key Takeaways

• Kickstarter is not just for funding strange gadgets; it’s a great platform for authors too! 📚
• You don’t need thousands of fans to have a successful Kickstarter campaign—just 1,000 true believers. 🙌
• Kickstarter allows authors to offer unique rewards and create a deeper connection with their audience. 💌
• Unlike traditional publishing, Kickstarter enables authors to economically produce niche books. 🔎
• Relying solely on retailers is risky; Kickstarter provides another revenue stream and marketing boost. 🚀
• The success on Kickstarter doesn't come overnight; it requires preparation, community building, and clear goals. 🛠️
• Selling on Kickstarter can involve bundles and exclusive editions, offering fans more value and a sense of exclusivity. 🎁

Overview

Kickstarter is revolutionizing how authors fund and sell books. Monica Leonelle and Russell P. Nohelty’s book, 'Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter', offers a comprehensive guide on how to successfully leverage this platform. With personal experiences, they illustrate the transformation of using crowdfunding for otherwise market-resistant projects.

Their book is a treasure trove of strategies for authors to maximize Kickstarter's potential. From campaign design to fulfillment, Monica and Russell offer expert advice for creating and executing compelling projects. They share insights on building a community, setting realistic goals, and engaging effectively with backers.

The book emphasizes the creative freedom and financial potential Kickstarter brings by eliminating traditional constraints. Authors can directly connect with their audience, funding unique projects that may not fit traditional market molds. This approach not only generates revenue but also cultivates a dedicated reader base.

Full Free Book! Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter - Monica Leonelle & Russell P. Nohelty Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 chapter 1 why you need to be using crowdfunding in your author business when have you ever heard of an author with barely 1,000 sales making $40,000 probably never yet I Russell Nolty have done exactly that I didn't always do it that way though I tried to launch a novel series on retailers in 2019 and it failed then
• 00:30 - 01:00 I relaunched that series on Kickstarter in 2020 and it raised almost $10,000 paying not just for the first book but also for three more books in the series those books went on to raise $1,000 which allowed me to write four more books I'll share my story around this in more detail later it's a good one the point I want to make right now is that this all happened through Kickstarter not through retailers if I had just focused on ret
• 01:00 - 01:30 tailers like people told me to do I would have given up on that series but I didn't have to because I found a way to write what I want and make money anyway and I don't want you to give up on your series either especially if you write in a mashup of genres don't write fast and don't make tons of sales from your books you don't need a lot of backers to make good money on Kickstarter the most backers I have ever had on a project is a little over 1,000
• 01:30 - 02:00 and I raised almost $40,000 with them on a recent campaign I only had $260 backers and we still raised over $10,000 for the project it's not a sexy thing to talk about but there are millions of authors and 83% of the money is made by 7% of them and if you are the type of writer who may only ever find 1,000 true fans then the question is how can you make a care out of them not how can you be one
• 02:00 - 02:30 of the lucky few who sells a ton of books on retailers that is why I love Kickstarter it allows you to reasonably make a living on a reasonable number of fans and not having to rely on chasing the lowest cost to get by on quantity because very few can play that game and even fewer can win if most authors sell 100 copies of their books I would rather them make $2,500
• 02:30 - 03:00 than $100 from them Kickstarter can work really well for people who write an off genres that publishing gurus tell them won't work because there's not a big enough market for them people just starting their career who don't want to spend 20 books getting it right before they start making a profit people who write one book a year and want to build up a back catalog before going to Amazon or other retailers at all
• 03:00 - 03:30 Kickstarter could give away for people to produce books that would not work on Amazon for all sorts of reasons and yet novelists haven't yet built a community on Kickstarter we wrote this book to change all of that so authors have more freedom and more options to get their writing careers off the ground what if you're doing well on retailers what if you have a thriving business on Amazon Apple Books Google Play Cobo Barnes & Noble Eng spark or
• 03:30 - 04:00 wherever else what if your books already sell well can you use Kickstarter like every other platform Kickstarter is even better for popular authors and books Kickstarter can also work really well for people who want to increase their direct sales especially on special edition print books merchandise and book boxes people who want to up their revenue per customer from the regular
• 04:00 - 04:30 price of an ebook $3.99 to 5.99 to a higher amount I regularly get an average $125 to 40 per backer people who want to build an excited fan base and the email list to go with it so they can bring their fans deeper into their world in the future Kickstarter is a phenomenal tool to add to your income streams if you already have a huge fan base on retailers we've seen independent Authors
• 04:30 - 05:00 Hit six figures on their Kickstarter campaigns and we know that this is an untapped resource for so many in the publishing Community should you be using crowdfunding in this book we're going to focus on why Kickstarter is important how authors are using it and how they should be and all the ins and outs of running an awesome campaign that could make you good money here's how we divvy up the chapters chapter 2 Kickstarter is ready
• 05:00 - 05:30 for publishing projects how Kickstarter saved Russell's author career and why he uses it consistently now why Monica loves Kickstarter and sees it as an important platform for the future of independent publishing what's true about Kickstarter and what's not why are Russell and Monica backing this so hard chapter three how independent authors use crowdfunding
• 05:30 - 06:00 why authors are using crowdfunding what are the different benefits and goals you can achieve with crowdfunding through Kickstarter why Kickstarter specifically instead of selling direct using another crowdfunding platform and more chapter four the five pillars of a successful Kickstarter launch what are the five pillars of a successful Kickstarter book launch what important aspects should you handle under each of the Five
• 06:00 - 06:30 Pillars how do you plan the broad Strokes of your Kickstarter launch chapter five designing your Kickstarter campaign for profitability what project should you start with for your first campaign what are the most important aspects of designing your campaign how can you budget your campaign for profitability and why must you do this from the beginning chapter six maximizing the buyer
• 06:30 - 07:00 psychology of a Kickstarter what gets people excited about Kickstarter and how is it different from a retailer book launch how do the various categories of psychological triggers improve your campaign how can you use buyer psychology to make your campaign as sticky as possible chapter 7 setting up your Kickstarter sales page how to explain your Kickstarter project
• 07:00 - 07:30 using Russell's foolproof messaging system why you need lots of visuals and what to use what do you say or create for the video Chapter 8 platform pre-checks and challenges what you need to double and triple check before launching what author specific challenges you need to make decisions on before you create your first project what you might encounter as you
• 07:30 - 08:00 run your project and how to get help chapter nine setting up your Kickstarter pre-launch marketing how can you most effectively use your Kickstarter pre-launch page what types of content do you share shortly before the campaign to get people excited what invisible tasks should you be doing behind the scenes during pre-launch chapter 10 planning a launch and sending more traffic to your
• 08:00 - 08:30 Kickstarter what is the 5 bx3 launch plan and how can you apply it to Kickstarter where do you find potential readers who might enjoy your work how do you catalog every opportunity you have to reach readers and orchestrate those opportunities for maximum benefit chapter 11 your Kickstarter is live launch week what should you do on day one of your launch
• 08:30 - 09:00 what is the type of promo you should be scheduling for the first week how do you use the first week to predict your final results chapter 12 your Kickstarter is live The Dead Zone what is the type of promo you should be scheduling for the middle of your campaign the thing that kills your Kickstarter campaign during this phase and how to prevent it the psychology of The Dead Zone and how to manage your own own
• 09:00 - 09:30 emotions chapter 13 your Kickstarter is live the last days what is the best promo for the end of your Kickstarter campaign what should you expect on the last days what do you do if funding is close versus you're already funded chapter 14 breaking down our Kickstarter campaign in detail what did we do each week to bring in over $21,500
• 09:30 - 10:00 what costly mistakes did we make what did we do well that you can emulate for your own campaign chapter 15 ushering people through your sales process how to come up with a sales funnel for your email list and advertising Target audiences what is the 10 stages of audience why you need to map out the 10 stages of audience for your brand before starting l Outreach and
• 10:00 - 10:30 advertising chapter 16 building your email list for a Kickstarter launch how to choose between organic and inorganic growth what are the four best ways to build your email list of readers chapter 17 exactly what to send to your email list and when to send it what is a good reason to send an email to your list and what is not why you need something new to say
• 10:30 - 11:00 every time and how to find it how do you manage email list overwhelm chapter 18 how to advertise your Kickstarter do you need ads for your Kickstarter if you decide to use ads what should you use and where should you send people how much should you spend and what results should you expect chapter 19 delivering on your Kickstarter all the details of how to collect money
• 11:00 - 11:30 for your Kickstarter project tips and tricks for delivering rewards to backers how to handle challenges with delivery plus how much time to to budget chapter 20 keeping the momentum going from your Kickstarter how do you make the most out of the time you've spent on Kickstarter how do you convert new Kickstarter backers to fans for life
• 11:30 - 12:00 what do you do with all your book inventory and how will you distribute it chapter 21 using Kickstarter with book retailers what should you launch on which platform and when what are some things you need to align during your campaign how do you transition readers from retailers to Kickstarter and vice versa chapter 22 using Kickstarter with patreon and substack
• 12:00 - 12:30 what should you launch on which platform and when what are some things you need to align during your campaign how do you transition readers from patreon or substack to Kickstarter and vice versa who is Russell my name is Russell p no halty and I have been independently publishing since 2014 after several years of being mismanaged by small press Publishers I have launch laed 18 successful publishing Kickstarter
• 12:30 - 13:00 raising over $250,000 on the platform for comics anthologies and novels and have traveled the country for many years selling my books during conventions during that time I have built a thriving mailing list Facebook page and authorship Community you can find more of my work at www. russell.com who is Monica
• 13:00 - 13:30 my name is Monica Lenell and I have been independently publishing since 2009 I write young adult fantasy under solo storm and romance under other pen names with about 40 books total in my catalog 25 of which are fiction my urban fantasy Nolla the last daughter hit the USA Today bestseller list in 2017 as part of a boxed set I've also written over 15 n non-fiction books about writing editing
• 13:30 - 14:00 publishing marketing and business you can learn more about my work at the world needsyou book.com we love talking about Kickstarter co-writing non-fiction books always brings up questions around how you communicate and speak to the reader do we do the I Russell and I Monica to indicate who's who do we go with i as if we are one person writing to
• 14:00 - 14:30 you we landed on using we most of the time because the truth is that we think the same way about a lot of topics around the publishing World however for this particular book Russell is the expert on Kickstarter Monica is mostly just publishing his words and combining his strategies with familiar terminology from her own Series so you will hear a lot more from Russell and we'll try to indicate that with some OD I Russell thrown in
• 14:30 - 15:00 there to be clear we are two separate people with two completely separate businesses aside from our collaborations with this series Russell has one foot in the comic book industry and the other in fiction while Monica has several fiction and non-fiction pen names across a diverse set of genres niches we also both write books host podcasts and offer courses to Independent authors and are considered thought leaders in the publishing
• 15:00 - 15:30 space despite building two very different businesses we are like-minded on many topics including book launches we've also been friends for several years so we've had the chance to talk about all this stuff we're pretty much always nodding our heads in agreement when the other is speaking in the end when we say we it means that at least one of us advises this but probably both of us putting our experiences together we have personal experience with a ton of the
• 15:30 - 16:00 opportunities authors have for book launches and Russell is particularly knowledgeable about Kickstarter which we'll share more about as the book goes on who this book is for this book covers how authors can get the most out of Kickstarter but we also believe that most authors should be using Kickstarter as part of their efforts to build their audience and deepen their relationships with readers and fans
• 16:00 - 16:30 sometimes Kickstarter is built as a platform with really specific one-size fits all needs but it couldn't be further from the truth Kickstarter can work at any point in an author's career and can work for a multitude of goals we have had conversations about this and we keep coming back to seven scenarios where authors can use Kickstarter to further their careers there are more of course and an author could fall under multiple scenarios but these are the seven we see most often
• 16:30 - 17:00 they are scenario number one the author is launching a first book or first book in a new series pen name whatever authors can often use Kickstarter to practice their book launch most launches at retailers require spending marketing money to get visible but Kickstarter helps you get money before you deliver the product it can also help you get feedback on your project or focus on increased Revenue
• 17:00 - 17:30 per reader that means that when you launch at retailers your messaging is honed your production costs are already covered and you maybe have some Capital to put toward ads for your launch scenario number two the author has a huge audience authors who have a huge audience that they want to do cool stuff for and make more money with have a huge advantage over most authors that said it's easy not to then Market your campaign especially if you
• 17:30 - 18:00 expect people to come in this scenario it's usually not a question of if you will fund or not but rather a question of where you will land mistakes can shave thousands off of your end total for funding so it's really important to nail campaign design control costs and physical rewards and use two goal types weekly goals and Flash goals to keep momentum going during the middle parts scenario number three the author has a huge
• 18:00 - 18:30 backlist authors who have a huge backlist run into the problem of readers not knowing where to focus or start you can put a book or series front and center and give your readers a cue to pay special attention Kickstarter is fantastic for pattern interrupts it's also a great platform for selling lots of bundles you can put your entire backlist in the add-on section which will greatly boost the amount you pH you can create
• 18:30 - 19:00 bundles of your work that people buy in packages this works especially well for a completed series you can also sell your backlist books that are not popular on retailers scenario number four the author is going deeper with fans authors who have books that have a strong fandom can use Kickstarter to deepen that relationship with fans they can focus on cool merchandise or an ancillary product produ like a game deck
• 19:00 - 19:30 or workbook printable the greatest value of this is finding your most Ardent fans increasing Revenue per customer bringing more people into your full body of work and getting an email list of buyers that you can then build a deeper relationship with you can also convert readers who have bought a book but haven't read or readers who have read but haven't gotten everything to true or lifelong fans scenario number five the author is struggling to find their
• 19:30 - 20:00 fans authors who have done all the marketing tasks like building an email list running ads selling books and more may find that their email list and readers just aren't converting if your email list isn't converting then your target audiences and lookalike audiences are likely not converting either you can't grow your business without figuring out who your books resonate with and why they like them Kickstarter is a way to experiment with
• 20:00 - 20:30 what offers your readers actually want you can separate your email list or audience into buyers versus lurkers and learn more about the profile or your true readers once you have a clean email list you can use it for retargeting through advertising and other means scenario number six the author is using Kickstarter as another retailer income stream authors who are committed to wide want to be in as many places as possible
• 20:30 - 21:00 you can use exclusivity in a way you can control releasing Advanced or special additions of your work you can build a new stream of income and tap into a new audience of people who love to back kickstarters as well as fans who love to buy bundles or ancillary cool products you can also be consistently present on Kickstarter as a retailer by planning multiple campaigns a year and Kickstarter integrates nicely with other
• 21:00 - 21:30 efforts like paying for audiobooks and translations building inventory for special events and selling directly from your website scenario number seven the author wants to grow their printbook revenue Kickstarter projects fund higher when they include ebook and print book rewards the ebook goes for15 to 10 and the paperback plus domestic shipping goes for $15 to 25 since project creators are always
• 21:30 - 22:00 trying to push toward a larger tier a series can work better because the bundles go for more print does especially well on Kickstarter and Kickstarter has been a fundamental part of Russell's efforts to grow his print sales the best way to do this is to run the launch of your new series on Kickstarter first before launching on retailers six months of exclusivity to the kickstarter campaign has worked well for Russell in the past you can pre-sell a ton of books deplete
• 22:00 - 22:30 your inventory of print book backlist by using add-ons and get a print run covered so you have inventory for events direct sales and more scenario number eight the author wants to refine their idea story or message Kickstarter is ideal for selling Hands-On experiences where you can get feedback on your book content whether it's fiction or non-fiction this is particularly useful for non-fiction Russell system had already been tested
• 22:30 - 23:00 on Comics novels and anthologies you can see that we've used our own campaign for this book to not only test Russell's system for non-fiction but also to build a community of interested authors who are ready to walk through setting up their Kickstarter with us in our group of 70 plus authors we are learning what their challenges fears and Hang-Ups are we are studying different author Styles and cataloges to see where Russell system breaks down this testing is incredibly
• 23:00 - 23:30 important on the non-fiction side and is the reason that this book might eventually go on to sell thousands of copies on the fiction side this is important too and works in the same way if you are using Kickstarter to test and improve your books for the Long Haul make sure you include a group experience so you can guide your readers through the content and make improvements based on their feedback getting things wrong
• 23:30 - 24:00 sometimes this book and Book Sales supercharged the series of books that it's attached to covers an ambitious spread of topics in intense detail we consider ourselves well-versed in the publishing industry through sheer experience between the two of us we have over 60 titles across fiction non-fiction and Comics successful audiobooks and translations titles in multiple genres and
• 24:00 - 24:30 niches tons of experience selling both ebook and print tons of experience with crowdfunding a solid understanding of Kindle unlimited versus wide from experience strong internet marketing skills still there is plenty that we don't or can't know we have done everything humanly possible to get these books right but there may still be gaps in our knowledge or places where we misstate
• 24:30 - 25:00 something this is where you come in please feel free to reach out to Monica with corrections if we've gotten something wrong Within These Pages or in subsequent books we want to make these books the best resource they can be so we won't be offended you can email Monica at Team theworld needsyou book.com or through her personal email igniters tv@ gmail.com we be sure to incorporate those updates into to the next version of the
• 25:00 - 25:30 book additionally if you want to follow industry news as it's happening make sure you join Monica's substack newsletter aggressively wide aggressively wide. substack do.com the world needsyou book.com substack we also have a Facebook group that we both admin for this book series called Book Sales supercharged Advanced book marketing for authors please join us as we share lots of awesome stuff related to this book
• 25:30 - 26:00 series there facebook.com/ groupbook supercharge additional resources sign up for Russell's free business course a free 10-day course highlighting the most important ways authors can start acting like a business it's the only way to get on my super secret monthly creative newsletter filled with inspirational ideas about how to lead a creative life the complete creative.com
• 26:00 - 26:30 sfbc sign up for Monica's industry newsletter the best place to keep up with this conversation is to join my industry substack newsletter aggressively wide the world needsyou book.com substack check out Russell's Blog the complete creative helps authors lead a successful creative life dealing with everything from mindset and creativity
• 26:30 - 27:00 to sales and marketing I've posted hundreds of blog posts courses and podcast archives discussing what it means to be a creative human www.the complete creative.com subscribe to Monica's podcast I post new 20-minute episodes about publishing going wide serialized fiction industry Trends and so much more on YouTube and my podcast feed the world needsyou book.com
• 27:00 - 27:30 podcast the world needsyou book.com youube follow Monica on medium I post regular articles about the publishing industry if you prefer to read about new developments the world needsyou book.com medium check out the rest of the series The Book Sales supercharged series focuses on each retailer format and plat form diving deep into everything you
• 27:30 - 28:00 need to know to succeed in that particular space you can find all the information about the series plus grab the entire set of books in a bundle directly from my website at a significant discount to purchasing each individually at retailers the world needsyou book.com wide chapter 2 Kickstarter is ready for publishing projects there are times when we encounter a lot
• 28:00 - 28:30 of push back on Kickstarter among independent authors the majority of people we talk to about this get it and are excited but sometimes we have to go a little deeper with the conversation to explain more of what the platform can do for authors in this chapter we're going to address the resistance we see along with sharing our own stories around Kickstarter and why we've become such passionate Advocates of of the platform Russell's Kickstarter
• 28:30 - 29:00 story I want to tell you a story about how Kickstarter saved my life and my career I know that might sound like a hyperbole but it's absolutely true it's the hardest story that I have to tell the year was 2018 and I was really getting into writing novels seriously I'd written some novels before and I'd launched a couple of novels on Kickstarter along with some anthologies
• 29:00 - 29:30 and some comic books but I was not really in the novel writing scene like I am today I certainly hadn't written more than a couple of novels compared to now where I'm writing my 35th novel at the time of this writing in 2018 I'd been consuming all of the things that you consume when you're trying to learn how to break into writing I'd been a successful Comic Book Creator and editor for a few years and I was working the convention scene
• 29:30 - 30:00 and I really wanted to get out of it I was in the middle of writing 20 books in 20 months and I just wanted to know what the best way was to get these books out here I had read dozens of books from all sorts of authors read all of the Facebook posts on the various groups and listened to a ton of podcasts one thing that became abundantly clear was that real authors didn't launch Books on Kickstarter they launched books on Amazon I started to buy into one prominent path
• 30:00 - 30:30 to success do rapid releases and spend a bunch of AD money on launch I decided that after the launch of my next book I would not launch Books on Kickstarter anymore I was just going to launch books on Amazon results from launching on Amazon I had this big rollout strategy that I had built from all of the combined knowledge of the hundreds of thousands of authors who had come before me I wrote a series called the God's
• 30:30 - 31:00 First Chronicles that seemed to be written by the book of what people tell you to do in 2019 I decided not to do Comics anymore and instead do novels it was going to work it was going to work my goal was to break even on the first book and then sort of slowly build from there what ended up happening was I launched the first book and it did break even I launched the second book and it
• 31:00 - 31:30 did worse I launched the third book and it did even worse than the second as I launched the fourth fifth and sixth books every book had progressively worse sales results I think I sold five or six copies of book six from the hundreds that I had sold for the first one so the series readership was shrinking rather than growing hitting depression from the series failure in June 2019 I was in the worst place I
• 31:30 - 32:00 had been since probably the very beginning of my career when I was sinking money into my comics and other creative projects I had no audience at the time not even on Kickstarter it was bad if a couple things hadn't gone my way or had gone the other way I may not even be in publishing right now I had put my whole career on the line for this project and it was falling apart in front of me that's when I
• 32:00 - 32:30 realized that I wrote in a genre that wasn't super popular I wasn't writing to Market books in hot genres and that was what I thought was required to make a living as an independent author there are definitely success stories of authors doing this and making money but most authors even the ones that do publish to Trend and Trope or still not making a full-time living if I was going to write what I was interested in there was no amount of incorporating tropes and tweaking ads that could make
• 32:30 - 33:00 my mythological fantasy books extremely popular and sell several thousands of copies a month which would be required for me to make a true living from writing the system felt broken the more I talk to authors the Rapid Release plus ads strategy wasn't working for most of them either again even many of the authors who were writing the ideal books that used the most common common successful author advice weren't making enough to quit
• 33:00 - 33:30 their jobs they had a day job or a supportive spouse who paid the majority of the bills or a trust fund or other sort of independent wealth the system was and is a broken system that works for some people especially if you write in popular genres romance Thriller crime or you write in an upand cominging genra like military sci-fi cozy mystery or clean sweet Romance the general advice could work for you
• 33:30 - 34:00 if you were following all of the trends you were willing to write just a book a month for a really long time you got some luck in addition to your hard work and persistence but it was not working for most authors as I said at the beginning there are millions of authors and 83% of the money is made by 7% of them I realized that there was no good way to be an author aside from to write
• 34:00 - 34:30 the things that you love or the things your audience loves or hopefully both and find your audience in a place that they want to buy since I had been successful on Kickstarter in comics I considered trying it again though I'd never really had success with novels the two novels I had raised funds with through a Kickstarter project had these results 155 backers and 3,400 $31 75 backers and
• 34:30 - 35:00 $1,866 I thought those were Monumental failures then I realized that most people don't ever make that amount of money with a book and I was making it before I ever did a retailer launch that meant that by the time I brought my books to Amazon they were already wildly popular compared to the average they had broken even I could never sell another copy of
• 35:00 - 35:30 either of those books again and still have made a killing on them compared to the average book I never quite got that out of my brain when I was launching these books I would sell a couple hundred copies and I'd think wait I only made $70 to $300 on these couple hundred copies because I'm selling the book at 99 or $2.99 suddenly my previous results didn't look so bad and I wondered what
• 35:30 - 36:00 if only 51,000 people ever like some of the books I write because they are weird and special and Niche what if my books are not designed to sell hundreds of thousands of copies on Amazon and I accept that if I continued my career launching on Amazon that career would be over but if I accepted some of my books for what they were Niche quirky offbeat I could use my experience with comics on novels
• 36:00 - 36:30 too books that don't sell at Amazon can still sell most of my books and Comics at this point sold perfectly well at shows but were not selling on Amazon so I asked myself okay what if I think about this differently I packaged the books that didn't sell on Amazon together and said God I need like $10,000 to make this not be a massive disaster for me I had already spent a ton of money on
• 36:30 - 37:00 editing covers that now needed to be redone promotion that didn't work I had spent $112,000 and made $3,000 on the series I needed a big chunk of money to break even and get out of the hole and then I could make up the rest at shows or some other way in January 2020 I put the books on Kickstarter and set a $2,000 goal because I was putting four books up $500
• 37:00 - 37:30 per book is a good starting place for a Kickstarter when you have no idea what to expect and I just crossed my fingers please please please please please please make me enough please please please please please please just let me stem off the disaster we raised almost $10,000 not only did we raise enough to break me even on a series that had not sold on Amazon but we raised enough to make a fifth
• 37:30 - 38:00 book and then that fifth book became a sixth book and seventh book and I brought those three books to Kickstarter in January 2021 and they raised even more money $1,000 and suddenly instead of being at a deficit I had made a profit of $3,000 on those seven books suddenly there was a path forward for my career and once you have a path for profitability Everything Changes this experience is the basis of
• 38:00 - 38:30 my business plan for the foreseeable future and the reason I'm still pursuing writing novels it's possibly the only reason because Amazon was not a viable place for me to launch these books into the black and I don't think I am alone now I can launch on Kickstarter get the books paid for and launch profitably on retailers at a later date Monica's Kickstarter story I didn't intend to include my
• 38:30 - 39:00 Kickstarter story in this book because I don't exactly have a long history of using Kickstarter aside from the one Loki attempt at funding my first novel through friends and family back in 2011 and the campaign for this book unlike Russell who has backed over 600 projects and created 18 I have only backed a few handfuls of projects in the last decade or more that I've been on the platform as as we were writing this book however it occurred to me that my own
• 39:00 - 39:30 Kickstarter story is the antithesis to Russell's Kickstarter story while I have definitely had challenges since I started publishing in 2009 including the first 5 years or so where I wasn't producing much and wasn't making much money I did eventually figure out Amazon and other retailers and I did build a traditional independent author career where I act as both the writer and the publisher my books sell over 60,000
• 39:30 - 40:00 copies on the non-fiction side and even my fiction and spirituality books are finding Their audience fairly easily through all the regular means including list building launches toying with the algorithms and advertising all of this is to say that I don't really need Kickstarter to pave the way for me to be an author once I got past all my own stuff and started publishing consistently good work regularly around 20 4 or so I was basically in the black on
• 40:00 - 40:30 retailers and this isn't to say that I haven't destroyed and built back up my publishing business a time or two I have but my business has never experienced failure when I'm doing all the things right in fact when I do all the things right I basically get the results expected on Amazon and other retailers and that's why my story is so important to share here because there are many many authors like like me who happen to follow best publishing
• 40:30 - 41:00 practices and get the outcome expected who may be scratching their heads at Russell's story and wondering how exactly does this apply to me again why Amazon works for some authors so let me go a little deeper into why retailers work for me and my catalog and why they're going to continue to for starters I write non-fiction and I write a lot of it this alone is going to pay my bills for the rest of my life easily with just the books I have
• 41:00 - 41:30 published right now and not counting everything I have in the works I have one book called novel writing prep that could probably make me a good living by itself especially when I add in the companion workbook and several other ancillary products along with the other things that non-fiction authors can do like workshops Consulting speaking and More in fact a lot of authors only write a non-fiction book or two and do exactly this it's a good
• 41:30 - 42:00 focused business model and a straightforward path to success as long as the initial book is well written and finds a solid audience so I don't need to write any more non-fiction books for the rest of my life the only reason I do is because I'm a passionate weirdo who doesn't know how to have a 40,000 word conversation with other authors in person so writes down her side of it in a book instead the books make money and they will make
• 42:00 - 42:30 money Forever at this point I also have a spirituality pen name that follows the same Playbook and business model as everything under the Monica lenel brand and in 5 years or so as long as I keep building it that brand will also be making full-time living money for me just by selling on retailers with that acknowledgement I want to set aside the non-fiction stuff for a moment moving on to my fiction I've always gravitated toward popular genres
• 42:30 - 43:00 and popular tropes I've written billionaire romance urban fantasy paranormal romance Academy and many other popular tropes and sub genres with Fair success when I put those books up they sell when I put ads on them they sell more when I put any effort into writing consistently in a series the pen name takes off my books are about young be beautiful women who have power they have money they are royalty they have
• 43:00 - 43:30 multiple hot powerful men who are desperately in love with them and guess what that happens to be what's popular and what will remain popular for a long time to come and to be clear I don't purposely write to tropes or Universal fantasies I gravitate toward them naturally I write what I want it just happens to be Evergreen popular kind of kind of like how I like Starbucks and there just happens to be one on every
• 43:30 - 44:00 corner or how I love Taylor Swift and her songs are always available at the karaoke bar I guess I'm pretty basic in this sense Kickstarter is not necessary yet a fiction author with my tastes also doesn't need Kickstarter to pave the way for their career at least not right now and there are a lot of us out there like this for whom Kickstarter is not a necessity to our survival but that
• 44:00 - 44:30 doesn't mean that we shouldn't be paying attention a few years ago I was following one of Russell's campaigns for a summer slate of novels he was launching I knew he was a big name on Kickstarter and had seen success there with his novels and Comics often raising $10,000 or more on many of his projects but still I was puzzled by this particular Campaign which was four novels in completely different genres with completely different branding and
• 44:30 - 45:00 storylines I studied the campaign quite a bit and couldn't find anything these four novels had in common besides having the same author Russell Nolty yet the campaign was raising a ton of money and the most popular reward tier by far was to get all four books in digital now most people would have glanced at this campaign and chocked it up to Russell is a unicorn who has built a Kickstarter audience that will will back anything he puts out and moved on
• 45:00 - 45:30 but I knew there was something more to it more on that shortly I want to be clear about something at this time Russell and I were friends but we were not working on books together I was not helping him publish all his knowledge on all the things and we had not conceived of this book get your book selling on Kickstarter yet but I was totally sending this campaign to my six-figure author friends asking them how do you think he is doing this because in my world this didn't
• 45:30 - 46:00 work you couldn't throw a rock without hitting an author who would tell you that their readers didn't follow them to a new genre or to a new series or even to a new spin-off series set in the same universe in the independent publishing world you needed to stay in your lane to survive you needed to write the next book in your bread and butter series and not stray too far from your branding and tropes in your other series or else your readers would
• 46:00 - 46:30 disappear unfortunately no one else was as interested in dissecting this campaign as I was but fortunately that meant that Russell remained one of the best kept secrets in Indie publishing until we finally decided to write some books together not sure he would have signed with me otherwise can you use parentheses back toback like this I'm not sure but now feels like an important time to satisfy the Curiosity some of you have about my
• 46:30 - 47:00 top five Clifton strengths so here they are strategic communication futuristic activator ideation okay now back to the story at the same time I was tracking another Evolution on the non-fiction side of things which was that as competition Rose marketing got more complex this is pretty obvious as a standalone statement but what really interested me about it was that I had witnessed with my own eyes how the
• 47:00 - 47:30 fiction industry followed about 5 to 7 years behind non-fiction in all things marketing I watched as the fiction industry started using lead magnets rebranded as reader magnets about 5 to seven years after non-fiction implemented them on a wide scale I watched as the fiction industry started using perree Facebook ads cross promotion industry bundles and many other efforts that the non fiction industry had pioneered which copywriters and direct sellers had pioneered before
• 47:30 - 48:00 them I listened as fiction authors said marketing fiction is different and thought to myself no it's just not as complex yet but it will get there I listened as fiction author said we don't need to do that or that doesn't work for us then a few years later the thing was a widespread and common practice marketing strategy or tactic and I paid very close attention when I noticed that the Gap in time was closing from the fiction industry
• 48:00 - 48:30 lagging about 5 to 7 years behind non-fiction to now lagging maybe two to three years behind non-fiction that Gap possibly spurred by the pandemic is closing faster and faster now still as I studied Russell's Summers slate campaign it finally hit me why it had intrigued me so much Russell was using several tactics that were a necessity in marketing non-fiction but that weren't yet a necessity in marketing fiction because the market
• 48:30 - 49:00 just wasn't competitive enough to Warrant the efforts yet but that didn't mean those things weren't going to become a necessity the fiction industry hasn't quite caught up on Kickstarter but we're headed there and soon the thing Russell built on Kickstarter that many successful authors don't have I found myself extremely interested in Kickstarter not because I need it now but because I'm going to need it in the
• 49:00 - 49:30 future I'm going to need to build a direct and deeper relationship with my fans that retailers don't own and it's eventually going to be a requirement just like it is for non-fiction authors and business owners to maintain success as a fiction author it's not just Kickstarter either other areas where you can deepen your relationship with your fans include direct sales in person book events and signings getting books into new formats
• 49:30 - 50:00 and getting your content onto fan-based platforms like patreon and substack Kickstarter is an important part of this ecosystem that allows authors to stop funding these efforts from what should be their profits in fact a lot of authors including Russell use Kickstarter to fund print runs for events and direct sales too one of the keys to success as an author is staying in your lane when people talk about this they often refer to it as a sub genre or a Trope that you
• 50:00 - 50:30 stick to but it's far more than that to really succeed you need to not only stay in your lane but you also eventually need to carve out a lane that you can dominate the process of doing this is the same process of finding your true fans and figuring out the threads that run through all of your books Russell knows his fans exceptionally well because he has a direct relationship with them through Kickstarter events and other means the Summers slate Kickstarter that
• 50:30 - 51:00 he ran succeeded because he knew exactly what people loved about his current series and was able to push those same buttons for people with these disperate titles Russell's readers love the mythology he creates in his fiction but they also love the mythology of him and his story and while you don't need Kickstarter to figure out your fans or your own mythology the platform is designed to help you do exactly that as with any new thing there's a
• 51:00 - 51:30 first mover advantage to getting in early right now there's an attention Arbitrage on Kickstarter because so few fiction authors are using it there's little competition and if you do a lot of things right you can make a lot of money from it and this is going to become even more true for authors who have success on other platforms already regardless of your success uccess level Russell is the perfect person to learn Kickstarter from because
• 51:30 - 52:00 he had to make it work for books that it couldn't work for on Amazon his methods will work even better for books that are doing okay or well on Amazon we may also teach you several General things about marketing buyer psychology and book launches along the way too in 2020 Russell and I signed a publishing contract and in 2021 we launched the book sales supercharge series for this reason we believe in wider than wide because we know it is
• 52:00 - 52:30 the future for all independent authors not just those who aren't getting what they want or need through retailers Kickstarter is ready for publishing projects at the same time that we are writing these books Kickstarter is completely set up to be an awesome Marketplace and retailer for independent authors the place where independent author projects live on Kickstarter is in in the publishing category which includes all sorts of things from
• 52:30 - 53:00 anthologies to poetry to journals and Zen to podcasts you can browse the fiction or non-fiction subcategory as well as children's books young adult and a few others that might be relevant to those reading under these subcategories you can find all past successful cancelled and failed projects Kickstarter never deletes them and you can see tons of copy and reward tear that might give you ideas an inspiration for the types of Kickstarter projects you might want to
• 53:00 - 53:30 start while Kickstarter as a platform definitely has all the functionality needed to host cool projects by independent authors one thing that's lacking is an active audience of people who back a bunch of these types of projects much of the frustration we've heard around Kickstarter stems from this as authors are looking for a platform that brings more readers to them in addition to them bringing readers to the platform but we believe that Kickstarter will eventually have a community of fiction
• 53:30 - 54:00 readers Comics has paved the way for this with a Vibrant Community of backers that support the entire industry if you are a Comics Creator you are likely on Kickstarter and these projects fund orders of magnitude higher than the typical publishing project right now all of that can and will change though if we want to use kickstarters unique function ality we can build the audience we believe that the more
• 54:00 - 54:30 authors use Kickstarter to do cool projects the more we will attract a regular audience of readers to the platform to look for new projects and while the publishing category is where the majority of authors will create projects there are also authors who will create projects in other spaces if you are creating a graphic novel adaptation of your bestselling novel you can try it in the com Comics category if you are creating an RPG or board game based on your world
• 54:30 - 55:00 you can try the games category if you are raising funds for a film adaptation you can try the film and video category in short Kickstarter is ready and waiting for us to come on over they are set up to help us find readers and build a community of people who support independent author projects they are doing the work on their end already so now we just need to show up common myths about
• 55:00 - 55:30 Kickstarter we've shared our personal stories about why we're passionate about Kickstarter but we also wanted to address some of the skepticism and misunderstanding we sometimes hear about this platform here are several common myths about Kickstarter that are still floating around in independent author circles you can't make money on Kickstarter with novels Russell made $75,000 on Kickstarter in 2020 across
• 55:30 - 56:00 five launches and has made over $83,000 in 2021 across six launches Kickstarter is only for science fiction fantasy and horror authors we have examples of all types of authors finding success with Kickstarter across all genres including romance and cozy mystery hint these readers love their book boxes you don't have to take our word for it because you you can see every project that's ever gone live on Kickstarter for
• 56:00 - 56:30 yourself running a Kickstarter is like having a full-time job Russell does not do Kickstarter full-time and spends less than an hour a day on it while it's running and since any launch is going to be more work than not launching it's not particularly more difficult or timec consuming than a regular book launch a patreon or substack would be easier to start patreon is also fan based but is usually Slow Burn Evergreen and a longer commitment it belongs at
• 56:30 - 57:00 the very back of your sales funnel while Kickstarter belongs toward the front and is actually a marketing production effort rather than the end of the line that said we are big fans of patreon and believe you should have both I won't get any sales no platform will work without a good product that has a clear target audience if your product isn't selling or gathering interest through other methods Kickstarter will not magically make it
• 57:00 - 57:30 sell everything else can be fixed by more marketing my readership is too small Kickstarter is made for small fan bases and readerships we are not pitching snake oil here you do need to do some marketing beforehand but if you treat your campaign like a book launch design it well and do some pre-marketing you can make a lot more from a small readership I'm too impatient to plan a kick starter Kickstarter is faster than launching a book and more effective than
• 57:30 - 58:00 getting a book up on Amazon and watching it sink I've already spent so much on my Series this is the best way to recoup costs faster so don't give up on yourself or your series you get the money at the end of funding rather than waiting several months you can't do as well on retailers without advertising so either way Kickstarter is your best bet for moving forward everyone I've seen succeed has massive resources it helps to bring fans to your
• 58:00 - 58:30 Kickstarter Russell often says that if you can bring 25 fans Kickstarter will help you find another 25 but there are other ways to optimize your efforts too we give you all the information to stack your deck with the resources you have I will be sad if I don't hit my goal and it might hurt me creatively yes it can be demoralizing we teach you how to set goals that are reasonable and help you stack the deck
• 58:30 - 59:00 well in your favor Russell's campaigns typically funded at least five times usually 7 to 10 times this isn't a book about Kickstarter while we've written this book to help authors get their books selling on Kickstarter we also don't think this book is truly about Kickstarter it's about something much larger a need a future a movement that is on the horizon we are still at the beginning of how authors can use Kickstarter and we're
• 59:00 - 59:30 here to bring the right people along with us as we help change the face of independent publishing for the better we want authors to have more control over their work and know how to make money from it we want authors to Value their creative efforts and charge more per customer regardless of whether they have thousands of them or just a few we want authors to not just say they're independent but to feel their independence to be able to write the off genre thing without killing their
• 59:30 - 60:00 algorithms to turn their work into audio books or movies or board games or soap sculptures to pay off their production costs without dipping into their savings or profits and to make good money doing it join the kickstarter publishing Movement by the time you hear this we will have launched our Kickstarter project for this book to bring this movement to the larger independent author community and while we truly have no idea of how many people are listening and interested
• 60:00 - 60:30 it doesn't really matter because the community will get to this place one way or the other we are transitioning into a period that non-fiction was not long ago where prescriptive playbooks stopped working for most people everyone in the non-fiction space had so many options for how to build their businesses that each person got to forge their own path very few non-fiction businesses look alike these days where once they all followed a lot of the same marketing
• 60:30 - 61:00 strategies and tactics and there was a linear stepbystep to success on the fiction side our businesses are still relatively simple but they are getting more complex the decision we're all making right now around Kickstarter and many of the other platforms formats and retailers available to us is not truly between yes and no it's more like now or later we invite you to join us now rather than later some of you will join
• 61:00 - 61:30 us because it's good for your book catalog and you have a better chance of launching your books on Kickstarter before you launch them on retailers others of you will join us because you are connecting the dots into the future as well and you get it still others will join us because at the end of the day Kickstarter is fun and exciting and we all need a little more joy in our lives we truly believe that Kickstarter as a platform is ready for a lot more
• 61:30 - 62:00 publishing category projects and we also believe that once we get more authors doing Kickstarter projects regularly we'll help to build an awesome community of readers that may not find us on retailers you picked up this book so you're probably at least Kickstarter curious we encourage you to stick with us through the rest of this book because we want you to commit to creating your kick starter project to additional
• 62:00 - 62:30 resources Kickstarter Sprint with us recorded videos as part of our campaign for this book we built a community of 70 independent authors who wanted to launch their Kickstarter campaign side by side with us in January 2022 this is the archive of the videos we recorded for them that take you through stepbystep everything we did for multiple campaigns to make them successful you can follow along and see how those campaigns turned out the world needsyou
• 62:30 - 63:00 book. teachable.com p/ Kickstarter dprint with- us- January d202 the crush it on Kickstarter course by Russell Nolty if you want Russell stepbystep for building $10,000 campaigns on his books grab this course wannab press. teachable.com pcrush iten Kickstarter join our Facebook group Book Sales supercharged Advanced book marketing for authors where we answer
• 63:00 - 63:30 questions about the series facebook.com/ groupbook Sala supercharge chapter three how independent authors use crowdfunding we've already talked a bit about how independent authors are currently using crowdfunding in their businesses but we wanted to spend a chapter stating it in list format so that you can get clear on your own reasons for launching a campaign or making Kickstarter a regular part of
• 63:30 - 64:00 your business what are some of your personal reasons we encourage you to highlight them within these pages so you can refer back to them later here are the ones we hear the most increasing your Revenue Kickstarter is a marketplace where you can make more Revenue per reader thus making more money with a smaller number of readers Russell's average is about $125 to 40 per backer it differs per campaign and
• 64:00 - 64:30 the campaign for this book fell in line with that started at $25 per backer and ended at $403 per backer this is important if you don't have many fans yet keep in mind that most Indie authors are pricing their books at $4.99 or lower which is a far cry from $125 to 40 furthermore you can simply start running kickstarters two to four times a year as another income stream Russell raised $84,000 on Kickstarter in
• 64:30 - 65:00 2021 on six campaigns you may not do that many campaigns in a year but even if you had a fraction of that success it would probably be worth it avoiding taking on debt you have to pay for covers editing advertising and more to launch a good product on retailers some authors max out their credit cards and others pay for the expenses out of pocket established authors usually pay for expenses out of
• 65:00 - 65:30 their revenue often making bets on whether their next book might succeed or not Kickstarter can give you the answer though and you can collect money before your retailer launch so you can launch in the black instead of in the red you'll have also potentially paid off your print run and you may even have a nice Nest Egg of advertising money to launch your series stronger adding kick starter to Your Arsenal could be a way to bootstrap your business to success faster or could just be a way to keep
• 65:30 - 66:00 more profit in your pocket instead of always reinvesting making the money work for books that don't work well in print on demand or ebook most independent authors still make 95 to 100% of their revenue from either print on demand or ebook sales those two methods of getting a book out into the world are critical to an indie author business model but what about books and formats that can't fit those requirements Comics
• 66:00 - 66:30 coffee books photography books children's books special edition hard covers audio dramas and more these types of books are either too expensive to produce in print on demand impossible to produce in print on demand no one does it or require a print run to compete with what traditional Publishers can sell them for this is where Kickstarter comes in testing your messaging before dropping ad money on your retailer launch you can find out what messages
• 66:30 - 67:00 work best and what reward tiar people gravitate toward before launching your book on retailers and potentially spending a ton of money to get your book ranking in the algorithms this can save you from investing in a series and launch that isn't hitting with your audience which has happened to just about every seasoned independent author at least once in their careers even the best of the best can't fully predict what will take off and what won't so the best way to gather data is to see what reward tiers your
• 67:00 - 67:30 audience buys risk-free with no ad spend using a platform like Kickstarter and before you waste your early algorithm juice on retailers converting current readers to fans and finding new ones Kickstarter is ultimately a retailer with its own algorithms and while you definitely need to bring your own readers to the party there are also people who frequent Kickstarter looking for projects to back Kickstarter will usually match the number of fans you can bring to your
• 67:30 - 68:00 project as long as your project is welld designed which is what we help you with in the coming chapters engaging with fans if you have a fandom already a Kickstarter project is a chance to give them a greater opportunity to support you it's also a place to deepen your relationship with readers and fans by selling cool non-book stuff one of the cornerstones of faning engagement is their investment into your brand namely their time money resources and attention authors have a
• 68:00 - 68:30 lot of untapped opportunities around getting readers to spend more on their brand Kickstarter is a way to do that selling direct to fans Kickstarter can help you fund the materials you need to sell at book events or directly from your website so you are not fronting those costs you can raise money for New formats for bundled content and for print runs selling more non-book stuff to fans
• 68:30 - 69:00 even if you make good money from writing there are all sorts of things that fans request from Audi books to board games to special edition hard covers to merchandise Kickstarter is a great way to expand your book's brand into new areas authors are currently doing some of this through direct sales and book boxes but Kickstarter is a place to regularly offer extras specials and exclusives around your books and series giving your family and friends or your other pen name readers a chance to buy
• 69:00 - 69:30 from you without polluting your also Bots Kickstarter is about finding as many cohorts of audience as possible and adding them all up to create a bigger campaign and higher funding amount you can invite everyone you know and everyone across all of your audiences to your Kickstarter without polluting your algorithms you can bring all your products and offerings even even if they don't have much crossover stick them off brand and backlist stuff in add-ons and
• 69:30 - 70:00 you might be surprised how many you sell Kickstarter is also a place where you can test multiple offers at once in separate tiers to see what your readers actually gravitate toward that's where you can then Focus your attention on retailers and finally it's a place where your mom can actually buy your books without giving you weird also Bots selling more back list and inventory if you have a lot of inventory from your backlist you can use
• 70:00 - 70:30 Kickstarter to sell more through add-ons even if the backlist titles aren't particularly relevant to your campaign Russell's campaigns frequently make about 20% of the total funding from backlist add-ons offered through Kickstarter and another 5 to 10% of the total through backer kit add-ons after the campaign ends this works especially well if your books are not tied up in exclusive ity agreements in any format as you can also offer ebooks and
• 70:30 - 71:00 audiobooks because they are digital you pocket 90% of the revenue creating and selling additional formats Kickstarter is truly a platform that supports being wide across ebook print audiobook translations fiction apps and ancillary products like book boxes graphic novels games decks artwork and more you can expand your book business to become a product business and you can expand your universe and exploit your rights and intellectual property across dozens of formats
• 71:00 - 71:30 yourself rather than parsing them out to companies continuing less popular series because you make so much more per backer than you do from other platforms Kickstarter is a great place to continue series that are less popular but have a loyal rabid fan base on retailers you must have a high quantity of readers to keep writing a series profitably on Kickstarter the quantity of readers needed is much lower as little as 10 to
• 71:30 - 72:00 20% of what you need on retailers to make the math work sorting buyers from lurkers it's easy to get caught up in marketing your books building your email list running ads and so on without making much real progress on growing your fan base of dedicated readers Kickstarter forces potential buyers off the fence so you can get an accurate estimate of who on your mailing list is truly interested in buying from you creating a buyer list at the end of
• 72:00 - 72:30 every successful campaign authors are given access to the emails and names of every backer so that you can see exactly who bought from you instead of guessing like on other platforms Kickstarter is both a platform with its own ecosystem that can drive visibility to you and a way to sell directly to your most excited readers celebrating and raising visibility anytime you do an event-based or time-sensitive promotion you'll raise
• 72:30 - 73:00 your visibility we like to use Kickstarter to make a fuss about our books and celebrate them with our audiences Kickstarter is a great way to bring back a stagnant pen name bring visibility to a once popular series or Revitalize a catalog by energizing its dormant fans when you give your fan base something to do you'll be surprised how much energy they can bring to helping you Market your work a Kickstarter campaign is something they can
• 73:00 - 73:30 participate in talk about to other potential readers and celebrate with each other jumping in before it's too trendy Russell has been doing this for years with great success in part because he is one of the only authors using the system this way there's lots of room for more authors to participate and while every platform gets more competitive as people begin to see success on it we think Kickstarter has many years before it's saturated with book projects additionally no project can go
• 73:30 - 74:00 longer than 60 days so you'll never be competing with all the books that have ever been on the platform unlike on retailers you are only competing with the books that launch within the same 60-day window as you which makes for some interesting Dynamics and buyer psychology why authors use Kickstarter the last thing we want to do in this chapter is talk about why authors use Kickstarter
• 74:00 - 74:30 specifically most of these things can be done on any platform so why use Kickstarter other options include a different crowdfunding platform like indigogo direct sales through your website or even just heading straight to retailers like you always have there are some good reasons to specifically use Kickstarter though here are some bringing visibility to your work Kickstarter is the largest and most popular crowdfunding platform and has
• 74:30 - 75:00 the biggest Community for book creators of all types it's Unique in that it's both a platform that functions similarly to a retailer in terms of bringing some people to the party but it's also a direct sales Channel where you form a personal relationship with the buyer this gives you the advantages of direct sales more profits a stronger relationship to your readers and the advantage ages of a platform more discoverability and readers finding you when we ran our last campaign the sales
• 75:00 - 75:30 of our series went up on retailers too it's a great place for more visibility and every launch is a marketing opportunity to find new fans and bring current fans in deeper being part of a community we are starting a publishing movement as we shared in the last chapter if you want to find like-minded authors and cross promote Kickstarter is the place to be additionally your readers will get to be
• 75:30 - 76:00 a part of a community creating cool things too Kickstarter is a bit like the online version of conventions conventions were originally created to help people find cool weird things that were not mainstream enough to get visibility Kickstarter was created for much of the same purpose and continues to serve that purpose in the online community today is especially when it comes to the publishing category buyer psychology Kickstarter
• 76:00 - 76:30 offers unique functionality that creates interesting inflection points throughout the campaign while retailers have a single launch opportunity before the product goes Evergreen Kickstarter has an exciting launch period and a strong deadline at the end of The Campaign there are lots of marketing levers to pull during this interesting trajectory and lots of built-in button pushers that make people go wild for these campaigns and buy more from you as a result establishing the front end of an
• 76:30 - 77:00 ecosystem a lot of authors are interested in events direct sales and fanb backed funding through platforms like patreon and substack we see all of those things working in an ecosystem that Kickstarter is the front end of in order to sell through Events book signings and your own website you need to hold inventory Kickstarter is a no risk place to fund your inventory production costs you can fund a big investment in your
• 77:00 - 77:30 company like if you want to start attending Live Events and need table materials or if you want to start direct sales but need to pay for warehousing we authors normally fund this out of what should be our profits in order to get someone to buy direct from you over and over again through a subscription on patreon or Seb stack you need to get them to buy from you once Kickstarter is the perfect place to establish that relationship and bring your casual readers deeper into your
• 77:30 - 78:00 world so they become the kind of true fans that want a subscription from you what about audiobooks and translations Kickstarter can help you fund the production costs on bigger projects like those to us Kickstarter is a critical part of any author's efforts to go wider than wide and move Beyond retailer Centric thinking and mindset we hope we've given you at least a few reasons to commit to launching a Kickstarter project in the near future
• 78:00 - 78:30 we found that lots of authors have fears around launching a Kickstarter and it's easy to not commit but once an author understands how important Kickstarter could be for their career they are able to push through the fears and get their first project launched the message to your audience now that you know why authors should be using Kickstarter and how many of them do we want to address a big question that comes up regularly what exactly does an author State as their
• 78:30 - 79:00 reason why I'm fundraising we hear this question framed in so many ways is it weird to ask my fans for money I'm already putting the book out whether we fund or not so there's nothing really on the line for funding I don't really have a ton of production costs if I'm doing print on demand I don't have a big inventory purchase to make I'm already a successful author
• 79:00 - 79:30 shouldn't I just pay for my audiobook narrator the first thing we want to distinguish is that Kickstarter is not a platform with the same purpose as GoFundMe and a few others you aren't just asking for charity this is really important and there's a big difference between asking people for money on GoFundMe versus funding a book with your fans on Kickstarter we sometimes see begging for charity energy on Kickstarter and it
• 79:30 - 80:00 doesn't work here's what it can sound like I'm having a hard time at life so fund my book Kickstarter is about rewarding fans first and foremost with cool things come up with a book that people are excited about and build cool things around the book it's okay if you are also having a hard time at life but that's not typically the main reason that people back your project this book means a lot to me so fund my book your story and the reason
• 80:00 - 80:30 behind why you wrote the book is secondary to the book itself people are buying a book the story and meaning behind the book or an enhancement of their enjoyment of the book Kickstarter makes this a little confusing by calling the main text section of your campaign story when really it's a sales page write a sales page for your book not a story about your life help me buy out my audiobook narrator or something similar with this
• 80:30 - 81:00 one the book is already available and they can already buy the book on a retailer this feels like help me pay off my credit card or something similar and is not exciting to people you can now buy the books on Kickstarter also if your book is already out there's not anything exciting about backing it on Kickstarter either additionally or in the first first place the person can just order it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble and probably will they
• 81:00 - 81:30 possibly have already bought it from a retailer and now this feels like a double dip like you want them to buy it again this is not a good use of Kickstarter Kickstarter is about exclusivity cool things new things and time-sensitive things here are some examples messaging that we've seen be very effective when stating your Kickstarter goal take this book to the finish line by helping me cover my production costs this is a good catchall as most people
• 81:30 - 82:00 understand that there are costs to your personal time plus editing covers and marketing materials they also understand that a print book costs money to print they like that the book is written already and you've met them halfway too this series is launching exclusively on Kickstarter and you won't be able to get it for six plus months on retail ERS this is a nice add-on to any messaging that you can add it on to because it
• 82:00 - 82:30 gives people a big reason to buy now rather than wait people keep asking me for X so I'm willing to do it for y amount of money but you have to show up this is a good one if you have a strong fan base for a smaller or less popular series you have a small but dedicated fan base but you need them to pay more per person to get something cool made I'm creating creting a cool game or ancillary product based on the books and it will enhance your enjoyment of the
• 82:30 - 83:00 books there are lots of other categories outside of publishing on Kickstarter that have really active and excited communities so if your book lends itself well to a game a card or tarot Oracle deck a soundtrack Etc then this could be a good route to go help me get my audio books made this is a good goal that resonates with readers so we recommend it with the caveats that a it might fund for a smaller amount than a print book launch and B you'll want to emphasize ebook and
• 83:00 - 83:30 print book goals as print books are the most popular format in the kickstarter publishing category right now audiobooks are often currently used as stretch goals and that could and probably will change in the future but the marketplace is not there yet I'm celebrating the relaunch of my pen name or my series or my book and I'd like to start with a bang Kickstarter is an ideal place to host a time-sensitive event or promotion so this one works well to signal to your audience that
• 83:30 - 84:00 they should be excited and you are doing something different this time people enjoy celebrating milestones and Kickstarter is also a pattern interrupt that will get your audience curious to learn more what do you intend to use as your messaging for why you're launching a book or a different format or whatever else through Kickstarter rather than launching it on retailers or paying for the production costs yourself hopefully we've given you something to think about you don't need
• 84:00 - 84:30 to overex explain this to anyone as most backers are not all that curious about your why for using Kickstarter this only needs to be a sentence or two on your sales page but we wanted to get the wheels turning early since it's a huge thing that holds authors back from exploring Kickstarter at all Russell's pep talk every product launch is filled with Fe here I know you have a lump in your throat when thinking about launching your product on
• 84:30 - 85:00 Kickstarter I wish I could tell you it goes away over time but I can't the truth is I have it too product launches are scary every launch I've ever had is filled with fear you will never have a perfect product launch no matter what you do there will always be problems you will look back after each launch and notice 50 things you should have done differently no matter how much you learn there is always something to learn from
• 85:00 - 85:30 the next one I launched my first campaign with a stable job and money coming in every month I just needed my product launches to cover printing costs that's not the case anymore now my launches have to pay my mortgage months into the future they have to pay for teams of artists and designers they have to pay for entire Productions meanwhile I still have to pay my bills that's a scary
• 85:30 - 86:00 proposition even though I know how to launch products really well there is always uncertainty there will always be uncertainty that's where the fear comes in for me and it never goes away but you can tame that fear it doesn't go away but preparation makes it bearable at the end of the day every new launch is stepping foot into the unknown you are putting yourself out there and
• 86:00 - 86:30 hoping people want what you have to offer even thinking about launching a product right now gives me knots in the pit of my stomach but it doesn't stop me it invigorates me because I know there is an audience for my products I know that even if something isn't perfectly launched I can make it work all of that confidence comes from launching products over and over again it comes from getting knocked down and standing back up it comes from success
• 86:30 - 87:00 after success and overcoming failure upon failure it comes from being in the game and staying in it if fear has been holding you back I urge you to launch something as soon as possible it doesn't have to be big it doesn't have to be groundbreaking it just has to be something so you can start developing your confidence for the future in the next several chapters
• 87:00 - 87:30 we'll talk about what that looks like and offer all the details on how to get started on your campaign task checklist highlight the reasons you want to use Kickstarter decide if you are going to try one campaign just as an experiment or if you already know you want to make Kickstarter a regular stream of income for your author business business you can change your mind later but bring yourself to a tentative commitment in this
• 87:30 - 88:00 area come up with the general gist of your campaign how would you summarize your reason for raising funding in a sentence or two this can help bring Focus to your efforts to get started optional decide on your first or next Kickstarter project and put all others out of your mind use the project as a filter or lens through which you listen to the rest of this book this helps narrow your task list and expedites your decision-making and
• 88:00 - 88:30 action-taking so you can have productive progress as you listen to this book chapter 4 the five pillars of a successful Kickstarter launch Kickstarter is an interesting platform with many moving Parts because of its focus on time sensitive launches it can be unintuitive to author because we are used to working with retailers and having our books up for long periods of
• 88:30 - 89:00 time this chapter covers the five pillars of a successful Kickstarter launch and also goes over how to think about and plan for kickstarters throughout the year as well as how to think about and plan a single Kickstarter campaign this chapter is meant to be an overview of the big picture rather than a detailed look at any of the individual pieces we want you to have a sense of where the rest of this book is going so that as we do break down each piece for you you know where it fits in the big
• 89:00 - 89:30 picture consider this chapter the framework for the rest of the book The Five Pillars of a successful Kickstarter launch we've come up with five pillars of a successful Kickstarter launch the first three are critical for success and the last two are incredibly helpful in supercharging your Kickstarter campaign the Five Pillars are campaign design sales page launch plan email list optional and advertising
• 89:30 - 90:00 optional number one campaign design the campaign design covers a number of items that will help you work within the kickstarter system to see success this is where you'll choose your rewards items and group them into reward tiers which you set on Kickstarter this is one of the five requirements for getting your project to the review stage once you get a review you can launch your pre-launch page and start collecting followers once you've set your rewards
• 90:00 - 90:30 you can also decide on several supercharged goals that are not a part of kickstarter's ecosystem but that Russell's Kickstarter system uses to maximize the campaign these are backer perks backer perks are weekly rewards for backing the project by a certain date Russell's system suggests a perk for the first 48 Hours of the campaign then a perk a week for the duration of the campaign after that stretch goals stretch goals are
• 90:30 - 91:00 goals that you add on when you hit certain levels of funding these are things that enhance your project and excite your backers to either pledge at a higher tier or share with their friends flash goals these are backer perks that you give when you need to recharge momentum on the campaign you can offer anyone who has backed the campaign by the next 24 hours get get a bonus this can get people off the fence and help you control your campaign finally the campaign design
• 91:00 - 91:30 relies in part on buyer psychology and pressing on those psychological triggers that get people to take action that is covered in an upcoming chapter number two sales page your sales page is the story though it's poorly named please don't tell a story in this space instead hook your readers with relevant information about your books and campaign you also want to think about
• 91:30 - 92:00 three different audiences your Die Hard fans who are excited to get your special edition hard cover or merchandise your casual readers who haven't read much of the series but know that they like you and are willing to give it a try in ebook or paperback your unknown readers who might back the campaign because they found you through Kickstarter or elsewhere as you were promoting these potential readers are cold traffic and you want your page
• 92:00 - 92:30 to be appealing to them too we see a lot of creators Focus only on the DI hard fans across design reward tiers and the sales page this is going to severely limit your campaign whereas Amazon and other retailers are largely about getting and staying very targeted and Niche Kickstarter is very much about bringing together multiple cohorts of audience that add up to a bigger amount so you can get the project
• 92:30 - 93:00 funded another important part of the sales page is your video this should be less than 3 minutes long 90 seconds is about right if possible and should include the highlights of your sales page as visual quick hits the video is technically optional on Kickstarter but it's still a good idea to have one people do watch them to find out out more about your project finally your sales page will have a lot of visuals in the form of
• 93:00 - 93:30 Graphics cover art and samples from the book If relevant number three launch plan your launch plan needs to cover three things platform trajectory traffic sources and a schedule of when you are going to send traffic sources to hit the platform trajectory the platform trajectory is just the shape of how success looks on the platform for Kickstarter you want to be at least 30% funded in the first 48 hours and the
• 93:30 - 94:00 amount you fund predicts where you'll end up you usually fund the campaign at about three times what you raise in the first 48 Hours your traffic sources are easiest to remember using the 5bx 3 book launch framework belongs to you build borrow by Buzz finally once you have your primary and secondary traffic sources you want to map those out out onto a schedule of what traffic sources you can send each day to hit the platform trajectory this will need to be adjusted
• 94:00 - 94:30 in response to funding results which is why you save your secondary traffic sources in case you need to Fan the Flames at any point during your campaign number four email list your email list consists of two things building the email list and sending the email list both are important ideally you already have an email list that you can send emails about your campaign but if you don't we cover this in later
• 94:30 - 95:00 chapters number five advertising plan your advertising plan is going to depend on whether the math even works on your Kickstarter you need to have an average amount per backer of at least $50 to make it profitable and books rarely do that you can also consider warming up cold audiences using reverse squeeze Pages sending potential backers to an email list and more planning out your year of
• 95:00 - 95:30 kickstarters before 2019 the most books I Russell had ever launched in one calendar year was three all the way back in 2016 then I launched eight books in 2019 11 in 2020 and 11 in 20121 as well it was a lot of launching I've been in a perpetual cycle of prep launch recover prep launch recover for the past 2 years doing so allowed me to survive without shows
• 95:30 - 96:00 during a global pandemic and really Thrive without shows too I've had to launch more often on Kickstarter and do so successfully if you're planning to start using Kickstarter regularly you'll want to plan out several campaigns in advance and know when you are launching what during your year here's how I've made it work number one bundle launches of the same series together launching one book a month
• 96:00 - 96:30 didn't work for me it was too much and honestly my audience burned out on it I didn't start having success until I started bundling three to four books in the same series together at one time and being able to leverage those increased sales into making it an event yes I might have lost some money along the way but for myself myself I couldn't handle launching a series more than once in a calendar year I really recommend having a year between releases
• 96:30 - 97:00 in the same series at least on Kickstarter this is different from when you're in Amazon's Kindle unlimited program where you can basically launch a book every two weeks and people will be there for it number two space your launches across Seasons I like to launch in January March June September and November if I have something small for the end of the year this is a lesson I learned from fashion designers they have winter spring summer
• 97:00 - 97:30 and fall Collections and are in a constant prep create launch cycle that lasts 3 months thinking about my own career like that worked for me I would prep a collection for a month create the campaign for a month and then launch for a month in the prep cycle I got to take a breath and in the launch cycle I had to be on all the time number three differentiate the length of your launches most people do every
• 97:30 - 98:00 Kickstarter launch for 30 days however I have had lots of success with doing 5 10 17 and 24-day campaigns along with longer ones depending on the project you don't have to launch every book for the same length of time and if you have multiple books launching you don't have to be so reliant on any one launch to bring in the sales number four vary the types of projects you launch when I used to launch once a year
• 98:00 - 98:30 every campaign had to pay for so much that it was hard not to put every ounce of my energy into it in 2021 I launched novels Color Comics black and white comics and non-fiction books along with an audio drama each took a different amount of capital to produce and required different asks of my audience my goal is to launch at least one project every year that everyone in my audience is obsessed with and several
• 98:30 - 99:00 they like which is much different than the oneandone mentality of my old launch model yes I still have bangers that need to make all the money like cthulu and kabad but then I have smaller projects like the void calls us home Audio Drama which cost less than $1,000 to make all in and was a very different kind of thing that I had ever never done before I'm sure Jimmy palati would punch me right in my mouth since he's always launching Comics but that's boring for
• 99:00 - 99:30 me I have many interests and I want to experience them all with my fans having an audio drama and some novels and some Comics varies things up and allows me to access different parts of my brain most people say to keep launching the same thing or type of thing to your audience but I say variet is the spice of life as long as you are making things you think your audience or different parts of your audience will love people
• 99:30 - 100:00 will burn out on one type of thing from you so it's nice to give them variety and keep them engaged number five you have to give a lot to take a lot since you are constantly withdrawing from the Goodwill Bank you have to be making lots of deposits too that means buying other people's books promoting them when you can getting to know your audience and spending time doing things that aren't slamming about your book number six get better at talking
• 100:00 - 100:30 about your books at launch most people just slam buy my book 100 times but you need to find new interesting angles to talk about your projects and make people care about them in different ways because just saying woe is me my project isn't funding won't work when you have four more launches this year and you're trying to clear 10 books off your plate number seven the more you launch the easier it gets the more people see you out there the easier this becomes it's hard to
• 100:30 - 101:00 start this cycle but keeping it going gets easier over time not only will people be more likely to try one of your books in a year but you'll also see other opportunities come your way from Anthology pieces to books people want you to do to other opportunities that exist because you are out in the world doing things number eight Community is everything you have to be a productive
• 101:00 - 101:30 Cog in the machine of your own personal fandom and also the wider community of creators because most of this is about getting other people to share and help you spread the word and the other part is making sure you are hitting your people with new information every day of your launch number nine people will start to sort themselves when you had one launch a year most of your fandom would buy that thing or abandon you but when you have multiple books and series launching
• 101:30 - 102:00 every year people will sort themselves into the fans of X thing or Y thing which will drop your total raise per project but increase your raise overall you need to be okay with that idea not everyone will love every project or have the money to support everything but if you give them multiple chances they will likely support something throughout the year number 10 get one year ahead of your slate really try to be at least one year ahead of your slate because otherwise
• 102:00 - 102:30 this will all kill you as you try hard to finish things by deadlines that keep crashing upon you you still have to be flexible with switching launches up because some pieces will fail to fall into place properly even with tons of time but if you can get most of your books cleared out early then the anxiety of a launch won't collide with the anxiety of production so try to be a year ahead for your own sanity there is more but those are my
• 102:30 - 103:00 best 10 tips for launching more honestly I am less burnt out across every launch and I'm more confident in the solvency of my business now don't get me wrong I am absolutely drained after six launches in one year but I'm no longer reliant on shows and can do most of my work in pajamas so there's that which is way better I think in the long run I recommend it but you do absolutely have to constantly be in finding new
• 103:00 - 103:30 audience mode because you will have to keep adding people into the funnel all the time to feed the publication Beast you are trying to make it takes a marketing machine to feed a publishing machine deciding on a 10-day 17-day or 30 plus day campaign in January 2020 I ran a 10-day Kickstarter for from my gods firste Chronicles Universe which raised $993 from 264
• 103:30 - 104:00 backers the gods verse is easily my most popular series with both the Katrina hates the dead and pixie dust graphic novels making me over $100,000 in combined revenue by themselves since their launches the God's First Chronicles Kickstarter was to expand the universe into novels and add 10 additional stories in the first week Tuesday to Saturday of that campaign we raised $697 from $173 backers in the last week
• 104:00 - 104:30 Sunday to Thursday we raised $2,958 from 91 backers raising nearly $10,000 in 10 days in an incredible feat but I had a nagging suspicion that I was leaving money on the table the optimized campaign 17 days in June of 2020 we finished a 17-day campaign for a slate of four Standalone novels which have zero brand recognition
• 104:30 - 105:00 which means they should be doing considerably worse than the gods verse which had huge brand recognition among my fans that campaign raised $5,795 in the first week over $1,000 less than the gods verse campaign we only had 165 backers eight less than the gods firste campaign so yeah it was doing worse in its first week but remember this campaign has seven additional days which means it has
• 105:00 - 105:30 a week to catch up and that's just what it did in the last week of my summmer slate we raised $2,352 from just 66 backers which was 25 less than the last week of the God's firste Chronicles campaign combined with the deficit from the first week of the campaign we had 33 fewer backers in the first and last week of the campaign than we did during the God's verse Chronicles campaign however we gained 47 backers
• 105:30 - 106:00 during the additional week in the middle of The Campaign which meant we finished the campaign raising $957 from 278 backers 14 more than my God's verse campaign we ended up raising $364 less but from more people than pledged to my super popular Universe I thought that if it had the same number of backers as the God's firste campaign it would be a huge win remember these books had zero brand
• 106:00 - 106:30 recognition yet it got even more backers and the only thing I can attribute it to was the additional week of the campaign going into the last week we were tracking slightly ahead of the Gods firste Chronicles by about 10 backers which means we pretty much maintained that Gap through the end of the campaign the additional week did not impact the final week negatively at all which is why I will start to recommend a 17-day campaign as the ideal time frame
• 106:30 - 107:00 for most books from now on the lengthened campaign 24 plus days I already have a lot of data on a 24-day campaign and a 31-day campaign I run 24-day campaigns for my most popular Anthology series cthulu is hard to spell and I do 31-day campaign for my most popular comic book series kabad Jones Monster Hunter and based on that data I would
• 107:00 - 107:30 not run either length unless I had a killer marketing plan and a big well-known series that I thought would get more traction over time like kabad Jones monster hunter or cthulu is hard to spell I have to invest significantly more time into those longer campaigns to make sure I have new perks launching throughout the campaign I have to find lots more marketing opportunities for those campaigns and if you don't have a lot of open marketing Avenues then having the extra days is dead
• 107:30 - 108:00 weight a long campaign would also have to be in a category with a Vibrant Community that I thought I could find a lot of collaborators through which is true of comics but not in publishing I love the backers and the publishing category but the novel writers I try to network with are having none of it we're building it with this book and our Kickstarter campaign but we're not there yet meanwhile the comics category is all
• 108:00 - 108:30 about networking and doing backer update swaps so I have more options to keep showing myself to new people in the comics than the publishing category the shorten campaign 5 to 10 days the main reason that I am hesitant about doing a 10-day campaign again is that the shortness of the campaign prevents me from using one of my most powerful assets backer updates one thing I wasn't able to do on my 10-day campaign was to send a second
• 108:30 - 109:00 backer update to my previous campaigns because the beginning and end were too close together which probably left a lot of money on the table I send updates to every campaign when I launch since I have 20 campaigns now I send to four each day over four to five days and I try to make sure not to include campaigns close to each other to avoid hitting the same backers multiple times a day with longer campaigns I also send an
• 109:00 - 109:30 update in the last 5 days of the campaign starting on Sunday and continuing for 3 days and ending on Tuesday two days before the end of the campaign those end of campaign updates are like gold and only having a 10-day campaign hurt my ability to do that which means I left a lot of money on the table a note note from Monica on campaign length I can't attend to my campaign every day so short campaigns while good
• 109:30 - 110:00 for mental health are a challenge for scheduling for me I only work four days a week right now and have a lot of stuff to attend to on those days I need to be able to step away from my campaigns throughout the week so 10 days in a row of showing up on anything just doesn't work well for me I haven't done a ton of campaigns but for me longer feels better as I can course correct knowing I have to miss several days a week the 40-day campaign
• 110:00 - 110:30 we did for this book was mentally challenging and we were running on fumes when it ended however with my schedule being what it is I will do it again for my upcoming fiction campaign and I will put a stronger plan for the places where the campaign felt exhausting the last time either short or long can work for you and I would go with your intuition on length of campaign if you are unsure I would try the default 17-day campaign that Russell lays out as you have a
• 110:30 - 111:00 decent amount of time to promote without burning out on marketing planning out your Kickstarter campaign before we get into the topic of planning out any one specific campaign it has to be said you don't have to do a Kickstarter campaign for your dream project first if you've never raised money on kickstar starter before then don't expect to raise several thousand especially if you have no network you are much better served doing a project
• 111:00 - 111:30 you can complete and fund even if it's only $500 or less then you will have a baseline of your audience and be able to build from there your goal is to get your feet wet and learn the ropes it's not to stress yourself out chasing an impossible goal you have an entire career to build up to your dream project it takes about a month to plan a Kickstarter especially your first time out you can definitely spend more time
• 111:30 - 112:00 than that but a month should be good for your first one here's roughly what you need to do each week week one get set up on Kickstarter fill out your creator information to set up your project full name Bank info Etc and set up a blank project the security check take a few days to go through as Kickstarter make sure you are a legit person with an actual bank account get this done now so
• 112:00 - 112:30 you don't have to worry about it later also pledge to other Kickstarter projects Kickstarter is a community and people want to see that you are an active backer before you launch a project additionally if you do back a lot of projects you can then email them during your campaign and ask them to introduce you to to Their audience it might not work but you are almost buying their time to consider your offer week
• 112:30 - 113:00 two figure out the basics of your project and finalize your reward tiers give yourself a good chunk of time to do this it requires a bit of thinking and if you care about things like profitability checking things in a basic budget spreadsheet it also requires itemizing your reward items and getting them set up into tears on Kickstarter week three write your sales page for the
• 113:00 - 113:30 project this is a section called story but it's actually a sales page once you are done with this section you'll want to submit your project for review which can take a few days when you get your project approval that'll give you your pre-launch page important note do not hit launch because you'll be launched within like 3 seconds on the site and there is no back button or aort week four create your project video and get
• 113:30 - 114:00 feedback first ask your audience or email list for feedback on the campaign using the draft sharable feature it'll only take about 24 hours to get all the feedback you're going to get so you don't need to do this particularly early Russell does his a week or two out second make your video it doesn't need to be crazy and 90 seconds or so is good I did ours in a couple hours that said if you are not
• 114:00 - 114:30 familiar with video editing then you'll want to start this earlier week five create your marketing plan this is going to be your launch plan and any other details you need to figure out like swaps press and more you may be recording and scheduling content ahead of time too by now we hope you have a good sense and overview of what it will take to plan and launch a campaign on
• 114:30 - 115:00 Kickstarter as well as what it might look like to do this regularly over the course of a year the following chapters break down each of the concepts we talk about in this chapter and go into greater detail about how to accomplish them task checklist decide what length of campaign you are doing schedule time on your calendar to plan the campaign according to the 5-we planner we shared in this chapter optional if you know you intend
• 115:00 - 115:30 to use Kickstarter multiple times a year make a schedule for project launch month and campaign length this can be just a few notes in a document it doesn't need to be fleshed out right now optional decide if you are going to focus on the optional fourth pillar of a successful Kickstarter campaign email list list or the optional fifth pillar of a successful Kickstarter campaign advertising you can also just focus on the main three pillars in which case you
• 115:30 - 116:00 can skip the chapters on email lists and advertising chapter five designing your campaign for profitability by now you've made some basic decisions about how you are going to use Kickstarter as a part of your author career you may have even decided your first project or adjusted your plan for your next project based on the last several chapters where we discussed some
• 116:00 - 116:30 possibilities and decisions to be made the goal of this chapter is to help you make good decisions that will maximize the amount you fund and minimize your risk and work this work is largely going to be done in the reward tiers for your campaign there are definitely other ways to create a great campaign design but Russell's system is to optimize for profitability and minimize the amount of additional work and risk he has to take
• 116:30 - 117:00 on that's what we're going to focus on in this chapter first we want to get clear on the broad Strokes of your particular campaign so think of the campaign you want to work on for the rest of this book to give yourself some Focus for any campaign we recommend that you choose something that is more likely to do well and is already popular on Kickstarter solo titles can do well for non-fiction children's books fantasy
• 117:00 - 117:30 science fiction horror and underrepresented characters and themes book boxes can do well for more popular genres like romance and mystery there are no rules but it helps to look at what's already performing well on Kickstarter and see what fits choose something that you know will excited your own audience for example you might want to run a Kickstarter for your most popular series as your fans will likely be more engaged
• 117:30 - 118:00 and ready to buy choose something from your catalog that has high profitability in addition to popularity you always want to consider your project based on assets like having lots of books in the series having a big world of interconnected stories and so on you can more easily sell a longer series of books in your reward board tiers and add-ons do the math on sales and profitability using the budgeting content in this chapter before you start
• 118:00 - 118:30 your project if possible aim to only create tiers for which you can deliver double the value to the backer and receive 50% of the funds as profit there is wiggle room in those numbers but don't offer a reward or tier that is low margin because it can kill your profitability on the campaign keep your campaign mostly digital with only a few physical product rewards Kickstarter backers want the physical rewards but the digital rewards
• 118:30 - 119:00 are high margin and a foundation of your campaign the digital rewards also help you charge a premium on the physical rewards when bundled together if it is your first campaign and you aren't sure what to do we have five campaign containers that we recommend for a first campaign publishing projects we recommend for your first campaign if you already have your idea for your campaign
• 119:00 - 119:30 fantastic if not we encourage you to choose between one of the Five Below that work well for a publishing campaign exclusive Trilogy or tetrology 3 to four books in the same series offered in print and ebook exclusive to Kickstarter for 6 months after the campaign ends you can launch pre-orders on retailers when the campaign ends the next book or several books in a popular series readers can get the next book or books in your ongoing popular
• 119:30 - 120:00 series in print and ebook early via Kickstarter hard cover special editions of a completed or ongoing book or series these can include special covers alternative or variant special production materials leatherbound foiled special content art notes or all of the above book box a themed box of books and merchandise that can be purchased as a digital or physical bundle Anthology one person you
• 120:00 - 120:30 organizes a group of authors to put together content around a theme anthologies don't make much money but it can be a good way to get your feet wet with Kickstarter especially if you have no audience and need the cross promotion help publishing projects we recommend for experienced Kickstarter creators if you're an experienced author or Kickstarter Creator and you want to attempt some trickier publishing campaigns you may be interested in
• 120:30 - 121:00 trying offbeat books if you have a book that's outside of your catalog normal range and you don't want to launch it on retailers Kickstarter might be a great place to sell it for the first time before you drop it into your backlist for fans to find in the future as creatives we often need offbeat books to take a breather from our money makers and avoid burnout Audi books audiobooks tend to have a smaller take on Kickstarter as the company has been built largely on
• 121:00 - 121:30 the print format with children's books comics and other visual books being the bulk of the campaigns you'll want to Anchor your project with some print and ebook tiers and use the optimizations in this book to increase your funding amount translations there's a separate section on Kickstarter just for translations which is used for both translations into English and translations from English to another language this type of project is particularly challenging because of the
• 121:30 - 122:00 target audience the high production cost of translations and the lack of popularity of this type of project on Kickstarter this project type is definitely for the advanced Kickstarter Creator and not advised for a first run on the platform these campaigns are not ideal for your first Kickstarter campaign because they often a harder sell in some way and will require finesse and understanding of the platform to maximize the
• 122:00 - 122:30 funding budgeting your project when people ask me what comes first when designing a project I tell them it is as often about putting the budget first as putting the idea first I've been able to survive for so long by being as obsessive about staying under budget as I am about crafting a stunning concept with every project you have a certain budget and your job is to find a concept you can do amazingly for that
• 122:30 - 123:00 budget for instance if you're trying to get into a new medium and you have no idea how it will go then I am almost always going to say to consider the budget first equally if I'm trying to create a book I can sell for a certain price my job is to figure out how to create an incredible experience that fits within a certain budget other times I have a signature product where I want Maximum Impact that's in a core product field which
• 123:00 - 123:30 I've had proven success on and then I'm willing to invest a lot more into that idea and allow myself to make something with a more ambitious scope and budget I'm almost always juggling projects on both ends of the spectrum at the same time honestly a big maybe the biggest part of being a professional is being able to say oh you have X budget then here's something we can do that's really cool for that price and then deliver on it that's not just for clients either
• 123:30 - 124:00 you have to be able to turn that back around on yourself as well I've seen way too many people go broke because they punched outside their budget and it blew up in their face I'm more cautious because I'm most concerned with living to fight another day if you live to fight another day you stay in the game and avoid being knocked out the life of a creative is littered with people who swung big and struck out
• 124:00 - 124:30 hard I'm not saying you shouldn't take your shots sometimes you have a huge budget and that's great I love those projects where I can spend big on advertising and marketing but other times you have a tiny one but your job is to figure out what you can deliver that is stunning for whatever budget you have to work with for me I like to have two to three big hitter projects at any one time and a gaggle of smaller ones that I'm working on in the shadows for a modest
• 124:30 - 125:00 budget but every project is designed to be an amazing experience at whatever budget level I'm working with too often people try to fit their big idea into a small budget and end up with a Jank project that doesn't work on the flip side I've seen people spend Millions on garbage my job is to make every dollar I spend work for me finding deals where I can and spending when I can't in order to produce the kind of experience that
• 125:00 - 125:30 makes people go wow every single time my goal is to get a 10 times return on investment Roi for every dollar spent that might not mean I make $10 for every dollar it might be to get respect or a claim or something else which is equally as valuable in the Long Haul when I have a small project that means hoarding every nickel and dime waiting until I find the right angle to strike
• 125:30 - 126:00 usually a project will sit for years before I find a way to make it or have a weigh in that makes sense budgetarily it's a lot easier to make a small project profitable if you think of it from a budget first standpoint you might only make a few thousand dollar on a project but if you can make it for a few hundred doar then it might make sense I just did a Kickstarter which raised $3,400 from 170 backers my lowest total
• 126:00 - 126:30 since 2016 but I brought that project in for under $1,000 so I made a decent profit on it whereas if it cost me $2,000 plus then it wouldn't have made sense at all I waited 5 years before I found a way to make that project work but it was worth it in the end in the meantime I'm willing to spend $10,000 Plus on our Flagship project because it's bringing in five figures every launch you can make something incredible
• 126:30 - 127:00 with a tiny or no budget even you can make something that feels like a million dollars with a pittance but you have to know how to nip and Tuck to hide the corners you cut and that is one of the biggest secrets of doing professional work not every project will work in every budget but there is an amazing project to be made at every budget level oh and time is also part of any budget too I always Factor the time it
• 127:00 - 127:30 will take me to deliver when I'm thinking about the budget for any project the last thing you want is a Time intensive project that sucks up all hours of your day but delivers no results it's a boring answer but it's also the right one getting your Kickstarter budget right it's not a sexy topic but budgeting for your product launch is one of the most important things you can do to make sure your launch stays on track a crappy
• 127:30 - 128:00 budget will kill your profitability and could even lead to bankruptcy I've seen many successfully funded products go arai because they didn't budget properly when that happens either the creator has to reach into their own pocket to fulfill their obligations or abandon their project altogether effectively torching their Goodwill for years to come luckily with a little preparation a good budget is easy to assemble all it
• 128:00 - 128:30 takes is some elbow grease diligence and an ability to Google things any good budget has seven fundamental sections to it number one product creation the product creation section of your budget involves the costs to design your product from scratch into a viable commodity including purchasing materials hiring of designers Outsourcing of Art and prototyping a single completed
• 128:30 - 129:00 version of your product this is not the mass Market production of your product this is everything that goes into getting your product Mass Market ready from the packaging to the designing and the research to the prototyping so that you can Mass produce it in the next section product cre creation also includes the production of any and all materials associated with your campaign including stretch goals for any crowdfunding
• 129:00 - 129:30 campaigns number two production once your prototype is complete the second section of your budget deals with the mass Market production of your product this includes all the setup fees Mass Market assembly and initial shipping of your product to your warehouse this step takes your product from prototype to a mass Market version ready for distribution it's important to have at least three different quotes when sourcing production
• 129:30 - 130:00 facilities you need a quote for a minimum run of your product a second quote for your anticipated run and a third for your wildly ambitious production run you also want to plan for any special editions you might want to add to your product if you hit certain benchmarks for books this might include adding spot UV or upgrading to hard cover for art prints you might throw in a glass printed version these additions might also include other stretch goals
• 130:00 - 130:30 too like t-shirts and hats if you are creating additional pieces of apparel like t-shirts or hats along with your core product make sure they are accounted for in your production budget otherwise you will have a massive budget overage when it comes to producing those pieces and risk bankruptcy additionally Source multiple quotes from facilities that have handled your specific type of product before don't
• 130:30 - 131:00 cheap out on somebody who says they have experience make them prove it too many budgets have gone off the rails because creators hired inexperienced production houses simply because they were cheap and ended up paying thousands of extra dollars to fix errors effectively bankrupting their launch number three distribution once you have the production costs handled the third section of your budget is the distribution of your product this starts
• 131:00 - 131:30 with warehousing your product and extends to shipping out your product domestically and across the world warehousing can range from storing your product in your garage to renting out a storage unit to working with a fulfillment facility to buying warehouse space Amazon has also become a viable option for for many creators your needs will depend on how much you expect to produce just like with your production run have
• 131:30 - 132:00 contingencies for your minimum anticipated and overly ambitious production runs you'll also want to factor in extra product to this budget you can grab additional inventory for your bookstore signings book boxes giveaways fulfillment through retailers like fulfillment by Amazon direct sales events and more Kickstarter is an ideal platform to grow your inventory because you can gather the money upfront and get scale on your printing and production
• 132:00 - 132:30 costs make sure to calculate shipping for your Kickstarter carefully almost 10% of successfully funded products fail to deliver the number one culprit in that failure is shipping when it comes to shipping take material costs into account along with shipping fees bubble mailers are much cheaper than boxes and buying tape in bulk is much cheaper per unit than buying one roll at a time additionally
• 132:30 - 133:00 toner ink and paper cost money as do setup fees on sites like backer kit and at distribution facilities like ship station once you have warehousing and materials locked down it's time to tackle shipping costs you have several options when it comes to mailing a package for anything involving media like DVDs CDs or books you can send your shipment Media Mail in the United States this is the absolute cheapest way to
• 133:00 - 133:30 send anything anywhere but it is very restrictive to pieces of media and nothing else unlike other types of mail you consent to having the post office open your mail and inspect it so they can ensure you are using the service correctly if you can't use Media Mail there are several other mail options I won't go into into here except to say that domestic and international shipping rates increase all the time expect rates to change every 3 to 6 months plan a 10
• 133:30 - 134:00 to 20% buffer into your shipping just in case your shipping rates increase shipping rates are determined by two factors size and weight you need to confine your boxes to the smallest and lightest container possible once you are done prototyping all your products buy a few boxes of different sizes and shapes to see how you can fit your products in the least amount of space possible make sure to take into account
• 134:00 - 134:30 international shipping fees too not all countries are created equal when it comes to international shipping and you have to check each country's shipping rate individually because they vary wildly I've seen rates range from $10 to $40 for the same package depending on the country you're shipping to forgetting a about international shipping is a great way to go bankrupt you need to be very careful with shipping it can add an undue burden
• 134:30 - 135:00 on the unprepared Creator sometimes rates go up but sometimes it's because stretch goals change the weight and size of the Box still other times it's because a product that was once media maale can no longer be shipped that way because certain incentives prevent it from being shipped in that way whenever you add something to your Kickstarter you change the shipping and you need to recalculate everything so maintaining your budget spreadsheet is going to protect your campaign
• 135:00 - 135:30 success with some planning you can make sure distribution and shipping doesn't destroy your campaign and send you into debt fulfilling rewards number four marketing the fourth section of your budget is marketing marketing for your launch includes running ads creating promotional materials building websites attending Live Events filming videos and anything you do to spread the word about your campaign you can expect to spend up
• 135:30 - 136:00 to 30% of your budget on marketing marketing is a mandatory part of any campaign your goal is to get your products seen by the most people possible which means doing a lot of promotion in the months leading up to your launch date and especially during your campaign the problem with a marketing budget is that you have to invest in it whether your product is successful or not even if you pay yourself back after your
• 136:00 - 136:30 launch is successful you have to outlay the money for it UPF front this is a scary scenario for most people but it's also a necessary part of any successful launch if you have to save up for a successful marketing Blitz do it marketing is the difference between a mediocre campaign and a great one that being said don't spend money on marketing just to spend it do your research and pour your resources into
• 136:30 - 137:00 the channels that give the best return number five Kickstarter and payment processing fees the fifth section of your budget involves processing fees no matter the outlet fees are an inevitable part of your launch Kickstarter and indigogo Take 5 to 10% in fees when all is said and done but even if you go with your own site there will be fees associated with your credit card transactions credit card processing fees
• 137:00 - 137:30 can be as low as 2% and as high as 5% depending on your processor and type of card the customer uses you need to build those fees into your budget or you'll have a cash shortfall additionally most companies and sites that help produce or distribute your product will have setup fees associated with them an example would be backer kit I recommend adding those fees to their appropriate budget section but if you don't want to do that
• 137:30 - 138:00 this is the catch all section for all miscellaneous fees associated with your campaign finally you can expect a 1 to 2% of your total funding to go to dropped pledges these are pledges that Kickstarter had to cancel because the person didn't update their credit card or the charge didn't go through you can recover these dropped pledges through Kickstarter and a service like backer kit but you likely won't get every single one of them
• 138:00 - 138:30 back number six your time the sixth section of the budget accounts for your time most creators think that paying themselves for their work during a campaign is gross I disagree working on a campaign is a massive amount of work and if you do it all for free or or you lose money it will be a miserable experience and you'll never want to do it again I'm not saying you need to make a windfall but at least factor in enough money to buy a
• 138:30 - 139:00 bottle of champagne and take yourself out to a nice dinner number seven contingency my favorite line item is the 10% contingency because it's easy to calculate after you have added everything else in your budget add a 10% pad to the bottom line to account for anything that goes wrong with your campaign there is always something that goes horribly wrong and it's critical to
• 139:00 - 139:30 have some extra money to deal with it you must take the time to properly construct your budget and that's why we suggest at least a month to plan your Kickstarter most of it relies on other vendors getting back to you but it's up to you to find those vendors choose the right one for your project and plug in all the numbers so you get a complete picture of your campaign goals the budget is the Bedrock of your entire campaign if you get it wrong everything will collapse in on itself if you can
• 139:30 - 140:00 get it right though you'll have a solid foundation for Success designing your campaign for profitability we know creators are eager to scheme fun and exciting rewards for their Kickstarter campaign but we put the budgeting section first so that we can slow you down and keep you from making costly mistakes in your campaign design now that you have a good sense of the costs of Kickstarter we are going to talk about reward items reward tiers
• 140:00 - 140:30 backer perks stretch goals flash goals and add-ons with budget factors in mind reward items your reward items are the items your backers get from backing at various reward tiers the best reward items are already completed you should get as much of your content and rewards done and ready to ship ahead of the campaign start date during the campaign you'll be marketing and after
• 140:30 - 141:00 the campaign you'll be fulfilling we recommend to have at least 75% of your rewards already completed before starting a campaign especially if your fulfillment time is 3 months or less easy to deliver digital content and anything that can be shipped via Media Mail is ideal for your campaign from there things get harder and more expensive to deliver so make sure you factor all of this in as you are building your campaign items that are
• 141:00 - 141:30 bulky or large can have expensive shipping and storage and be more likely to break or get damage in the mailing process easy to store and track keep in mind that you will hold inventory on all of your extra books and merchandise if you have big items you need a bigger storage space if you have variant book covers you have multiple scuss if you have clothing and apparel you have different sizes and multiple scuss plus you'll run into inventory
• 141:30 - 142:00 problems later down the line exciting to you and your audience your rewards are informed by what your audience tells you they want and are excited about you need to gear your Kickstarter toward your fans and give your most Ardent ones the things that they've been wanting you to make high margin I use mainly physical items that have high margins like enamel pins are about $1 but can be sold for $110 to 15 that's because there are a lot of
• 142:00 - 142:30 costs to running the kickstarter campaign itself and getting people to back it that will eat into my profit on anything I sell factor that in and make sure your item costs less than 50% of the full price to produce and ship easy to reproduce a Kickstarter is a great way to build build assets for the future sometimes people offer things like a personalized story that will never be released or a book with handwritten notes on all the pages on
• 142:30 - 143:00 the non-fiction side this might be personalized consulting or Hands-On time with the Creator while those are cool rewards they are not assets for the future so you want to limit or charge a premium on anything that trades time for dollars one size fits all keep your Kickstarter reward simple there is no need to add multiple options for similar items variant covers while popular is one example of this each
• 143:00 - 143:30 reward should be targeting a specific buyer and have enough space in between to clearly delineate the right buyer for that product if you're struggling to find rewards that fit these best practices the best place to look is on Kickstarter what have other people with similar projects done for their Rewards you can make a list of the items that you like and that excite you and then you can evaluate that list based on these best practices to whittle down your
• 143:30 - 144:00 offerings reward tiers once you have your rewards you need to group them into teers you'll itemize your rewards on Kickstarter but backers ultimately choose and pay for them in bundles for a standard publishing project centered on books I recommend you start with the $11 $10 $25 $50 and $250 tiers obviously certain products will not fall into this range but for a
• 144:00 - 144:30 publishing product these five levels should be your base you can always add later as you divvy up your reward items into tiers keep these best practices around profitability in mind sell your physical products books merch art Etc at a premium for the most part books are not a high margin reward item they are a medium margin reward item you have to price them higher to make a reasonable profit I price a novel
• 144:30 - 145:00 plus shipping and handling at $25 in my reward tiers bolster the value of your physical product tiers by adding digital stuff on top of it the ebook and audio commentary tuck rization a thank you in the acknowledgements and more are all value added reward items that cost you nothing to reproduce to be able to charge a premium on the physical book tiers mix in high margin physical products like pins
• 145:00 - 145:30 prints and more look for items like pins which only cost about $1 per pin but which can sell for $10 to $15 or prints which are about the same don't overextend yourself on merchandise especially once a project is funded creators generally go crazy offering in all sorts of merchandise like t-shirts mugs and other very high- priced items the problem is that they are eating into their own profit margins
• 145:30 - 146:00 and eventually end up in the red merchandise is unnecessary in almost all instances until you have a well-known product if you must make merchandise don't make anything with multiple sizes also note that if you offer merchandise you can no longer ship your product Media Mail align your Kickstarter pricing to the other places you are selling you may need to raise your prices on retailers or lower your prices on
• 146:00 - 146:30 Kickstarter your Kickstarter campaign is effectively competing with your catalog on retailers you aren't going to beat Amazon in costs of producing and shipping your print books so how can you still make a good product and give people a reason to buy directly from you via your Kickstarter campaign as opposed to ordering the print book on Amazon exclusivity personalization signed copies bonus content author commentary patronage and more can help
• 146:30 - 147:00 with this compare your tiers to each other because they also compete with each other people are going to gravitate toward the highest tier within their budget that has the goods they want how do you draw people to the $10 tier versus the $1 tier your tiers need to make sense in a comparison think internationally as you build your tears the physical rewards are going to be us Centric because of exorbitant international shipping fees
• 147:00 - 147:30 that backers aren't going to want to pay you simply cannot compete with retailers on getting physical products overseas so make sure your most popular tiers have a digital only version so that your Global audience has a way to back the higher tiers without having to pay extra for shipping you can offer them an extra set of the ebook or an extra seat on your call or in your program include rewards from all
• 147:30 - 148:00 previous tiers you don't want people hesitating about backing a higher tier because they don't want to miss out on something they really wanted from a previous tier you want it to be very easy for them to increase their pledge level increasing existing pledges is a crucial part of the middle campaign law and any hesitation will prevent you from getting that extra pledge money when you have your basic list of reward tiers you can start dividing your
• 148:00 - 148:30 tears into tracks this can be helpful for you during your messaging as Kickstarter mixes all the reward tiers together the tracks are something you can use on your sales page to communicate where a potential backer should focus if they are most excited about ebooks print books merchandise or whatever else you can organize your tracks however you want but we recommend these as a starting point print track digital
• 148:30 - 149:00 track merchandise art pin track backer perks backer perks are weekly rewards to provide new messaging for your campaign the main purpose of the backer Rewards or to give me a reason to email my list again each week I email them once when the backer perk is ending and the next day to tell them about the new backer perk I pick up a few new backers each time I send these emails I keep backer rewards digital and
• 149:00 - 149:30 use content that is done already or that I can create quickly for fiction and Comics I use other people's books with permission if you are a fast writer you can write an exclusive short story or bonus scene each week keep backer rewards very simp le as they are mostly used to keep momentum going during the dead zone of The Campaign which we talk about in a later chapter having bonuses with deadlines
• 149:30 - 150:00 definitely pushes people to a buying decision which is why you do them but you don't want to overtax yourself on backer perks your main product will always be the main reason that people back the campaign stretch goals similar to backer perks you want to keep stretch goals simple ideally a stretch goal expands the main product or offering and makes it cooler stretch goals should always make your core Kickstarter product better
• 150:00 - 150:30 most people have terrible trouble with stretch goals once a project funds the backers fall off because there's nothing more to keep their interest you can change that by making sure your stretch goals always improve the quality of your project for instance if you have a book that is a 100 page soft cover comic you can add extra pages at the end as a stretch goal you can add an extra story you can make your soft cover a hard cover you could make your book a bigger
• 150:30 - 151:00 size meanwhile the original backer is still paying the same amount for their pledge and they are getting a better product nobody cares about the bookmarks and prints they just want the coolest project they can get some examples might be additional chapters another point of view an upgrade to better paper formatting illustrations Etc a unique but affordable to you piece
• 151:00 - 151:30 of content like artwork you may want to consider who is going to benefit from your stretch goal and use them to pull people up into the higher reward tiers your first stretch goal might be for all backers while later stretch goals might be only for people at the $10 $25 or $50 level or you could offer stretch goals for increased numbers of backers like hitting the next 100 in the campaign you should also make sure that
• 151:30 - 152:00 stretch goals are added to the add-ons where relevant finally you don't need to have a stretch goal I don't do them for all my campaigns and they are more important for longer campaigns where you need new reasons to reach out to potential backers in this case you should introduce your first stretch goal in week two at the earliest add-ons add-ons are your allock heart menu and an essential part of your
• 152:00 - 152:30 campaign and a place where you can make a surprising amount of money it's usually worth listing all of your reward items and everything else in your catalog as add-ons on your campaign this allows your backers to build their own bundle or reward level you can offer these add-ons in whatever formats you are allowed to sell as well check your exclusivity contracts as well as your intellectual property contracts to make sure you can legally sell something everything we've talked
• 152:30 - 153:00 about regarding digital products physical products shipping costs and budget applies here too so be cautious when listing your physical books if you want you can also give your add-ons a discounted price that is for backers only task checklist decide on the basic container for your campaign create your budget make a list of your reward
• 153:00 - 153:30 items groups your rewards into tiers group your tiers into tracks for your sales page messaging decide on your backer perks stretch goals and add-ons get all of this inputed into kickstarters dashboard under Rewards chapter six maximizing the buyer psychology of a Kickstarter campaign before we get into the sales page chapter we feel like we need to
• 153:30 - 154:00 give you a crash course in why things sell and especially why things sell on Kickstarter since it's truly an unusual and unique platform the good news with sales is that people want to buy things they actually want to help businesses succeed and find cool stuff in the process the problem is that people are also inherently lazy and skeptical of the unknown the key to sales is making sure a customer's desire to help out and to
• 154:00 - 154:30 find cool products outweighs their laziness and skepticism one way to effectively overcome laziness is through the use of buying triggers buying triggers have been used by every company that has ever existed to build their brand once you learn about buying triggers you will see see them everywhere this is a bit like seeing the code underneath the Matrix so in this chapter we're going to dive into buyer psychology using all of
• 154:30 - 155:00 the psychological triggers we've collected over the years from working in sales marketing copyrighting startups and more we're going to apply these psychological triggers in two ways writing marketing content that attracts your ideal audiences pushing buttons on Kickstarter that will increase how high you fund this chapter will cover the list of psychological triggers we've collected and use in our Kickstarter projects how
• 155:00 - 155:30 they apply specifically to Kickstarter and how they apply specifically to the copywriting you will do for your sales page on Kickstarter list of psychological triggers psychological triggers are what copywriters marketers product designers and salespeople Ed to persuade people to take action they are the seasoning on your content that push buttons and create emotional resonance with your reader they are useful for any type of
• 155:30 - 156:00 writing and the psychological triggers that we cover in this chapter are applicable to copywriting fiction non-fiction memoir book descriptions social media and advertising all types of writing that authors do on a regular basis the six categories are are the X factors position you above or several steps ahead of your audience connection deepener position you as a peer to your
• 156:00 - 156:30 audience the button pushers encourage action at a subconscious level Pleasure and Pain inducers evoke visceral and resonant emotion core wounders and healers take the audience on a transformational journey emotional fantasies and Nightmares allow the audience to explore a different life in safety Kickstarter uses a bunch of these in its functionality and you'll probably
• 156:30 - 157:00 be using the rest in your sample content and your sales page let's break these categories down further number one the X factors having an X Factor for yourself your product your book your name or whatever else is going to create more sales you want to use x factors when you're placing yourself as a leader of a group or movement that a reader would follow providing Heroes to look up to
• 157:00 - 157:30 and aha moments to your readers lives inspiring readers to listen or take action this is going to be most important for a non-fiction book where you are the person with the X Factor but it can also be important in getting readers interested in your characters here are the 10 x factors that you can add to your sales Page Plus explanations for fiction and non-fiction Memoirs can use
• 157:30 - 158:00 both Direction fiction giving your character a clear goal or vision and setting them on the path non-fiction having a goal vision for your reader and listing a step-by-step process that they can follow thought leadership fiction having your character Express smart ideas to other characters non-fiction expressing new ideas in an industry
• 158:00 - 158:30 relevancy fiction relating your story to something happening now in the real world through metaphor non-fiction relating your work or your campaign to something happening now in the real world and answering the question why this why now trendiness fiction and non-fiction catching a wave around a topic or Trope while it's a Hot Topic among readers consistency fiction giving the character
• 158:30 - 159:00 a personality and core values that will help the reader feel like they know them as a person non-fiction showing up regularly for your reader commitment fiction giving your character Something That Matters to them and that they can prioritize non-fiction honoring deadlines and Promises to your reader doing whatever it takes to get them results
• 159:00 - 159:30 Authority fiction giving your character a reason for people to listen to them whether it be experience putting them at the top of the hierarchy or through an institution that has its own reputation that's extended to the character non-fiction listen to me because I'm at the top of a hierarchy often gained through borrowing from branded institutions credibility fiction creating trust
• 159:30 - 160:00 between the character and the reader Often by giving the character challenges that help them establish themselves as being able to lead or hold their own in a fight non-fiction listen to me because you trust me and believe I know what I'm talking about often gained through either research or real world experimentation alignment fiction making it clear why the character is chosen for the task at hand or why the two characters should be
• 160:00 - 160:30 together often gained through backstory non-fiction you are the right person to be sharing this because often gained through backstory celebrity fiction giving the character a name or reputation that precedes them giving them a mythology ology that has other characters making interesting assumptions about them non-fiction you are known for sharing this your name precedes you often gained through previous successes
• 160:30 - 161:00 and often making people ask themselves I wonder what they're really like number two the connection deepener having a connection with your backers is kind of the point of Kickstarter and also the way you build a fan base that keeps coming back for more you want to use connection deepen when you're relating to your audience through Story character or situation helping your readers move forward from where they are at usually
• 161:00 - 161:30 not where you are at helping your readers make a transformation without coming across as judgy elitist or out of touch whereas the X factors can probably feel a bit braggy and full of it to some of you the connection deepener are a balancer as long as you use both in your copy you shouldn't have any issues and you need both because if you are too much of a leader then people won't relate to you
• 161:30 - 162:00 and if you are too much of a peer then people won't feel confident following you these are once again going to seem more relevant to non-fiction but they apply to fiction too here are the 12 connection deepener that you can add to your sales Page Plus explanations for fiction and non-fiction memoirs can use both emotion fiction offering more than rationale and Logic for your character's intentions and actions emotion sometimes
• 162:00 - 162:30 rules our decision-making non-fiction offering more than ration and Logic for intentions and actions authenticity fiction having your character share a genuine story that helps another character what your character does when no other characters are looking non-fiction sharing a genuine story or true love for helping others vulnerability fiction showing your
• 162:30 - 163:00 character in precarious or deathly situations non-fiction offering details that are personal could be judged but are otherwise relatable tension fiction giving your character anxiety and worry about something to come non-fiction telling a story that keeps readers reading investment fiction seeing the character
• 163:00 - 163:30 invest or go all in on something that's not a sure thing watching a character take a big risk for an even bigger reward which helps the reader get invested too non-fiction creating a personal investment in the character or the reader transformation fiction taking your character from point A to point B your reader comes on the journey and experiences the transformation themselves too non-fiction taking someone from
• 163:30 - 164:00 point A to point B or sharing how you did it Community fiction giving your characters a sense of community and others to fall back on when they are facing a challenge non-fiction facilitating others to communicate with one another about the content interaction fiction allowing readers to make decisions within the story whether this happens in the story itself or
• 164:00 - 164:30 through a relationship with the author interactive stories are also growing in popularity thanks to mobile devices and fiction gaming apps non-fiction giving readers ways to have an effect on the content Simplicity pick ition making your story accessible and easy to digest non-fiction making your content seem accessible and easy to digest
• 164:30 - 165:00 reciprocity fiction putting the character in a situation where they have to return a favor non-fiction giving your readers response in kind when they help you or communicate with you friendly competition fiction having your characters engage in a game or some other type of back and forth as your reader will want to know who wins non-fiction playing fun games with your readers or getting them to play
• 165:00 - 165:30 against each other for fun personalization fiction offering a way for readers to make some element of your story their own which can happen with merchandise sales special edition hard covers and so much more non-fiction offering a way for readers to make some element of the content their own number three the button pushers pushing buttons is generally looked at as a Bad Thing often this
• 165:30 - 166:00 phrase is used when you are trying to capture attention and get a reaction but that's pretty much what you are trying to do with a Kickstarter promotion you want someone to look at your page and be so moved that they become a backer pushing button is good in sales and marketing because it means you are receiving a response to your efforts you want to use button pushers when you're trying to get your reader to take
• 166:00 - 166:30 action connecting at a subconscious level to help the reader take the next step encouraging the reader to keep reading button pushers are probably the most common tool used in internet marketing and direct sales which have given them a bad rap but button pushers are just tools and it is your choice as to whether you use them for good or evil there are so many gentle and subtle uses for button pushers and if you are
• 166:30 - 167:00 hesitant to use them I encourage you to look for them in your favorite television show or book seeing them in the things you love will help you develop your own style for using them in your own work here are the 13 Button pushers that you can add to your sales Page Plus explanations for fix and non-fiction Memoirs can use both repeatability fiction teaching readers a short hand to replay an emotional long hand EG symbolism tattoos jewelry or a
• 167:00 - 167:30 phrase that a character repeats non-fiction teaching readers a Shand to replay an emotional long hand musical callback controversy fiction having your character share a sharp opinion that you know some will agree with some won't having another character take the opposite stance of Common Sense and watching them Clash non-fiction sharing a sharp opinion that you know some will agree
• 167:30 - 168:00 with some won't taking the opposite stance of Common Sense social proof fiction having trusted or influential characters within a story stand up for your protagonist or side with them non-fiction sharing how many others took the action you want your reader to take exclusivity fiction giving your story some real world Insider information like
• 168:00 - 168:30 the inner workings of a drug cartel or bringing your character into a secret society like a sorority or other type of Club non-fiction creating small communities or secret bonuses scarcity fiction taking something away from your character if they don't take action giving them a lack of resources as an obstacle or providing several terrible options non-fiction event-based
• 168:30 - 169:00 promotions deadlines limited seating availability taking something away if they don't take action common enemy fiction uniting a group of characters that don't normally get along against another person or group to get them to have unusual and surprising interactions non-fiction uniting a group against another group to get them to take action anticipation fiction giving readers a
• 169:00 - 169:30 reason to jump into the next chapter like a cliffhanger non-fiction giving readers a reason to get to the end completion bonus open Loops fiction and non-fiction leaving readers in a will they won't they scenario so that they can't stop until they have the answer this sustained the television show Friends for many many seasons and became the iconic example of an open loop
• 169:30 - 170:00 surprise fiction and non-fiction doing or writing something that the reader couldn't have guessed but that makes sense in hindsight payoff mystery fiction giving your readers a puzzle to decipher about a character or something in the plot regardless of whether you are writing a mystery non-fiction giving your readers a puzzle to decipher Secrets fiction giving your characters
• 170:00 - 170:30 things to keep from each other and letting the reader know watching as the two characters misunderstand each other non-fiction giving your reader something that no one else can offer them Trade Secrets unpredictability ition letting your character do something completely out of character as a regular person might do and explaining it later in the narrative so it all makes sense non-fiction not providing a
• 170:30 - 171:00 schedule for specific events flash sale bonus fiction bonus and deleted scenes or epilogues non-fiction adding something that the reader wasn't expecting to the offer number four the the Pleasure and Pain inducers humans see the world in Pleasure and Pain I had a good day or bad day this sucks or it's awesome I
• 171:00 - 171:30 want to do it or I don't people want to experience pleasure or pain when they read too as these are the triggers for several other feelings happiness sadness anger worry surprise you can set the mood of your marketing or your story or Express Primal desires through detailed imagery by understanding the Pleasure and Pain inducers you may notice that a lot of sales tactics Focus heavily on pain or why you're not good enough as you are now but you don't have to do that you
• 171:30 - 172:00 can also focus on Pleasure or the vision you have for someone you want to use Pleasure and Pain inducers when you're trying to induce deep emotion in people hoping to hook readers and create emotional resonance between them and your work drawing readers into a fantasy or mood that can bring them pleasure or pain or both we think of Pleasure and Pain
• 172:00 - 172:30 inducers as the pepper of the seasonings available to you write your copy then pepper in these words to amp up the flavor and make all the other seasonings work together here's an incomplete list of Pleasure and Pain inducing words wealth millionaire billionaire Rich Hampton's royalty bja food delicious fluffy creamy sweet salty sour touch caress soft skin satin silk
• 172:30 - 173:00 delicate sex sexy steamy hot wild XXX status Elite corporate Special Top expert MD royalty Crown danger War Death hunger Mission Adventure trap competition games select contest compete rivalry Exotic Travel beaches ruins Cliffs Dunes panoramas breathtaking views mesmerizing sights Beauty gorgeous pretty lovely
• 173:00 - 173:30 Charming Enchanted goddess bombshell productivity better faster smarter habits efficiency output best reward romance love connection soulmates Hearts Heavenly Oneness Nostalgia wispy sentimental black and white idyllic period homesickness jealousy Envy threat insecurity defensiveness greeneyed monster number five the core wounders and
• 173:30 - 174:00 healers there are only six major core wounds with most other wounding or upset leading back to one of the main six you want to use the core wounders and healers when you're trying to create transformation in others forming a deep emotional bond between your characters and your readers telling your own stories of trial and Triumph throughout your life below I have the six main transformation arcs as well as the
• 174:00 - 174:30 popular fictional characters who have made those Transformations rejection right pointing Arrow acceptance Harry Potter Bellis Swan control right pointing Arrow surrender Voldemort Dumbledore abandonment right pointing Arrow integration Elena Gilbert shame right pointing Arrow honor Jon Snow Edward Cullen betrayal right pointing Arrow devotion Peter
• 174:30 - 175:00 malar Injustice right pointing Arrow equality Katniss everine what I found most useful to understand around the core wounders and healers is that the most popular books really stick with the character same transformation Arc across multiple books for example Bella Swan goes through a rejection and acceptance cycle in every single one of The Twilight Saga books in the first she feels rejected by Edward
• 175:00 - 175:30 Cullen before starting a relationship with him in the second he literally breaks up with her in the third he refuses to turn her into a vampire despite the obvious threat to her life and in the fourth he rejects her willingness to have their child and tries to abort the baby to save Bella's life Jon Snow is another character who is a perfect example of this in nearly every scene we see him struggling with the shame honor
• 175:30 - 176:00 Paradigm everything about Jon Snow from the shame he was born with as a bastard all the way up to his final Act had to deal specifically with shame and honor as defined by the world I encourage you to think about which of these six transformation arcs match each of your major characters as well as how everything from their backstory to all their scenes might support their character Arc providing evidence of the narrative that you want to tell for non-fiction you can choose
• 176:00 - 176:30 yourself as the character or you can choose your ideal target audience for example with a weight loss book you might focus on emotional eating and choose the shame to honor transformation of healing the emotions inside you that cause you to overeat you could also focus on a target audience of recently divorced or cheated on women who are walking a betrayal to devotion transformation the short-lived reality television show Revenge body with host
• 176:30 - 177:00 Khloe Kardashian took this approach or you could also focus on a narrative around control to surrender like the food Freedom Movement there is no transformation narrative that is better or worse than another and they are fairly genre independent Trope independent and topic independent you can't really get it wrong the most important thing you can do when choosing a transformation narrative or noticing one you are
• 177:00 - 177:30 already writing and you're probably already writing one is to get everything into alignment with the narrative double down on your narrative to make it more resonant with your reader we used an injustice to equality narrative for our campaign for this book we talked a lot about how it's not fair that you can't write what you want and still make good money on it and it kind of defeats the purpose of becoming a creative to begin with we talked about
• 177:30 - 178:00 how the business model of books doesn't favor offbeat books because the revenue per customer of the average ebook is so small that you need a ton of readers to make a book successful we talked about how we don't want authors to be independent we want them to feel their independence to write what they want and still make a living from it we framed all of this within the context of a solution of course Kickstarter if you are writing non-fiction you have to offer the
• 178:00 - 178:30 solution your readers are craving and it has to be a real solution too none of what we shared is manipulative these are our true lived experiences as creatives and we've both got Decades of business experience to discuss the market dynamics and our solution is not snake oil we have tested this multiple times and have the legitimate numbers to show that it's a very real solution to the problems we've laid out we also have more solutions to this problem because
• 178:30 - 179:00 Kickstarter is just part of a larger ecosystem of direct sales which is where we believe true creative freedom lies these are our sequels to this book if you are writing fiction and using this powerful category of psychological triggers you usually want to show the character moving from a place of the wound to the healing over the course of a single book you also usually want to aggravate the same exact core wound in a different way in the
• 179:00 - 179:30 next book in the series look at any massive best-selling series and you will find that the author does this incredibly well as well as many other structural story pieces that are also done incredibly well in fact it's kind of fun to pick out popular characters in Long series and figure out what their perseverant core wound is throughout the series then find scenes in each book where this is triggered over and over again in different ways the core healers and wounders will
• 179:30 - 180:00 help you align to the universal transformation narratives that readers gravitate toward and resonate with number six the emotional fantasies and Nightmares unlike the core wounders and healers which are transformations that help you change your reality emotional fantasies and Nightmares are actually transportations that help you escape your reality just for a little bit people want to change their lives with the former but they do not want to truly
• 180:00 - 180:30 change their lives in the latter they just want to escape into fantasy and Nightmare while still staying safe in their current life and World they want to explore a different life while being able to come back to their real life whenever they please you want to use the emotional fantasies and Nightmares when you're writing Escapist Fiction with Fantastical Adventures outrageous conflict and Challenge and extraordinary
• 180:30 - 181:00 worlds trying to share your vision for someone with them in a safe way without all the hard steps it will take talking to people about really difficult to understand or charge topics through metaphor to make it feel safer to engage with the app lications of this category of psychological triggers are obvious in fiction who actually wants to be abducted by a vampire mob boss but this applies well to non-fiction authors too
• 181:00 - 181:30 it works best when your ideal reader is several steps away from achieving what they want for example if you are selling business Consulting to an entrepreneur you might share stories about seven figure businesses that started at the kitchen counter with a pile of laundry and three kids screaming in the background the fantasy is the seven fig business it feels Way Out Of Reach to the person sitting at that kitchen counter but that person wants to explore
• 181:30 - 182:00 the fantasy of it without dealing with all the pain that probably comes with it at least for a little bit eventually they may move into wanting to make a transformation but honestly the amount of healing they'll have to do is not the selling point you lead with and doesn't always make someone want to get moving they may not be ready to confront the things that are holding them back they may not be ready to truly change their ways just yet give them the nightmare
• 182:00 - 182:30 versus fantasy first then when they've agreed to formally work with you give them the actual steps to transformation for this category there's not an easy digestible list of emotional fantasies and Nightmares but rather a process of analyzing the emotional fantasies and Nightmares that you write about and that resonate with your readers right now like in other categories we encourage you to identify what you are already doing well then
• 182:30 - 183:00 lean in or double down on it the process is step one figure out what emotional fantasies and Nightmares your books hit on you can do this through talking to your audience reading your review use breaking down the topics or tropes in your genre and noticing the categories that they seem to fall into for example royalty stories fall into three narratives Ordinary Girl to
• 183:00 - 183:30 princess princess to Queen and Ordinary Girl to Superstar handmaiden if you write royalty you should know the why behind what people like about each of these three because it's different and goes beyond royalty step two go deeper into what resonates about that narrative what are ordinary girl problems versus Princess problems versus queen problems versus handmaiden problems what does each have that is
• 183:30 - 184:00 normal and what are they going to get that's abnormal during their transformation how does the abnormal thing cause tension in the story step three tease out the visuals of these stories in the form of scenes if you are non-fiction you can think of these as stories case studies or even embodiment if you have been through the transformation yourself first how can you write scenes or add chapters that fulfill those fantasies or nightmares how can you write the fantasy
• 184:00 - 184:30 of the characters normal and the nightmare of the characters abnormal that's coming their way how do the fantasies and Nightmares play out in relationships does the girl get the princess but it's a nightmare for them step four implementation and bringing the fantasies and Nightmares to life choose visuals and samples of your work that convey these fantasies and Nightmares you can also work with some of the other categories we've discussed
• 184:30 - 185:00 to flesh this out even more note the visuals and the text need to go into your sample and on your sales page for your Kickstarter Campaign which we talk about in the next chapter although I used a fiction example all of this applies well to non-fiction too when we designed the campaign for this book we wanted to make sure that we fulfilled the author fantasy of raising $10,000 from a single book on Kickstarter we ended up hitting
• 185:00 - 185:30 $21,500 plus now we're working with our clients to help them get started on Kickstarter and Achieve bigger campaigns as well the fantasy which feels Out Of Reach to many authors is $10,000 on a campaign as we create more proof that we can help more authors get these results we'll shift into looking at the core wounders and healers psychological triggers so we can incrementally move people along toward their goals we hope we're doing
• 185:30 - 186:00 this in this book too this is not much different from what we do with our characters in fiction the protagonist changes but it's all a transformational journey how we use these psychological triggers we have trained ourselves through our past experiences in copyrighting marketing and sales to think and work and plan in terms of how we can stack as many psychological triggers as possible into our books and
• 186:00 - 186:30 promotions it comes fairly naturally to us at this point and we don't always do it consciously we wanted to give you the secrets behind what we're doing because you'll need them to write a better sales page which we talk about in the next chapter we all understand buyer psychology intuitively at some level some of us have just gone deeper the bottom line on buyer psychology is that all you have to do to get good at it is recognize what you're
• 186:30 - 187:00 already doing and amplify and double down on it then add more of these psychological triggers as seasoning to your project or book you can never overseason Russell's system for Kickstarter is heavily built on tapping into the buyer psychology we've laid out here Monica's branding similarly uses psychological triggers our campaign for this book performed unusually well and exceeded
• 187:00 - 187:30 our expectations largely because we use these psychological triggers in all the things we do often intuitively rather than on purpose when we consciously design our campaign using these things we see even better results and we think you will too you now have our secret ingredients to why our branding audience building and selling works as it does and you can take this knowledge to any project or book but you're here to learn
• 187:30 - 188:00 Kickstarter so let's see how you can apply these psychological triggers to your project to get more people interested in backing your campaign kickstarters built-in psychological triggers Kickstarter uses a lot of these triggers in its platform especially the button pushers here are some places that they use them transparency Kickstarter has a transparency policy that permeates through its site this uses many
• 188:00 - 188:30 connection deepener like authenticity vulnerability investment community and interaction campaign the campaign itself is a massive open loop of will it won't it fund even after it funds the question is how high and eventually the campaign ends bringing in the scarcity factor that will get you many additional pledges before the end money and Backer counters these both hit on social proof but they also hit on
• 188:30 - 189:00 the Pleasure and Pain inducers around wealth productivity and success and the connection deepener around investment and Community limited number reward tiers this uses scarcity and exclusivity especially when the limited reward rewards are signed or otherwise special compared to the next set of tiers Tim limited reward tiers this uses scass te and we used it with success in our last campaign closing a few of our
• 189:00 - 189:30 tiers early we actually sold more of the tier after we closed it than we had during the 5 weeks it was still open we recommend that you try to use at least one of kickstarter's unique functions in your launch each time you run a campaign you can use all of them but there's always an investment of time energy and more to implement it the more you can use the more you will probably fund at more psychological triggers that you can use for your
• 189:30 - 190:00 campaign when you're not given the functionality you can create it yourself that's what most of the extra things like backer perks stretch goals flash goals and more are meant to do creators are trying to keep pushing those buttons to get attention and create action throughout their campaign here are a few ways it happens backer perks and Flash goals Russell system uses backer perks which use the same button pushers that kickstarter's regular trajectory uses
• 190:00 - 190:30 too every week it's almost like you are doing a mini Kickstarter within the kickstarter for your weekly backer perk and you will see the same trajectory of more sales coming in at the beginning and end of the week it makes sense backers respond responded to the button pushers before they will respond again now flash goals are this but over the course of only a day or two stretch goals most people on Kickstarter use stretch goals and
• 190:30 - 191:00 usually this triggers people's love of additional freebies and bonuses you're either upgrading your main product to something cooler for the same price investment wealth reciprocity or you're offering something more to those who upgrade to a higher tier status surprise exclusive anticipation on your end your goal for stretch goals is to keep people engaged in the campaign so they aren't tempted to cancel their pledge investment psychological triggers to use on your sales
• 191:00 - 191:30 page we haven't gotten to the sales page yet but we want to give you a list of places where we want you to use more psychological triggers to attract your readership sample your sample should absolutely 100% start with a emotional fantasy or nightmare that your audience really resonates with read some of Russell's samples from former campaigns every single one has what he's known for real characters Lawless Landscapes Big Life questions monsters
• 191:30 - 192:00 physically or mentally Gore cursing and dark humor author bio as uncomfortable as it might be you want to pour as many X factors as possible into this section use connection deepener elsewhere to diffuse L the tension of this but you have to talk yourself up and be proud of your efforts in this section budget money is taboo so when you share how you plan to spend the money this feels secretive and
• 192:00 - 192:30 mysterious people love peing behind the scenes and one of the most popular questions we got from friends about the campaign was but what's your actual reward goal hopefully we've given you a lot to chew on in this chapter all of these psychological triggers are essential for the long-term growth of your business and naming them is going to help you start to see them everywhere each trigger is powerful on its own but if you can mix them together you will increase your sales
• 192:30 - 193:00 exponentially some of these triggers take time to build into your business Authority and social proof won't happen overnight others like scarcity and commitment you can build into your sales funnel today which is what Kickstarter does and why people with great ideas and no audience can often have a bigger campaign on Kickstarter even if it takes time to seed some of these triggers into your business it's important to have a plan to incorporate most of them
• 193:00 - 193:30 eventually task checklist go back through this list and notice all the places you are already using psychological triggers in your books your campaign design or your marketing how can you take those pieces to the next level bring them out more make them the show horse instead of the work Pony remember you can never overseason look at Russell's previous Kickstarter campaigns and notice where
• 193:30 - 194:00 he uses psychological triggers effectively to communicate what he's offering read our campaign breakdown for this book in an upcoming chapter and study our Kickstarter page notice where we use psychological triggers in our campaign design and copyrighting after studying our methods go back through this list again because it's all available to you too we want you to steal this list from us and find your own unique way to comfortably
• 194:00 - 194:30 implement it in your books especially your samples and all your other marketing copy take it to Kickstarter retailers patreon your website your social media and more use it as a checklist make it yours and sell sell more chapter 7 setting up your Kickstarter sales page you can't have a successful launch without a captivating sales page where customers can buy your work this chapter
• 194:30 - 195:00 is all about the next pillar of a successful Kickstarter Campaign which is your sales page the function of a sales page is to build up a customer's desire to purchase your product by showing them why they need it in their lives the most effective sales pages are built after you've spoken with potential customers about your product in the months leading up to your launch by pitching the product to your ideal customers you find out their pain points their wants their
• 195:00 - 195:30 needs and their objections you learn the triggers that convert people into buying customers and what wording prevents them from purchasing your product all of this research becomes essential data when constructing an effective sales page an effective sales page is broken down into four parts the important elements of your story Kickstarter page or sales page are the title and subtitle the
• 195:30 - 196:00 copy the visuals the video we will break these down one by one in this section your title the right title is critical for Kickstarter success with with hundreds of projects to choose from you only have a second to catch a backer's eye with the way that Kickstarter is set up you basically get an image and a title to make a back or click on your link you want to make sure your title is
• 196:00 - 196:30 catchy and that it uses all 60 characters to fully explain the reason somebody should click on your project almost all hypers successful projects use a colon after the name of their project to State what the project is about make sure to utilize all 60 characters in order to give yourself the best chance for success for instance Ouya launched on Kickstarter a few years ago unless I told you that it was a video game
• 196:30 - 197:00 console most people would have no idea what Ouya did or why they should buy it therefore when they launched the title of their product became Ouya a new kind of video game console the descriptor was a great way to get people invested in their product launch immediately they instantly defined their market and boosted their clicks with just a couple of words some of my fiction project titles include the void calls us home exclusive
• 197:00 - 197:30 hard cover plus Audio Drama Black Market heroin an action adventure urban fantasy ogn the obsidian spindle Saga four Mythic fairy tale fantasy books God's First Chronicles seven mythological fantasy adventure books wannabe Press Summer fantasy science fiction novel slate your subtitle you have about 135 characters
• 197:30 - 198:00 to give a log line for your book or product if you've been pitching your product for a long time you'll know exactly how to summarize it for maximum Effectiveness if not then you might want to practice telling people people what your book or project is about see where their faces light up in understanding or interest that's the core of what your product is remember it's not about the what or how of your product it's about creating
• 198:00 - 198:30 an emotional resonance with your customer so their soul needs to have it some of my best subtitles include Rebecca never thought she was suicidal however that didn't stop stop her from jerking her car off the side of the road last night a criminal accidentally rescues the Antichrist and has to keep her alive until morning to prevent the apocalypse four portal fantasy novels
• 198:30 - 199:00 filled with fairy tales mythology action and romance all gods are real they just suck now the women of the Gods verse are back with three new novels to knock them in the teeth four new novels featuring monsters mythology magic aliens and more all written by USA Today best-selling author Russell Nolty your copy on the kickstarter page the copy is
• 199:00 - 199:30 found directly under the video the name of the product and Main description are above the fold then you have to scroll down to read any of the products benefits a sales page is always a daunting Endeavor Russell has a full foolproof template that breaks up the possible things that you can put on this page into small chunks that are easily scannable for the reader for each of the sections listed keep your text concise people on
• 199:30 - 200:00 Kickstarter love to use huge blocks of text but that is ugly to the eye they also love to muddle their paragraphs remember in school where we learned how to write a paragraph you have a main sentence two to three sentences that support the main sentence and finally a concluding sentence that ties together everything you said the same thing is true with paragraphs you have a thesis paragraph with your main point then three to five supporting paragraphs and a concluding
• 200:00 - 200:30 paragraph you don't need much in order to get somebody to back but it does have to make a compelling clear and concise case the best thing I can do in this section is give you a link to my Kickstarter profile where you can see my examples of implementing this over and over again kickstarter.com profile russle T here are the sections I include on my pages in the rough order that I put them
• 200:30 - 201:00 in number one link to the sample the best way to sell something is to give people a taste of it so they can see if they enjoy it I use the first 10 chapters from a novel or the first two to three chapter chapters from a non-fiction book for Comics I use three to four spreads so people can get a sense for the artwork and Story number two inciting questions I think of the inciting
• 201:00 - 201:30 questions as proof of genre love and use them to get potential backers to decide that the campaign is for them I ask three questions for my fiction and with each question I want the reader to say yes if they get three yeses they are the ideal for the books for non-fiction we used three questions targeted at three different audiences our readers only needed to answer yes to one of them to qualify themselves number three explanation of
• 201:30 - 202:00 scope this is a fairly boring section that explains the formats offered levels of violence and sex genres length Pages trim and so on I put this and try to get it to look exactly like it does on a retailer product page so that people can recognize it and don't ask questions about it in the comments number four the book description or blurb this is your book description that you would put on your product page at a
• 202:00 - 202:30 retailer number five table of contents for non-fiction more relevant for non-fiction as people want to know what's in the book number six overview of the series write a few paragraphs about the series you can also talk about your reason for wanting to write the series here number seven overview of the setting or World building for fiction depending on your genre you can
• 202:30 - 203:00 offer a paragraph or two about the world and setting where the book takes place it doesn't need to be a lot and it's going to be very dependent on what your campaign is and what you are offering use the last chapter to think about how to make the setting come alive for people and work with the Pleasure and Pain inducers plus the emotional fantasies and Nightmares to refine this section you want the images and text to transport the
• 203:00 - 203:30 reader number eight overview of the characters for fiction most readers are looking for those resonate character arcs so you'll want to focus on core wounders and healers in this section then Heap on Pleasure and Pain inducers and emotional fantasies and Nightmares to bring the characters to life and make them more visual if you have images of the characters you can use those two to support the text number nine about the
• 203:30 - 204:00 author this can be as simple as copying and pasting your biography and you can pull the text for it directly from your website or from retailers you should also pull an image of yourself that works within the branding of your book series or product use your X factors here number 10 budget you can make a graphic of your budget and list out the different sections of it it doesn't need to be detailed at all most creators have the
• 204:00 - 204:30 reward goal they set for the project but then have a nice to have goal that they'd actually like to fund at I build my budget off of the nice to have goal check out my projects to see how I do this in my campaigns number 11 reward tiers by track on Kickstarter rewards are placed on the right hand side of the page so a customer can pledge to a product easily once they have been convinced to
• 204:30 - 205:00 buy while this is an elegant solution for where to place rewards most sales Pages Place their rewards at the bottom of the page instead of along the side and add a ready to buy link after every few paragraphs that redirects customers to a check out page wherever you place your rewards each tier needs to be targeted to a specific type of customer that's why we recommend using tracks where you can list all the digital tiers all the print tiers and so on so backers can find what
• 205:00 - 205:30 they are looking for more easily additionally always include lower tier rewards in your higher tiers it's tempting to make rewards exclusive to a single level but this prevents people from choosing higher higher reward levels if they really love something at the lower tier rewards and if you don't make your rewards inclusive then you lose out on that additional Revenue I made this mistake during my first launches and it prevented several
• 205:30 - 206:00 backers from increasing their pledges to higher tiar number 12 add-ons most campaigns are going to have some version of a build your own bundle by picking up add-ons the challenge with add-ons is that poten backers can't see them until they back the campaign first this is the section where you list your add-ons usually by group so for example you might say you can pick up the individual books in all of the following Series in
• 206:00 - 206:30 ebook paperback and hard cover or you can grab any item in any reward tier as an add-on after you back the project depending on your audience's savviness with Kickstarter it may be helpful to explain this visually as well if you have relatively few add-ons you may want to offer a short description in this section feel free to move these around as it makes sense for your project the most important thing is that they are on
• 206:30 - 207:00 the page so that you don't have a million questions about what you're offering if someone doesn't understand what you want to give them they're not going to back and most won't reach out with their question at the end of the day copy isn't about you it's about your customer and why your product is perfect for them even when you talk about yourself it needs to reflect the reasons why you are uniquely qualified to birth your product into the
• 207:00 - 207:30 World As you move down your page make sure to break your copy up into distinct paragraphs each with a main idea supporting sentences and a conclusion then compile these paragraphs into easy to follow lists that can be read without any guidance customers have been trained to read sales Pages like lists scrolling through until they see something pertinent to them because of that every bullet point needs to be carefully constructed to deal with a specific
• 207:30 - 208:00 problem without rambling off topic your customers should have all their questions answered by the time they finish reading your copy if they are still scratching their heads wondering what your product can do for them you've lost a sale people say damn Russell your page is long but then multiple people still complain about things and ask me to add something like I just added this Matrix for the rewards because the big graphic wasn't enough for some people that's why my campaign pages are
• 208:00 - 208:30 so long it's not so that I think everybody will read everything it's because multiple people have asked me for certain things over the years so it keeps getting longer your visuals ever hear the phrase a picture's worth a thousand words well it's especially true when you are trying to sell something images reveal more information about your product than copy ever
• 208:30 - 209:00 could additionally customers associate imagery with professionalism on Kickstarter Pages images are interspersed with copy to break up thoughts and give customers a relief from word heavy paragraphs they all o Define the key benefits and features of products that would take thousands of words to describe the easiest way to make your sales Page look more professional is by adding quality imagery good sales pages
• 209:00 - 209:30 on Kickstarter have five or six images but the best have more the more relevant imagery you can have on your sales page the more positively your customers will view your product the average successful Kickstarter has 11 IM in it even if you have something with a novel there are plenty of images you can add besides your cover you can add a photo of yourself you can add some quotes from your book overlaid on top of a
• 209:30 - 210:00 royalty-free image you can add silly memes you can have somebody draw some illustrations of your book humans are visual creatures and pictures help improve the quality of your page and make your project look more professional it should also be noted that when people are browsing kickstarters categories they will see one image from you which is the main one for your project that you set in basics in the back end I usually make this a cool image with no
• 210:00 - 210:30 text and rarely put a book in the image because people already know it's a book when looking at the title and subtitle the ideal image for this is something attention grabbing that makes you want to click through anything that you would use for an ad image will work for this slot and if you've tested some images through ads that could work use those your video a video is the best way to build empathy connection and trust with your
• 210:30 - 211:00 potential customer it allows them to see and hear you so they can build an instant connection to you as if they'd met you in person the video should be the first thing people see when they come to your page just like it's the first thing you see when you land on a Kickstarter page where the video is front and center you can view it without scrolling at all I call that above the fold placement it's critical that the video headline and
• 211:00 - 211:30 Main description of your product all have above the fold placement the Instinct of creatives is to shy away from the camera but to sell your product you need people to feel a connection with you while loving your product is essential making a connection to you is just as important so unfortunately you must be on camera for at least part of your video suck it up and get over it our goal here isn't to make you comfortable it's to sell
• 211:30 - 212:00 product you need to be on camera your sales video is a commercial for your product it needs to be big bold and full of motion it also needs to be short there is a reason television commercials top out at 60 seconds people don't have the attention span for much more than that nobody can stand a commercial for more than a couple minutes no matter how amazing the commercial you can say everything you
• 212:00 - 212:30 need to say in under 3 minutes yes you will have to edit yourself down there are plenty of free programs like iMovie which can take out all the ums and awe you need to make your case clearly and succinctly so people don't tune out you don't have to keep it under 60 seconds but your video should be well under 3 minutes that means it will only show the highlights of your product its biggest features and greatest benefits
• 212:30 - 213:00 this is why I do it last after I've already written my sales copy I use a very simple structure when it comes to creating the scripts for my sales videos introduction the first part of the video is a simple introduction of myself and the product this takes under 10 seconds it's literally hi my name is Russell and I'm the publisher of wannabe press I'm here to tell you about my
• 213:00 - 213:30 awesome new product the product in this section I talk about the product and its biggest features for no more than 60 seconds I highlight what makes the product unique and why people should buy it additionally I add imagery that pleases the eye and entices people to keep watching remember this is an ad so it has to engage and entertain the viewer The Plea after demonstrating the
• 213:30 - 214:00 product the third part of your video contains the exact reasons it needs to exist and why people need to buy it immediately during my video for the spaceship broken needs repairs campaign I explained that I came to kickstarters specifically because the subject of the book abuse was incredibly Niche and had no hope of succeeding on the open market without an initial Boost from the kickstarter Community if they didn't support it then it would never see the open market since Kickstarter is a
• 214:00 - 214:30 Marketplace for weird new and original ideas that wouldn't exist on their own this plea struck a nerve and I was able to fund my fifth successful campaign it's a really simple formula that I've used used again and again I've never had a video run over 3 minutes and almost all my videos have clocked in under 230 the shorter you make the video the more likely people will be to stay until the
• 214:30 - 215:00 end task checklist write your title write your subtitle write each of the sections of your copy add more images write your video script create your video Chapter 8 platform pre-checks and challenges no platform comes without its own challenges quirky features and
• 215:00 - 215:30 questionable policies we wanted to break down some of the challenges some authors might face on the platform along with considerations and workaround solutions emotions run high as your campaign gets off the ground so we want to give you all of this so you're not having to search out the solutions while launching a campaign and we want you to double check several of these things before you launch your first campaign if possible using your real name or company
• 215:30 - 216:00 name Kickstarter has no functionality around setting pen names you must use your real name or your company name on the platform for some creators this works but if you have multiple pen names and you'd like to run projects for several of them then you may be better off using a company name or a neutral name that is still yours and also works for all your pen names Additionally you can only have one account on Kickstarter and once you
• 216:00 - 216:30 become a Creator by launching your first project your name field will lock you want to set this to what you'll want for the long term given the information you have now there are ways to change it in the future by contacting Kickstarter directly but they have rules around what they will and won't change you can also delete your account and start a new one but you lose access to all the campaigns you backed in the past and you are permanently disconnected from campaigns you created
• 216:30 - 217:00 too in other words you want to put a bit of thought into this especially if you intend to use Kickstarter multiple times in the next 5 years editing and deleting content kickstar starter has many functions on its platform that will not allow you to edit or delete things that are posted here are some of the functions your launch start and end once you hit launch there's really no abort button outside of cancelling a project
• 217:00 - 217:30 don't launch your project until you are 100% ready additionally make sure your end date is correct before you launch because you can't change that once you launch the campaign ends automatically and and if you've put in the wrong date you'll have to adjust your marketing to accommodate that or cancel the project your reward tiers once someone has backed a reward tier you are unable to delete it be especially careful with
• 217:30 - 218:00 assigning shipping to each tier as well as putting in the correct delivery dates and items if you make a mistake and someone chooses that tier you're on the hook to deliver unless you can convince the person to switch tiers on their end this is not so much a problem with just one person but if 150 people back your tier and you forgot shipping or priced shipping poorly you're going to be expected to deliver anyway if you need to delete a reward tier during your
• 218:00 - 218:30 campaign but can't the best option is to close the reward tier through putting a limit on it then duplicating it and adjusting the terms ideally you eat the costs of the mistake if there are any but if you desperately need need people off of the reward tier due to costs communicate and ask them to switch tiers for you be honest in your explanation you may not be able to get everyone that way but you can definitely get most to switch with a communication
• 218:30 - 219:00 request the public comments section on the page you can't delete comments that are posted by your backers and anyone with an account can back your campaign you also maybe more importantly can't delete delete comments that you post publicly this means that you want to think carefully and respond instead of react to anyone who posts a comment on your page because it will stay up forever your backer updates when you publish an update it goes out right away
• 219:00 - 219:30 to backers in an email update you can adjust the published update on the platform for 30 minutes which is good for fixing typos but not great for fixing actual errors if you make a mistake add a comment to the update with the correct link or information so people can find it if it's important send a second backer update your campaign rewards and story page when your campaign ends the campaign page locks and becomes
• 219:30 - 220:00 uneditable you may want to make sure that you have all content corrected as the campaign comes to a close especially if your campaign has changed a lot since launch rare trolling incidents what would a platform be without trolls you can't have interaction with people without encountering some irritating ones so here's how to handle them on Kickstarter we've experienced two types of trolls on
• 220:00 - 220:30 Kickstarter concern trolls people who question every aspect of your project or comment repeatedly in a negative way bringing down the energy of your campaign they may also be subtly negging you or telling you that you aren't good good enough to be doing what you're doing money trolls people who cancel or change their pledge up and down multiple times during the campaign this can create negative days where you lose money rather than gain it it can also be
• 220:30 - 221:00 disheartening when it's a large sum unfortunately you can't do much about either of these trolls you can complain to Kickstarter and they will pass it along to their trust team where they will determine if the person is in violation of their Community guidelines you can read their trust and accountability policy here kickstarter.com trust from that page you can find links to other policies that Kickstarter has
• 221:00 - 221:30 to ensure that creators and backers get along on their platform a big Challenge on the platform is that there is no block button or way to formally end your relationship with another person on the platform there are many reasons why this is important for Safety and Security if you've ever had to use a block button before anywhere you probably understand all the scenarios in which you want this available to you on any platform that allows
• 221:30 - 222:00 interaction on the flip side Kickstarter also has its reasons for not allowing it many of which revolve around transparency between backers and creators especially as backers are entrusting creators to deliver their rewards still being on the Creator side of the equation we wish there was a way to block someone from backing the campaign so that no money was exchanged and that's not possible that means anyone who has an
• 222:00 - 222:30 account on Kickstarter can form a customer relationship with you if at any point you do not wish to be in that relationship with them you have no recourse aside from ignoring them or cancelling your project and ending your relationship with all backers at once Kickstarter offers a workaround solution which is that at the end of The Campaign you are able to refund a backer and formally end the relationship with them you can refund anyone on the
• 222:30 - 223:00 platform even after the collection period has passed though depending on how much time has passed you may lose your payment processing fees additionally there's a big difference between what could possibly happen and what actually happens most people who use Kickstarter never have issues and in 20 campaigns Russell has never had an issue while we hope Kickstarter implements a better solution for this in the future we don't think it's a reason
• 223:00 - 223:30 alone to avoid the platform nor do we think it's the worst platform policy among all the other retailers and platforms and companies that authors work with we wanted authors to be aware of this in case they're unique situation makes it unsafe for them to be on the platform without the ability to block people read before using the platform these are all the author specific challenges that we've seen on the platform that we think are going to
• 223:30 - 224:00 be relevant to those listening to this book make sure you do your own due diligence to make good decisions about how to use the platform that are right for your books your business and yourself you don't want to learn that the platform form doesn't work for you after you've already launched task checklist make a decision about your name on the platform if you haven't already double check your start and end dates for your campaign before you hit
• 224:00 - 224:30 launch double check your reward tiers for mistakes especially around delivery turnaround and shipping get familiar with the to and any other relevant guidelines about using the platform chapter n Kickstarter pre-launch Marketing in this chapter we're going to walk you through some of the most important things you can do in the several weeks leading up to your
• 224:30 - 225:00 Kickstarter get these done early as you want time to build excitement for your campaign a Kickstarter campaign by its nature is a launch and as with all time sensitive promotions the more you can do ahead of of time the smoother the launch will go this chapter covers project review and approval setting up your Kickstarter pre-launch page getting feedback from your
• 225:00 - 225:30 audience building your audience ahead of the campaign what you could do in terms of advertising project review and approval once you've completed the tasks up to this point you should be ready to submit your project for approval it can take several days to get it approved or it can go through immediately if you are established on the platform already you want to do this early ideally a month in
• 225:30 - 226:00 advance you don't need your page to be completed to submit for review you only need the basics of your story page and reward tiar up so that the reviewer can get a sense for what the project is about and make sure it doesn't violate the platform's terms of service you should expect to continue making a lot of changes to your campaign as you get closer to the deadline but having this done early is critical for getting your pre-launch page technically once you are approved
• 226:00 - 226:30 on the project you are able to launch if you are behind in your setup don't worry too much you can be launched within a couple days of submitting your review and maybe sooner the value of submitting your project approval early is to get the pre-launch page that's why we recommend doing this a month in advance your Kickstarter pre-launch page Kickstarter creates a landing page where people can get notified about your
• 226:30 - 227:00 launch the notification page is critical to your Kickstarter success a lot of kickstarters Fund in the first few days and this is where you want to be too if you can fund the first day even better you can get a sense of how the first few days of your launch might do by working your pre-launch page how many people have asked to be notified it matters it doesn't mean they'll back your project and that's
• 227:00 - 227:30 okay this number still signals to others that the project is exciting and popular it gets people interested to create their Kickstarter account if they don't already have one it notifies them via email when the campaign starts so they can back early the three optimizations for your Kickstarter pre-launch page there are only three things that show up on your pre-launch page and they are autogenerated from the basic section
• 227:30 - 228:00 that you filled out already if you don't like them you can change them in the basics these three things are your main campaign image your project title your project subtitle we've discussed how to optimize each of these in the previous chapter on sales Pages if you didn't update these then you may want to do so now as these three pieces are the only relevant content that Kickstarter browsers will
• 228:00 - 228:30 see if you pop up in categories and search results what you do here will also affect how well your pre-launch page converts to Follows what to say about your Kickstarter pre-launch page having the pre-launch page gives you a good reason to talk about the kickstarter because the call to action is to follow the pre-launch it's fairly easy to do and people are willing to do it as a show of curiosity interest or
• 228:30 - 229:00 support here are some things you can share to get people to your pre-launch page busting through objections takes a lot of the fear away objections can be anything from what is Kickstarter or objections specific to what you are selling you need to talk to your potential audience to get a sense of what these are being able to address objections is one of the ways that we boost our confidence when people aren't sold on what we're offering teasing rewards if you know
• 229:00 - 229:30 your audience has been pestering you for things teasers might help sell them on your reward tiar you can share answers to questions like what does the reward tier include and what is the experience of joining that reward tier of unboxing the content for the latter you could possibly even do a video especially if you have samples of your product already sharing the why behind the campaign a lot of your audience will
• 229:30 - 230:00 want to know why you are doing this on Kickstarter especially if it's your first time we addressed how to talk about your campaign around this in earlier chapters you can also share a mission movement or personal story around your campaign sharing why you're using Kickstarter instead of retailers and asking them to switch if you normally sell somewhere else this will likely be a question as you have built your audience on one platform and are asking
• 230:00 - 230:30 them to buy from another this time pre-selling higher-end tiers if you have expensive tiers people are probably not going to impul buy them you can do several posts or emails to address obje and build Buzz for these tiar ahead of time you may also want to drop these onto a page on your website you can link to it in the reward tier or drop a section at the end of your sales page on Kickstarter you'll collect follows
• 230:30 - 231:00 throughout the campaign and people who follow get reminders at the beginning and end of the campaign so there's no harm in having more of them and letting Kickstarter do some of the marketing for you you can also use this number to to gauge interest on a campaign you can estimate that 30% or more of your follows will go on to back the campaign if you also estimate that you'll average $125 to 40 per backer then you can do some rough numbers to
• 231:00 - 231:30 relate follows to eventual pledge money we don't advise that you let that influence your reward goal but we do think it can be soothing to see that the numbers can work out doing this calculation also gives you a goal around getting followers on the conservative end how many do you need to hit a total that would get you to break even to profit to your actual high in the sky number I dare not speak out loud
• 231:30 - 232:00 go nothing is guaranteed and you'll know the true answer when you launch but the one thing we can say with certainty is that more follows is a good thing and you'll have more the sooner you launch your pre-launch page your Kickstarter pre with comments Kickstarter also allows you to send a draft of your page to a friend for feedback they give you a link and we send this out to our email lists and social media accounts we want more ideal audience eyes on our project so that we
• 232:00 - 232:30 can get feedback before we launch we do this a week or two before the campaign goes live though you can do it a day or two beforehand as well you're going to get most of your comments within the first 24 hours so this doesn't require much lead time doing this can help you find typos that you may not be able to change after you launch learn where your audience is getting confused looking at your
• 232:30 - 233:00 page receive questions that can be addressed before launch see what reward tiar are resonating with your audience and what's not an additional benefit to doing this is that viewers of the preview or draft have the opportunity to follow your project on the platform your email notifications list for Kickstarter before creators had a pre-launch page they had to build their own pre-launch notification list most
• 233:00 - 233:30 used a separate email list and a landing page or form with their email service provider although your first priority should be to get follows on your Kickstarter project since Kickstarter will do promotion for you you can also create an email notification list as a second touch point the notification list is especially important if you have a regular schedule for emailing your list that isn't going to jive with a big
• 233:30 - 234:00 promotion you can ask your readers if they want to be notified about the kickstarter and separate them out from your normal list this means that you'll send some of your bigger announcements about the kickstarter to your main list but then you'll send some to only the notification list to promote this list email your people you can also add it to your website social media and back matter content if you have the time or think it'll work well sometimes readers are
• 234:00 - 234:30 more willing to sign up for an email list than a Kickstarter page because it's a little more familiar to them it's also probably easier to get your email list to sign up for Kickstarter than people not on your list lastly you can use the emails for Facebook ad targeting during The Campaign which you can't really do with follows on Kickstarter the email notification list is a little extra effort to set up and is optional but it could be a part of
• 234:30 - 235:00 your strategy your relevant samples the best way to sell your Kickstarter project is to get people interested in the characters and story that you are putting front and Center for your campaign get your samples ready you should get as many people as possible into any relevant sample content that makes sense these can be the first several chapters of your book or series on
• 235:00 - 235:30 offer previous books in the series previous books in the genre prequels or short stories bonus chapters deleted scenes Etc in the chapter on launching we'll be discussing the many Avenues around this in detail but for now you want to use any assets that might be helpful to your advantage in creating pre-b Buzz your
• 235:30 - 236:00 audience you should be excited Kickstarter is about excitement and people back things on Kickstarter because they are excited about them you can create excitement in any way you want but if you want to follow us step by step we've listed our suggested five prompts for posts below post about your campaign and all the places you can on social media and your email list post number one I'm doing a Kickstarter
• 236:00 - 236:30 campaign Post Number Two why I'm using Kickstarter to launch this book Products Post hash3 one of the coolest reward tiers I'm offering is blank because Post Number Four another cool tier is blank because post number five what do you think of this preview build your audience beforeand do some list Builders giveaways follows and so on whatever you can do to build your email list and
• 236:30 - 237:00 social media accounts with people who might be interested in your content your advertising you rarely want to send advertising traffic to your Kickstarter page or pre-launch page and most publish in projects are not going to meet the lower-end threshold of a $50 average per backer to make your ads Break Even instead if you have the budget you may want to consider other types of advertising for cold traffic and warm traffic especially if it builds your
• 237:00 - 237:30 longer term assets that will last beyond the kickstarter for cold traffic people who don't know you yet you could send people to download sign up for or buy your sample books or sign up for your general email list for warm traffic your audience you can send them to the email notification list to sign up or depending on your relationship with your audience you can just ask them to follow the page however it may be worth a boosted post to your audience
• 237:30 - 238:00 too schedule launch day communication buffer HootSuite sendable later and many others allow you to schedule a baseline of social media posts before your campaign begins you will have other things to post as well but you want to make sure you get the bulk of your updates out of the way early so that you aren't Fring about them when your campaign is live task checklist submit your project for review takes 2 to 3 days
• 238:00 - 238:30 sometimes generate your pre-launch page create a dedicated email notifications list for your Kickstarter gather and optimize your samples for follows and email notifications prepare and schedule social media pre-b Buzz messages book or schedule any pre-b Buzz advertising chapter 10 planning a launch and sending more
• 238:30 - 239:00 traffic to your Kickstarter if you've been working along with this book through the campaign design and sales page pillars of running a successful Kickstarter campaign you've probably completed all the pieces that Kickstarter requires to launch your project but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're ready to launch your project because once you launch there's going to be a lot of real-time tweaking and decision-making to do if the moment
• 239:00 - 239:30 passes and the social media post didn't get done then it didn't get done the next several chapters are about the three acts of your Kickstarter campaign but before we set you off on your Grand Adventure we need to show you the map of where you're going along with the gas pedal that will help you have a successful Kickstarter campaign this chapter is a crash course in how to launch things on any platform you can use this information and framework for any time sensitive
• 239:30 - 240:00 promotion and will tailor this chapter to the specifics of Kickstarter how to build a launch plan for Kickstarter you need to have a marketing plan if you are headed to Kickstarter and you do need to bring your own audience in addition to working some of kickstarter's organic visibility and algorithms and when we talk about how to find readers who will fund your Kickstarter well the list of efforts
• 240:00 - 240:30 looks a lot like what it takes to launch a book on any other retailer this is either a good thing for you or a bad thing for you depending on if you know how to get readers on retailers already so this is our general marketing plan for launching your book on Kickstarter number one you need to know the trajectory of benchmarks for the platform Russell has a lot of experience with launching Kickstarter projects so
• 240:30 - 241:00 we have a very detailed list of benchmarks to hit I.E at xh hour we needed to be at y this is how you'll keep the launch on track the excitement of a Kickstarter launch happens quickly in the first 5 days or so but it's the first 48 hours that will predict where you end the campaign we use benchmarks for a $10,000 campaign over a 17-day period but you can scale the numbers up or down based on your goals we'll do the actual
• 241:00 - 241:30 numbers on this later in the chapter the trajectory is what is important here like other platforms you want to work with the natural trajectory of projects don't try to reinvent the wheel number two you need to have a sample of your work for fiction we recommend either a sample of the book like the first 10 chapters or if it's a series and you can manage it a prequel noela or short story
• 241:30 - 242:00 the reason the latter is very nice is you can publish it to retailers and take advantage of the algorithms you already know and use to get traffic to your Kickstarter but if you don't have that the sample also works fine number three you need to explain your work and get people interested in the samples the sales page is your main marketing tool we've already told you what to put on it if you need to deviate
• 242:00 - 242:30 from that you can look at any page on Kickstarter to get an idea of what to put on the page including Russel's past Kickstarter projects or you can use the content that you would normally put on Amazon like the product description reviews and so on number four you need a way to send traffic to your Kickstarter page most likely you need several ways to send traffic you will send traffic based on the benchmarks you are trying
• 242:30 - 243:00 to hit from number one if you are behind on your benchmarks you add more traffic if you are ahead on your benchmarks you try to scale your traffic so you can maximize the launch this is the the gas pedal we mentioned earlier and you need to know whether to tap it or to press it to the floor your trajectory numbers are the road map to make those decisions when we think about traffic we think about the 5bs that are in Monica's book plan your book launch traffic
• 243:00 - 243:30 sources that already belong to you traffic sources that you want to build traffic sources that you want to borrow traffic sources that you want to buy and finally traffic sources that create verality and buzz you can make a list of traffic sources that you can confidently send and attempt to match it up with the trajectory of the platform this is your marketing schedule number five you try it and rework the parts of this that aren't
• 243:30 - 244:00 working if your sample isn't getting people excited to back your book then you rework that if your sales page is not getting people into the sample then you rework that if you aren't getting traffic to the page then you rework that a lot of people want marketing to be a oneandone thing but it is a process of optimization get the pieces into place then look at each piece and figure out how you can improve just the one piece
• 244:00 - 244:30 at a time it's pretty unusual to get all of this right out of the gate be patient with yourself and use your Kickstarter to solidify your books marketing so you can have a stronger launch on retailers your Kickstarter is not the end of the book's life it's just the beginning and the testing ground to see what kind of legs your book or Series has again you can apply this basic Theory to any platform to master it but we'll be applying it to Kickstarter
• 244:30 - 245:00 we've covered most of this already so we're going to focus on the details of number one and number four in this chapter trajectory of the platform one of the bigger fears around Kickstarter is if you will do all this work and get crickets but when I saw and learned how Russell Stacks the deck in his favor before a launch it was clear that he had a systematic and repeatable process that can produce results every
• 245:00 - 245:30 time his system was very soothing to me as I launched our campaign and we kept hitting the benchmarks he laid out for us that said Kickstarter is not a Magic Bullet Russell like to say that if you can bring 25 people Kickstarter can bring the other 25 people but you have to get the party started which means you need some traffic to send to your Kickstarter page getting your Baseline numbers ideally your campaign funds on
• 245:30 - 246:00 the first day as this will relieve the pressure and bring more people to the campaign people like to back successful campaigns and like to get in on campaigns that are funding very high while getting funded on the first day is ideal you need to raise at least 30% of your Kickstarter funding goal in the first 48 hours if you raise less than that it's going to be an uphill battle to reach your goal before the end of the campaign we already talked about your
• 246:00 - 246:30 follow count this metric is one of the only metrics Kickstarter offers pre-launch that will give you a sense of the health of your Kickstarter campaign before it starts more follows is better obviously ready for some math you can expect about 25% of your campaign followers to convert to backers in the first 48 Hours you want to also factor in that a large portion of people will not follow
• 246:30 - 247:00 the campaign and will instead just wait until the link is live and back it so whatever your numbers are from the 25% you would normally double them but let's put it at 70% rather than than 100% to keep our expectations low finally you want to factor in that Kickstarter will find more people for you we've said it's double what you bring but let's be conservative again and estimate it at another
• 247:00 - 247:30 70% so we're looking at number of followers time 0.25 * 1.7 * 1.7 the average backer pledge amount is $125 to 40 usually on the low lower end as the campaign begins you want to take the expected backers and multiply that by $25 all of these numbers are conservative on purpose we hope you do better than this but this is what we think most projects can do when the
• 247:30 - 248:00 Creator follows what we've taught them to do in the campaign design and sales page pillars and builds their follows from their current audience we did the math on this for a range of follower numbers for the first 48 Hours of your campaign and those numbers for easy reference are 25 follows translates to 19 backers and $465 pledge 50 follows translates to 37 backers and $930
• 248:00 - 248:30 pledge 100 follows translates to 74 backers and $1,859 pledge 150 follows translates to 112 backers and $2,789 pledged 200 follows translates to $49 backers and $3,719 pledged 300 follows translates to 223
• 248:30 - 249:00 backers and $557 pledged 400 follows translates to 298 backers and $743 pledged 500 follows translates to 372 backers and $929 pledged there is no guarantee on these numbers of course and every campaign looks different we've calculated these numbers conservatively for the projects
• 249:00 - 249:30 we recommended for first timers and if you've deviated from that your numbers may be wildly different we're also assuming that you're going to Market your campaign to the best of your ability these numbers aren't coming from calling it in during launch week although your results May differ we share these because we think industry standard numbers are helpful and soothing we will use the numbers from this as the Baseline of your
• 249:30 - 250:00 campaign this can help you get a sense of your first 48 hours and we'll use that to determine the rest of your trajectory numbers I want to make an important note before closing this section that these are not the numbers you put as your reward goal we've already talked about how to set that but if you're unsure plan on $250 to $500 per book so a Trilogy would have a reward goal between $750 to
• 250:00 - 250:30 $1,500 Russell aims for a $10,000 campaign for his novels but he sets the goal at $2,000 usually for four books there are some campaigns particularly his Comics ones where he sets a much higher goal due to production costs these numbers are the numbers that you don't speak out loud but that you are tracking behind the scenes to make sure your project stays on the expected trajectory of a Kickstarter
• 250:30 - 251:00 project getting the trajectory numbers for the campaign you're not going to truly know the trajectory of your campaign until you launch it even with the follows numbers you will have a better idea within the first day when you see people actually backing the campaign and then you will have a very solid idea within the first week since Russell almost always Launches on a Tuesday at about 9:00 a.m. eastern and ends the first week on that
• 251:00 - 251:30 Saturday we count the first week as the first 5 days of launch we're going to use your conservative number from above as the Baseline and we're going to calculate your trajectory from there please don't get too attached to your numbers here as it's far more art than science in attempting to predict the trajectory of your campaign and it's going to change based on your marketing too here are your benchmarks for the first 5 days of launch if you follow Russell's timeline of launching on
• 251:30 - 252:00 Tuesday first 6 hours of launch Tuesday afternoon Baseline number times .5 first 12 hours of launch Tuesday evening Baseline number times 75 Wednesday evening Baseline number times .9 First 48 Hours Thursday morning Baseline number Thursday evening Baseline number times 1.4 Friday evening Baseline number times
• 252:00 - 252:30 1.75 end of launch week Saturday evening Baseline number time 2 during the first 5 days you want to be checking to see if you are hitting these bench marks if you are finding your first few days higher than you expected you can adjust your numbers to the new trajectory and try to hit the benchmarks at the higher level you really want to hit the highest curve you can on these first 5 days it's going to determine how
• 252:30 - 253:00 the rest of the campaign goes don't be too alarmed if you're behind or ahead on a benchmark or a few there's a margin of error here you may see really high numbers the first day and level out the next four or it may be roughly even the first 5 days most of this depends on your marketing pushes each day you can also check out Russell's previous novel campaigns through kick track.com to see the trajectory of each and how they work the trajectories of
• 253:00 - 253:30 the first 5 days vary wildly but he ended each launch week in roughly the same place and ended up hitting about $10,000 with each one every Kickstarter campaign is a little different and your numbers are heavily influenced by your campaign design sales page and use of psychological triggers all of which we've covered in previous chapters what matters the most this first week is that you get to the
• 253:30 - 254:00 Saturday evening number by Saturday evening if you don't make it that's okay but you'll want to adjust your numbers for the rest of the campaign at that point the way you catch up if you're behind or accelerate if you're on a higher trajectory curve than you predicted you would be is through sending more relevant traffic to your campaign we use primary and secondary sources of traffic to help you budget your traffic so you don't blow every traffic Source you have on the first
• 254:00 - 254:30 day after the first week the benchmarks are still important but a little less predictable things slow down significantly in week two you should still be marketing and we give you what to do in our chapter on The Dead Zone but the middle of the campaign can feel like pulling teeth to get traction this will last until the last 3 to 4 days of the campaign expect to add anywhere from 0.1 to3 of your Baseline number per week
• 254:30 - 255:00 during The Dead Zone you can do more if you pull some marketing levers during this period but you don't have the plethora of psychological triggers that Kickstarter implements for you at the beginning and end of your campaign campaign also note that if you're doing a 10-day campaign you don't have a dead zone period which is one of the reasons Russell does it on the last week of The Campaign which Russell usually ends on a Thursday another 5-day week you can expect to add
• 255:00 - 255:30 about .5 to one of your Baseline number to your total you can map out your trajectory and find your benchmarks using these numbers across the three acts of your campaign launch The Dead Zone and the last days and then we just have to match the traffic sources to your trajectory schedule and we have your marketing plan taking inventory of your traffic sources now that you have your trajectory schedule we can take
• 255:30 - 256:00 inventory of your potential traffic sources and match them to the schedule to the best of our ability for this we use the 5B X3 launch plan the 5bs are belongs to you your current assets such as your website email list or followings build the assets you want to build with your upcoming launch assets can be either starting for scratch or hitting a new goal borrow the assets you want to
• 256:00 - 256:30 borrow from others through cross promotion buy the assets traffic visibility clicks you want to buy through advertising in newsletters or display advertising buz event-based Andor viral promotions you can run for a limited time period during your launch to create more visibility number one belongs to you your first source of traffic is things that already belong to you this is a traffic category you want to use
• 256:30 - 257:00 the most during launch week and the last days of your campaign these include the book or series itself you can upload sample chapters of the book with a call to action CTA at the end to your Kickstarter campaign or pre-order page other books in the series if you're selling later books in the series you can use the first book as a freebie or 99 Cents discount on retailers you can also use other formats
• 257:00 - 257:30 as samples to drive traffic for example if you're doing a special edition hard cover of the first book in a series you may want to set that same book in ebook or Audi book digital versions free on retailers with promotion in the letup to your Kickstarter campaign other books not in the series if you have a huge back catalog promotions on any of your books can bring people into your world if you run several campaigns a year you could set
• 257:30 - 258:00 up a CTA in all your books that leads to Kickstarter notification signup page during a campaign you can point this link to your pre-launch page or campaign page outside of a campaign cign you can point this link to an email sign up your author platform your email list website social accounts medium account retailer accounts Amazon Goodreads and BookBub followings video and podcast accounts serialized fiction accounts teachable substack or patreon accounts
• 258:00 - 258:30 and other accounts you have can all Point people to your Kickstarter campaign for your followers on Amazon and BookBub you can only promote books already on retailers so you may want to schedule promotions on your catalog leading up to and during the campaign number two build your second source of traffic is things that you want to build as assets Kickstarter is just part of your book selling machine and you can put effort
• 258:30 - 259:00 into building your assets through before and through your Kickstarter campaign so you take those with you regardless of how your Kickstarter campaign ends up you can build assets before the campaign to drive more traffic to the campaign you can also build them during the campaign so you have them to better succeed at retailers and future kickstarters after the campaign this is a traffic category you want to use most during pre-launch and the dead zone of your campaign these
• 259:00 - 259:30 include reader magnets during the campaign you can write exclusive content for some of the tiers like a short story nlet prequel Nolla or bonus epilog email list you can create a new reader magnet giveaway quiz or cross promotion to bring more readers onto your list social followings build your social media accounts before you launch to help create social Buzz for your Kickstarter campaign number three
• 259:30 - 260:00 borrow your third source of traffic is things you can borrow from others this is a traffic category you want to use most during the dead zone of your campaign these include cross promotions email Builders giveaways affiliate promotions scavenger hunts and Anthology boxed sets are all promotions that you can line up before or during your campaign you can check out our book get your book selling with
• 260:00 - 260:30 cross promotion for more ideas and how to implement them newsletters and social swaps trading space with another author in your newsletters running page and group takeovers and creating mashups on social sites like Tik Tok can be helpful to get visibility to your books or to your Kickstarter you can also use companies like bookfunnel and story origin to turn it up on these efforts retailers platform promotions get your assets from the Belongs to You
• 260:30 - 261:00 section in front of more readers through promotions on Amazon draft to digital Cobo Apple Books Barnes & Noble and Google playbooks non- retailer platform promotions you can use Goodreads or BookBub to get visibility on relevant books in your catalog press book yourself with podcast interviews features on high traffic sites guest posts and book blogs influencer social accounts on Instagram or Tik Tok or vloggers on YouTube number four
• 261:00 - 261:30 buy your fourth source of traffic is things you can buy you can buy visibility directly on various platforms but you can also buy it for books in your catalog that lead new readers to your Kickstarter this is a traffic category you want to use most during pre-launch of your campaign but if you have the budget you can use it at any time during your campaign these include book advertisers Amazon BookBub
• 261:30 - 262:00 and Facebook Instagram are the best places to advertise your books you could also try good reads though most people don't seem to have great success with them General Advertiser Facebook Instagram Pinterest and Tik Tok might be worth looking into if you just want to promote the kickstarter by itself as we've shared it's not going to make sense for most Kickstarter campaigns unless you can average $50 or more per backer discount and deal sites and
• 262:00 - 262:30 newsletters these are sites like BookBub Robin reads written media and more they are also book only advertisers and are usually fairly cheap the best way to use these is to send the traffic to a relevant free book in your catalog that has a strong CTA to your Kickstarter project number five Buzz your fifth and final source of traffic is things you can get Buzz going on this is a traffic category you want
• 262:30 - 263:00 to use most during pre-launch and last days of your campaign these include engaging current readers offering all the things that you might use in a regular launch to generate Buzz can work here too cover reveals quotables or Snippets sample chapters and Buzz from early reviewers work creating viral efforts you can use viral giveaways that provide more entries for sharing or taking other actions King Sumo rafflecopter or themed
• 263:00 - 263:30 quizzes that allow you to share results on social media and collect email addresses R stream quiz Thrive quiz Builder interact your marketing plan if you're following along you should have traffic sources that you can group something like this pre-launch build buy and Buzz launch week belongs to you and buy Dead Zone build borrow and buy last days belongs to you buy and
• 263:30 - 264:00 Buzz don't overload yourself with things you can't Implement make sure you call this list down to something manageable that you can actually do you you also want to choose an appropriate amount of marketing for the length of your campaign if you're doing a 10-day campaign you're not going to have time for all of this whereas if you're doing a 30-day or more campaign you want to map this out in more detail the last task is going to be to
• 264:00 - 264:30 group these traffic sources into primary secondary and drip traffic sources for each of the four phases of your Kickstarter campaign your primary traffic sources are going to be your most engaged and stable sources in each category for example your email list is probably a primary traffic Source your secondary traffic sources are things that might send some traffic but you've never tested it or you don't think it will send much
• 264:30 - 265:00 traffic your drip traffic sources are things that you know are going to be slow drip rather than a bunch of traffic at once this could be something like pre-promotion on your freebie or blog posts to your medium account it's worth looking at some of these sources to see what can be scheduled beforehand for example you can drop ctas into your back catalog or schedule social media posts ahead of time do as much as this as possible and let it drip
• 265:00 - 265:30 to your campaign throughout this will help you maintain a steady stream of backers during your campaign your primary traffic sources are the things you are going to definitely do they form the base of your traffic for the campaign your secondary sources are the things you are going to try to do they are also things you may pull out of your back pocket for a Negative Dead Zone days or as lighter fluid that you can pour on the Flames during launch week or
• 265:30 - 266:00 last days your drip traffic sources are things that you want to invest more in over time and if you plan to run regular campaigns and make Kickstarter a cons stream of Revenue you probably want to make these efforts as Evergreen as possible so you don't have to go back and update it and so you're building an asset that sends fresh traffic to your Kickstarter efforts at all times if you map all this out ahead of time it's going to give you about as
• 266:00 - 266:30 much control as you can possibly get over how well your Kickstarter campaign does again this is more art than science there are no guarantees and you're going to get much better at launching the more times you do it this is about the best we can do to prepare you to launch your project these are all our tricks well almost more important things to add to your marketing plan there are a few things that have
• 266:30 - 267:00 worked particularly well for us mostly Russell during campaigns we think you should try them too number one set up live events in person or virtual live streaming for the launch week and last days of your campaign for whatever reason live efforts work so well to launch things both at the beginning and the end most authors hate live things but do you like money because this works very well you can set up your live event at
• 267:00 - 267:30 your house at a local comic book store at a park or a restaurant the key is not to spend a bunch of money on the event and get the right people excited about your project your event needs to align to your Kickstarter project in both content and audience if you are an artist you can hold a show at a local Gallery if you are a filmmaker you can hold a trailer screening at a local theater these
• 267:30 - 268:00 events help drum up the more fervent enthusiasm possible during the most crucial times of your campaign number two set up one piece of press in front of someone else's audience during each week of the Dead Zone when we say press we don't mean journalism you could also be setting up a podcast interview or an appearance in someone's Clubhouse room or a swap in a newsletter or a Facebook group takeover just do something each week to get in front of someone else's audience
• 268:00 - 268:30 you can do multiple things if you have time but this will truly keep momentum going during The Dead Zone especially on a longer campaign it's important to get this set up before your campaign launches emailing press contacts the day your campaign launches is too late the Press may have up to a six-month lead time on getting promotional content for you into their pipeline podcasts record months in advance authors have one slot
• 268:30 - 269:00 in their monthly newsletter reach out earlier also build your contacts well before then and contact them sooner rather than later to get coverage during your campaign to get their help and buy in the real question you need to ask is how can I provide value in their lives when it's time to email about your project then you need to make it easy for them to publish number three model previous Kickstarter
• 269:00 - 269:30 success hundreds of other campaigns have done Kickstarter better than you in the past they've succeeded and failed thousands of times use that to your advantage look through them all and find the points of commonality between them make sure to take note of the words they use the imagery and the reward levels that are consistent among the highest performers then you can model that in your own campaign for the highest chance of success also you bought this book so
• 269:30 - 270:00 model your campaigns after Russell don't come up with your own system use his and implement the things he says to do the further you stray from his system system the less the Baseline numbers and benchmarks will be able to predict for you even seemingly small decisions like choosing not to make your books exclusive to your Kickstarter launch or not using backer perks can cause big variations in your results we've purposely given you
• 270:00 - 270:30 everything we have to help you plan a good Kickstarter campaign including crash courses and psychological triggers and launching so please listen to these chapters again and Implement what we've said your decisions now will determine your final reward and each decision can cause orders of magnitude difference in what amount of funding you end the campaign at task checklist estimate your Baseline number based on the number of follows you can get to your pre-launch
• 270:30 - 271:00 page calculate your trajectory and benchmarks for launch week each week of your dead zone and last days take an inventory of all of your traffic sources for this campaign decide whether a traffic source is primary secondary or drip map out your traffic sources to the days of your campaign so you know what you're sending on each day schedule as much of your traffic efforts as possible before your
• 271:00 - 271:30 launch optional set up a live event during launch week in the last days optional study Russell's previous campaigns to get a better sense of how the tra rectories worked and how the money came in over time during the campaign use kick track.com to look at this data chapter 11 your Kickstarter is live launch week at this point we've given you
• 271:30 - 272:00 everything you need to launch a successful Kickstarter campaign you have set up your campaign you have your pre-launch page and you have your launch plan that's figured out week by week of your campaign so do all of that stuff that we spent 10 chapters guiding you through in the next several chapters we aren't going to repeat all of that or at least we're going to try not to repeat much of it what we want to give you instead is a checklist of things you want to remember about each of the three
• 272:00 - 272:30 phases of your live Campaign which are launch week The Dead Zone and the last days this chapter covers launch week these chapters are also a catchall for everything we forgot to mention before or that didn't make sense to mention in any particular previous chapter you can use these chapters to add to your marketing plan or task list you can also refer to them when you're in the middle of your campaign and
• 272:30 - 273:00 wondering what you should be doing here's launch week task checklist and reminders bring the passion to your Kickstarter campaign if you can't show passion for your product then nobody else will show passion either you need to show extreme passion for your product to motivate others to get passionate about the product as well your passion is contagious as is your lack of it it needs to come through in your word your
• 273:00 - 273:30 social strategy and definitely in your video launch on a Tuesday at around 9:00 a.m. eastern you don't have to launch on this day but it works pretty well for Russell Kickstarter sends an email to Follows immediately when you launch so don't email your list about it right away you can email them midday and get a second wave of pledges give an early bird perk to your first day Kickstarter backers The First
• 273:30 - 274:00 48 hours are critical to the success of the campaign so reward those people who back early it doesn't have to be much maybe the first day backers get a wallpaper or maybe they get the digital rewards before anybody else it doesn't have to be much but that little gesture will help push people over the edge to back early experiment with early bird perks it's more work but you could try having three early bird perks on the first day
• 274:00 - 274:30 and removing one each day of your campaign until there are none left this gives people who buy on day two and three a reason to pledge early while still rewarding those who backed even earlier with more exclusive stuff if you drop all your rewards after day one then people who didn't back on day one have no reason to pledge early if you give a customer a reason to postpone buying your product they will take it choose a reward tier to focus on and
• 274:30 - 275:00 funnel people toward the most this is ideally your $50 tier or above we funneled people toward our Kickstarter Sprint with us tier which was $ we then spent the rest of the campaign trying to upgrade people to similar tiers it worked pretty well you'll change up the focus tier in later weeks because you'll run out of things to say about this one post about your Kickstarter campaign on all your primary traffic sources on
• 275:00 - 275:30 day one this is a simple announcement that it's live now you'll have to get creative with your messaging after this but we've given you tons of ideas already and we tell you exactly what to message your audience with in an upcoming chapter about email marketing schedule one more major marketing effort a day for week one with your audience if you don't have enough marketing efforts through your own platforms you can start to leverage
• 275:30 - 276:00 other people's audiences to fill this Gap ideally you'll save borrowed audiences for week two though promote your stuff hard Russell's pep talk on this I will not apologize for running a Kickstarter or trying to get an awesome book funded frankly it's your loss if you don't buy it I am trying to do you a favor I already know how good it is and it's really good if you like Dark Fantasy horror comedy
• 276:00 - 276:30 monsters and fast-paced action it's right up your alley so ignore it at your detriment it would be downright cruel to not tell you about it and let you experience it as well because it will fill your heart with joy to read it I will blow up your feeds starting Tuesday because I made this book for you and you deserve to enjoy it bring this level of energy to your campaign ask for the projects we love badge at the end of day one or early on
• 276:30 - 277:00 day two Kickstarter is eager to get more independent authors using the platform regularly so they are happy to help out our community and give visibility to those of us who are writing books for a living there are three ways that you can notify Kickstarter about your project you can tweet them at their brand new publishing specific Twitter account Kickstarter reads twitter.com Kickstarter red you can fill out a special form that
• 277:00 - 277:30 Russell got for us this form lets the team know about your Kickstarter feel free to let them know you heard about it from us but please don't share it outside of our group it's here docs.google.com ford1 fql se0 kmx nqq hore 0 iore p8 pg4 vehicle 9 D5 asrc W6 ggn PDN 71 wview form if you don't get a response from
• 277:30 - 278:00 the other two methods the way Russell used to get featured was by emailing this email address to let them know about your Kickstarter this may not be the process anymore but in case it helps here's the email stories kickstarter.com watch your numbers and stay on track for the first week of the campaign these numbers predict the campaign's success thank people through kickstarters messaging system when
• 278:00 - 278:30 somebody gives you their hard-earned money it is only polite to say thank you it's easy for us to treat our backers as money but they are humans and adding the human touch will will improve your connection on top of being the right thing to do it will also stem the loss of backers toward the middle of your campaign because you are making a connection after you put together a great campaign the only thing that matters is what people end up buying lean into whatever they are buying
• 278:30 - 279:00 that's why you did this to begin with a lot of times people don't know what they want and they definitely don't know what they need they almost never know know what they will pay for either this is one of the more nuanced things you need to learn to be successful it's critically important to survey your audience you need to get good at reading between the lines how often have you heard you should make that and then been stuck with something that just doesn't sell your goal is to
• 279:00 - 279:30 separate what people want from what they need and from what they need from what they will pay for allow people to put their money where their mouth is chapter 12 your Kickstarter is live the dead zone no matter if you run a Kickstarter set up a pre-order campaign on Amazon or launch your own website there will be a dead zone in the middle of your launch where you don't make very much money in
• 279:30 - 280:00 fact 75% of your funds will come in the first and last few days of your campaign there are huge spikes at the beginning and end of your campaign the beginning spike is because your product is new and exciting you have built up interest among your Ardent fans until they are froing at the mouth to buy your product the end Spike happens because people don't want to miss out on buying your product their desire to buy has
• 280:00 - 280:30 finally overcome their inherent laziness the scarcity psychological trigger comes into play on its own at this point and people's fomo fear of missing out causes them to back in higher numbers than ever before as your campaign comes to a close in the middle of your campaign however there is nothing pushing your customers to buy your audience knows there is more time to back your campaign and thus they decide to sit on their hands your goal then is to survive the
• 280:30 - 281:00 dead zone lull between the beginning and end of your campaign by increasing the number of backers who buy your product in those intervening weeks here here are some things to implement task checklist and reminders if you don't want to deal with the dead zone run a 10-day or 17-day campaign reduce the dead zone time especially if you don't need to hit a huge funding amount or if you have a stable audience and know you can get
• 281:00 - 281:30 backers without a dead zone get the highest funding you can in the first 5 days of your campaign there are many ways to survive the lull but the most important one is to increase the sales at the beginning of your campaign the more money you make during the initial days of your campaign the higher your sales will be during The Dead Zone if you can double your sales during the initial Spike of your campaign you can double the sales during The Dead Zone as well once you have
• 281:30 - 282:00 created a massive Spike at the beginning of your campaign it's time to work on other ways to survive the dead zone all of these strategies have one thing in in common they give your audience a reason to check in with you throughout the campaign while increasing their desire for your product to succeed create weekly backer perks or giveaways for your existing backers giving people something for free is a great way to increase their desire to
• 282:00 - 282:30 buy your product every additional week a customer is part of your campaign they have another chance to win free stuff this gives people sitting on the fence a reason to back immediately instead of waiting until the end because their early support means they have more chances to win these giveaways don't have to be big spends on your part but they should be hyper targeted to your ideal customer so they enthusiastically buy your product early be present for your audience
• 282:30 - 283:00 throughout the campaign being present for your audience is a great way to boost enthusiasm for your product among potential customers and give your camp campaign a human face this can mean live q&as through Facebook live or Google Hangouts it could mean amas through Reddit or anywhere you are available for your audience either online or in person during one campaign I recorded a new Kickstarter tip every day and followed
• 283:00 - 283:30 that up with a Facebook live session every evening to answer questions work with other people who've launched similar products if you've built a solid network of creators before you launch a product you will have friends further along in their career than you who have already launched similar products to people in your ideal audience reach out to them and ask if they will share your product With Their audience usually they will offer to share your post on their social media
• 283:30 - 284:00 channels this is nice but your goal should be to get in front of their email list this is where affiliate links can be very effective most people don't want to share their email list with anybody but if you can entice them with money they are more likely to say yes because you have given them a monetary stake in your success use your sales page to write emails to your audience if you are wondering how to talk about something
• 284:00 - 284:30 new in the middle of the campaign and you're sick of just saying buy my book just start literally copying and pasting sections of your page there's 100% chance that some people haven't read it and it will help them understand your project plus people that did read it and didn't buy will have a second chance to fall in love marketing is about persuasion and putting your best sales copy in front of the most eyes possible is how you persuade the most people set up backer update swaps it
• 284:30 - 285:00 involves reaching out to other campaigns to arrange backer update swaps with them where you send an update with information on their project and they do the same for your project in their update look for people whose campaigns are around your level of funding and then try to add somewhere between 1 to six into an update the more you add into each update the more you have to push each campaign and give people a reason to click remember this is about both of
• 285:00 - 285:30 you winning so do the best job you can at making the project enticing keep your spirits up in the face of negative days they're not not fun and they're not likely to happen Anywhere But The Dead Zone a negative day is where the amount you lose by backers cancelling their pledge exceeds the amount you raise from new backers for instance if one person cancels a $300 pledge and 10 people collectively pledge $200 you have gained nine backers
• 285:30 - 286:00 but still lost $100 on that day these are good days to do something fun for your backers like a silly video a bonus or a flash goal ask for help there were a couple of days this year when I was close to having a negative day and I literally reached out and just asked people to help because I really didn't want a negative day and they came through one day I was atus $3 for the day and I asked people for $5
• 286:00 - 286:30 and got about $50 just by asking you can't do it every day and I try to only do it when it's absolutely necessary but some sometimes simply asking for help is enough do more marketing talk about your mission and message talk about and celebrate the campaign's success so far engage your backers in some way ask people to share why they
• 286:30 - 287:00 back start your stretch goals create new messaging for new Target audiences create new graphics have at least one push every day it can be a new platform a new Avenue for audience a new video a new podcast interview or live event and can be really helpful to stay motivated and feel in control of the kickstarter get out your flash goals perks if you are running behind Target
• 287:00 - 287:30 make a new Flash goal offer to excite backers and give it a tight deadline to encourage action change the message to your current audience in our campaign for this book we focused on getting as many backers as possible at any level in week one we burn through our current audiences this way meaning that we can't keep sending the same message to them they'll tune out unsubscribe feel bad harassed Etc in week 2 3 4 and five we
• 287:30 - 288:00 worked on hand selling our main audiences into our higher tiers through Outreach reach out to secondary sources of traffic within your current audience for us that was social media former teachable accounts medium and substack pull people from lower tiers up into higher tiers schedule a bunch of swaps ahead of time to go live here you'll already have social proof take your content from week one
• 288:00 - 288:30 and get it onto more platforms take your content from week one and get it into more formats audio video trans script Graphics release a new chapter section of the books you're promoting handell your higher reward tiar to your audience through one-on-one or small groups at a live event virtual live event or wherever else look at and plan your last week of the campaign and test messaging and
• 288:30 - 289:00 tears so you can end with a bang reach out to former backers via kickstarters messaging system they backed you once so they might do it again chapter 13 your Kickstarter is live the last days you've reached the end you've made it you're down to the final hours here are some things to implement in the last days of your
• 289:00 - 289:30 campaign task checklist and reminders you made your bed for how this goes in the dead zone if you were persistent in working on your marketing and funding then you probably have more follows and more backers than you would have that's going to accumulate at the end as people convert from followers to backers and as people convert from low tier to high tier Kickstarter sends Last Chance emails this should help you if you've been Gathering follows during your
• 289:30 - 290:00 campaign you can expect a 30 to 35% conversion rate by the end of your campaign we got a 45% conversion on the campaign for this book hit your entire audience again to let them know that your campaign is ending send it to your primary audiences your secondary audiences your drip audiences you can do this starting four to 5 days before your
• 290:00 - 290:30 campaign go all out you've gotten this far and everything is set up so you might as well push at the end and maximize your funding start thinking about fulfillment if you haven't already set up your survey through backer kit Kickstarter or wherever you plan to set it up get your files ready to deliver WR your we did it email and Backer update revisit your production and shipping plan check quotes and file
• 290:30 - 291:00 requirements from your sourced vendors to make sure nothing has changed since you selected them originally order packing materials you should have a good sense of how many of each item you need to order now so redo your numbers with better estimates put together a fulfillment timeline and set expectations with your backers they are going to want you to fulfill the campaign as fast as possible you want to set their expectations back
• 291:00 - 291:30 to reality a few things to consider in your timeline Kickstarter doesn't finalize backers until 7 days after your campaign ends you may also have dropped pledges in your campaign because Kickstarter wasn't able to charge someone's card Kickstarter doesn't release your money until 14 days after your campaign ends they do not recommend that you send anything prior to that you might also
• 291:30 - 292:00 not have the funds to make production purchases before the money is in your bank account backer kit requires a 1 to two day approval process before it lets you send your survey it also requires a smoke test be performed first and data collected for 24 hours publicly celebrate the numbers going up faster again just like at the beginning of the campaign people are going to be watching just to see how the campaign morphs and
• 292:00 - 292:30 changes some of these curious people will end up backing at the last minute enjoy the end all your hard work has paid off hopefully but if it hasn't you are done either way if you gave it your best it was a success regardless of funding chapter 14 breaking down our Kickstarter campaign now that we've taken you through an entire live campaign and what
• 292:30 - 293:00 you need to do at each point we figured we should offer you a breakdown of this book's campaign in detail so you can see how we implemented this information first if you want to see our numbers the campaign page and the kick track that breaks down our fundraising day byday is here kickstarter.com projectlight Linus Kickstarter D4 authors kick track.com projectlight line/ Kickstarter D4
• 293:00 - 293:30 authors in this chapter we'll share a few notes on the money what was going on each week of the campaign and lessons learned throughout the campaign we'll end the chapter with a copy of our behind the scenes backer updates throughout the campaign the money if you look at our graph on Kick track it's just about a perfect encapsulation of how a Kickstarter graph should look you will have a big spike at the beginning followed by a lull in the
• 293:30 - 294:00 middle and then a big frenzy right before the end we raised nearly the same amount in week 1 and week six and then we weeks 2 to five had roughly the same amount raised as the first and last week Kickstarter campaigns Fund in three acts week one is act one weeks two to five are act two and then week six is act three you can't slack off on any of the acts or it will affect your total raise we kept pushing throughout the campaign
• 294:00 - 294:30 even when we were making less than $1,000 per week because we knew it would be cumulative at the end lots of people will slack off in the middle and they have to scramble to make up money at the end but by making sure we were on it even in the dead zone at the middle of the campaign we were able to slowly accumulate money that helped our total raise another major thing you need to look at is the total backer number in
• 294:30 - 295:00 week one we had over 250 backers to the campaign including 119 on the first day meanwhile we only had 100 backers in week six including 39 on the last day we raised the same amount as Week 1 from less than half the number of people because people wait until the end to up their pledges and get the big ticket items they likely waited to see if they have the money and if they really wanted it scarcity becomes a
• 295:00 - 295:30 factor in our case we timed the end of the campaign with a huge independent author conference called 20 books in Las Vegas we were able to talk to a lot of people during week six that ended up backing our higher tiar you can expect your campaign to have a similar trajectory especially if you use live events at the beginning and end we also had a virtual live event at the beginning of the campaign that
• 295:30 - 296:00 helped us hit higher numbers that week too the plan when we first conceived of the idea to do a Kickstarter campaign for the kickstarter book it felt exciting and far away in October but when we were about a month out without having moved forward much on the campaign we genuinely considered the off-ramp Russell had two campaigns in September and November that we would be sandwiching this campaign between Monica had never done a campaign before and she
• 296:00 - 296:30 had canceled the test one she was planning to do for fiction in September we had also come up with a lot of big plans and ideas that sounded great at the time but weren't realistic or profitable to execute Russell also had a virtual conference planned that was a week before the launch and we agreed to move the launch up a week making it even longer than we planned we had already extended it a week to end it right after
• 296:30 - 297:00 20 books so we were now looking at a 6we campaign that Monica who had never done this before would be running with Russell's heavy presence guidance and marketing help oh and we had a minimum goal of $10,000 that we had no idea if we could hit no pressure the pre-launch the pre-launch was really hectic for us Monica had no idea what
• 297:00 - 297:30 she had gotten herself into and had a ton of personal stuff going on right before the launch especially with it being moved up a week Russell had to teach Monica everything he knew in about 10 hours of communication between the two all the campaign pre-launch stuff had to be completed and it all took way longer than Monica expected so it was all coming out very slow and late at the end it somehow came together with Russell just writing some of the
• 297:30 - 298:00 sales page and Monica pulling one or two allnighters in the days before the campaign we were both pretty terrified to launch this and had a few conversations about how if it flopped it wouldn't be that surprising Monica had never done a campaign before and Russell didn't do much non-fiction nor had he tried a Kickstarter campaign on a non-fiction book before it was out of both of our wheelhouses and we each had a piece of the puzzle but were woefully ignorant of the other half would it add
• 298:00 - 298:30 up the campaign pre-launch page went up about a week before the campaign and garnered nearly 200 followers which gave us some assurance that someone would show up to this campaign we also wrote some key pre-marketing pieces of content and got permission to post in a few key groups that we knew had our target audience Russell told Monica that his Kickstarter system worked and she followed the Playbook Monica told Russell that if the
• 298:30 - 299:00 system converted people getting the word out was no problem we had access to everyone in the community and could make it so every one knew the project existed luckily we were both able to do our jobs and it worked we funded at our initial goal of $11,000 in 2 hours and reached about $7,500 by the end of the week since our goal was only $10,000 we were thrilled and knew that we would hit our behind
• 299:00 - 299:30 the-scenes goal some of the key things we did to promote the campaign before launch were writing persuasive posts about why authors should use Kickstarter in key places where our audience hung out these relationships were built ahead of time shared a lot about our campaign on Facebook where both of us are very active we also tagged each other in every post so both of our audiences were seeing
• 299:30 - 300:00 it sent a few emails to our lists asked for feedback on our preview page pre-old some of our higher tier te like the kickstarter Sprint with us tier through posts on Facebook week one the launch was a success we launched on a Tuesday and got about half of our first week's funding in the first day it was both exhilarating and terrifying to launch Monica had finished enough but
• 300:00 - 300:30 not everything Russell told her to put up on the campaign and she never got back to it over the course of the 6 weeks during this week we introduced digital only teers so that International backers didn't have to pay for shipping of the paperback just to join our Sprint for us we had originally set them up so you get everything in lower tiers but we had to create tiers that swapped out one paperback for three digital copies of the book
• 300:30 - 301:00 instead we also did a 48h hour early bird perk and another perk for the rest of the week 3 days some of the key things things we did to promote the campaign in week one were writing more persuasive posts about why authors should use Kickstarter and posting those to Facebook sent a few emails to our lists had a podcast drop Russell ran a virtual one-day conference and Monica spoke at two
• 301:00 - 301:30 sessions of it we recorded several videos for the YouTube playlist including one that was a postmortem on week one of of the campaign you can find them here youtube.com/ playlist question mark list equals pl4 DC nm1 LL pv4 cp5 rst V3 PF vt8 L dial week two in week two we had some highs and lows we told people of our first stretch
• 301:30 - 302:00 goal for hitting 300 backers which happened to be this chapter that you are listening to we also announced additional stretch goals for 400 backers and $13,500 the stretch goals and Backer perks don't always Spur new backers to join but they do the important job of keeping current backers in the campaign especially when the campaign is longer like ours is the low of the week was dealing with what we would consider a troll someone
• 302:00 - 302:30 kept coming at us in the comments of our project insisting that we were selling snake oil nothing we said or did made this person go away or change their stance of trying to get us to admit that we were losers basically eventually he disappeared on his own and we haven't heard from him since we refunded him at the end of our campaign the high of the week was that we asked other backers why they backed and they flooded our comment section with love it was so nice to read and
• 302:30 - 303:00 really helped us pick ourselves back up from the person who was trying to tear us down some of the key things we did to promote the campaign in week two were writing more persuasive posts about why authors should use Kickstarter and posting those to Facebook sent a few emails to our lists had a podcast drop Russell spoke on a panel we created a bunch of branded
• 303:00 - 303:30 Graphics that we used for the rest of the campaign in Social updates and emails to our lists week three in the middle of week three we hid our behindthescenes funding goal of $10,000 Russell also went on a week long planned vacation this week he got all his emails and drip marketing done beforehand Monica switched messaging to a couple new things the first was Consulting and she sent out several
• 303:30 - 304:00 Consulting emails and posts to her audiences there were no bites which was frustrating she also deleted a bunch of tiers that had no backers at them and tested a few new ones at the same price points one that worked well was a bundle of craft books from her other series for authors we also create a deluxe craft bundle for newer authors that had two courses in it some of the key things we did to promote the campaign in week three
• 304:00 - 304:30 were writing more persuasive posts about why authors should use Kickstarter and posting those to Facebook sent a few emails to our lists had a podcast drop Russell spoke on a panel we added some new tiers focused on craft for authors not ready for Kickstarter and those did reasonably well week four in week four the marketing started
• 304:30 - 305:00 getting harder after a depressing attempt to sell Consulting for 2 weeks Monica gave up she shifted to Russell was dealing with some personal stuff that had him traveling again right up into the 20 books conference he didn't have as big of a role during The Dead Zone weeks but it was still a lot to be running a campaign at the same time as what he was dealing with we both felt exhausted and decided to close Consulting early before we went
• 305:00 - 305:30 to 20 books we had three backers at that level and didn't want to feel pressure to let anyone else in ESP especially when we felt that we might sell more Consulting packages at 20 books we didn't want anyone to be able to buy them in case we got overwhelmed so while we did let a few more people in the door they were people that we had spoken to throughout the week some of the key things we did to promote the campaign in week four
• 305:30 - 306:00 were writing more persuasive posts about why authors should use Kickstarter and posting those to Facebook sent a few emails to to our lists tried to sell Consulting via email but it was a bust week five during this week we started dropping drip content to our secondary traffic sources like Monica's podcast YouTube channel medium channel substack channel and more it's hard to say if the
• 306:00 - 306:30 content marketing worked because it felt too little too late content marketing should probably be done in the early parts of the campaign and stay stay consistent through the campaign if possible that is of course a difficult feat to pull off without a ton of lead time we don't know if it moved the needle or pulled people off the fence we just know that it happened and we had a good week six regardless we also switched back to our original message and preferred tier
• 306:30 - 307:00 which was the kickstarter Sprint with us we had wasted some time testing other messages in The Dead Zone but this was the one that everyone wanted so we just kept leading with that we also added a new tier that was double the price the wide marketing Sprint with us and that also started doing well once we switched messaging again to focus on the Sprints we went from 30 people in them to 70ish across both by the end of the
• 307:00 - 307:30 campaign some of the key things we did to promote the campaign in week five were writing more persuasive posts about why authors should use Kickstarter and posting those to Facebook sent a few emails to our lists added the wide marketing Sprint with us tier which people gravitated toward switched our messaging back to the thing people wanted from the beginning it's important to test your reward tiers but when you hit a popular
• 307:30 - 308:00 one do everything you can to keep selling it week six the 20 books conference in Los Vegas was interesting because we were both there starting on Sunday and through Friday Saturday when the campaign ended we were not seeing any movement for the first several days we were there even though Monica had a talk where she mentioned it we had gotten two talks ahead of time one about Kickstarter and
• 308:00 - 308:30 we picked up a second one about Kickstarter because one of the speakers had to drop out we also had a number of panels throughout the week which didn't usually allow us to even mention the campaign but which ended up creating more visibility anyway once Russell started presenting on Kickstarter on Wednesday we started seeing an uptick in backers on our page again this continued and gained steam up until Saturday when the campaign ended
• 308:30 - 309:00 we fielded questions about the backer levels on Thursday and Friday there's no question that the talks helped us significantly we had had a ton of visibility at the conference Russell also went to a ton of meetups where he kept meeting people and some of those people ended up backing the campaign this week was grueling for both of us and we were so tired going into it but we showed up and made it a success some of the key things we did to
• 309:00 - 309:30 promote the campaign in week six were sent a few emails to our lists especially to end the launch created special pins for 20 books attendees and handed them out when we met new people spoke on a lot of stages and panels Russell did several presentations on Kickstarter and related topics like merchandise attended a ton of meetups Russell did so many of these and met
• 309:30 - 310:00 lots of cool people as a result the postlaunch Russell was done with his portion of the campaign aside from delivering on the kickstarter Sprint with us which was honestly a lot to do still Monica struggled through every aspect of the Fulfillment process she also showed up a lot to the kickstarter Sprint with us Group which was a lot more fun the Sprint with us group was a fantastic idea because we got to walk
• 310:00 - 310:30 people through the content from the book and we got so many questions that helped us shape the book into something better this was so important that we would do it every single time for a non-fiction project Monica told Russell I'm happy to invest too much in the first 500 people if they can tell me how to get the next 9500 this pretty much sums up what the kickstarter Sprint with us is and why it's priced the way it is the conversations we've had have been
• 310:30 - 311:00 invaluable to us and we have really enjoyed hanging out with this group of people Lessons Learned there were a few key lessons that we learned many of which we've already shared throughout the book but we wanted to share them again as they relate to this particular campaign USE in-person events or if that's not possible virtual streaming events at the beginning and end of your campaign we used this with great success
• 311:00 - 311:30 and saw this with one of our clients as well who used webinars at the start and end of their campaign it works really well especially for non-fiction but also for fiction if you are selling any group program coaching consulting or other offer where you help people Hands-On you absolutely want to be at an event because conversation is the best way to sell your offer do more ahead of time Russell is superhuman in this respect while Monica is pretty consistently a few days late
• 311:30 - 312:00 on everything the more you can do ahead of time though the better after seeing it all work once Monica is more motivated to get that good marketing juice and have a better campaign next time have an appearance or several for every week of the Dead Zone we were able to maintain momentum into week two and week three largely because Russell had a few podcast appearances in front of our ideal audience getting in front of other
• 312:00 - 312:30 people's audiences is huge during The Dead Zone when your own audience is starting to tune you out momentum dropped off significantly in later weeks when we didn't have a podcast interview dropping keep working during The Dead Zone the funding you receive during that time is not as interesting as the cumulative effect it creates at the end as backers start to upgrade their reward tiers and grab add-ons in addition to press it would have been helpful to have content
• 312:30 - 313:00 marketing dripping this whole time save some of your energy for the End by week four and five we really didn't have the energy to keep promoting the campaign there were so many Avenues Monica wanted to explore including using medium substack podcasting and Clubhouse she has a sizable following on some of those platforms but there wasn't time and energy to organize anything on the one hand you are never going to do
• 313:00 - 313:30 everything and should be happy with what you did on the other hand we probably could have funded higher if those efforts had been secured ahe ahead of time save your energy for the whole campaign use add-ons Monica didn't take the time to set up a ton of add-ons when the campaign launched then didn't update throughout she figured she could sell them through the survey at the end but the survey sales were a fraction of the sales that came through the add-ons on
• 313:30 - 314:00 the kickstarter campaign get your entire backlist into the add-ons on your campaign it's a lot of work but you will sell a lot more too and if they are digital rewards it's all profit for you sell High ticket items in advance we did some of this but we could have done a lot more we had some cool ideas for very high ticket items that might have done better if we had been selling them for a month or two previously especially if we offered special pricing through
• 314:00 - 314:30 the kickstarter create backer perks that can sell well in the future Russell usually chooses backer perks that are completed already which is smart we did backer perks that were 2hour workshops and while only three of them got recorded during the campaign we will have those to sell forever and can do so in every future Kickstarter campaign as well as from other direct sales channels behind the scenes backer updates here are all the behind thes
• 314:30 - 315:00 scenes updates we ran for the campaign number one October 6th 2021 we hit our goal plus how to get the projects we love badge thank you so much for backing our project and book get your book selling on Kickstarter we are thrilled and humbled to have you behind the backer wall as promised we'll be sharing some behind the scenes through these backer updates so here's how our first day went
• 315:00 - 315:30 from our perspectives launching the kickstarter why we did what we did we hit our goal of $11,000 within about 2 hours of the campaign launching and then doubled it at about the 4.5h hour mark and then we got the projects we love badge from Kickstarter and then we hit our overnight goal of $3,500 all good stuff but I'll be honest we had
• 315:30 - 316:00 absolutely no idea that this would happen even though it seems obvious in hindsight Russell and I talked about this a few days ago how I had never done a real Kickstarter before and my audience wasn't primed for it how Russell doesn't do non-fiction so his audience wasn't primed for it either and probably doesn't necessarily care about learning Kickstarter how it doesn't matter who we are or what weight our big names and visibility carry because despite what
• 316:00 - 316:30 everyone believes people don't actually buy things because someone big put it out there what even is a big name anyway we did not set a goal of $11,000 for the sake of hitting it quickly we said it there because we literally didn't know what to expect from a non-fiction Kickstarter Russell normally uses $2,000 as a goal for his fiction and goes much higher for many of his Comics but he's
• 316:30 - 317:00 never done a non-fiction campaign before and he's never tested his system using it and even though we are super proud of what we we accomplished already we still have a list of numbers we need to hit throughout the campaign to guesstimate where we'll end up at the end and we haven't hit all the benchmarks we need yet as of today when I'm writing this the real reason we funded we know that people are going to say some version of of course their Kickstarter funded that quickly they are
• 317:00 - 317:30 Russell and monicaa but what we want to say back is that we know why it really funded and that's because we worked Russell system for running great kickstarters this system is based heavily on buyer psychology sales funnels and more so it makes sense that it works across a lot of different publishing project types and I'll be honest as the person who is doing a lot of the updates for this campaign I'm not Russell in two
• 317:30 - 318:00 ways one I'm not as organized as him so a bunch of stuff that he told me to do just didn't get done for example we got a about 200 people to get notified of our Kickstarter before launch but he told me if I had gotten the pre-launch page up when he told me to about a month in advance we would have likely had 400 people on our notifications for day one two I haven't done 18 campaigns there are dozens of things that Russell would have done differently than me
• 318:00 - 318:30 because he knows the kickstarter system very very well things that are obvious to him weren't or aren't to me I struggled to wrap my head around some of the concepts too I struggled to understand how much lead time I needed on stuff I struggled through massive fears and anxieties that he might not have gone through because this is his regular workflow all of this is a good thing because the truth is that I didn't Implement Russell's complete system and
• 318:30 - 319:00 we still got good results you don't have to be Russell to do well at this you can be a beginner you can be scared you can be confused and still do well Russell brought almost everything to the success of the campaign that much is pretty obvious from watching it especially if you've backed something else by him before I did bring one thing to the campaign though a deep knowledge of what independent authors want and need I
• 319:00 - 319:30 trust Russell so as we were building this campaign I did what he said to do about 95% of the time if he said do X we did X I did not question his judgment or methodology on this for about 5% of the things where he said do X and I said I'm not sure I feel like this won't work for non-fiction those instances were rare but when I said it Russell graciously listened to me and we tweaked his system
• 319:30 - 320:00 ever so slightly to make it work for non-fiction Russell system works really well what we know now is that Russell's system that he perfected through Comics also works for both fiction and non-fiction books the system is clear and teachable he taught it to me as a firsttimer for this project and we intend to teach it in a big way in our Kickstarter Sprint with us that takes place from mid November to mid-February $100 tier if you want to join
• 320:00 - 320:30 us we did the work and stacked the deck in our favor before the launch but that didn't give us an idea of how the project might perform at launch the only thing that helped us confirm whether we were on track or not is actually launching we both had a lot of anxiety around it but we did it and now we're just tracking the numbers so we can adjust and tweak our strategy as the project hums along in the coming weeks getting the projects we love
• 320:30 - 321:00 badge we got it yesterday yay thanks to Russell's system for running great kickstarters plus his connections with kick starter the first created the second we are excited to pass along some information that can give you an edge in getting this badge to there are three ways that you can notify Kickstarter about your project you can tweet them at their brand new publishing specific Twitter account Kickstarter reads twitter.com
• 321:00 - 321:30 red you can fill out a special form that Russell got for us this form lets the team know about your Kickstarter feel free to let them know you heard about it from us but please don't share it outside of our group it's here docs.google.com ford1 5ql se0 kmx nqq hore 0 iore p8 pg4 vehicle 95 asrc W6 ggn PDN 71 w/
• 321:30 - 322:00 viewform the way Russell used to get featured was by emailing this email address to let them know about your Kickstarter this may not be the process anymore but in case it helps here's the email stories kickstarter.com we recommend doing the first two on the first day that your project is live and hitting the email address if you don't get a response from the other two methods Kickstarter is eager to get more
• 322:00 - 322:30 independent authors using the platform regularly so they are happy to help out our community and give visibility to those of us who are writing books for a living thanks again for backing this project and please let us know if there's anything you want us to cover in the coming weeks the next update is titled the answer to the question we keep getting asked behind closed doors and the first sentence is author friends keep quietly messaging me behind the scenes so what is your real goal for
• 322:30 - 323:00 this campaign well stay tuned for the answer smiley face number two October 8th 2021 behind the scenes number two the answer to the question we keep getting asked behind closed doors author friends keep quietly messaging me behind the scenes so what is your real goal for this campaign we wanted to answer this question frankly so you have a better idea of how to guesstimate this for your
• 323:00 - 323:30 own campaign I'm not sure which of us Russell or I came up with the fun meta idea to launch get your book selling on Kickstarter on Kickstarter but one of the first things Russell said to me about it was if we can't hit a $10,000 campaign we shouldn't do it we spent a lot of time looking at how to ensure to the best of our ability that we could hit this goal and up until early September we still weren't confident that we were going to do
• 323:30 - 324:00 this something Russell is great at is planning and controlling a launch he's developed so so many ways to track his numbers and adjust his sales and marketing accordingly he has his numbers for his fiction campaigns that he's agreed to let me share here keep in mind that these are just his numbers but we hope they give some idea of how you can use benchmarks to stack the deck in the favor of your campaign as well as see if
• 324:00 - 324:30 you are on track Russell aims for a $10,000 campaign for his novels he sets the goal at 2, usually there are some campaigns particularly his Comics ones where he sets a much higher goal due to production costs something he told me while we were prepping the campaign was that we would have no idea what the trajectory was until we launched it and that we would know within the first day and then we would have an even better idea within
• 324:30 - 325:00 the first week Russell almost always Launches on a Tuesday at about 9:00 a.m. eastern and ends the first week on Saturday is benchmarks for fiction for a $10,000 campaign and a $2,000 goal are as follows first 6 hours of launch equals $2,000 first 12 hours of launch equals $4,000 5 days into launch by Saturday at midnight equals $8,000 hitting about 1
• 325:00 - 325:30 to 1.5k on each of the in between days Wednesday Thursday and Friday after that he hopes to get about $1,000 to $2,000 a week for each week of the campaign on the last week of The Campaign which he usually ends on a Thursday he tries to hit $2,500 to $4,000 more he normally does either 10day campaigns or 17-day campaigns so he
• 325:30 - 326:00 doesn't usually have the many weeks in between like we do during this campaign we have about six weeks for this one so there's lots of room for us to experiment the things working for you at both the beginning of the campaign and the end of the campaign are kickstarters algorithms and notifications the notifications will email people right when the campaign starts so you should save your emails to your own list until later in the day and Kickstarter will also notify all your
• 326:00 - 326:30 followers when it ends we started the campaign with around 175 followers right now we have nearly 250 and have converted about 43% to backers people can follow throughout the campaign so get them to watch you because it helps at the end remember Russell does $10,000 on fiction books novels Pros he is not even on Amazon
• 326:30 - 327:00 with most of his stuff he often hits $10,000 with around 300 to 500 backers if you have a readership from retailers already could you possibly hit $20,000 $30,000 or more we feel it's possible the numbers don't lie we hope this helps you map out your own Kickstarter bench marks you may not be aiming for $10,000 but you can see how the trajectory Works mathematically and
• 327:00 - 327:30 scale the numbers down or up based on your goal Number Two October 14th 2021 behind the scenes number three how to generate more excitement for your campaign one of the most important ways you can generate excitement for your campaign is by having a larger Mission and goal for your project in the early days of this book's conception Russell shared with me his vision that the publishing industry and
• 327:30 - 328:00 independent authors would someday have a thriving community on Kickstarter the same as the comics industry does Kickstarter has changed Russell's life and in many ways has saved his fiction career he wanted to see a place for creators to generate a lot of revenue for their Niche books so authors could make a full-time living even if they didn't write to Market or didn't write to market for a specific book meanwhile I Monica have had success
• 328:00 - 328:30 on retailers like Amazon because I do write to Market in popular genres like business self-help urban fantasy and paranormal romance but I saw a need for authors to be less dependent on any one stream of income which meant adding new revenue streams running direct sales to fans like in the non-fiction world and expanding product lines to generate more Revenue per reader when I heard Russell's Vision it was obvious to me that Kickstarter was a
• 328:30 - 329:00 key part of both getting more authors into the publishing ecosystem regardless of their startup capital and helping authors who had seen success create sustainable and long-term careers without the constant hustle and burnout that Indie authors seem to be seeing we both knew it would take a lot to create a thriving Kickstarter Community for authors for starters there were very few success stories in the publishing category especially for novelists most campaigns in publishing
• 329:00 - 329:30 don't even fund and few make $10,000 or more Russell had a proven system that he used to take his own campaigns to $10,000 and more but he didn't have an easy way to Mentor people to do the same for themselves Monica knew that there would be resistance in the author Community because Kickstarter comes with its own challenges around launching fears holding inventory and international shipping we both believed that if we
• 329:30 - 330:00 could address these challenges plus teach more authors how to use Kickstarter successfully plus get more authors to create and run their first campaign successfully then we could grow a community of authors and readers who use Kickstarter as a Marketplace for discovering fresh stories and cool inventive authors who hung out with their fans Russell has had incredible Kickstarter success in the publishing category he knows that if he can raise 10 to 30k and more for his very Niche
• 330:00 - 330:30 books that other authors who have huge followings and massive cataloges can raise a magnitude more $50,000 $100,000 and Beyond we also know that as more authors get on Kickstarter readers and Innovation will follow making it easier for everyone to find new readers as we were setting up this campaign I told Russell this isn't just a book it's a movement and now it's a movement that
• 330:30 - 331:00 300 plus of you have said yes to more money more freedom more control over our creative careers more cool stuff created more connection with fans more positivity and awesomeness put out into the world we believe it's possible and we're really really excited so the tip for this backer update is to share your larger why for
• 331:00 - 331:30 your project just like we have above and if you can we'd also love to hear from you about what brought you to our Kickstarter project in the first place if you could do us a favor go to our Kickstarter page and click on the comments tab tell us why you backed this campaign just type I back this Kickstarter because finish the sentence we only need a sentence and it doesn't matter what the sentence is
• 331:30 - 332:00 maybe you are backing because you're friends with us or because you found us in search or because you intend to do a kick starter project or because you have a Kickstarter project in the works or because you just think it's cool that we're putting ourselves out there it doesn't matter we want to hear why you backed so please make sure you post in our public comments section about why you backed it will take a few seconds on your end and it will keep us smiling for
• 332:00 - 332:30 days seriously thanks so much for backing sincerely Monica and Russell number four October 21st 2021 behind the scenes number four what to do during the dead zone of your campaign a list the dreaded dead zone of a Kickstarter campaign is the murky middle slog basically anything outside of the first and last weeks of the
• 332:30 - 333:00 campaign the biggest challenge of the dead zone is how to promote your Kickstarter and keep momentum going without becoming a broken record on your message we're currently thriving in the dead zone of this campaign something Russell doesn't always experience on his own campaigns and we have been breaking down what's going on in private conversations behind the scenes we wanted to share with you some of the insights we've had while managing the dead zone of our Campaign which is
• 333:00 - 333:30 nearly 30 days long course correction or stepping on the gas the dead zone is not all bad despite its name if you want to Stack the deck in your favor on your Kickstarter project you may need a longer dead zone like we did the most important thing you can do during your dead zone is to notice who is actually backing what tears they want and what messaging really matters to them we have definitely honed our
• 333:30 - 334:00 message since week number one and figured out which tiers people like the most those are the solo book tiers the kickstarter Sprint with us tier or what we think of as the Sprint with us Delux tier which is basically for an extra $50 you can get Russell's signature Kickstarter course crush it on Kickstarter we also figured which tiers were not working for us which included our $75 tier which we deleted and
• 334:00 - 334:30 replaced still not working for us and some of our higher tiers which we are going to do more testing on over the next few weeks so with these observations our major goals for The Dead Zone were extend the message and get people into the solo book tiar have one-on-one conversations with people about the kickstarter Sprint with us tears message us if you have questions as that's where we've been chatting about them and keep promoting
• 334:30 - 335:00 them exchange some of our lower tears to attempt to capture a secondary audience of newer authors who didn't have a book yet or were still working on their first book we added a $20 tier and a $75 tier aimed specifically at newer authors and the first one is converting push the Consulting tiers by talking about them more still in progress but you'll see us rolling out that messaging in the coming days the dead zone is a time to do more
• 335:00 - 335:30 of what is working and experiment with what is not preparing for 20 books Vegas for our campaign specifically we are ending it at a conference called 20 books in Las Vegas where we will both be speaking about Kickstarter amongst other things we know there will be many newer authors there who are just getting started in their careers so we were hoping to nail our offer to them during this dead zone period these are our two
• 335:30 - 336:00 new offers the first of which is converting well the second of which is still not we feel confident in several of our tiers that are aimed at more seasoned authors and know that we can have those conversations at 20 books but we definitely want to figure out how to get our Deluxe craft bundle to convert because we think it's a killer deal this is the important work of The Dead Zone especially on a longer campaign what is working and what isn't
• 336:00 - 336:30 the beauty of Kickstarter is the data your audience tells you you're messaging and we think this is one of the most exciting uses of Kickstarter because we are testing multiple offers in real time and learning so much about our audience and what they want and now we are going into the conference knowing exactly what pieces to put in our presentations panels and more Russell's an old hat at this and often goes to an event during his
• 336:30 - 337:00 campaign I was pretty mad on the idea as it sounded like a lot and a big investment but now I totally see the value of lining up the campaign as we did luckily I was smart enough to listen to Russell and advise everyone to do the same we believe this applies to really anything you can get such good data on Kickstarter and you can then take that data to your marketing efforts on retailers I hear from authors all the time that they don't even quite
• 337:00 - 337:30 understand why their books are selling on retailers or why one book is selling better than another and so on retailers are getting all that data that we as authors and creators need too Kickstarter and more generally direct sales to the rescue does all this it translate to fiction I get this question a lot when I talk about non-fiction does this apply to fiction as well yes most of the Strategic stuff we're doing on this
• 337:30 - 338:00 campaign translates to fiction too the cool thing is that we're doing this again in January 2022 where we will be demonstrating these Concepts as they apply to fiction in our Kickstarter Sprint with us we also made a list of things you can and should do during the dead zone of your campaign and almost all of it translates to a fiction project it's in the next section Russell has posted some early videos now in the Facebook group about
• 338:00 - 338:30 his November campaign and I'll be posting my first videos shortly too especially to capture my early thoughts on how all this applies to fiction as I go deeper into designing my January campaign people have been asking about our specific projects I'll be working on a pen name that needs some love and I'll be launching with the later books in a contemporary fantasy series that is very much in the magical princesses in pretty dresses fall in love with hot guys
• 338:30 - 339:00 category so it should be pretty interesting to watch especially for those who are building their first pen name or who write genre fiction Russell is launching a new series most likely that I'll let him talk more about in the Facebook group his genres are a mix of fantasy horror thriller so you'll get to see how the system plays out for targeting two very different audiences I doubt Russell's and my books have much Crossover at all what to do during The Dead Zone to
• 339:00 - 339:30 keep momentum going the only thing that will kill your campaign is trying to send the same message over and over again to your audience or your backers you need something new to say to them and it needs to add value to them a lot of what Russell does is provide reasons for himself to send a new message to his audience I definitely worried about this a lot before the campaign because I
• 339:30 - 340:00 didn't think we could possibly have more to say but it turns out at least for this campaign that we have the opposite problem there are so many directions we can go and we have to pick and choose and space them out and of course there is the reality check of how much you can actually get done oh do I wish I had worked more ahead on this project we came up with a list of things that you can do and there is definitely something on this list for every type of
• 340:00 - 340:30 Kickstarter campaign you can think of talk about your mission and message we did this in the last last update talk about and celebrate the campaign's success so far engage your backers in some way ask people to share why they backed we did this in the last update thank you for sharing start your stretch goals create new messaging for new Target audiences create new
• 340:30 - 341:00 graphics have a weekly Target and keep an eye on it daily we are finding that having at least one push every day a new platform a new Avenue for audience a new video a new podcast interview or live event can be really helpful to stay motivated and feel in control of the kickstarter get out your flash goals perks if you are running behind Target make a new Flash goal offer to excite backers and give it a tight deadline to
• 341:00 - 341:30 encourage action change the message to your current audience we focused on getting as many backers as possible at any level in week one we burn through our current audiences this way meaning that we can't keep sending the same message to them they'll tune out unsubscribe feel bad harassed Etc in week 2 3 4 and five we are working on hand selling our main audiences into our higher tiers through Outreach you'll see us switching from
• 341:30 - 342:00 talking about the book to talking about Consulting reach out to secondary sources of traffic within your current audience for us that was social media former teachable accounts medium and substack pull people from lower tiers up into higher tiers schedule a bunch of swaps ahead of time we didn't do any swaps during the first week relying just on our audiences we saved swaps and PR for when we
• 342:00 - 342:30 already had visible success so that there was a story around it take your cont content from week one and get it onto more platforms take your content from week one and get it into more formats audio video transcript Graphics release a new chapter section of the books you're promoting hand sell your higher reward tiers to your audience through one-on-one or small groups at a live event virtual live event or wherever
• 342:30 - 343:00 else look at and plan your last week of the campaign and test messaging and te so you can end with a bang don't get overwhelmed you do not have to do all these things of course we share this list because the greater fear is usually that there will be nothing more to do or say but we have not found that to be true at all we are not personally going to be able to hit all of the things on this list for this campaign but I love having the list
• 343:00 - 343:30 because it will help me plan an even better campaign next time learning from each campaign one of the cool things about doing this campaign is that we are learning so much this is Russell's first non-fiction publishing project and his system is working so well for it but we're also learning a bunch of stuff that works well and easily in non-fiction that we can now take back to fiction this book is going to be awesome it really
• 343:30 - 344:00 is and if you want an even deeper look at how we apply all this to fiction we really recommend the kickstarter Sprint with us tier even if you don't want to do a Kickstarter with us in January you can learn so much about the buyer psychology of launching with fiction and even if you want to do a Kickstarter but not in January you can get all the behind the scenes we take you through because we are recording it all and dropping it to a teachable site
• 344:00 - 344:30 so you can have access forever either via our hosted teachable or download it's $100 and there is a digital only version for international backers who don't want to pay shipping costs you can send this tier to someone as a gift scholarship too two people have and you can upgrade to the crush it on Kickstarter course for only $50 more if you want Russell step by step before the Sprint gets
• 344:30 - 345:00 going in late November early December come join us in the kickstarter Sprint with us reward here there are over 30 people signed up already from seasoned authors with bigger campaign goals all the way down to newer authors starting out and running their first campaign many of us are hanging out in the Facebook group already where Russell has posted several videos of his November 2021 campaign redacted you can be in too when you back
• 345:00 - 345:30 the campaign at this tier thanks so much for backing this campaign and we hope this update has been helpful to you sincerely Monica and Russell the we did it update November 18th 2021 admin update number 8 we did it fulfillment updates we did it the campaign for get your book selling on Kickstarter is
• 345:30 - 346:00 complete and we came in at 537 backers and $21,500 Plus thank you so much we are surprised and amazed that so many people believed in this project we are also excited to share everything we know about Kickstarter through Russell's system which has now been proven across Comics anthologies novels and non-fiction it works and we can't wait to show you how additionally we had two stretch
• 346:00 - 346:30 goals at the end that we didn't quite hit but we decided to do one of them anyway the plan yourbook launch workbook covers Kickstarter Amazon Apple Books Google playbooks Cobo Barnes & Noble and more and follows my book plan your book launch it'll eventually be listed at my usual workbook price of $29.99 but during the campaign it's included at the $50 and above tier which you'll be able to upgrade to in the backer
• 346:30 - 347:00 survey the second stretch goal we didn't hit was $25,000 for the audiobook Russell and I have agreed we will try to get the book through a new feature at Google playbooks for AI R audiobooks so as long as this works and as long as it complies with Google playbooks agreement terms which as far as I can tell it does we'll be sending out the air R audio book to the $50 and above tier as well we'll keep you updated on the progress of this but
• 347:00 - 347:30 hopefully that'll be another nice add-on so you can consume the book quickly if audio is your thing fulfillment updates the book I wanted to give you an update on fulfillment I'm getting the backer survey set up and I'm close to sending it out so that we can start sending out your stuff Russell is an Old Pro at this but this is my first campaign so it's taken me a few days to wrap my head around all the tasks that need to be
• 347:30 - 348:00 done for this I'm hoping to send it out tomorrow Friday at the latest the get your book selling on Kickstarter book is probably the most important piece that people want to date on and I'm in the process of getting everything updated and formatted plus adding new chapters we learned so much through this campaign and there is a lot to add I'm fairly quick at non-fiction books though so the finalized digital version of the book should be out shortly and no later
• 348:00 - 348:30 than Wednesday November 24th the day before us Thanksgiving as long as all goes well the print book plus signed book plates will ship within a few weeks of that sometime in early December this is my first time processing this many copies of a print book so there's a learning curve for me but I have a plan to get it done in a timely manner shipping times for the US should get it to you in December probably before Christmas but there are simply no
• 348:30 - 349:00 guarantees for international shipping I really have no idea what to expect in terms of when it will arrive I'm going to make some calls to see if I can nail down a timeline for those of you that are affected by international shipping around the holidays fulfillment updates Consulting if you want to set up your Consulting hours $500 plus tier with either myself or Russell please let us know you can email us directly monal nl@
• 349:00 - 349:30 gmail.com and I can forward to Russell if needed or you can message us on Facebook where we are both pretty responsive for Consulting we are never sure where people are and their projects and what they need so we rely on you to come to us when you are ready for these if you are in our Sprint tiers $100 plus tier you can jump in and chat with us immediately by joining our Sprint Facebook group here facebook.com/
• 349:30 - 350:00 group16 25944 69325 367 if you are not there still time to join through the backer survey and there are some bonuses in that group that are already available Russell has completed one build of his Audio Drama already and the recordings are available now and he is also going to record his March 2022 Kickstarter as a bonus too as a reminder we're both recording our January
• 350:00 - 350:30 kickstarters plus answering all your questions and looking over what you post the VIP group coaching call $50 plus tier is on January 22nd at 2: p.m. Eastern 11:00 a.m. Pacific and it's for all at the $50 tier and up here's the info and the sign up works the same as the workshops we'll check your backer pledge before approving it when January 22nd 2022 1 p.m. central Time US and
• 350:30 - 351:00 Canada register in advance for this meeting exacted fulfillment updates everything else for nearly everything else in our fulfillment process you will either receive it automatically once the survey is sent out or will receive instructions on how to get it when you fill out the backer survey most of the digital content is done already and there are only a few other rewards that will not
• 351:00 - 351:30 be available right away the list below gives you an update on each $10 plus tier get your book selling on Kickstarter digital version November 24th 2021 $10 plus tier Kickstarter launch plan digital version December 1st 2021 $25 plus tier get your book selling on Kickstarter physical version exact dates TBD but the current plan is to
• 351:30 - 352:00 ship in early mid December 2021 $50 plus tier the Creator interviews which I'm still in the middle of recording release date is TBD $50 plus tier the kickstarter workbook that we added in the final minutes of the campaign release date is TBD $50 plus tier the AI red Audi book that we added in the final minutes of the campaign release date is
• 352:00 - 352:30 TBD $100 plus tier the backer perk Workshops the dates for these are in in the backer update here redacted and any that have passed will have recordings sent out as soon as they are available you will receive a recording if you are eligible regardless of whether you sign up for the live recording and you will receive all seven Workshop recordings if you pledged at $100 or more $250 plus tier several of the
• 352:30 - 353:00 digital library books that are on pre-order through July 2022 Amazon is one of the best places to to look for updates on these as most of them have pre-orders there otherwise feel free to email me at monal nl@ gmail.com for an update on a specific book final bonuses we're a tad nut smiley face we've been getting a lot of questions about Kickstarter but our two most popular ones are these from authors starting out how do I
• 353:00 - 353:30 run a Kickstarter from an audience of Zero from authors further along why do a Kickstarter when I'm doing well in ebook on retailers to me the answer to the first question is cross promotion and getting your sample into the hands of your target audience the answer to the second question is that you want to reduce your dependency on retailers by selling direct to your fans through fan-based sites like Kickstarter and patreon as
• 353:30 - 354:00 well as through your own website and in person at events and signings kick starter is the first step to that because you usually need some level of inventory and merchandise to sell direct and Kickstarter helps you test plus fund that so as a bonus for the $10 tier and above we've decided to give you two of our other co-authored books the first get your book selling with cross promotion can help you if you have the audience of zero question and the second
• 354:00 - 354:30 get your book selling at events and signings can help you if you have the I'm already doing well question we hope you enjoy these books they've been a labor of love and we think they will answer a ton of questions about how Kickstarter fits into your larger business we also want to continue the discussion in our Sprint with us group containers for those of you who have joined about 70 of you crazy as a reminder you can upgrade to
• 354:30 - 355:00 any tier and grab add-ons in the backer survey we're looking looking forward to getting stuff to you we appreciate your support of this project so much we'll be in touch soon with the backer survey sincerely Monica and Russell the backer fulfillment update November 28th 2021 admin update number 10 backer kit survey is out digital fulfillment
• 355:00 - 355:30 through next Friday hi the backer kit survey is out about half of all backers have submitted it already thank you the way we've set it up is that if you want you can upgrade your pledge level and or grab most of what we offered during the campaign individually as an add-on please note that if you are grabbing digital books from my catalog some are available now and some have an
• 355:30 - 356:00 expected delivery date in 2022 going all the way out until July 2022 additionally please note there are a few other digital rewards that are not quite available for one reason or another the list of those with expected dates is here redacted I will keep updating backers on this list as pieces get fulfilled finally I want to give you an update on when to expect content and
• 356:00 - 356:30 what form to expect it in I'll start sending available digital content via bookfunnel Plus getting people added to teachable on Monday and continue working through the surveys throughout next week I apologize for the delay and was hoping not to run into the holidays with this but now that it has I don't have much control over my schedule this weekend hence why you're hearing from me after midnight my time and can't start processing the surveys until Monday
• 356:30 - 357:00 during regular work hours lastly the digital book has a new date as well now you can expect it by Friday December 4th it is longer than my usual non-fiction and taking more time than I thought I'm sorry for the delay on this as well behind the scenes using backer kit for the survey we definitely want to keep it real for you in these updates including any challenges and less than optimal decisions going on behind the
• 357:00 - 357:30 scenes in my last update I shared that the time line for the backer kit survey was a concern for me the reason was because while I had finished it on the Friday after the campaign closed I didn't realize that it had to go through an approval process up to two business days and then a smoke test with a recommended 24-hour waiting period another day add in that the backer kit team was out until next week for the US Thanksgiving holiday and I wasn't sure
• 357:30 - 358:00 that it would get approved this week before they became unavailable after some back and forth with them it did get approved before the holiday just barely sometime on Wednesday evening I didn't receive a notification and didn't see it until Thursday morning Thanksgiving day I decided to wait until Friday morning to run the smoke test I really didn't want anyone to get the survey on a major Us holiday I wanted
• 358:00 - 358:30 people to enjoy their day without asking them to do something even if it only took a few minutes of their time the smoke test was largely a success but that put the survey out for everyone on Saturday a full 13 days after the campaign ended definitely not what I want to do in the future it's been a good learning experience for me because the campaign Ended as I was coming back from the 20 books conference and I wasn't prepared to jump right into
• 358:30 - 359:00 fulfillment like I should have been I was literally on a plane when it ended and couldn't get internet during the last hours of the campaign not the brightest scheduling on my part getting the survey done slowly plus not realizing there was an approval process completely my fault plus the holidays has added a silly amount of days to fulfillment that didn't need to be there the moral of the story for me is get the survey set up earlier start
• 359:00 - 359:30 the approval process right after the campaign ends your campaign must be over before you can submit and hopefully send the survey out within 3 to four days of the campaign ending the second potential bad decision I made is not using backer kit to send digital downloads from the comments and confusion on the survey I gather that many creators using backer kit put the digital downloads through backer kit as well so that once you submit the survey you receive the digital download
• 359:30 - 360:00 immediately makes sense I didn't do that for a few reasons a a lot of the courses are already hosted on teachable so we would just be giving access and there wasn't a great way to do that through backer kit B A lot of the digital content is in UB format andbook funnel is a far better tool for sending those because they can get the ebooks onto your reading device in a few clicks as opposed to you just
• 360:00 - 360:30 having the file and having to figure it out yourself I don't compile PDF versions of my ebooks maybe I should aside from the actual print ready interior files that I would upload to retailers and I don't usually give out those files to readers For Better or For Worse I'm not sure the downside to sending it this way is I have to send it manually which as I said I probably can't start until Monday and will go in waves as backers complete their
• 360:30 - 361:00 surveys I'm not sure I made the right decision or chose the right solution here when I spoke to Russell about this it sounded like he uses backer kit for All Digital fulfillment so that may be something I switch to in my next campaign finally I wanted to explain something we've gotten a few questions on a few backers have asked some version of why are experts on Kickstarter having issues with fulfillment so I want to be
• 361:00 - 361:30 clear Russell is the person with the expertise and experience and he's not involved in fulfillment at all it's 100% me Russell definitely has a handle on all this stuff he's actually run another entire campaign and is at the same stage of fulfillment on it since our campaign ended which is crazy to me I am not an expert on it and this is my first campaign the goal in doing this is for me to take his system and try to
• 361:30 - 362:00 implement it with fresh eyes so we can see where the challenges are and make book better many of you out there will also be going through this for the first time with your first Kickstarter and it's nearly impossible for Russell to take himself back to 20 campaigns ago and remember what he didn't know then we think this setup has worked out pretty well with most of the early hiccups happening before the campaign launched so no one saw that right now during fulfillment you're seeing a bit
• 362:00 - 362:30 more of the messy learning process and I think that's largely a good thing I'm not Russell and I can't Implement Russell system like Russell can but hey we still had a successful campaign and you can too and you don't need to be as good as Russell is and trust me after going through this process myself he's an absolute superhuman at it since I'm 100% handling all of the Fulfillment myself there are bumps in the road I wish it was smoother and it's
• 362:30 - 363:00 not fun to be stumbling so publicly things are moving forward again and everything should be back on track but I also don't know what else I don't know the only thing I can promise is that if the plan goes Ary again I'll share the behind the scenes of it again so you don't make the same mistake I'm looking forward to sharing more in the book about the Fulfillment process especially around some other pieces like actually receiving the funds
• 363:00 - 363:30 that need to be accounted for as you plan your fulfillment timeline that's all for this update please feel free to email me with questions at monal nl@ gmail.com thank you again for backing and thank you so much for your patience with me throughout this process if you filled out the survey already you'll start hearing from me again in 36 to 48 hours and if you haven't filled out the survey please do
• 363:30 - 364:00 so by Monday morning us Central Time Zone to be included in the first wave of sent talk to you soon Monica lenel chapter 15 ushering people through your sales process there are two optional pillars of running a successful Kickstarter campaign email lists and advertising you can run a very successful campaign without being great
• 364:00 - 364:30 at either of these if you invest time into building your email list and learning advertising though these two pillars can supercharge your book sales through Kickstarter exponentially and net you far more profit on your campaigns before we get into the chapters on email lists and advertising we wanted to do what we've done for some of the other pillars which is give you a crash course in how we think about sales funnels and building your audience for this we offer Monica's 10
• 364:30 - 365:00 stages of audience framework we've excerpted the details of this framework from her book get your book selling jumpstart your book sales without launching scheming or hacking the productive novelist number n this is told from her perspective and she is the I in this particular chapter you can use the 10 stages of audience to come up with content ideas for your posts videos lives stories and advertising on Facebook the 10 stages of
• 365:00 - 365:30 audience the idea behind the 10 stage stes of audience is simple you have 10 stages and portions of your potential audience are at each of the 10 your job is to move your potential audience through the stages all you have to do is build a bridge from one stage to another here are the 10 stages stage one target audience someone who hasn't heard of me but has read
• 365:30 - 366:00 books similar to mine stage two lead someone who has heard of me reads books like mine but isn't actively considering purchasing my book stage three prospective reader someone who reads books like mine and is actively seeking out more information about my books like going to a product page or reading my blog stage four trial reader someone who had downloaded sample chapters of my book or a full book if it's at the beginning of a fiction series and is
• 366:00 - 366:30 considering purchasing stage five perspective customer someone who has read my product page and encountered a buying decision either saying yes or no to purchasing stage six customer someone who purchased my book doesn't mean they read it though stage seven reader someone who has read at least one of my books in full stage eight fan someone who buys more of my stuff a repeat
• 366:30 - 367:00 customer Stage Nine true fan someone who will buy everything I create just to support me stage 10 evangelist someone who shares my work with others and recruits new readers to me audience your audience will experience these stages in order if you have gaps or conversion issues between any of these stages you'll see that customers drop out along the path to avoid that you must create Bridges between each of the stages the
• 367:00 - 367:30 bridges are your marketing and sales materials this framework is going to help you identify where you have marketing and sales materials in place to move a person to the next stage it will also help you identify where you don't have marketing and sales materials or where your marketing and sales materials need Improvement the 10 stages of audience is your sales funnel you may have heard of a sales funnel before but considered it
• 367:30 - 368:00 a confusing or tedious marketing strategy to get into place your 10 stages of audience sales funnel is like your dance card again all you have to do is fill in all the spots and when all the spots are filled your book will be selling marketing is not a big scary thing it's truly just getting materials in place it's a checklist of to-do items as long as you've overcome some of the blocks that are holding you back you
• 368:00 - 368:30 should be able to move through your checklist with some serious Zen stay one target audience in this stage your potential reader is simply a person who reads books like yours to find these people you want to identify what genre your book is in and also Identify some similar books to yours that are already popular so if your book is a romance then your target audience is going to be romance readers simple right or if you have a
• 368:30 - 369:00 business book you might be looking for people people who read books like Malcolm gladwell's Tipping Point because we're working with books which are a well understood product we don't need to delve too deeply into any target audience exercises your audience understands the type of product you're offering and all they're looking for now is will they like your book that's all you really need to think about and because people's tastes vary
• 369:00 - 369:30 so widely you can stick to a fairly generic target audience for the purposes of this framework you need two types of marketing support at this stage to identify your target audience identify your genre or people who read books that are similar to yours no matter what genre you're in I believe you should be able to think of at least three to five fairly popular books that are like yours if you struggle with this
• 369:30 - 370:00 think about the types of books you like to read since those are the ones that probably inspired you to write your book in the first place a way to reach your target audience and let them know about your book this one is a little trickier because you need to be able to do this without alienating people this will mostly consist of leveraging other people's audiences lopa this could be as simple as reaching out to a similar book's author to ask if
• 370:00 - 370:30 he or she wants to coordinate a Cross promo every time I review this material I notice that I'm not doing enough to support this stage if you're in the same boat don't beat yourself up driving traffic to the top part of your sales funnel is one of the most challenging parts of this process that you will ever face it's very common to mess this part up or rely on traffic sources that are working one day and gone the next questions to
• 370:30 - 371:00 answer what genre or Niche do you write in what are some books that are similar to yours what are a few ways you can lopa that fit into your chosen strategies stage two lead in this stage someone in your target audience has heard about your book typically just a mention or two they may know your name and the title of the book or they may just recognize the
• 371:00 - 371:30 cover they can hear about your book in a number of ways including stumbling on your book in a store whether that is a brick and mortar store or a retailer online they can hear about your book from a friend or they may even find out about your book through your own Outreach efforts and marketing materials that you're putting out there however they hear about your book they suddenly go from being someone who was simply in your target audience and had no idea who you were to someone who
• 371:30 - 372:00 knows who you are and what you're selling even though your potential reader knows who you are stage two is still a very passive stage for the reader why because typically a reader needs to hear about your book multiple times from multiple sources that they trust before taking any action on their own to learn more about your book think about this in your own life how many books have you heard of multiple times that you think you would
• 372:00 - 372:30 probably like but that you've never actually gone to Amazon and looked up for me personally there are hundreds of books like this I'll hear about a book sometimes 10 or 20 times before I even think to go look at it on Amazon and if I'm not looking for more information what's the likelihood that I'll take action and purchase zilch this doesn't mean that I'm not interested it doesn't mean that the books aren't good and it doesn't mean
• 372:30 - 373:00 that I wouldn't absolutely love these books once I got my hands on them it just means that finding this book at this time in my life is not high on my priority list so it never gets done keep that in mind as you're going through these stages because you can bring a ton of awareness to your book but it doesn't necessarily mean those people are going to buy even if the book is absolutely perfect for them you could be solving a huge problem they have and
• 373:00 - 373:30 they are not buying this is a painfully common occurrence yet when we are on the author's end of it we feel terrible we wonder why people aren't buying what's wrong with us well nothing's wrong with us or our books awareness doesn't easily convert to action but it doesn't mean that we're the problem at this stage it can feel like there's not really too much that you can do you've already told your perfect reader about your book and now the ball
• 373:30 - 374:00 is in their court right well not quite the pieces of marketing support you need to put in place to help a reader overcome this stage and move on to stage three are Foster evangelists we'll talk about these readers later in this section but for now know that once a reader hits stage 10 they can and will tell other potential readers about your book the reason that this is so powerful is
• 374:00 - 374:30 because people are much more likely to buy your book when they get a personal recommendation from someone they trust another reason is because books suffer from what is known in the business world as the network effect the network effect is the idea that something is significantly more valuable when more people are using it this pops up all over the communications industry a telephone for example is much more valuable when everyone has one
• 374:30 - 375:00 because the whole point of the telephone is connecting with others if you had a telephone in your house and no one else had one it would be worthless emails fax machines and even the internet are significantly more valuable because everyone uses them it turns out that books are the same way not quite on the level of communication devices but close when you think about this it makes a lot of sense because books are always more enjoyable
• 375:00 - 375:30 when you can talk about them with others as much as you can enjoy the ideas in the book on its own you also want to read books in order to build a shared language or shared world in the case of fiction with others in some ways a book is a communication tool which is why it obeys the same rules as the telephone when it comes to the network effect raise awareness by putting out more and more and more marketing specifically release the same
• 375:30 - 376:00 message in different forms like I said before most people that are in stage two need to hear about your book at least two to three times before they even begin to start looking for more information on it this is less true for non-fiction than it is for fiction non-fiction has a benefit in that it's solution oriented so someone might have an urgent pain and may be looking for a solution your book might contain that solution and then
• 376:00 - 376:30 they won't have to hear about it so many times before they go out and look look for more information on it but for fiction it really comes down to just getting your marketing materials in front of people over and over again and trying to entice them into trying you there are tactics at later stages that can Aid with this but the ultimate message here is that when in doubt Market more smartly of course raise the priority of your book
• 376:30 - 377:00 in the potential reader mind the fastest ways to priority are add urgency add scarcity add desperate need you will see this a lot especially with book campaigns some examples are make the book free for a limited time sometimes to the point where they lose access to the book If they don't read it by certain time put it on sale and give a really
• 377:00 - 377:30 huge discount for short amount of time create something that is going to be out ofd next year like an almanac or a gift guide create something that's tied to an event for example if you have a book that teaches people how to take pictures of fireworks then you'll probably see an uptick in purchases right before the 4th of July so there are a couple things that you can do to raise the priority in your
• 377:30 - 378:00 readers minds but it's not the easiest thing to do and many of these these tactics won't work on an ongoing basis each of these tactics is promotional in the sense that they are time and event-based that means you can only expect short bursts of sales rather than consistent sales there's nothing wrong with short bursts especially if you have a promotional calendar however you don't ever want to rely primarily on event-based or time-based marketing
• 378:00 - 378:30 these produce sporadic sales at best and create an artificial hive that feels incredibly low when you fall back down the tactic out of these three that you can affect the most is putting out more and more marketing luckily we're going to be putting out a ton of awesome marketing for your book in the rest of these stages questions to answer how can you add more marketing materials to this stage to get more impressions in front of your
• 378:30 - 379:00 leads what Evergreen marketing opportunities do you have at this stage what event-based or time-sensitive promotional opportunities do you have at this stage stage three prospective reader in this stage someone is actively seeking information about your book for example somebody who has heard about your book from a friend decides to look up your book online or somebody clicks through to your website after listening to a
• 379:00 - 379:30 podcast interview you've done however it happens happens someone is trying to learn more about you in your book whether that be on your actual product page on Amazon or any other e- retailer on your website through Goodreads reviews or anywhere else you've put up information about your book The mindset of this person is that they have probably heard mention of your book two to three times already often through recommendation remember 85% of books are
• 379:30 - 380:00 sold to recommendation or through Word of Mouth this person is ready to pursue the opportunity to read your book whether it's because they need it in the case of non-fiction mostly or whether they think it sounds entertaining or interesting what you're going to need at this stage is a website landing page or author product pages on retailers where people can find more information about your book the first thing they're probably
• 380:00 - 380:30 going to want to do is look you up on Google you want a place where you control the message others will share their own messages about your book as it gains popularity so you need to be part of the conversation the more you can share about your book on your website the better but at the least you want to have cover image title and description links to buy information about
• 380:30 - 381:00 you any other relevant purchase information like whether the book is part of a series or not your new release schedule this is the number one question you'll get asked as you develop more series your email newsletter sign up one of the most important marketing tools you have good marketing material that creates desire for the book this is the part where authors
• 381:00 - 381:30 struggle most many authors are very good at delivering content that creates value and not as good at delivering content that creates desire the distinction between the two is important but unfortunately two Nuance to go into in detail and Beyond the scope of this analysis if you realize you need to learn how to write content that creates desire start studying sales copyrighting and marketing you can also look at what other authors in your genre are doing to
• 381:30 - 382:00 get ideas the content used here can range from a number of different things blog post on your site about the topic interviews that you've done a book trailer a really tantalizing book description that you've written and so on there are a ton of possibilities here questions to answer where can readers learn more
• 382:00 - 382:30 about your book or series landing page website page Etc what are some pieces of content that you can use to create desire for your book stage four trial in this stage someone samples your work this stage is one that I consider optional because you don't actually need to have a trial or primer in place to sell your book lots of authors have succeeded without
• 382:30 - 383:00 it that being said I highly recommend it because I think helps bridge the gap from stage three to stage five quite nicely the other reason is because I've noticed not only with myself but also in talking to other authors about their habits that readers who go through stage four seem to read the book that they eventually buy much faster they also seem to go forward after they read the book through stages 7 8 9 and 10 so in some ways stage four is a great
• 383:00 - 383:30 supporting piece of marketing material for stage ages 6 to 10 so what is the trial put simply it's a sample of your work that's closely related to the book that the reader is actually going to purchase that doesn't necessarily mean that the trial or the primer has to be free though lots of authors are very successful with a paid trial as long as the price is low enough right now that typically means
• 383:30 - 384:00 trialing with an ebook and it's typically priced at 99 you can try to price higher but a $1 trial is common across so many industries that more people will buy at the lower price the marketing support you need at this stage is a sample of your work that is either free or has a very low monetary barrier to entry like 99 Cents you want this sample to be
• 384:00 - 384:30 something that is small and easily consumable in this case a huge book as a freebie is not necessarily ideal you want it to be something that readers can get through quickly why because if they don't finish your trial they won't buy your book something complete that produces a desired result or ends with open questions for fiction at the same time you don't want to give someone one scene and call it a day yes that's small and easily
• 384:30 - 385:00 consumable but it's probably not enough to get someone hooked on your fiction give them a full story that they can continue if they are excited enough about the characters and concept if you're writing non-fiction the worst thing you can do is say here's a 10-step framework buy my book to get steps for to 10 if someone can't get a result with just steps one to three then they aren't going to be very impressed with your framework and won't necessarily want to buy the rest think if I had given you
• 385:00 - 385:30 just the first three steps of this this even if you implemented every single thing I said you could still easily see no sales the entire framework or at least steps 1 to five are required in order to see tangible results a sample that creates desire for your paid book don't use something tangentially related but rather something that is closely related for fiction this could
• 385:30 - 386:00 be something like a short story or a noela length prequel to the series you're trying to sell while for a non-fiction book it may be a bonus audio that is going to create desire it can be a delicate balance to create both something that produces a result and something that creates desire at the same time my best advice is to take a small but complete piece of your story or larger idea and make that a sample even though your trial or sample
• 386:00 - 386:30 is yet another piece of material that you have to create it doesn't have to be hard work in fact you can use a portion of your book just by pulling some of the best chapters in your book and bundling them together you could also take the same content and put it in a different format which is one of my favorite ways to create a sample a great example of this is doing a short audio on one of the chapters in your book especially if you have a non-fiction book the reason that
• 386:30 - 387:00 this works is because a audio is very easily consumable people listen to audio while they're jogging while they're driving to work while they're on the train while they're waiting in line and because it's so easily consumable people are happy to listen to the audio and then go back and buy the same content in a book form so they can dive deeper into your lessons and insights even though it's the same content you are providing two different
• 387:00 - 387:30 experiences this works well with too though in this case you often need to provide a whole story I found that a short story related to the characters creates desire to learn more about them especially if you can evoke strong emotions in a short amount of text or leave the story on a cliffhanger or big reveal I was able to do this with the first book of the billionaires Alibi series which was only 20,000 words or about 75
• 387:30 - 388:00 Pages the goal of the trial is to deepen your bond with her reader to easily get your message in front of people to remove unnecessary barriers to entry to try your work and to get to know your readers better through their feedback if you do these things you can create desire that makes the pricing of your paid book less relevant it's very simple when someone really wants your book they don't care if it's priced at $2 $5 or
• 388:00 - 388:30 $10 questions to answer what are some free or cheap trials I can offer to entice people to my book how can I slice and dice small sections of my book to provide a complete yet enticing experience to the reader that will interest them in my paid book stage five prospective customer in this stage someone hits your sales page on a retailer and they make the decision to buy your work or to not buy your
• 388:30 - 389:00 work this stage is self-explanatory and it's really encompassed by that moment right before someone purchases your book They're going to make a decision to buy or not buy and in some cases they may make other decisions like putting you on their wish list putting you in their cart but never checking out or not taking any action right then but keeping it in the back of their mind that they want to purchase your book eventually what you need at this stage an awesome product page that
• 389:00 - 389:30 closes sales to bring your potential Reader through this stage you need to have awesome covers a great description plenty of five-star reviews and blurbs from people who like your book an incredible sample and if possible also a sense of urgency on the page though that's not always easy to do and you can't stay in an urgency State year round Kindle countdown deals is a great example of a short-term urgent State you have a few options that may
• 389:30 - 390:00 help you improve your product page study other product pages of successful authors in their genre and make notes about the various elements on the page like cover reviews and more see if you can identify the successful elements and attempt to mimic them using your own author style ask your readers what confused them most about your product page if anything pay attention to the reviews on your product page if you are below four
• 390:00 - 390:30 stars that may be an indication of where you need to improve I've gained tons of insight from my own review section that led me to change my covers text and even the structure of my book ask another author to help you diagnose weak points on your pages usually this works best if you talk to an author with a bit more experience than you they can save you tons of time and wheel spinning by providing answers
• 390:30 - 391:00 quickly stage six customer in this stage someone buys your book at market rate this stage does not include anybody who acquired your book through other means like stealing borrowing or receiving your book as a gift the whole point of this stage is that somebody is an actual customer of yours and they've actually given you money in exchange for getting your book I want to make that distinction clear because I think that it gets a
• 391:00 - 391:30 little lost at times you should value a customer much higher than somebody who has gone through say stage four where they've just merely sampled your work at a discounted rate you may be thinking hey sales that was my entire goal or who a lot of authors see stage six as the end point but it's truly just the beginning of the back five stages being a buyer does not make someone a
• 391:30 - 392:00 reader all you have to do to understand this is to look at your own buying habits when it comes to books television or movies if you go through your own Archive of media you can probably find a number of books DVDs products and programs that you've paid for but didn't ever consume if you can't find anything in that stash perhaps you have unused gym memberships past grocery store purchases rotted fruit and vegetables clothes in the closet with price tags still on them
• 392:00 - 392:30 and any other bad decision that you've ever made with money we as humans tend to buy more than we need especially those of us who live in First World countries we often buy things that we think we want and that we never ever use it's just human nature so the same thing happens with books just because someone bought your book doesn't mean that they ended up reading it and that in my opinion is a huge wasted opportunity what you need in this stage
• 392:30 - 393:00 is for someone to buy your book and open it that's the entire goal of this stage because you want customers to read your books a customer will never become a repeat customer unless they read your first book and then take a number of additional actions we don't want them to buy and promptly forget about you questions to answer how can you remind readers to
• 393:00 - 393:30 read your book after purchasing it does does the content of your book create that wow factor stage seven reader in this stage someone reads your book it's really that simple what you need at this stage to give your reader a reason to complete your book again all you have to do to know that this stage is hard to get through is to look at your past purchases we all have books that we
• 393:30 - 394:00 bought that we started that we never finished reading because we lost interest along the way or it was too difficult to comprehend and even if someone picks up your books with tons of enthusiasm and Dives in right away you can still lose them a book is long and a huge time commitment calls to action at the end of your book in the back matter you might have a call to action for reviews a call to action for email
• 394:00 - 394:30 Andor a call to action to download the bonus resour sources you may want a few ctas to be able to Target people in different ways because people respond to different things or you may have a specific goal in mind based on your strategy questions to answer are readers completing your book and if not what's stopping them what calls to action can you use in your back matter to bring your customers and consumers of your work back to your
• 394:30 - 395:00 email list where you can contact them again stage eight fan in this stage someone who has read your book takes positive action at the end of it this can be anything including writing a positive review about your book at a retailer signing up for your email list buying a second book visiting your website and reading some of the articles on it or grabbing your bonus resources or extra content like deleted scenes like interviews you've done with
• 395:00 - 395:30 experts on the topic of your book or like other short stories that you've written what you need at this stage is more content more books more bonus resources more interaction in a Facebook group whatever you can offer so they've already read your book and they've presumably enjoyed the book because they got to the very end and they didn't quit somewhere in the middle you want to provide them with even more content that they can access on your
• 395:30 - 396:00 website or your email lists so that you can stay in touch with that reader going forward this is really important because anyone who's become a fan of your book wants to get more from you and you need to have a great way to communicate with them in the future about things that you're doing next and other ways that you can help them questions to answer what can you offer to someone who has read your book to keep them engaged and get them to share their contact
• 396:00 - 396:30 information with you what bonus contact or interaction do they respond to or do they just want the next book from you Stage Nine true fan in this stage someone has signed up for your email list or regularly checks your blog or Facebook page or whatever and they want to buy your next thing no matter what it is a true fan is what businesses are built upon it's someone who likes you someone who tracks your movements online
• 396:30 - 397:00 across multiple channels and interacts with you on whatever you're doing next your job now is to keep in touch with that person and to continue to provide them value while you're working on your next book at this stage the only thing you need to do is nurture that fan depending on your chosen strategies you may want to continue to provide them with additional content that they may be interested in updates on what you're
• 397:00 - 397:30 doing reminders to take further action that you would like them to take like buy your next book Sign up for your email list or share your post personal stories that help you for connection with the person new books products or Services you can engage your fans in a number of ways through personal emails comments and forums by sharing videos and audio
• 397:30 - 398:00 connection deepener of yourself talking about the subject of your book this one or the next one by posting regular new content by writing more books questions to answer what is the path someone takes to move from fan to true fan what books do they read in what order what marketing materials do they consume which promotions or marketing
• 398:00 - 398:30 efforts do they participate in stage 10 evangelist in this final stage someone shares your book with others this person is telling others about your book at every chance that they get and is bringing new readers with similar tastes from stage one which if you'll remember is just being in your target audience and not knowing who you are at all to stage two which is having awareness of you evangelists can even potentially bring readers in your target
• 398:30 - 399:00 audience to stages three four and five where they seek out information about you and your book and get to the decision-making Point while this is labeled as stage 10 in some ways it's actually stage one because it is the beginning of a new cycle of somebody learning more about your book at this stage you are going to focus entirely on Word of Mouth which means you need to activate your fan base you can do that
• 399:00 - 399:30 through content that is specific specifically created for sharing purposes that your evangelist can share with others connection with the community and helping various people in the community who are excited about what you're doing and finding things that they can do together continuous calls to action that remind your evangelist to share your book the reason you need all of these things is because an evangelist won't
• 399:30 - 400:00 just talk about your book out of nowhere evangelists as excited as they are about what you're doing still have their own lives problems and drama there are other things that they're thinking about at any given time it's very easy to fall off an evangelist's radar even though they loved your book and they're really excited to tell somebody about it so what you have to do with activation is you just need to give them a reminder and a reason to talk about
• 400:00 - 400:30 your book with others questions to answer how can I activate my evangelists how can I treat my evangelists to extra goodies that they will use in everyday life additional resources to read the rest of the book The 10 stages of audience information was excerpted from pick up get your book selling jumpstart your book sales without launching scheming or hacking
• 400:30 - 401:00 the productive novelist number nine Russell has an awesome course build a rabid fan base which goes over how to get people from Facebook to your email list to buyers wab press. teachable.com pbuilder Aid fanbase if you are looking for ways to build your email list creatively check out Monica's book recruit your readers get more readers on your email list easily efficiently and ethically the productive novelist
• 401:00 - 401:30 hh10 task checklist answer the questions and prompts throughout this chapter to better understand your sales funnel for your Kickstarter notice all the places where you already use the 10 stages of audience in your marketing where are the gaps the stages where you have little or no marketing or products to offer can you use Kickstarter to fill in those gaps optional map out your 10 stages of
• 401:30 - 402:00 audience for your email list for your Kickstarter optional map out your 10 stages of audience for your advertising strategy for your Kickstarter chapter 16 building your email list for a Kickstarter launch whenever we talk about email lists there are two major topics how to build an email list and what to send an email list in this chapter we'll talk about how to build an email list and in
• 402:00 - 402:30 the next chapter we'll talk about what to send your email list especially during a Kickstarter most authors have an email list of some sort even if it's small ideally you should be building your audience for at least 3 months before you launch a campaign you can't be successful in crowdfunding without a crowd that means showing off your project starting a Facebook group beefing up your social media presence making press contacts and building a
• 402:30 - 403:00 newsletter the more time you have to build your network and prepare them for a Kickstarter project that's coming the more likely they will be to back your campaign when it's time there is no doubt in my mind that mailing list growth is the most important key to have success in your creative career no matter the industry almost every figure of note says the same thing the money is in the mailing list I know I talk about it add nauseum
• 403:00 - 403:30 to people when they ask about the SEC secrets of My Success even people who are successful without a mailing list would be more successful with one so we're going to blow past that today and assume you already know that a mailing list is your best chance for building your career and talk about the four main types of mailing list subscribers organic versus inorganic mailing list growth before we get started we need to talk about organic versus inorganic
• 403:30 - 404:00 mailing list growth from their names one seems better than the other but they are just two sides of the same coin in order to be successful you really need to practice both organic mailing list growth comes from people signing up to hear about your own creative work perhaps they read to the end of your novels and they saw a way to sign up for your mailing list and followed the link or perhaps they were at a convention and signed up for your
• 404:00 - 404:30 mailing list at your table the point is that they signed up to hear from you because they were interested in your work the advantage of organic growth is that people actually want to hear from you so your open rates should be relatively high and if you can build a bond with people you can have a high conversion rate between people on your mailing list and sales the downside to organic growth is that it's painfully slow especially at the beginning of your
• 404:30 - 405:00 career inorganic growth is when people sign up to your mailing list because of their interest in another product or brand the most famous way this happens is through offering giveaways to people companies have done this since the dawn of time have you ever been inside a mall and seen them raffling off a car or some other product that was a company leveraging another brand to gain mailing list subscribers the advantage of inorganic
• 405:00 - 405:30 growth is that you are leveraging another brand which means that you can get a lot of mailing list subscribers fast the downside is that because they didn't sign up to hear about your products you will have much lower conversions than organic subscribers and it will take much longer to warm them up neither of these ways are bad but the quality of the subscribers are different you need to understand the difference between organic and inorganic
• 405:30 - 406:00 subscribers in order to have explosive grow grow what is the best way to build a mailing list I know this is the question you really want to be answered but I don't believe there is a best way to grow a mailing list I think you have to look at a lot of different factors and every type of mailing list growth has pluses and minuses all right now let's get down to it number one organic mailing list growth from who enjoy your
• 406:00 - 406:30 work mailing list subscribers who already enjoy your work before signing up for your list are the best kind of subscribers because they are already buyers all of the work is done trying to convert them into fans these are people who sought you out online went to your web page and signed up to your email list because they actively love what you do honestly these are the only type of mailing list subscribers most people go for if they even have a list but they
• 406:30 - 407:00 are also the small smallest pool of people especially when you are small potatoes very few people know who you are and thus even fewer people are seeking you out your list will stay very small for a very long time if you only focus on these kinds of subscribers but your open rates and conversion will be very high the biggest problem when people try to expand their mailing list practices and find subscribers in more ways is that their mailing list opens and clicks
• 407:00 - 407:30 conversion rates go way down they are not willing or able to nurse somebody who doesn't know their work into a buyer because they have always only dealt with Buyers before positives best conversion rate little hassle negatives slow growth especially at the beginning number two mailing list subscribers who sign up to receive a lead magnet the next best thing to somebody
• 407:30 - 408:00 enjoying your work and signing up are people who who sign up for your mailing list in order to get a lead magnet from you a lead magnet is a free piece of content you offer them it might be free wallpaper for their computer or a free short story or something else but the differentiating factor is that they are signing up to receive a free thing from you because they enjoy your work but they haven't bought your work yet often this is clumped in with number one when talking about different types
• 408:00 - 408:30 of subscribers but I wanted to pull it out on its own for the sake of this conversation because these people have not bought your work and th they are not already buyers however they are interested in your work so as long as you have a good onboarding sequence and are very good at making people like and trust your work you should be able to turn these people into buyers without much effort for these people you have to place the offer in front of them for them to take you up on it they are still
• 408:30 - 409:00 very good subscribers but not as good as somebody actively seeking you out if somebody does more than number one they usually stop here almost nobody then goes into the world of inorganic subscriber growth which is where we're venturing for the rest of this article remember inorganic growth happens when somebody signs up for your list but only because they are interested in another brand this almost always happens because
• 409:00 - 409:30 you are running a giveaway filled with other people's products there may be other ways to get inorganic growth but I have not found any as of yet so for the sake of this I'm going to talk about giveaways exclusively as a means for inorganic growth positives customers know you and want to learn more negatives you have to give away a lot of free things which means creating free things for people number three running giveaways
• 409:30 - 410:00 through utilizing other people's mailing lists there are two main ways to run giveaways and the first involves contacting other people in your same industry and asking for them to share it with their fans this leads to the highest quality of subscribers because the people who are sharing your giveaway to their fans have already curated a list full of people who like their work and odds are that they will also like your work additionally the people who
• 410:00 - 410:30 sign up for your mailing list from the giveaway are already familiar with mailing lists so they have a high likelihood of sticking around on yours as well however a couple of problems emerge from this model if you have a small mailing list then it will be very hard to get people to share your giveaway with their fans this is because they will often want you to share something with your fans and are generally looking for similar audiences for that to happen otherwise
• 410:30 - 411:00 they they are helping you grow your audience with nothing in return once you have somebody share your giveaway with them you can't really go back to their audience for a while because then you will just be pulling off fewer new subscribers with each giveaway these subscribers are still pretty good though especially because you are in the same industry you'll get a good conversion rate from them if you do it right you have to first introduce
• 411:00 - 411:30 them to you though before you do anything else because they have no idea who you are during the giveaway positives lots of new subscribers fast well-curated lists mean good conversions negatives cold subscribers don't know who you are you can only run giveaways with the same people every 3 to 6 months number four running giveaways through advertising running giveaways through advertising brings in subscribers with
• 411:30 - 412:00 the lowest conversion rate of any other method because not only do subscribers not know who you are but they also have not been warmed up to mailing lists through another like-minded Creator these subscribers are completely cold to your brand which means you need to work hard to win them over however this is also the most scalable way to build your list compared to any other method this is because it is much cheaper than running advertising
• 412:00 - 412:30 to your own books since people already know the brand and because you are not relying on other people's lists to share your giveaway while it might cost you 50 cents to $1 per new subscriber using other methods of advertising you can find subscribers for as low as 8 cents to 11 cents or lower by running ads to giveaways positives cheap subscribers easy to scale negatives have no idea who you are need a lot of warming
• 412:30 - 413:00 up those are the four main types of mailing list subscriber growth you will be dealing with and honestly you need to utilize all of them in different ways in order to be successful however you also need to know the positives and negatives of each type of growth type so that they can work together in order to build a rabid fan base you can treat mailing list subscribers gained from advertising like ones you got organically because they are at different types of their sales
• 413:00 - 413:30 cycle with you if you understand the mentality for each type of subscribers then you can optimize your mailing list to convert the most subscribers and grow your business into the stratosphere this will help you drive more traffic to your Kickstarter campaign too especially if you combine this knowledge with some of the other information we've shared in previous chapters task checklist put together a list building
• 413:30 - 414:00 plan based on this chapter the chapter on buyer psychology the chapter on the 5bs of launch and the chapter on the 10 stages of audience decide what you are going to do before your next Kickstarter campaign decide how you are going to use this Kickstarter campaign to grow your list engage your list or both chapter 17 exactly what to send to your email list and when to send
• 414:00 - 414:30 it you are going going to ask for a lot from your audience when launching a product on Kickstarter they will be bombarded by it on every social media channel imaginable you will be disseminating information dozens of times a day on multiple outlets and the people who follow you on multiple channels they're the real heroes with so many updates about your product it's easy for people to become annoyed with you and tired of your
• 414:30 - 415:00 product they will want to unsubscribe from your newsletter and unfollow you on social media by the time your launch is over they won't want to hear from you ever again the only way to combat this is to have a great relationship with your audience before you launch your product because you will torch it once your launch begins that's why you need to be making deposits into the Goodwill Bank far in advance of any product launch this is
• 415:00 - 415:30 the CR of the value first mentality this is the business reason for why we have to provide information to our audience and grow their trust before we ask anything in return because we will ask for something in return when we launch a product and we will ask a lot we will ask so much that any rational person will tune us out but emotions aren't rational people allow those they like and Trust to get
• 415:30 - 416:00 away with irrational things like pounding them with reasons to buy their product that's why we need to build up massive Goodwill before we even consider launching our product the First Bank of Goodwill think about your Goodwill like it's a bank we'll call it the First Bank of Goodwill this Bank works like any other bank except that it runs on your Goodwill instead of money when you do something nice for somebody you make a deposit into this
• 416:00 - 416:30 Bank whether it's writing a blog post speaking on a panel providing advice over coffee or even just retweeting an interesting article everything you do for your audience is a deposit in the Goodwill Bank by contrast Everything you ask of your audience is a withdrawal from the Goodwill Bank every time you ask somebody to buy your product every time you pitch them something and every single time you ask them to share your
• 416:30 - 417:00 posts you are withdrawing from your Goodwill account if you have been depositing into the Goodwill Bank over and over again you can make these withdrawals without overdrafting your account however if you haven't been making these deposits then you can't afford to make an Ask of your audience imagine trying to buy a $50,000 boat in cash when your checking account only has $327 in it you just can't do
• 417:00 - 417:30 that the same is true with your Goodwill if you keep withdrawing from the Goodwill bank without making deposits there will be nothing left in your account when you need it without enough Goodwill your product launch won't be successful because your audience has no reason to support you if you keep making those deposits then you will always have enough Goodwill in your account to sustain your withdrawals this is where most people screw up when it comes to launching a
• 417:30 - 418:00 product they haven't spent enough time making deposits into the Goodwill Bank to sustain their withdrawals so their ask comes across as begging it's perceived as Brash and creates an uncomfortable situation instead of people gladly buying the product they either bristle at the thought of buying or only buy out of pity this type of customer doesn't stick around for the long haul this is why making deposits into the Goodwill bank is such an important
• 418:00 - 418:30 concept if you do it correctly you'll always have a massive amount of Goodwill available when it's time to launch your product with that Goodwill built up your audience will gladly buy from you instead of recoiling from your ask just note making deposits into the Goodwill bank is a Perpetual task you must perform throughout your career you can't just use it on your first launch and Coast on the interest forever your Goodwill account is like a checking
• 418:30 - 419:00 account it doesn't build interest luckily Goodwill is easy to deposit if you are a good person who wants to serve your audience if you come from a place of service and value then almost everything you do will make a deposit into the Goodwill Bank what to email your audience about your launch a Kickstarter launch is like pushing a boulder down a hill there's no stopping it once it starts so you want
• 419:00 - 419:30 to make sure you are prepared before you nudge It Forward most creators derail their campaigns because of the misguided reluctance to bug their fans because they choose to be courteous they end up with a passive marketing campaign or no campaign at all while you will certainly bug some people with a more robust campaign this belief also prevents customers who really want your product from seeing it enough times to make a buying decision customers need seven to to 15
• 419:30 - 420:00 touch points before they make the decision to buy your product if you only hit them one or two times over the course of your product launch you haven't given prospects enough information to push them over the edge think about when Starbucks relaunches their pumpkin spice latte or when McDonald's rolls out the McRib you see those Billboards everywhere and hear those radio spots constantly that market saturation is how they gather enough touch points to make
• 420:00 - 420:30 make sure their audience is aware of their product and ready to buy it to have a successful launch you need to plan an aggressive marketing campaign just like Starbucks or McDonald's one or two updates during your product launch aren't sufficient to gain traction with your audience you must plan dozens of touch points daily so customers can interact with your product enough to make a buying decision your marketing strategy needs
• 420:30 - 421:00 to be robust efficient and it needs to start well before your campaign launches the exact schedule you employ will vary wildly depending on the size of your audience and your choice of social media channels however the necessary elements are always the same we give you my exact list of emails that I send during a 17-day campaign preparing your email list for your Kickstarter launch if you set up these elements well
• 421:00 - 421:30 in advance you can get get out in front of the marketing Boulder instead of having it Crush you underneath its Unstoppable momentum number one create a sales page with email list opt in and autoresponder sequence a couple of months before your campaign begins set up your sales page with a different opt in email list than the main list on your website and a new targeted autoresponder sequence that specifically tells people about your new
• 421:30 - 422:00 product this isn't the same as your main email list this one is specific to your product your first set of emails to this list should introduce customers to your product its benefits and why they should get excited about it make sure to send regular emails to this list and give them updates on the progress of your product every time you send a newsletter to your main list make sure to reference your new product sales page so people on your main list can easily migrate to
• 422:00 - 422:30 yourct products new email list the goal of this targeted list is to prime your customers to buy this single specific product so hyperfocus your discussions to just the areas of interest for that ideal customer if you are creating a boat calendar for instance then Focus your discussion on different kinds of boats that will appear in the calendar number two start a social media repository like a Facebook group for
• 422:30 - 423:00 your product months before your campaign launches set up a Facebook group dedicated to your product this is where you can show the behindth scen stuff that audiences love Facebook has its own algorithms and as people engage with you they will recommend your group to others and find people for you you can direct people from your Social Media Group to your email list to get more exclusive stuff too number three design different
• 423:00 - 423:30 imagery for every every day of the campaign your audience is willing to be touched by you but only if you provide new reasons to touch them you can't feed them the same imagery and information every day when planning your launch make sure to create at least one or two different images for every day of the campaign this will keep your information fresh throughout your launch and give you new touch points with your audience number four write new emails
• 423:30 - 424:00 for every day of the campaign you can't plan everything you will say during your campaign updates because launches change constantly however you should have the general gist of your daily updates planned in advance these posts are aimed at people who haven't bought yet so they should build on each other every day you will always talk about your product at the bottom of your post and provide a link to your sales page but you need to Prime the audience with
• 424:00 - 424:30 information before asking for their money number five schedule your emails and posts before your campaign begins you can't schedule every Post in advance but you need a good base of posts and emails in your pipeline before you ever hit the launch button I always schedule at least three posts per day per social Channel throughout my campaign and at least one email every week that means I have a base of content even if I go into a coma
• 424:30 - 425:00 for a month and I can add more throughout the campaign as time allows that's the base of information I set up before I launch a product number six have emails and posts ready when the following benchmarks are triggered in your campaign when somebody backs your campaign this is an easy touch point to create with your audience people like to be part of the winning team if they see other people backing your project it
• 425:00 - 425:30 will build up your social roof and make them want to buy your product as well when you reach sales Milestones you will have sales goals within your campaign once you hit those goals celebrate them remember people want to be part of the winning team when you celebrate your successes people will want to buy your product and join in on the fun when you unlock new rewards certain sales Milestones should unlock new benefits for people who buy your product
• 425:30 - 426:00 customers love free stuff every bit of free stuff adds value to your campaign and makes people want to back you more Additionally the people who already bought your product will see the extra value and push your product more so they can get additional free stuff when rewards are going away conversely from above as your campaign moves forward certain early bird rewards will go away that scarcity makes people want to back sooner than they might
• 426:00 - 426:30 otherwise so they don't lose out on free stuff when the campaign begins it's incredible how many people don't blast Their audience when their campaign starts you must send out emails updates and private messages when your campaign begins so people know to back early those first few days are critical to your success when your campaign is about to end when your campaign is wrapping up send out updates like a madman I send them out the day before 12 hours before
• 426:30 - 427:00 2 hours before and 30 minutes before the end of any campaign I want to make sure people know my campaign is about to be over and that they will never be able to get as good a deal on my product or get any of my other exclusive rewards ever again number seven repost all your email content to social media repost repost repost you already created the content so let it work for
• 427:00 - 427:30 you everywhere you can get it if you can set up all of these marketing elements early you will have a rock solid foundation when you hit the launch button you don't want to get caught without any strategy when your campaign begins because then you will be scrambling to catch up which never works you need to get out in front of your marketing if you want any chance of success how to get over annoying people on your email list
• 427:30 - 428:00 people are so worried about sending a bunch of emails during a launch because of mass UNS subs or complaints so I figured I would tackle this headon for one campaign at 27 days I had sent 29 emails which is more than one a day in that time I've gotten five emails complaining about the number of emails I have sent out also during that time I've had 91 spam complaints which is an average of three per email or or a total of
• 428:00 - 428:30 .2% the average is. 1% which means this is less than the average email list look up current industry standard rates for this in addition I have had a total of 575 unsubed from my main list however I've also sent emails to other segments that aren't part of my main list and overall have had 1,130 unsubscribed for the sake of being Uber
• 428:30 - 429:00 fair I I'm going to take the total unsubscribe rate and the current subscriber count so 1,130 and 19,7 2016 which comes out to 39 email unsubscribers per email or 2% which is the average unsubscribe rate of the average email list so all in all I've received five email replies complaining or .3% of my total list I have been marked as spam by .2%
• 429:00 - 429:30 of my subscribers I have had 2% of my list unsubscribed from my emails at the same time 53% of my subscribers were active at least opening one email during that time I can't easily check the click rate but I can tell you that during that time 570 backers have pledged $1,417 if my numbers bear out from previous campaigns then about 255 of
• 429:30 - 430:00 those backers are from my list and 255 are brand new that would mean 1.3% of my list converted while 5.7% unsubscribed accounting for $978 and. 50 of my total campaign Pledge on a spend of $19 which is what it cost to maintain my list furthermore every time I send an email I saw an uptick in backers now this might be correlation
• 430:00 - 430:30 and not causation but I think there's at least some causal link between those events would you pay $19 to make $978 15 I made $70,000 on Kickstarter in that year and my email list before I switched cost about $100 per month so would you spend $1,200 to make $35,000 even if the kickstarter dashboard is right and my list only
• 430:30 - 431:00 brought in $722 which is what it says came from an unidentified source and that usually is my email list and it cost my entire yearly spend of $1,200 to make $722 would that be worth it I would make that trade all day every day how to think about negative comments about sharing your project I got a slightly negative mildly
• 431:00 - 431:30 nasty comment on Kickstarter one morning after sending a campaign update to an old campaign telling people about my new campaign this project is long over do not expect to see more updates about it and when I open it it's an advertisement for another project I am pretty sure this is not what the update feature of Kickstarter was meant for this is the kind of thing that can derail creators from reaching out so I thought you would like to see my
• 431:30 - 432:00 response I'm sorry you feel that way Kickstarter does not give creators a good way to reach out to Old projects they send an update saying that a project is live but that's it I have tried doing other things including not updating old campaigns when my new books are live and when I do that long-term backers complain that they weren't notified I am one Creator trying to keep creating things and I know you might say well then run a Better Business and quit
• 432:00 - 432:30 bugging me and that's fair but after I make these updates backers come and back the campaign after just yesterday's update we had a dozen new backers which tells me that some people appreciate it and given the fact that it's one update coming to your inbox though I know you back many projects My Hope Is that while you might not like it at least you will understand that we're trying to make something and the best way to keep making something is the raise funds for the new thing and the
• 432:30 - 433:00 people people most excited for those projects are the people who backed our old books I would much prefer to have a way to communicate with backers through Kickstarter and send them all messages which they can opt out and opt into but this is the system that Kickstarter has set up and I am trying to navigate it though awkwardly as best as possible I'm sorry it is annoying to you but the simple fact is that these new projects allow for new kabad to exist so
• 433:00 - 433:30 they are all relevant to your interests I hope if not hopefully you can at least understand that I am navigating as best I can between communication and annoyance meanwhile dozens of backers did come back from previous campaigns and that's where I choose to focus I will not apologize for marketing myself and trying everything within reason to get a project funded and I think reaching out to Old backers is completely reasonable
• 433:30 - 434:00 you don't have to agree or do anything you are uncomfortable with but I wanted to share this in case it was useful to you in getting over your worries about sending more email my exact list of email sends for a 17-day campaign now I promised that I had would give you my email calendar for a 17-day Kickstarter campaign and here it is this is my basic email schedule for this kind of campaign when it comes to
• 434:00 - 434:30 my mailing list I think it utilizes the most successful pieces I've done with longer and shorter campaigns without burning people out on hearing from me I start every campaign on a Tuesday and end on a Thursday and all my perks go end on Saturdays and start on Sundays except for Flash perks which I will add when things get slow I'm not saying you should do that too but having done it the same way 12 times means I've developed my own process
• 434:30 - 435:00 if you are doing a different length of campaign you'll have to either cut some of the emails in this sequence or spread them out more while possibly adding more emails if you're still trying to email your list every day here it is day one Tuesday three emails I send a we launched email in the morning with a graphic of my early bird perks then I send a midm morning bonus perk email assuming we do well enough to qualify
• 435:00 - 435:30 for it often this perk is tied to backing on the first day only then I send a final email at night saying the first day bonus perk is going away day two Wednesday one email the first day is for hitting people that already know and love the book the second day is about introducing people to the book a second time sending the blurb and going into depth about the book day three Thursday one email this
• 435:30 - 436:00 email is to tell people there are only 2 days left for early bird perks I use this email to talk about early bird perks I recommend having four to five early bird perks available for backers day four Friday one email this one is to say there is only one day left for early bird perks day five Saturday two emails I send a last day for early bird perks in the morning then a last chance for early bird perks at night I have tested this
• 436:00 - 436:30 all sorts of different ways and sending the second email is very effective day six Sunday zero emails break day seven Monday one email this is an email talking about week two perks I recommend four to five week two perks this also sets up that you'll be spending the second week going deep on different aspects of the book day 8 Tuesday one email dive deeper
• 436:30 - 437:00 into the main character or the story idea though you probably covered the story in the previous week's emails day N9 Wednesday one email dive deeper into the setting or the art or another part of the book day 10 Thursday one email dive deeper into the reason you made the book this is your why email and critically important to get people who heard all about the book and just need one little push to go over the edge day 11 Friday one email one day
• 437:00 - 437:30 left for week two perks this is the same as the previous week day 12 Saturday two emails last day for week two perks in the morning then last chance for week two Perks at night these emails are exactly like the first week's emails day 13 Sunday zero emails break day 14 Monday one email introducing final week perks you don't
• 437:30 - 438:00 have to go go is hard this week you can just have two to three perks for this since you'll get a lot of traction out of the campaign ending day 15 Tuesday one email I send a 2 days left email in the morning knowing that Kickstarter sends a 48 hours left email to people watching the campaign in the afternoon day 16 Wednesday two emails one day left in the morning 24 hours left in the afternoon or whenever there
• 438:00 - 438:30 are only 24 left in the campaign day 17 Thursday four emails 12 hours left 8 hours left 4 hours left 2 hours left that's 23 emails and I often decide to send another email each Sunday making it 25 emails which sounds like a lot but every time I do I make hundreds of dollars for my campaign of course I have 25,000 plus people on my mailing list too I probably
• 438:30 - 439:00 wouldn't send 25 emails to a list of 30 people or maybe I would I don't know I suppose it would depend on how many of them already backed the campaign the key is that every day I'm trying to find a new way to talk about the project which will get people excited I assume that my last email convinced everybody it was going to convince and I need to tweak my pitch to find new people but there is always a
• 439:00 - 439:30 way way to tweak a pitch to make it relevant and if you do different perks every week then there is always something opening and closing and giving you reasons to hit your list I follow that same strategy in my social media as well usually copying my emails into my social media accounts and tweaking them for the platform but definitely augmenting that email with something on social media for people that aren't on my email list I'm conscious to never talk about
• 439:30 - 440:00 the same thing twice in my emails every time I reach out to people I have a new reason the calendar I've lined up above comes from 20 campaigns and over $275,000 raised on Kickstarter since 2014 task checklist set up your email list for Kickstarter campaigns write out a sending plan of what you will send to your email list each day of your campaign steal from
• 440:00 - 440:30 Russell create Graphics to go with your different messaging get as many of your emails as possible drafted ahead of time and get them drafted on social media too so that you can hit publish easily during your campaign chapter 18 how to advertise your Kickstarter in this chapter we're going to talk about whether or not you should advertise for your your Kickstarter
• 440:30 - 441:00 campaign along with how to go about it we won't be able to go into details on advertising on Facebook Amazon and wherever else because that's beyond the scope of this book we wanted to include this chapter because people ask about advertising for Kickstarter and for the most part we don't recommend advertising directly and we usually don't recommend advertising indirectly unless it's already part of your budget around growing your audience and you have time
• 441:00 - 441:30 to recoup the costs of it in this chapter we'll explain why those are our recommendations even though they go against common practice and most authors marketing methods almost all big audiences are built with advertising of some kind I'm talking about big engaged audiences here if you are waiting for somebody else to bless you with verality then you'll probably be waiting forever honest ly the number of people
• 441:30 - 442:00 who have grown a huge fan base organically might as well be zero all artists think they should be able to grow organically or it doesn't count but organic growth takes time and eventually it either tapers off or explodes and 999,999 times out of a million it tapers off so should you use advertising to grow your audience on Kickstarter the $50 minimum Thresh
• 442:00 - 442:30 old experts suggest that you will not be able to make back your money by advertising your Kickstarter directly unless you have an average pledge amount of $50 or more this is rare for me even on a tetrology my projects are usually between $125 to 40 our campaign for this book ended at $403 but it was averaging $25 at first just because that's not my average
• 442:30 - 443:00 does not mean it's not possible for you to hit it if you have a huge audience or a big main reward you may be able to meet this requirement we've seen authors with $200 book boxes hit about a $150 per backer average in this case should they advertise to related audiences possibly or maybe their campaign is driven largely by voracious fans only they will know when they look
• 443:00 - 443:30 in their back end and see who bought the book box from them when it comes to advertising unless you know what you're doing and have a large budget it's probably not something to worry about for your first campaign especially if you're learning the platform what should you advertise if you decide to advertise anyway consider focusing on assets that will last you beyond the campaign like Kickstarter email list
• 443:30 - 444:00 list regular email list download of freebies targeted giveaway with email addresses website traffic there is a saying the person who can spend the most on marketing Wins part of that is because everybody else is waiting to be blessed from some all powerful algorithm yes it is possible to build and monetize a nice fan base without advertising
• 444:00 - 444:30 ing some say I have done so but even though I didn't start spending a significant amount on Facebook ads until 2018 I spent a lot on conventions since 2016 which is its own form of advertising in 2016 I spent $7,700 on convention tables and travel my first real full show year I didn't invest in advertising and I had my worst year as a full-time Creator barely able
• 444:30 - 445:00 to eek out $50,000 and losing money at a rate of $2 for every $1 I made in Revenue it sucked in 2017 I spent $6,450 and this was the year I did two $25,000 plus campaigns and went over $100,000 for the first time in 2018 I spent $2,425 Plus
• 445:00 - 445:30 on Facebook advertising for a total of $335 21 which is the year I ran a $3 39,46 Kickstarter in 2019 I spent $119,950 on conventions and another $1,489 on Facebook advertising for a total of $ 32,39 which is my third year in a row with $100,000 plus Revenue
• 445:30 - 446:00 musicians tour constantly and that counts as advertising as well but it is recoupable advertising I am all about creating advertising campaigns that pay for themselves immediately and then using those Newfound fans as the base for my next campaign the more I spend on advertising and the longer I spend it for the more success I get I am not naive enough to believe that I can build or sustain a business on verality
• 446:00 - 446:30 that would be Folly the secret is to find an advertising mechanism that is profitable then take the profits and funnel that back into advertising along with your initial spend if you have $20 and you make $40 not you put $40 into the advertising mechanic and then with $40 you make $80 and so on until you eventually scale up I'm still nowhere near the scale I want but I know what is
• 446:30 - 447:00 working and working to do more of that every day can you scale your audience without advertising yes but when you factor in the number of people who've had viral success and compare it to the number of total creators it is effectively 0% there are a lot of things you can do for free I know I literally wrote the course and two books on how to build a fan base for free but at some point you have to advertise if you want to scale
• 447:00 - 447:30 because having 100 fans on Facebook and 20 on Twitter is just not good enough to make a living doing this stuff it's not enough you have to find another way you can say well I don't even make $20,000 in a year how can I spend that on Advertising Mr Moneybags but I didn't start there I found out how to sell at conventions and make it profitable and then I funneled
• 447:30 - 448:00 those profits into more conventions and more and more and that's how I scaled then I figured out what ads were profitable and I kept scaling those until I hit a comfortable number I have only lost money on two shows in my whole career and while I've had more than two failed marketing campaigns I cut the ones that don't work and then double down on those that did I didn't create Magic I took money made more money and then took that extra
• 448:00 - 448:30 money and put it back into the system again and again and again if I ever stopped doing that then my company would slow down immeasurably but because I understand what works I can keep doing it and expect success with advertising in the future advertising is a piece of your overall marketing campaign but it's a different Beast entirely from everything we've talked about so far while marketing is mostly a time commitment you can't add advertise without
• 448:30 - 449:00 money your goal with advertising is to spend a dollar and make $2 in sales at the very least you want to spend $1 and get $1 out too often people spend a dollar and get 25 cents back or even less if you do that then you're funneling a massive amount of money into a campaign and getting nothing in return it's a travesty when that happens but there has to be something to
• 449:00 - 449:30 advertising right I mean McDonald's and Starbucks spend billions of dollars on it every year they aren't going to do that without getting a return and every other post on Facebook is for somebody pitching some sort of product isn't it so somebody's making money on ads aren't they the short answer is yes nobody is going to keep spending money on something that loses them money
• 449:30 - 450:00 least of all a Fortune 500 company if advertising didn't work companies wouldn't do it where people go wrong with advertising so what is it people do wrong when it comes to advertising they start too early for one before you start advertising you must know your target market down pat and have a fully realized ideal customer Avatar your avatar needs to translate successfully into proven clients you can
• 450:00 - 450:30 rely on consistently your funnel also needs to be Rock Solid you must know how many people have to go into the top of it to make money come out the bottom everything you have done up to this point honing your ideal customer Avatar and perfecting your funnel pays off in Spades with advertising this is where you scale all that work into a lucrative business up until this point you you've
• 450:30 - 451:00 watched your ideal client trickle through your funnel slowly over time you've seen the wording they like and what they hate you've noticed which links they click and which they don't care about at all you have a good sense not just who your client is but also what buying triggers they respond to best this information becomes critical when you are building an advertising campaign with advertising you are pushing a massive amount of people through your funnel if they don't like
• 451:00 - 451:30 what you have to say they'll abandon you before buying if you don't have this laid out perfectly advertising isn't for you yet the second mistake people make with advertising is treating every potential customer the same way as we talked about earlier there are two types of people in your audience cold prospects and warm leads people screw up on Advertising because we tend to treat everybody like a warm Le lead or leads already know you
• 451:30 - 452:00 some of them even like and trust you they understand your brand and believe in it cold prospects have none of that empathy built up for your company they don't know you from Adam unless you are launching a product to your existing Network most ads are built to Target cold prospects and not warm leads you can send a warm lead directly to a product offer but you can't do that with a cold
• 452:00 - 452:30 Prospect cold traffic doesn't convert well on Kickstarter I see this all the time with Kickstarter campaigns I'll be fed an ad from somebody I don't know and sent directly to their campaign page I don't know them I don't like them I don't trust them so I'm never going to buy from that person even if their campaign is awesome consequently they've just wasted 60 cents because because they treated me
• 452:30 - 453:00 like a warm lead even though I'm a cold Prospect in advertising you treat a cold Prospect the same as if you just met them on the street you need to provide value first before you ask for anything this is so much harder with advertising than any other form of marketing because you are paying cash now for the hope of making money in the future if you aren't comfortable with that advertising isn't for you yet with a cold Prospect you must send
• 453:00 - 453:30 them to a piece of content that adds incredible value to their lives and also relates to your product it needs to resonate with your intended Prospect you can deliver this value in a webinar a blog post or even a guide that potential customers can download the point of this content is to pack a powerful punch and make the prospect fervently believe they must learn more about your offer at the end of this piece of content make an offer so they sign up
• 453:30 - 454:00 for your mailing list if they don't sign up retarget them with new ads and even more valuable content until they relent in order to retarget people you have to set up Google AdWords and a Facebook pixel along with retargeting pixels from any other advertising networks you use once they sign up for your mailing list you have Reed their commitment and they become a warm lead put them into your existing funnel and and have them
• 454:00 - 454:30 work their way down it just like everybody else if you've done your job right you know exactly how many people need to go into the top of your funnel to get money out of the bottom of it if you don't have this information then advertising isn't right for you yet advertising your Kickstarter to warm leads given the choice my preference is to advertise only to warm leads warm leads are people who are on my mailing
• 454:30 - 455:00 list or my Facebook page or already access my website these people know and like me so they are much more likely to buy right away the problem with warm lead advertising is that you quickly exhaust your existing customer base and need more cold Prospect to grow your Revenue warm leads are not enough to sustain a business you need cold prospects too you absolutely should not do any advertising until you know your ideal
• 455:00 - 455:30 client Avatar precisely and are completely on top of how your funnel works if you know those two things then you can work backwards and determine a reasonable advertising budget if you don't then you'll just be wasting money even if you are ready start small and work your way up there's no need to spend more than $5 a day until you can prove advertising is a wise investment for your business how to turn turn a cold
• 455:30 - 456:00 Prospect into a warm lead cold prospects don't buy products a cold Prospect is a person you just met who doesn't know you from Adam they don't know your brand they don't know what you offer and they have no interest in buying what you have to sell yet cold prospects have no affinity for your product until you met they had no idea who you were as a creative that doesn't stop most creatives from seeing this initial
• 456:00 - 456:30 meeting as a chance to sell their product of course these efforts are a miserable failure since cold prospects don't buy products this makes complete sense when you think about it in your own life doesn't it I mean how often do you go from discovering a new product to buying it on the same day it doesn't happen very often in my own life I usually have to sit on a product for days if not weeks before I buy
• 456:30 - 457:00 something I need to groove on the cost and the value I have to research the company and make sure it aligns with my values I have to determine that the product won't turn to dust in my hands after use my money is precious to me I worked hard for it and want to make sure I give it to worthy people this is how most people see buying products and it's why they generally buy from Brands they know when I need a a hammer I go to Home Depot
• 457:00 - 457:30 because they are a brand I know I'm not a cold Prospect for them I'm in their warm lead audience warm audiences are full of people who know and trust your brand they are the people working their way through the inside of your funnel they gain value from what you do and are convinced your brand offers quality products to build the most engaged audience we need to turn as many people from cold prospects into warm leads as
• 457:30 - 458:00 possible how do we do that there are a couple of ways we can build devoted warm leads from cold prospects none of them involve shouting buy my product at somebody until they open their wallet number one social media the easiest and cheapest way to build a warm audience is through engaging with them on social media and sharing valuable content consistently the more consistent value
• 458:00 - 458:30 you can provide into a person's life by linking to interesting articles and engaging with their profiles the more likeability and Authority you build with them it's important to post things relevant to your ideal client Avatar that will drastically improve their lives but it's even more important to be consistent over a long period of time people value dependability they want to know you aren't going away tomorrow before they trust you in the long
• 458:30 - 459:00 run number two mailing list the most profitable way to turn a cold Prospect into a warm lead is through creating a mailing list when somebody gives you their email they are allowing you into the place online they hold most dear their inbox if you feed people incredibly valuable information through a newsletter your cold audience will quickly warm up and become receptive to buying your product
• 459:00 - 459:30 this newsletter is not a list of coupons every week it's a thoughtful piece that provides value to your audience just like you do on social media creating a newsletter and delivering consistent value will make you stand out from the noise that bombards your prospects on social media every minute of every day number three website your website and its accompanying blog is a great way to build empathy between your brand and
• 459:30 - 460:00 your ideal customer if you speak in a language your customer understands and deliver your content in a way that provides value in their lives then customers will quickly build trust in your company that trust equates to more warm leads and eventually into more sales out of all these strategies websites require the most work upfront the largest investment of money and the longest amount of time to pay dividends that's because web site traffic comes from search rankings and
• 460:00 - 460:30 search engines rank you for relevancy On Any Given topic based on traffic and clicks among other factors website traffic takes time unless you have a massive marketing budget you can expect your website to take 6 to 12 months before it starts paying off with Organic traffic from search engines but once you are ranked on the first page of search engines that traffic keeps coming to you in perpetuity you can help the rankings grow quickly by consistently sharing
• 460:30 - 461:00 your blog posts on social media to help Drive traffic to your site the larger your audience grows the more traffic you will be able to generate to your site and the higher search engines will rank you number four in-person events whether it's speaking engagements conventions or even flea markets in person events are the quickest way to turn cold prospects into warm leads even though these events are expensive and
• 461:00 - 461:30 timec consuming you immediately get in front of your ideal client over and over again right at the moment they are primed to buy the quickest way to get a prospect to like and trust you is to shake their hand and make eye contact getting somebody to like and trust you are two key parts of your sales funnel and it's how we turn somebody from a cold Prospect into a warm lead therefore if you can shake 200 hands at any given event you have just moved 200 people
• 461:30 - 462:00 from cold prospects into warm leads whichever of the above advertising strategies you employ none of them work in a vacuum they are interconnected pieces of the same hole the most important part of turning a cold Prospect into a warm lead is that you are meeting people now in order to turn them into sales down the road some people will be ready to buy immediately but most won't warm up until much later
• 462:00 - 462:30 they need to see you hear you and listen to you over and over again and over a long period of time to build the kind of empathy necessary to buy your product task checklist estimate your average reward pledge per backer if you have no data on this then assume that you will fall between $125 to 40 decide if you're going to run advertising for your campaign if so decide if you're going to run
• 462:30 - 463:00 advertising directly to your page or to another step in your sales funnel like a landing page where you collect an email address and presumably Market your Kickstarter campaign to prospects later through email use the 10 stages of audience framework to get a plan of content together for moving your ad targeted audience from cold prospects to warm leads so you can then Market your Kickstarter to them chapter
• 463:00 - 463:30 19 delivering on your Kickstarter so your Kickstarter funded congratulations this chapter goes over everything you need to know as you move into fulfillment of your campaign we will cover five major things you need to do when your Kickstarter ends communication collecting money creating your survey set setting up digital reward
• 463:30 - 464:00 fulfillment setting up physical reward fulfillment communication you want to prepare a we did it message to send out to your backers fairly immediately upon funding let them know the basics a thank you for their support what the project funded it and how many backers participated when you intend to send the backer
• 464:00 - 464:30 survey when you intend to start fulfillment for various items in terms of categories digital ebooks will go out right away print books will start shipping mid-march Etc the general gist of what to expect next while everyone will want answers immediately you probably want to say less during this communication and triple any estimates that you have communication will continue to be important until every last reward is
• 464:30 - 465:00 fulfilled you want to communicate whenever you've sent out a new batch of rewards along with whenever you get an estimated date to sending out a new batch of rewards always give yourself way more time than you think you need because Kickstarter has a culture of accountability as a deadline gets close backers will wonder where their rewards are if a deadline passes with no update backers will wonder where their rewards are manage your backer expectations
• 465:00 - 465:30 throughout and don't be surprised if you still get a bit hounded by a few backers who want their stuff sooner if a backer is getting snippy rude or belligerent with you there's always the refund button which you can use at any time after the campaign has ended collecting the money Kickstarter has a smooth timeline of collecting and finalizing payment at the time of this writing this is the
• 465:30 - 466:00 timeline when the campaign funds charges cards within the first few days finalizes your payment details with you collecting any additional information they need to process through stripe 7 days from the fund date drops all pledges that have errored usually due to the credit card being declined for a variety of reasons 14 days from the fund date releases your money minus the 5% Kickstarter fee and the payment
• 466:00 - 466:30 processing fees a few days later sometimes the next day you receive the funds in your bank account there is not much to do regarding collecting the money except for making sure your payment information is updated and making sure you get as many errored backers to update their cards as possible following up with errored backers about 5 to 10% of your backers May have errored pledges all it means is
• 466:30 - 467:00 that they've not updated their credit card it can also mean that their credit card was declined because they don't have the money in which case they probably have bigger problems than not getting your Kickstarter reward for the most part though these are just outdated credit cards you can get about 80% of the people to update their cards with a little followup remember they want your wares so there's motivation on their to follow through with their pledge and send you
• 467:00 - 467:30 your money before the offer is gone you can find your errored pledges in the backer report and you can Mass message everyone who has an errored pledge we do this every two days until the pledge is drop on day seven here are some of the messages we send message number one hi thanks so much for backing the campaign If you're receiving this message Kickstarter is having trouble
• 467:30 - 468:00 processing your payment you can fix this by updating your credit card with Kickstarter so that they are able to charge you for the reward tier you selected there are currently 27 backers and $1,276 in errored attempts so please get your payment method updated before the end of the week we are excited to start fulfillment tomorrow and we're looking forward to getting you your Rewards
• 468:00 - 468:30 sincerely Monica and Russell message number two a few days later hi this is a friendly reminder that you have three more days to fix your pledge before Kickstarter cancels it in the last few days we had several people fix their pledge and now only have 14 pledges outstanding and $669 left that has failed thank you so much again for backing the campaign and fixing your
• 468:30 - 469:00 pledge as soon as you can Monica and Russell you can also follow up with people you know personally to make sure they update their pledge and you can follow up with any larger pledges that you'd really like to recover by reaching out to them in a different place EG Facebook messages or their website about Midway through the week not everyone checks their Kickstarter accounts regularly and and a lot of people don't see their emails from
• 469:00 - 469:30 Kickstarter you'll recover most of your pledges this way and whatever you don't recover can still be recovered in the survey period side deal money without fail you will have people who didn't back the kickstarter but still want to after the deadline it's up to you whether you allow it or not but if you do you can't sell through Kickstarter anymore because the campaign ended so you have to sell direct if you want to allow it you can
• 469:30 - 470:00 accept money through PayPal or another means and add backers manually to the survey if you're using backer kit this will give them access to everything aside from the backer updates you can make a significant amount of money on this type of backer addition hundreds to thousands of dollars so you simply have to decide what you want to do and accept survey add-ons
• 470:00 - 470:30 you send out the survey after the campaign has ended to collect data that you need to fulfill rewards this can add even more money to your total because people want to up their pledge or buy add-ons that they didn't pick up the first time they looked at the campaign we use backer kit and it always pays off at least two to five times what we pay for it which is a percentage of the total funds raised on Kickstarter for the project sending out survey
• 470:30 - 471:00 give yourself time to set up your survey if you've never done one before we use backer kit because it pays for itself just with the pledge manager and because it makes fulfillment far easier than using the kickstarter survey functionality it's not an intuitive tool to set up though you want to at least set up the following sections all of your reward items you can attach to reward tiers which are imported which gives them SKU which you
• 471:00 - 471:30 can then use to tell backer kit to collect certain information or send certain downloads for all of your add-ons backer kit will import these from Kickstarter but you'll need to set up any backer perks stretch goals or additional items from your catalog that we included in your campaign your survey questions you can attach these to specific tiers to be shown your digital rewards for download you can set these up so that when people fill out the surveys they begin to
• 471:30 - 472:00 receive the digital rewards that are available as more rewards are added and activated backer kit will send out emails to update backers that new downloads are available it's impossible to go into much more detail than this for backer kit because everyone's business is different and your setup will be highly dependent on what you offered for reward tiers as well as how you are Distributing your Rewards one question we get is can I just send
• 472:00 - 472:30 out my digital rewards by direct messaging each tier on Kickstarter or via a Kickstarter backer update to a specific tier we don't recommend that it's a very messy implementation and people are likely to miss things there is a lot of manual management you will have no way to upgrade people to a new tier or get them to buy more and for those who are hoping to fulfill faster you also shouldn't
• 472:30 - 473:00 send out digital rewards until the cards charge which is 7 days after the campaign ends whichever company you go with for your survey make sure you give yourself time to set it up you can start during your last week of your campaign and you can also communicate to backers that the survey will take some time to complete with backer kit you have to submit your survey for review which can take up to two business days and you have to complete a smoke test to 5% of
• 473:00 - 473:30 your audience to find errors as much as we want to fulfill campaigns immediately there is actually a healthy delay built into the process so you can set it all up well give yourself the time to get it right completing the products if you haven't done so yet you'll need to complete all the products or at least make a plan as to when you will complete and deliver all the products we recommended having at least
• 473:30 - 474:00 75% of the rewards done before launching the project because the minute the project funds people will want to know where their rewards are the more you can send right away the better and this involves getting completed products set up to ship through your survey provider right as the campaign ends since physical rewards take a longer time to deliver you can send your digital rewards soon after your campaign ends to tide people over as they anticipate a package in the
• 474:00 - 474:30 mail if you are a person who doesn't enjoy the pressure of creating something after having pre-sold it you'll probably want to only do your campaign on completed products delivering digital rewards as an author working with ePub format you likely want to use a tried andrue Distribution Company like bookfunnel to help you distribute we also distributed video bundles through teachable and a few other small items
• 474:30 - 475:00 through Dropbox sharable links both bookfunnel and teachable can generate individual codes for you that you can load into backer cat's delivery system backer kit will send a unique code or link to each backer which is really nice you can also upload files to backer kit and they can deliver them for you delivering physical rewards you've probably gotten quotes from multiple vendors for everything you
• 475:00 - 475:30 intend to order here are some of our favorites low price great book printing mix.com price here fast great book printing 48 her books.com enamel pins and lanyards gs-jj docomo for kickstarters or yourself and team Terminus tees.com you'll also need to order shipping supplies specifically boxes from a place
• 475:30 - 476:00 like Uline now is the time to order your merchandise with insurance so you don't lose your investment to damage and get everything shipped to you if the product has changed you'll want to get updated quotes for all your vendors and factor that into your budget when everything arrives set aside a few days for packing you can print address labels from your survey or backer kit also has backer kit postage that you can use when the packages are packed you can
• 476:00 - 476:30 schedule a USPS pickup to ship them for you or drop everything off at your local post office in batches task checklist communicate to your backers in a we did it post get your financial information squared away with Kickstarter collect errored pledges set up your survey set up anything you need for your
• 476:30 - 477:00 digital rewards fulfillment set up anything you need for your physical rewards fulfillment chapter 20 keeping the momentum going from Kickstarter you've completed your Kickstarter now what this chapter is all about how you can keep the momentum from your Kickstarter going after your kick starter we'll talk about three different
• 477:00 - 477:30 but critical ways that you need to use your Kickstarter campaign to build momentum forward so that your business grows those ways are getting people to your email list getting your new assets into other spaces making the best use of the data you've gained from your Kickstarter there are good reasons to use Kickstarter year round several times a year as a part part of your marketing and distribution mix but even if you're
• 477:30 - 478:00 only using it one time you can take the results and bring them forward to every aspect of your business getting people to your email list if you want to get your new customers to connect and buy from you on other places retailers patreon direct sales Live Events the easiest way is going to be to get them onto your email list first from there you can direct them to all your other promotions and Evergreen
• 478:00 - 478:30 offers and sales funnels in your business but there's one problem although you have access to your backer's email addresses through the reporting tools on Kickstarter you're not allowed to add them to your email list or send them an email outside of delivering a reward without additional permission this is to comply with the law Kickstarter has their permission to send them email but you as an individual cre Creator don't there are a number of things you
• 478:30 - 479:00 can do to get some of those people on your email list deliver a good experience you won't have people on your email list if your Kickstarter doesn't make a good impression on your readers your offers need to be the best you can deliver and you need to stay in contact with backers if there are delays it sounds obvious of course but this is truly the foundation of moving your customers to become rep customers ask them use your backer
• 479:00 - 479:30 updates to tell them why they should join your email list and consider offering a separate email list that is just for notifications around your Kickstarter projects that call to action CTA should probably have at least a few takers given that they've already backed your campaigns once before offer an email signup bonus Kickstarter campaigns are built on bonuses so you can offer your backers an irresistible and relevant email signup
• 479:30 - 480:00 bonus that they are not already getting through the campaign make a direct sales offer your backers have already bought from you so why not ask them to buy again you can offer them a special from your website and give them a coupon code it could be free or a really good deal when they sign up or purchase you will have their email from the transaction and you can add them to your email list deliver your rewards in ways that make it easy to also sign up for your
• 480:00 - 480:30 email list ebooks are tricky to deliver and as an author you'll probably be delivering something in the format we use bookfunnel to distribute ebooks so offer an optional way for those who claim their ebooks to sign up for your general email list put your email list ctas in all of your digital rewards to supercharge this use all the typical strategies you use on any other tailor to get readers to join your life for example you can offer
• 480:30 - 481:00 a bonus or deleted scene to entice them retarget them through advertising regardless of whether you have your backers on your list you at least want to keep a spreadsheet copy of their information because they are a previous customer you can then retarget them through advertising and try to pull them into your sales funnel that way remember they have probably spent more money with you per book than someone who buys at a retailer has so they are not just
• 481:00 - 481:30 customers but higher ticket customers which means it's worth it to reach them for your next promotion or offer even if you have to pay for it getting your new assets into other retail spaces during a Kickstarter campaign you've likely created additional assets for your catalog you have new books new companion guides new formats of your backlist and more you have bundles that you didn't have before that can be officially repackaged into new SKU
• 481:30 - 482:00 numbers through boxed sets and book boxes you have new merchandise that can be sold at various places you've also tested a lot of different offers and have seen which ones your backers gravitate toward this information is gold your backers have seen your catalog spliced and diced several different ways and they have spoken with their dollars Kickstarter is a fairly unique platform in this way in that it teaches you what bundles and
• 482:00 - 482:30 packages your audience is likely to buy in the future you want to take all of this knowledge to other retailers so that you can sell more on those retailers too but there are a few challenges with this too how much inventory will you hold Kickstarter is a great way to get the funding to buy your books and merchandise in bulk in smaller print runs maybe you sell 40 copies of your hard cover and you have enough money to
• 482:30 - 483:00 buy and ship 100 of them you ship out the 40 to your backers and you have 60 left to sell the 60 left are already paid for so everything you receive from them minus whatever it costs you to sell them is going to be profit where do you send them how do you sell them we see Kickstarter as the starting point to holding inventory this is an odd thing for most independent authors who make 90% of
• 483:00 - 483:30 their money selling eBooks at retailers and another 10% of their money selling print on demand pod paperbacks and audiobooks most authors don't hold any inventory of their product and tend to like it that way but Kickstarter is a place where you can produce items that don't fit well into digital retailers and pod usually that's why an author turns to Kickstarter because they can't do what they want with
• 483:30 - 484:00 pod yet they rarely consider this question or see the bigger picture of how Kickstarter can and likely will shift their business when they use it regularly it's possible to use Kickstarter without holding inventory but it's not going to maximize profitability or expand your business in new and interesting ways most items are going to cost less when purchased in larger quantities and most authors are going to learn a lot about what their readers
• 484:00 - 484:30 want when they look at the response to various reward tiers why waste all that incredible knowledge by never offering those bundles again we recommend you open yourself to holding some inventory in this day and age you don't even have to technically hold it yourself there are full service fulfillment companies that will drop ship it for you when you use Kickstarter you've already identified the train cars that people want and purchased more than
• 484:30 - 485:00 enough train cars to fulfill demand now all you need to do is build a few additional railroads in your business so you can send those train cars down the tracks and get paid there are a few key places you can sell your extra products and bundles digital storefronts if you've created new content or found new bundles that might perform well with your audience get those products into ebook format and start selling them on retailers if you're pricing higher than
• 485:00 - 485:30 $9.99 most ebook retailers outside of Amazon still give you a 70% royalty on those purchases print on demand pod similar to the digital storefronts you can get your new products and bundles into pod as well even if you have a special edition with different materials that aren't possible through pod you can still get things like bonus content and extra EXT ra scenes into a simplified deluxe version paperback or hard
• 485:30 - 486:00 cover fulfillment by Amazon FBA FBA is Amazon's fulfillment arm and is the way that most people sell non-book products on Amazon you can get your book boxes and other merchandise packaged and send a shipment to FBA to get a listing on Amazon there are pieces to figure out that you may not be used to with digital and print pod like storage fees and pack packaging requirements but if you found a winning offer it's worth it to figure
• 486:00 - 486:30 out how to sell more of those through the biggest e-commerce store on the planet your website it takes a bit to get set up for direct sales but those who pursue it can run advertising directly to their site and make a killing using Shopify or woocommerce you can hook your website to a fulfillment service like printful so you can drop ship the inventory without having to hold pack and ship it yourself iners events and signings one of the
• 486:30 - 487:00 biggest challenges to getting tables at cons and farmers markets alike is the prohibitive costs to get inventory ahead of time and to get table setups that meet requirements at various shows Kickstarter is a good way to front the costs of much of that making shows possible you can also grab our book get your book selling at events and signings Book Sales supercharge number 10 to read how Russell sells profitably at shows your next Kickstarter campaign there
• 487:00 - 487:30 will always be people who missed out the first time around so you should include all your extra inventory from past kickstarters in your reward tiers or your add-ons your other fanback channels if a reward tier bundle or package works on Kickstarter chances are that it's going to work on another fanback Channel like patreon or substack 2 add it as a tier and let your audience know assignment in bookstores more independent bookstores are working with
• 487:30 - 488:00 independent authors often on consignment if you have some striking covers or merchandise that you want to move you could ask them if they need window display materials maintaining exclusivity you may be thinking I told my backers I was only doing this for the campaign how am I going to now go and sell this everywhere to us exclusivity can come in many forms perhaps you're only going to
• 488:00 - 488:30 do one print run of something because it's expensive to make in that case it makes sense to get extras beyond what you sell but when those sell out no more because it's financially infeasible and unjustifiable to get another print run in the quantities you need to make it profitable communication is everything and you need to think about reasonable ways to talk about your product process if we were offering special edition hard
• 488:30 - 489:00 covers we might say we sold 35 but we will print a run of 100 to meet the minimum and on a future Kickstarter campaign we might say we have several copies of the special edition hard covers left but there is a limited Supply options to keep backers feeling special are exclusive production or print run the item is limited in production or print run and only a certain number exist in the
• 489:00 - 489:30 world exclusive pricing the item costs more through retailers but the backers get a special price exclusive content the item has bonus content in it that's not available anywhere else exclusive timing backers get something long before it's made available to the general public exclusive packaging luxurious to the touch boxes or variant covers are are special and worth going to a Kickstarter for when they won't be
• 489:30 - 490:00 available elsewhere exclusive numbering or signing the print run is numbered and the backer is getting one of the first 100 plus it's signed think through how you want to balance making things exclusive for your Kickstarter versus using Kickstarter to create Evergreen assets and build longevity into your business and career there's not actually much conflict between the two goals and honest communication will be the key to keeping your backers happy around
• 490:00 - 490:30 this using the data wisely and Gathering more data to improve your products Kickstarter is a perfect testing ground for figuring out what your audience actually wants to buy from you as well as what strangers want to buy from you here are some of the ways you can take that data and bring it to the rest of your sales and marketing strategies on retailers and everywhere else number one create new
• 490:30 - 491:00 bundles we've given you one of the important ways to use data which is to bundle items together according to popular reward tiers and create new products that you can market and sell in as many places as possible number two improve your current products another way you can gather data especially if you are a non-fiction author though this can work for fiction too with a bit of a imagination is to have a deal price tier in your
• 491:00 - 491:30 Kickstarter to work with you in a group setting in our campaign we had several Sprint with us tiers that people could join for $100 or $200 where we would group coach them through their own Kickstarter campaigns these were popular tiers over 70 people in the $100 one and these groups have helped us test the material in this book on a larger scale than just doing the work ourselves this this is a good way to gather questions about where people get
• 491:30 - 492:00 stuck in your material and a fast way to test a book from beginning to end to make sure that it actually makes sense to people and gets them the transformation they want Monica did this with her previous non-fiction series as well which is what has helped the series sell 60,000 plus copies again you can use the same concept for fiction too but you have to get a little more creative with the implementation of it perhaps it looks more like a fan club where you serialize
• 492:00 - 492:30 drafts in progress and you host it on a site that readers are already familiar with like patreon or substack number three update future offerings one of the greatest advantages we have as creators is the ability to decide when and how we will release our work if you've learned that you can sell a thousand books as special hard cover editions and you make more profit on them than you would selling eBooks or paperbacks then why not test your next
• 492:30 - 493:00 release as an exclusive special hard cover Edition offer a pre-order on your website then order 2,000 copies and send the extras to Amazon to sell through FBA you can still release your book as an ebook to the masses at a later date and possibly have an even bigger release with hundreds of reviews on the first day and more people wanting to get the paperbacks to us the key to Freedom as an
• 493:00 - 493:30 independent author is using exclusivity to your advantage and putting the railroad tracks in place to sell directly to your fans wherever possible direct sales is almost always the most profitable route retailers are of course very important to an author's ecosystem for discoverability and scale but independent authors have ignored their secret profitability weapon exclusivity for far too long number four fund production costs
• 493:30 - 494:00 on new formats we are all about authors keeping as large a portion of their Kickstarter funding as possible as profit for themselves at the same time if you are using some of that money to invest into the future of your business you can take some Kickstarter money and fund new formats like audiobooks and translations for your most popular books use the data to see what's most popular and and place your efforts there rather than trying to get every book into audiobooks or
• 494:00 - 494:30 translations number five fund marketing efforts if youve found a popular offering you can take some of your Kickstarter profits and put it in your advertising budget fund we did this with our Kickstarter using a portion of our funding to put toward 3 to six months of advertising for the six co-authored books we have on this series the data tells us that our our books have legs and are worth investing in more
• 494:30 - 495:00 aggressively than we originally planned additional resources get your book selling at events and signings Book Sales supercharg as10 task checklist get people to your email list figure out how you plan to hold inventory choose the places where you want sell your extra inventory do a postmortem on your campaign and look at the data to get a
• 495:00 - 495:30 sense of how you can rearrange your business to make more money chapter 21 using Kickstarter with book retailers most authors listening to this are making most of their money on a retailer like Amazon we know from talking to hundreds of authors that they are looking for an additional stream of income on top of what's already working at r retailers rather than another stream of income that might cannibalize
• 495:30 - 496:00 their sales elsewhere this chapter is all about how to use Kickstarter alongside book retailers specifically with three considerations exclusivity price alignment launch scheduling we have lots of books in this series book sales supercharged that help you optimize your books for other platforms too so make sure you you check those out if you are looking for information on any of the book
• 496:00 - 496:30 retailers exclusivity we've talked a bit about how valuable and profitable exclusivity is to your business it's no surprise that exclusivity is also valuable to retailers in their businesses lots of retailers fiction apps and other businesses have exclusivity terms that may conflict with you selling a particular book series or franchise direct to your readers through Kickstarter exclusivity can take place
• 496:30 - 497:00 across content format language and more so the first thing you want to consider is creating a spreadsheet to track where you have signed an exclusive contract and what the terms of service toos on those contracts means for your ability to sell that property direct to your readers discussions about copyright intellectual property and more are beyond the scope of this book we recommend a few books books from Christine Katherine rush and Dean Wesley Smith that can help fill in the gaps
• 497:00 - 497:30 here in our additional resources section in this chapter once you have an inventory of your exclusive contracts you are left with a list of products that you are able to sell directly to readers we recommend selling all of those same things on Kickstarter as either a reward item or an add-on depending on the focus of your campaign add-ons are so important to improving the profitability of your campaign and there's no reason
• 497:30 - 498:00 not to sell the things you already have done one thing most book retailers are not good at is making it easy for independent authors to offer bundles through ebook files or pod this is where Kickstarter shines because each reward tier is effectively a bundle of your products and you are using direct sales to figure out how many people will upgrade their bundle if x item is added to it some notes on Amazon select program and its Kindle unlimited
• 498:00 - 498:30 program one of the most common exclusivity contracts that authors agree to Via the terms of service of the program which is a type of contract is the KDP select program which you can sign up for per book for 90 days at a time this program is subject to change so the information in this book may become outdated at any time please check the current to for how it works at the time of this writing books in
• 498:30 - 499:00 this program cannot be sold or distributed for free anywhere else in digital format this includes your website email list and other retailers including Kickstarter and it also includes portions of the content and bundles of the content so you cannot have the individual books in the program but have a boxed set knot nor can you have a boxed set but not the individual books the program is strictly enforced with Amazon using programmatic efforts
• 499:00 - 499:30 to detect the book being available at other retailers Amazon sometimes bans books that violate the to from its platform and can even shut down and ban author accounts from the platform we want to make you aware of this because if you are keen on following the TOs for the program you are not able to put ebooks enrolled in KDP select for sale on Kickstarter in reward tiers or add-ons if you put most or all of your books in the KDP select program it can
• 499:30 - 500:00 significantly affect what you are able to offer through add-ons there are workarounds that can help you still have a profitable Kickstarter and use your ebook content to your advantage in your campaign you can have your book on pre-order at Amazon at the same time you use it in your campaign on Kickstarter your book doesn't enter exclusivity until it's actually for sale on Amazon so the pre-order period is a great time
• 500:00 - 500:30 to run a Kickstarter for it you can ask Amazon to release your main series that is the focus of your Kickstarter from the KDP select program right before your campaign goes live Amazon is usually willing to let authors end their KDP select program early it's only 90 days long to begin with if your series is the focus of your Kickstarter you can take it out of KDP select during the campaign and fulfillment then put it back into KDP select
• 500:30 - 501:00 afterward you can use other digital formats to bolster the value of your reward tiers we shared how we bolster physical product tiers with digital rewards to charge more for those tiers and balance profitability you can use other digital rewards like audio books audio commentaries courses recorded workshops digital art exclusive prequel or epilog content bonus scenes and more to Anchor those reward tiers instead of using the
• 501:00 - 501:30 ebooks KDP select is not the only exclusivity program out there so make sure you pay attention to your exclusivity contracts and to agreements pricing alignment when you launch your Kickstarter your offer needs to be fairly priced in comparison to retailers you can't sell a book for $15 with free shipping on Amazon and sell the same book for $25 with free shipping on Kickstarter and as Russell said in a
• 501:30 - 502:00 post recently you can't sell a book for $15 with free shipping on Kickstarter without losing your shirt the math just doesn't work there are ways around this you can sell different things on Kickstarter than on retailers we've talked about having exclusive items for Kickstarter a lot in this book already you can bolster your physical reward tiers on Kickstarter by including lots of digital content that has value
• 502:00 - 502:30 or perceived value a single 300-page novel with shipping included needs to be at the $25 price point to make the math work for you but you can include lots of digital bonuses that cost you nothing extra to produce and ship they are high margin to that $25 tier to increase the perceived value you can increase your prices on retailers most Indies are priced too low on print for example some are priced too low on
• 502:30 - 503:00 eBook check in with your prices there and see where you can adjust without affecting your retailer sales you probably need to make use of all three of these tactics to make all your reward tiers look like a solid deal in comparison to your catalog on retailers your goal for each reward tier is it's maximized in profitability to you it's a nice looking deal for your backer
• 503:00 - 503:30 in comparison to retailers everything we've taught you in this book is about hitting a balanced Sweet Spot between the two launch scheduling if you plan to use Kickstarter regularly you also want to consider which books you are going to launch on each platform and when we recommend planning out your schedule a year or two in advance it can always be updated ated or changed but it's helpful to have some idea of how you want to use each
• 503:30 - 504:00 platform we've covered a lot of the topics around this in other chapters of this book already so we'll just say the major things we think you should factor into these decisions are exclusivity in terms of making your Kickstarter special exclusivity in terms of your contracts with other retailers maintaining what's already working in your business business which will usually be your current sales at retailers you want Kickstarter to be an
• 504:00 - 504:30 additional income stream rather than eat into your current sales popularity of franchise series or book content of franchise series or book as some properties may make more sense to launch on Kickstarter versus retailers or vice versa precedent and expectations of your readers if you've released your popular series a certain way it may not make sense to take Book 12 and do something completely
• 504:30 - 505:00 different in general Kickstarter is a platform that coexists nicely with retailers especially when you look at its strengths compared to retailer strengths Kickstarter truly fills in the gaps where ebooks and pod fail authors while retailers are able to distribute an author's books quickly affordably easily and at a larger scale compared to Kickstarter both have a place in an author's business business and marketing plans we hope you use both in your
• 505:00 - 505:30 business additional resources get your book selling wide get the basics of publishing in print ebook audiobook translations apps and more Book Sales supercharged number one get your book selling on Apple Books learn discoverability and visibility on the Apple book store and app find out how to get merchandised and more Book Sales supercharged as2 get your book selling on Amazon optimize your Search terms metadata and keywords
• 505:30 - 506:00 increase your visibility and discoverability and learn Amazon's advertising platforms Book Sales supercharg has3 get your book selling on Cobo build your visibility and sales at Cobo by understanding their business model philosophy algorithms retailer Partnerships and more Book Sales supercharge as4 get your book selling on Google playbooks learn the algorithms metadata and search engine optimization
• 506:00 - 506:30 strategies that drive Google Play bookstore sales book sales supercharged as5 get your book selling on Barnes & Noble learn the ins and outs of stocking your ebooks and print books and increase your book sales online and in store Book Sales supercharg 6 task checklist look at your exclusivity contracts and create an inventory list of products you can offer on on Kickstarter as reward tiers or add-ons get your pricing in alignment on
• 506:30 - 507:00 Kickstarter and all the retailers you have a presence on make a plan for your Launches on Kickstarter versus retailers and think about how you will use exclusivity at one platform or the another to maximize your profits across all retailers chapter 22 using Kickstarter with patreon and subs stack this chapter will be fairly short because it's at the end and we've
• 507:00 - 507:30 covered so much in previous chapters already we wanted to spend a chapter talking about the differences between Kickstarter and other fan-based sites like patreon and substack we are very much of the belief that you should make money everywhere and we consider ourselves wider than wide authors in that we are willing to sell books and make money wherever we can so this chapter is not about choosing between Kickstarter patreon substack or
• 507:30 - 508:00 any other platform instead it's about how to use the Platforms in harmony without confusing your readers or making them angry Kickstarter versus patreon and substack the biggest difference between Kickstarter and patreon or substack is that the latter two are focused on subscriptions while the former is focused on a one-time purchase this makes Kickstarter a much easier sell to most people including
• 508:00 - 508:30 strangers on Kickstarter you'll likely have backers that are new to you and not part of your current audience on patreon it's nearly impossible to get people who don't know you or your work to become a patron on substack you will get new readers but it's a simplified platform largely used for topical content which means not everything could move from Kickstarter substack anyway the beauty of these differences
• 508:30 - 509:00 is in knowing where to sell what and to who the platforms don't serve the same purposes and don't have the same functionality this gives you the perfect reason to use all of them and send your readers to various places for various things we personally believe that Kickstarter is a great place to find people who are interested in offbeat unique offerings from authors and then we think it's a great idea to bring them over to patreon for those same offerings
• 509:00 - 509:30 or to substack for your content offerings because subscriptions are a little harder to sell to strangers and even fans than a one-time purchase we see Kickstarter as the entry point for finding fans who will buy Direct and patreon and substack as the next step in that sales funnel a lot of your subscribers will probably back your campaign while a smaller percentage will move in the reverse using your Kickstarter data to improve your patreon and substack
• 509:30 - 510:00 offerings on both Kickstarter and patreon there's a sweet spot for the number of reward tiers that you can offer to maximize your profitability if you offer too few then there are less opportunities to capture potential backers but if you offer too many people get overwhelmed and make no purchases at all on Kickstarter you can test many reward and figure out what your most popular ones are along with the price
• 510:00 - 510:30 points that your audience is willing to pay there are a few things you can do with this data turn the reward tier into a patreon tier this is the most obvious option but it's worth being said if it works on Kickstarter it's probably going to work on patreon too create a yearly patreon or substack tier based on your most popular price point some fan bases are willing to pay more than others so it's worth knowing the actual number your fan base
• 510:30 - 511:00 gravitates toward is it $50 $100 more or less you can turn that amount into a yearly patreon tier of substack subscription since that's very similar to a one-time purchase in people's minds then you'll be able to Better Price your month-to-month subscriptions too use stretch goals flash goals and add-ons that worked well on Kickstarter to build momentum for for a new subscriber push on patreon or substack we like to think that our subscriptions
• 511:00 - 511:30 will grow in a linear fashion but more often they grow after a big promotion campaign use what you've learned on Kickstarter to plan a new drive to get subscribers on patreon or substack use Kickstarter testimonials to support your patreon and substack sales as you get feedback on your campaign you'll have extra testimonials to do a promotion for your subscriptions invite backers to join your subscription at a discount they already like what
• 511:30 - 512:00 you're offering and enjoy buying directly from creators so they may be interested in upgrading their one-time purchase to a subscription break down your higher tiers into monthly segments and encourage people to pay month-to-month on patreon or substack not everyone can afford an upfront cost to get the tier they wanted but you may be able to essentially offer them a payment plan by dripping out what you're probably creating already for your backers using your Kickstarter campaign
• 512:00 - 512:30 sell your substack or patreon subscriptions you can also sell your memberships on patreon or substack through Kickstarter this is easy to do on substack while a little more complicated to do on patreon as they have no gifting functionality there are many reasons why you might want to do it including bundling it into other reward TI years and offering the subscription as an add-on you also want to stay in touch
• 512:30 - 513:00 with your backers and keep giving them cool stuff for as long as you can after your campaign if you serialize your fiction for example or write articles on the topics of your books as another example then it makes sense that you'd want your higher tier backers on your regular subscription Channel too if you don't want to sell memberships you can at least look at what's working well on Pat or substack and think about how to incorporate that into your Kickstarter
• 513:00 - 513:30 campaign task checklist look at what's already working well for you on patreon or substack and think about how to bring that to Kickstarter do a postmortem on your Kickstarter campaign to decide what you can offer regularly as a subscription chapter 23 next steps thank you so much for picking up this book and learning more about how you as
• 513:30 - 514:00 an author can use Kickstarter to build your independent author career we hope we've given you a lot to chew on and shown you the many ways with which you can sell your books directly to fans we see Kickstarter as a hugely untapped opportunity for authors that opens tons of doors to more direct sales which is where the independent author's true Freedom ultimately lies what next please send your questions and suggestions to Monica's team at Team
• 514:00 - 514:30 theor needsyou book.com we will get your message to the right person we'd love to help you out as you build your audience and author platform on Kickstarter we encourage you to consider our other books on direct sales website sales get your book selling on your website Book Sales supercharged number 7 print sales get your book selling in print book sales supercharged 8 in person events and signings get your
• 514:30 - 515:00 book selling at events and signings Book Sales supercharge as10 the book sales supercharge series if you want to dig into other platforms that are useful to authors we encourage you to continue the series we have co-authored several books together get your book selling in print book sales supercharged # get your book selling on Kickstarter Book Sales supercharged number
• 515:00 - 515:30 nine get your book selling at events and signings Book Sales supercharged as10 get your book selling with cross promotion Book Sales supercharg 111 get your book selling with Facebook book sales supercharged as12 get your book selling with Advanced Facebook advertising Book Sales supercharged 8 the series is available at all retailers we are aggressively wide over here but if you want the best deal there
• 515:30 - 516:00 are also large bundles of the book on the website to learn more go to the world needsyou book.com shop if you want to just learn more about the series you can also go to the website which lists all the books in the series plus links to everywhere they are available to be purchased to learn more go to the world needsyou book.com wide Russell's training courses and
• 516:00 - 516:30 books Russell has an incredible set of courses at wannabe press under the brand the complete creative some of the courses he teaches include create profitable Facebook ads build a rabid fan base crush it on Kickstarter you can check out these courses here wab press. teachable.com
• 516:30 - 517:00 Monica's the productive novelist books in addition to the Book Sales supercharge series Monica also has books that are strategy focused on things like craft book marketing and more the productive novelist series is 14 books spanning all topics related to writing editing publishing and marketing your books there are also several Advanced books in this series for those who intend to make writing a career and want to build their businesses for
• 517:00 - 517:30 longevity the content in this series has been tested by thousands of authors when it was originally published as the growth hacking for storytellers series we've since updated all the content and added several chapters to the newer editions to learn more and see what we have to offer go to the world needsyou book.com shop the productive novelist Channel podcast and
• 517:30 - 518:00 blog Monica shares tons of free content on my YouTube channel podcast and blog some people like to get right to the solution with a course or a book While others like to receive a drip drip drip week to week through my YouTube channel or podcast feed please connect with her and subscribe to her channels podcast the world needsyou book.com podcast YouTube the world needsyou book.com youube Blog the worldyou book.com
• 518:00 - 518:30 blog wi newsletter the world needsyou book.com substack your feedback please our goal for writing this book is to help get more authors up to speed on how to use Facebook to build their careers we would love to know how we did there are two ways to leave feedback reviews if you love this book we can always use an honest review on our
• 518:30 - 519:00 public retailer Pages where other people looking for the books can see what real people think of them choose your retailer and leave a review here the world needsyou book.com review bs9 feedback form if you have anything you'd like to share privately please feel free to fill out our feedback form here the world needsyou book.com feedback all answers are private unless
• 519:00 - 519:30 you say we can use the responses publicly in our marketing materials spread the word can you think of two people who could use this book in their lives maybe they've published their first couple books but they're having trouble finding a market or audience for them maybe they have a lot of books but now they are ready to build their a audience in unique and surprising ways maybe they have been at this publishing thing for a
• 519:30 - 520:00 while and they've never taken the time to develop their direct sales efforts if so we would love it if you could connect them to this book so they too can learn the ins and outs of using Kickstarter to make more money in their book business thanks again for listening be the igniter we hope you have enjoyed this honor Bridge production of get your book selling on Kickstarter Book Sales supercharged book
• 520:00 - 520:30 N Text copyright 2020 by Monica Lenell production copyright 2022 by Monica Lenell All rights reserved