The Kickstarter Diaries (part 5) | End and Aftermath
My diary for the final two days of the campaign and a retrospective of what went well and what didn't.
Today I have the last two entries from my Kickstarter diaries, plus a retrospective on the campaign, and finally some publishing news to round it out.
The Kickstarter Diaries
Day 21: 14/11/2023
Kept my eye on the campaign all day. Posted all over social media repeatedly, especially before work, at lunch time, and after work. I was hoping we’d see a steeper spike than yesterday, but it was flatter, and we only made 2% in progress. I’ll take it, but I hoped for better. There’s no way we’ll hit that second stretch goal now.
The number of new backers is good, but I notice that nobody is taking the bigger rewards, so the amount of movement we get on the target is less. I’m happy to be building the audience, though. I think these backers are interested in Gourmand Go and not in my backlist or just generally getting bargain books.
Spent the evening with my spawn while the wife was at an appointment after work, and that was a nice distraction. Then I had a call with an editor about some future work, which was also good.
Half a day remains in the campaign. Let’s see what happens in the final hours.
Day 22: 15/11/2023
No closing spike, but we did have new backers coming, even into the last 10 minutes. We made another 3% today, which is ok. When I was first planned the campaign I was hoping to make 6 or 7K, based on my original 5K goal, but when we adjusted that down to 4K initial goal I should have tempered my expectations proportionately.
I wouldn’t change that decision now, especially in light last week’s interest rate rise. Darren has taken it a bit personally but I’m very happy with everything he did for this campaign and I don’t believe I could have managed anywhere near what we did make without his help.
I’m relieved it’s over. 134% funded is a definite success, and I’m satisfied.
Now to wind down a bit. I’ll take a few days away and then I’ll set out a campaign retrospective.
Kickstarter Retrospective
Alrighty, I’ve had time to gather my thoughts, so here is a big rundown of the whole shebang, starting with my motivation for doing it and covering preparation and the campaign itself.
Motivation
I took Gourmand to Kickstarter because I think it’s a niche product with a high concept that’s easy to articulate. The length and format of the book—seven chapters, seven artists—make it a difficult sell to a publisher, and I know the premise will not appeal to everyone.
Five years ago, I would likely have just run off a print run, put it up on comiXology, and sold copies at conventions, but changes to overheads have made this a ruinous proposition. Also, Kickstarter has become the ubiquitous way to do these kinds of books, overseas and locally, and I felt obliged to try it.
I hesitated, though. I hesitated for 2 years, because I knew it would be stressful and time consuming to set up the campaign, and to run it. And it was, even with Darren along to do a lot of the heavy lifting. But I had to have a good hard think about what I wanted to achieve here.
First, I wanted to get the book in front of as many eyes as possible. I worked very hard on it for a lot of years, and my art team sweated bullets delivering my ridiculous story, and I owed it to everyone to do that.
Secondly, I needed the book to be economically viable. I would have loved to make money on the project, but I would have had to this 300% funding we achieved for that. I wanted to at least not lose money on the remaining expenses: printing and shipping. The closer I get to break even, the more of these projects I can do.
Rewards and Pricing
I priced the rewards to make the same margin on a print or a digital copy. In theory, I am just as happy with either kind of sale, but in practice the print books are more popular, and there is an economy of scale for physical copies.
My early modelling showed that I would need a ridiculous number of backers to hit the numbers I needed with only those meat-and-potatoes options. But Kickstarter is not purely a retail situation, where buyers just want the best price. Involvement in the end product, and the campaign itself, are also selling points.
So I included some add-ons for a small extra amount: a collection of the scripts for the series and an audio commentary, which offers them additional insight into the book.
A small number of high dollar pledges will go a long way to getting them to the goal amount, so I added some pricier tiers that would include some of my backlist books and comics. I tried to offer value for money here. The extra book bundles are a bargain compared to normal retail prices, but they still need to increase the margin for campaign—otherwise they’re just making extra work for me.
Bigger tiers offered original art from the book or custom artwork. These rewards can inflate the amount of money the campaign brings in, but also I try to give most of the money from these rewards to the artists, so these rewards do inflate the campaign amount without helping the bottom line.
With that said, campaigns that have raised higher dollars get better promotion from the platform, because Kickstarter wants to maximize their cut. Success breeds success. I think we found a good balance with the reward design.
Shipping
Shipping is a huge pain, because it counts towards the target. As carefully as I calculated it, I am certain that shipping is going to cost more than I expected. I made arrangements for POD editions of Gourmand Go which I can ship to backers overseas without having to double-handle them, but most other rewards I made available only in Australia. Several overseas backers approached me about those rewards, but were discouraged when I showed them the shipping costs and walked away entirely as a result.
Shipping is high even for Australian backers, and I know that dissuaded plenty of people. I have seen other campaigns offer below-cost shipping—I guess they build that margin into the books. Perhaps I should do the same in future.
I would have liked to offer no-shipping, a local pickup option, but I would have had to create a whole new reward tier for every physical reward in order to offer this and it was too unwieldy. I’ll look at other options next time.
Timing
I approached Darren about this campaign in September. I didn’t think there was time to set it up for 2023 and proposed we would run the Kickstarter in February 2024, but he encouraged me to get it going and I’m glad he did. We definitely didn’t want t kick if off in November, when we’d be competing with everybody’s Xmas spending.
When the October 7th attacks happened and the war in Gaza kicked off a few days prior to the campaign, I thought very hard about pulling the plug. I didn’t put this in any of the diaries, but I wasn’t (and still am not) in a good headspace as that continued to unfold, with repercussions have spread to my own country and specifically for my community.
Hyping a Kickstarter felt like a petty activity amidst so much real life horror. I wanted to switch off social media entirely and bury my head. But we had already started the countdown and I am glad we went ahead with it, in the end.
It gave me something positive to focus on.
Kickstarter Design
I think the design of the Kickstarter page was pretty good. Darren made some really nice looking graphics and we laid everything out in what I think is a pretty typical way, which is dense with information.
I’m still proud of the way we named the rewards as if people were ordering off a menu. That was a nice gag and I know I’m not going to be able to replicate it.
The campaign video, on the other hand, was a nightmare. I took me weeks to record and edit it, and in the end, it didn’t look good. Luckily Darren Roweth came along and, after many hours, turned it into something slick and professional (well, as professional as it can look when the video is me flapping my nerd mouth).
Promotion and Messaging
I hoped we’d get a lot of traffic from Substack, but in the end Facebook and the Kickstarter platform itself were by far the biggest drivers. X/Twitter, Bluesky and Instagram and even LinkedIn yielded a smattering of more backers, but not many.
I put a fair effort into X/Twitter, even, paying for verification (which I hid from my profile out of shame) in order to boost my reach, but I didn’t see great results from that. I don’t have much of a footprint on Instagram, but I think that network shows the most promise and I will work on that for next time.
Darren and I tried to push out new content every day. Bits of art, insight about the book and its influences, artist spotlights, as well as countdowns showing progress towards the goal. I would have liked to be more consistent in keeping up the food/restaurant metaphors through these updates, but that proved difficult under pressure. I wish I had spent more time prepping posts and wasted less on the video.
I’m honestly not sure how effective any PR coverage from news sites, blogs and podcasts was, but I don’t think I prepared enough of that—again, beause I was too busy with the video. Most of the coverage I did have happened in the first week, perhaps it would have been better to have it nearer the end when we were funded but had already gotten the message out to our immediate networks.
Conclusion
I’d call the campaign a moderate success. We achieved the goal and made a little extra, and I have established a reader base on the platform now, as well as some experience running a campaign. We’ll see how I got getting the books out early next year, but this was a positive experience for and, as you have surely gathered, I will most likely run another one next year. Stay tuned for Smiling Damned #2, which is about… the yakuza.
Story Sale
I’m very pleased to announce that I sold my short story “Grizzle” to the anthology Spawn 2: More Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies.
Grizzle is about a widowed father trying to care for his newborn child while plagued with insomnia.
I’ve had this story in my head since my son was an infant. I planned to write the story when IFWG and editor Deborah Sheldon announced the first Spawn anthology, but I was so busy at the time that I hadn’t even started when the deadline passed. I am very glad the book did well enough for a sequel, and I’m grateful that Deb accepted the story.
The book contains stories by Helen Stubbs, Matt Tighe, Matthew R. Davis, LEanbh Pearson, Pauline Yates, Anthony O’Connor and many other excellent Australian writers and I’m thrilled to be in the lineup. Here’s Luke Spooner’s brilliant cover:
That’s it for the Kickstarter Diaries. I am in the midst of crazy end-of-year writing deadlines now, with two scripts, edits for two short stories (including the one just announced) and other work due, and of course I need to start preparing to fulfill Kickstarter rewards once they hand over the funds, so I’m going to be pretty busy right up to the holidays.
Next post will be about AI again, so keep an eye peeled for that one.
Live wrong and prosper,
— Jason
I think we did reasonably well, considering the economic climate and of course the global issues dominating people's thoughts, not to mention a very crowded kickstarter marketplace. But it wasn't easy - so hard to get much traction with all of that going on.