5 Things I learned in putting together my 1st Kickstarter
My first ever Kickstarter is now in Pre-Launch (click here) and I have to agree with everyone who said “It’s a hell of a lot of work to get to the starting point, and then the real work begins.”
Back in February when I was putting together Wondrous & Perilous Treasures Volume 1, I debated doing a Kickstarter for it. The truth was I hadn’t released a new book of 5 years, I was still battling anxiety and depression, and I wasn’t mentally in a place where I felt I could take it on. I decided in March to do a pre-order with some pushing to a few Facebook forums for Old-School Essentials and OSR TTRPGs. To my surprise, a lot of people signed up - a lot more than I thought. Then for the next two months, it sold better than I could have hoped for over at DriveThruRPG.
In June, I released the 5e conversion. I wasn’t sure if it was needed, if there would be an audience, and I discovered that - yes there was. Did it need its own independent cover? Probably not - that I will chalk up to over-thinking and fear of confusing people.
As Volume 2 started to come together, I was determined to take another run at doing a Kickstarter. I tried to enlist one person to help me, which didn’t work, then another, which didn’t work - and then I just pushed through. Using the same strategy as I did for putting Volume 1 together, I just chipped away at it.
Many hours on weeknights and weekends blurred past as I tweaked graphics, wrote pledge tiers or stretch goals that seemed okay only to then be torn down and re-written - but I could see it coming together. I’d been following and researching Kickstarters in the TTRPG space for about a year and a half - and I could see some of the benefits of having done that.
If I were to give advice to myself from several months ago, I would have helped his anxiety by breaking it down to the following:
What are you trying to do? (My friend Josh emphasized this too). Are you trying to get your physical book in people’s hands for them to play it? Are you trying to get the digital version in people’s hands? The tighter you make that purpose, that goal, the easier it makes to evaluate whether some pledge tiers and stretch goals make sense. For example “I’m trying to get my book into people’s hands, to build a brand, so that I can make more books like this as well as adventures and world books. I want my supporters to find these books really imaginative and engaging.”
What’s important to your potential supporters? As an author with a back catalogue of published books, it would be easy for me to make my books part of higher pledge tiers - but my books don’t have anything to do with my current project. What is important to them? What could be valuable to them? Signed copies? Sure. Some art postcards? Yup, good idea. T-Shirts, etc? Maybe in the future but not right now for me. At the top most tier, I added my books because that’s an all-out, they are in it for everything level. I did make my books available as add-ins.
Funding target and stretch goals. If there’s one thing to potentially drive you around the bend and back again, it’s thinking, thinking some more, over-thinking, and then throwing it all away and starting again - it’s stretch goals. I decided that my initial funding should just be $500. I’ve self-funded before, I would just like people to participate AND I have never done a Kickstarter before, so I don’t know what I don’t know. Stretch goals… I think I went through four versions of them, each one getting better and each time tying back to points number 1 and number 2. I had to balance delivering things that would add value to the potential supporters and wouldn’t be full-on Kickstarter-worthy projects on their own (careful not to take something that I was certain I could deliver and rocket up the difficult level to an anxiety-inducing impossible level).
Doing my homework paid off. I’d been following Kickstarter forum on FB for about a year and a half, and I’d been reading Kickstarter’s in my same space for two years - looking at their goals, their material they posted, etc - and supporting way too many of them (I’m building another bookshelf this weekend). That homework allowed me to have some idea of what steps I needed to go through, though I missed the off-ramp for wiring up BackerKit it seemed… didn’t realize that had to be before the Pre-Launch. Next time.
Get Feedback. Once you think you have a draft that you can live with, get feedback. I posted to a forum and asked for feedback and it was invaluable. Some things I thought were crystal clear weren’t to some folks, one thing I’d backed off of but then put up were two very limited top tier pledge levels because enough folks pointed it out that I should. In the end, it was a great exercise to shake the tree and see what fell out and what didn’t. One of the things a lot of writers say to those asking for help, me included, is that the worst draft is better than the most wonderfully sculpted tale that’s trapped in your head. The same is true for Kickstarters and getting feedback.
Who knows what’s going to happen, but the pre-launch site is up, the date is set for Friday, November 3th (runs for 15 days), and all that’s left to do is the other 90% of the work :)
If you’re reading this before November 18th, check it out here: Link.