I’ve been meaning to write up a post on my experience with using Kickstarter to fund publishing projects (in my case, an audiobook project), but I’m still busy getting together all the reward goodies for those who pledged, so I better wait until I have everything wrapped up. Fellow writer, John Portley, is running a campaign now, however, and offered to write a guest post. If you’re wondering if this might be a way to fund the start-up costs of getting your first manuscript online, then read on…

Is a Kickstarter Campaign a Consideration for You?

by John Portley

Being an author can be a lonely job, and in the transition to being a reasonably paying job, it can be a costly one.  If one is going the indie route, then doing more than just creating an ebook can be a daunting concept.  An author may want to create a special printing of her/his work, or to add numerous quality illustrations to a book before publication, or create an audio presentation of a novel, or to create another derivative of your work, such as a graphic novel.  Hopefully the following regarding a particular way of asking for help in paying for such a project will help you in determining if this method is for you.

Hi, I’m John Portley, who will be publishing my first book later this year (Guardians of Pangea, Book1:  The Worm in the Wood).  I am here to share what I have learned in starting my Kickstarter campaign.  Laying out some of the steps that I took should assist you in your deliberations of starting your own Kickstarter campaign, either now, or later in your career, to take advantage of crowd-funding, the term used for going to the masses to find funding for a particular mission, with Kickstarter.com being the number one website in the United States for assisting in such a goal (excluding charity sites).

Firstly, there are other websites with similar purposes to Kickstarter, with IndieGoGo being one that takes a lower percentage as their fee and is known to release the collected funds faster (Kickstarter and its partner will take about a collective 10% off the top, and can take 3 weeks to deliver the funds to your bank account after your campaign successfully ends).  Though IndieGoGo is smaller in web traffic, you probably will be driving the majority of the traffic to your particular webpage, so taking a look at other crowd-funding sites should be a consideration.

For a discussion of crowd-funding websites, here is a good article.

Look to which sites apply to you, what each offers, and then charges, for hosting a crowd-funding webpage.

Incidentally, there will be an explosion of similar sites with the recent passing of a law that waters down the requirements for investors in a new company.  Nearly anyone, from anywhere in the States, will soon be able to invest in a new business concept.  Internet sites will spring up by the score, touting the Next Big Thing, telling you that you can be part of a cool company, and be a part owner in the next FaceBook, or Apple, or Twitter.  Some great companies may be started this way, but I fear that this new law will multiply to ridiculous levels the boiler room stock pumping-and-dumping activities of fly-by-night companies.  A strong warning for the future:  beware.

But back to bringing your story’s project to the public.  You will need to combine a bit of creative thought with a lot of rational thinking…

One of the first things to determine is exactly what you want to do.  After all, what you will be doing is creating a contract between yourself and your sponsors.  Set a specific monetary target for a clear goal—e. g., you will purchase X number of illustrations to go into your book, and will need Y number of dollars to do so, as well as pay for all the other aspects of the project.  Do not set the monetary goal too high, because at Kickstarter, if the campaign does not generate enough pledged money to meet your goal, then none of the money comes to you.  If your project has more money pledged than your goal, it all comes to you.  Do not set the goal too low, as part of the milieu of crowd-funding is that the person asking for money will set up levels of support, and reward sponsors according to the level of support pledged.  For example, if a sponsor pledges $25, then that person receives the book, postcards with illustrations from your book, and your thanks to this sponsor listed at your website.  More rewards at higher levels of sponsorship.  You have to factor in the costs of these rewards on the individual levels and within the overall project.  These rewards must come out of the project itself, such as copies of your published book, or downloads of your audio interpretation of the book, or posters based on the illustrations which were paid for by the campaign.

I set my costs of the rewards at 40%-60% of the pledge amount, and that does not consider the sweat equity of designing, producing, and then delivering the items.  Which brings up an important consideration:  factor in the cost of having these items shipped to you, and then to your individual sponsors.  The cost of shipping 100 posters to you in bulk may be $15, but cost $6—for a mailing tube and postage—for each of your pledge supporters.  If you accept international donations, then figure out how to address international shipping, and its considerably higher costs.

To assist in telling your story about the campaign, Kickstarter strongly recommends that one creates a video, with the limit being 250 MB in size.  Have your receipts ready for any licensed music used in your video if you also post this video to YouTube, as they have become sensitive about music rights (Kickstarter kindly lists a number of sources for licensing music at their website).  It probably would not hurt to keep receipts for any copyrighted pictures used as well.  Crowd-funding sites in general will probably be asking for all of these soon enough, in order to cover themselves legally.

My costs for the video were less than $500, though yours will probably be considerably lower, unless you hire a professional.  The largest expense came from the three commissioned illustrations of characters from my book, something which you may not encounter for your project.  I wanted to show the quality of the to-be-commissioned art for the book, so I paid for some before the campaign.  I also paid for a few licensed illustrations from dreamstime.com and licensed music from JewelBeat.com (and some similar music also for my website).  I purchased a video editing program.  And though I just purchased an USB microphone (~$90) which is too late to use for this video, I am sure it will greatly improve my future ones, and strongly recommend using a separate microphone, and not your computer’s built-in ‘mike’.

Among the items to upload to your Kickstarter site is an image as the ‘face’ of your campaign, preferably in a 4 by 3 ratio (width by height, respectively).  I took elements of my book cover, and rearranged them into a new picture.  This gave continuity throughout the project—this new picture at Kickstarter, the book cover at my website, and some of the opening images in the video, all variations from the same illustration.

You will need a very short description of your project, and then a detailed description.  The short is 135 characters of description.  Mine was:  “Guardians of Pangea is a family friendly series that explores a rich world of fantastical creatures and inventive individuals.”  I still wonder how to spice up 135 characters, and this did nothing to talk about the goal of illustrations for the book, but it did describe the book itself…somewhat.  For the long version, name drop if you can:  the person(s) who will do the illustrations, the company that will produce the audio CD/download, or the printing house that you have arranged to do the special hardback collectible (and perhaps list similar works that this company has done).  Show that you have planned ahead.

You will be asked to do a biography, which is something that I have always hated, but hopefully you are better at it than I.  They also want a picture of you, which is something that even my own mother would be hard pressed to find, yet I hope that you are less shy than I.  Then the address of your website, which is now nearly a requirement in this digital age, and for this I have no problem at all, for this is where I love to share details of my invented world.

You will need a banking account that will accept your funds, if and when they happen.  I made mine a business account, as I am running my writing as an occupation, and involving the federal and state governments in its profits and expenses (the usual required partnership with the IRS and State Department of Revenue).  The legalities in my state to set up such a business and then a business banking account actually took a little more than two months.  I believe that a personal account will be acceptable to the Kickstarter campaign entities (named in the following paragraph).

Kickstarter uses Amazon to collect and distribute the funds of a successful campaign.  So you will need to set up an Amazon Payments Account.  Part of that process is that Amazon verifies your bank account, electronically if possible.  My financial institution does not verify its bank accounts electronically (and I feel better that they do not), so Amazon plays a little game (PayPal does the same in their verification of a bank account, by the way).  Amazon makes two sub-one dollar deposits into one’s bank account, then you access your account, electronically or in person, and report to Amazon what the exact deposits were.  To save time, set up your account so that you can access it electronically, especially as Amazon can spread these two deposits across a number of days, and will not tell what those days will be.  Also, part of the process at Amazon requires the filling out and signing a 1099 tax form, so that the government can track the money that your project may generate.  Yes, there are frustrating delays everywhere, if you are not prepared.

And hopefully you are now more prepared, if you do want to run a crowd-funding campaign.  There are at least two reasons to so:  1) the project itself; 2) the publicity for your work, whether or not the campaign financially succeeds.  If you do run one, I wish you the best in both regards, and drop me a note at my website, I might be interested in what you are offering, or to answer questions about the process.

http://www.john-m-portley.com/

Please take a look around.  My series has a broad age and genre appeal with its world of inventive people and devices, and dynamic characters who deal with friendship in the face of stress and conflict.  A taste of the world and the series is at my website, including the first six chapters of Book 1 for your own enjoyment and judgment.

The video and webpage of my Kickstarter campaign is at:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1922781115/guardians-of-pangea-book-1-kickstarter-campaign

…and there is even a button there to send the host (myself) a message, if you would care to remark on my project.

If you enjoy either, then please share, allowing your friends a chance to experience Guardians of Pangea.  Perhaps you, they, or their friends, will be interested in the soon-to-released book and the colorful items that I am offering through the Kickstarter campaign, for themselves or as gifts to others.

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A lot of authors who read this blog (at least two out of three of them!) are publishing, often self-publishing, their first books. That’s a noble endeavor, but what if you’ve been writing for a while, and you have several books already published? What if they’re all related (i.e. stories in a series)? Maybe it’s time to look into putting together an omnibus.

That’s what I did a couple of weeks ago, publishing The Emperor’s Edge Collection on Amazon. It includes the first three novels in my fantasy series, and I decided on $7.99 for a price tag, so it’s a good deal for readers. So far, I’ve sold 50 copies, so it’s sales are low compared to my other novels, novellas, and short stories (though it is outselling my poor children’s story collection — it’s so hard to find 10-year-old readers with Kindles and the ability to buy from Amazon!). That said, 50 sales at $7.99 (putting a little over $5 in my pocket for each book) isn’t too shabby, especially considering I didn’t write anything new for the collection, meaning I didn’t need to pay for editing. Also the cover art and formatting costs were minimal (I got deals on both since we were just re-purposing existing covers/files), and I’ve already recouped those costs.

“Ah, but wait,” you say, “aren’t you cannibalizing your own sales with an omnibus? Aren’t the people who bought those books folks who would have purchased them individually?”

This is a valid point. My first ebook is free right now, so no loss there, but I sell EE2 and EE3 for $4.95 each (although, last I checked, Amazon had price-matched one of those down to $3.99 based on some slow-to-update store out there). Essentially, instead of making $5-something on the omnibus, I could make $6+ if people bought EE2 and EE3 separately.

I have no way to know for certain, but I suspect I am losing money on this deal, at least with the omnibus priced at $7.99 (I may raise the price down the line, especially if I ever “un-free” the first book). Based on earlier sales months, I know that a high percentage of the people who buy Book 2 go on to purchase the following books.

So, why do it?

Well, it’s a way to give the readers a deal, perhaps encouraging those who are on the fence about getting into the series, and it’s still a pretty good deal for me. Also, it gets people to buy the set today rather than the books one at a time tomorrow (if your situation is different than mine, and you don’t have a high percentage of people returning for the remaining books in the series, this may be a particularly good idea for you).

When does the omnibus really shine?

As you can see, with my EE books, creating an omnibus was more of a convenience for the readers than a big earner for me. But, there are instances, especially with e-publishing, where it can be super smart to create an omnibus.

The next one I’m going to put together is a three-story collection of my Flash Gold novellas. Because those are shorter than my novels, I sell them at 99 cents (although the first is free right now), $1.79, and $2.99. The last one, which is the longest at 43,000 words, is the only one that earns the 70% royalty rate at Amazon. I earn $2 on a sale of that one, but I only earn 35 and 60 cents respectively on the first two adventures, because ebooks priced under $2.99 receive a 35% royalty rate.

When I release the novella omnibus, I’ll likely sell it at $3.99 or $4.95 (we’ll see if the first one is still free then). Again, this will be a deal for the reader, who will be getting the word-count equivalent of a full-length novel, but then I’ll be earning the 70% royalty on the whole collection of stories.

The best possible scenario is when all three of your stories (or however many you want to combine) are selling individually for less than $2.99, thus forcing you into the 35% royalty rate. Combine them to get into the 70% rate, and you’ll be making significantly more on your omnibus.

A sneakier tactic to sell more omnibus editions?

As I mentioned, I didn’t write anything new for my omnibus. I didn’t want readers who had already purchased the books individually to feel compelled to buy the collection as well to get new material.

However, that is precisely the strategy many publishers pursue, no doubt to great effect. I know I’ve purchased omnibus editions of books by favorite authors because of new essays or stories tucked into the collection. If you don’t want to worry about an omnibus cannibalizing your other book sales, this may be a tactic to try, as you might get people who already purchased the books individually coming to grab the collection. Granted, you’d need a fan base built up, one that’s into your world/characters to the extent that they’d pay to get their hands on extras, even if it meant double-purchasing some stories.

It’s up to you to decide if that’s something you want to try.

Is a multistory edition good for anthologies and non-series collections too?

What if you don’t have the first three books in a series, but you have a collection of short stories that you’re selling at 99 cents a piece? Can you still take advantage of the higher royalty rate by combining them into one ebook anthology or collection?

The answer, of course, is yes, though you may have mixed results when it comes to sales. With a series, it’s more of an obvious buy for folks who like the sample and see that reviews are good for the rest of the books. With short story collections, the more unrelated they are, the less they’re likely to appeal as a collection.

You can always give it a try, though, and see how it goes. If you format your own ebooks and can splice together existing covers to make a new one, you needn’t pay anybody anything to put together works that have already been edited. Even if you only end up selling 10 or 20 copies a month at $2.99+, that might end up earning you more than selling individual tales for 99 cents.

~

So, readers and authors, what are your thoughts on the ebook anthology/omnibus? A good deal for all or do you prefer working with individual titles?

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A while back, we debated whether it is, in this new world of e-publishing, still worthwhile to create print versions of our self-published books. That’s up to each author to decide, but, if you do have paperbacks made, it can be helpful with book promotion. You can send review copies to book bloggers who don’t accept ebooks, make gifts of signed paperbacks to contest winners, and list giveaways over at Goodreads.

Just in case you didn’t know, Goodreads is a big social media site just for readers. Tons of people hang out there, interacting with other readers (and sometimes authors) and reviewing books they’ve finished.

If you’re an author, hoping to make more people aware of your work, it can be helpful to have folks over there reviewing your books. As I said, this is a social site, and those reviews show up in people’s activity logs, something all of their Goodreads friends can see. Even having your book in someone’s to-read list can be a little free advertising

Listing a Goodreads book giveaway

Any author can give away a book at Goodreads, and it doesn’t cost you anything (other than a paperback + shipping). You simply create an author account and start a giveaway.

Goodreads suggests these be new releases or advanced reader copies, but there’s nothing in the rules to say you can’t give away copies of a book that’s been out a while. To celebrate the release of my fourth Emperor’s Edge book (and maybe get some new people into the series, eh?), I’m running a giveaway of the first over there right now. I’m also planning to do a giveaway for Encrypted later this month (with that one, the ebook has been out over a year, but I’m just getting around to creating a paperback version).

Why bother with Goodreads?

You may think you can simply run a giveaway on your blog or perhaps on your Facebook page and “build buzz,” but the reality is that Goodreads has a lot more visitors than your author sites. It’s the difference between selling something at a garage sale and listing it on eBay (where millions of people have a chance to find it).

Here are a few of the possible perks of running your giveaway on Goodreads:

• More visibility — People who’ve never heard of you may browse the giveaways page, decide your book sounds interesting, and sign up. They may also list the book in their to-read list where their friends can see it, friends who might think, “Hey, that sounds like something I might like too.” Those friends might add it to their to-read lists where their friends might see it, and so on. If you’ve heard the term viral marketing, this is it.
• Reviews — We all know that reviews are important, as they help new readers decide if a book might be worth a try. If you don’t have many reviews yet, this can be a way to get some. Jane Friedman, quoting a Goodreads newsletter, wrote: “If your goal is to get reviews, it makes sense to give away a lot of books. Nearly 60 percent of giveaway winners review the books they win, so the more books you offer, the more reviews you are likely to get.”
• A way to connect with potential buyers — When I ran my first Goodreads giveaway last year, I didn’t think to try this, but Robin Sullivan of Ridan Publishing mentioned that you can contact all of the entrants after the giveaway is over. Apparently you can say something like, “Thanks for entering and sorry you weren’t selected, but, if you’re interested, here’s a coupon to grab the ebook at Smashwords for half price.” Because I give away the ebook version of the first book in my series anyway, I could forgo the coupon and just give them a link to grab the digital version for free.

So, does all this work? When I did my first Goodreads giveaway, I didn’t measure sales, but I’d definitely say it helped make more people aware of my work (at the least). I had close to 1,000 people enter to win a copy. That was before I had much of a fan base, so those were mostly people who found the book via Goodreads. I’ve seen people writing in more popular genres receive even more entrants. Considering it only costs about $10 (an author copy of your paperback + media mail shipping), it seems like a no-brainer.

Here’s a link to that Jane Friedman article again (she has some giveaway pointers on there that are worth reading). As to where I heard Robin Sullivan talk about the giveaways, she’s been interviewed a number of times for podcasts (I’m afraid I’ve forgotten which one specifically this was mentioned on), and you can find those by doing a search for her name under podcasts in iTunes.

Any thoughts? Have you tried a Goodreads giveaway, and did it help you with book promotion? Or are you thinking of trying one?

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It’s been a little over a week since I released Conspiracy, the fourth Emperor’s Edge book, and we sold a thousand copies in the first week. That’s a record for me (I believe EE3 sold about 500 copies in the first week), and it was great to sell enough right off the bat to cover the cover art and editing costs. Thank you for your support, everyone!

As promised, I’m working hard on Book 5. Thanks to the, ah, slight cliffhanger at the end of 4, folks are asking when the next one comes out.

It’s a little early for me to post a date, but I’m going to shoot for the end of summer (maybe the first of September). I’m about 30,000 words into the rough of EE5, and it’s coming along well. I’ll post more details as I get closer to finishing the first draft.

There have been a few other questions of late, so let me go ahead and answer those here:

Will there be paperbacks for all of the Emperor’s Edge books? Do you make much on the paperbacks (i.e. is it worth buying them to support the author?)?

Yes, to more paperbacks. The formatting is almost done for Encrypted, and Glendon over at Streetlight Graphics (he does all of my covers) will be starting on EE4 soon. That shouldn’t take long since we’ll be using the same style as was used in the previous books. I do have plans to have all six EE novels turned into paperbacks.

At $11.99, they are fairly expensive to buy, but at 6″ x 9″ they’re larger than mass-market paperbacks, and I think they ended up looking pretty good. But, as far as what the author gets, I make about a dollar per sale on those (compared to $3 on the $4.95 ebooks), so unless you really want a hard copy, please don’t feel like you should spend more for my sake.

If you do want paperbacks, and would like them signed, please send me a note. I usually have some books on hand, and, because the author copies cost less than store-bought copies, I can sell them to you for less than that $12 per book, even including shipping (for those in the U.S. anyway). I’m also planning to have some custom book plates made eventually, so I can sign those and send them to you to stick inside the books (if you already bought the paperbacks elsewhere).

Maybe someday I’ll get on the ball and make a separate page on the site with details about this.

Will there be a sequel to Encrypted?

I want to finish up the six Emperor’s Edge books first, but, yes, I’m planning on a sequel. I may try another Kickstarter campaign to help support the cause, because sales of Encrypted are quite a bit lower than of those of the EE books, so writing more books with those characters isn’t as obvious of a choice. That said, I do want to pen at least one more adventure (we have to see what happens when Tikaya brings Rias home, after all).

I’m still working on getting goodies together for the last Kickstarter campaign, so this will likely be a 2013 project.

When will the next Flash Gold story come out?

Because I left Kali and Cedar in a better spot than the EE gang, I want to focus exclusively on EE5 this summer, but I do plan to get back to the Flash Gold stories before too long.

In the meantime, I’ll be publishing an ebook omnibus of the first three adventures this summer, and I’m planning to do a paperback version of that as well.

Will you do any more character interviews?

The Sicarius interview was quite popular, and I’ll absolutely do some more. Maldynado may be the next up to bat since he’s the secondary POV character in Book 5. I imagine he’ll be a tad more verbose than Sicarius was…

Want to keep up on the latest news and tidbits?

You can sign up for the newsletter (link in the menu on the right) or follow me on Facebook, as I often post little dialogue teasers there.

Also, if you’d like to chat with other fantasy fans, check out the Emperor’s Edge Forum that a nice reader set up.

Any more questions? Let me know in the comments. Thanks!

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• Deadly Games, The Emperor’s Edge Book 3, Is out!
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Success is one of those words that means different things to different people. For the sake of this blog post, I’m going to define success as “meeting or exceeding your goals,” whether that means making such-and-such amount of money a year, being read by X number of people, or simply putting out a finished book that makes you proud. That said, I know a lot of people dream of writing for a living, so these tips may slant things in that direction.

Note: this short list doesn’t mention cover art, editing, formatting, blurb-writing or any of the basics that have been discussed here and elsewhere before. I’m going assume you’ve already read that advice.

3 Tips for Self-Publishing Success

1. Hone your writing skills before you publish

In the early days of e-publishing, there wasn’t a lot of competition in the Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc. stores, and some people made it big largely because they got in early with decent stories or were the first to price their ebooks at 99 cents. By the time I came on the scene at the end of 2010, it was starting to get more competitive, with many more offerings in the e-stores. So many people were pricing their books at 99 cents that this was no longer a way to stand out. Today there are even more self-published and traditionally published authors with ebooks at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

What does this mean?

You can’t just be there with a pretty cover and an attractively priced ebook — everybody has that. Perhaps as always should have been the case, the writing has to stand out.

Give yourself every advantage by honing your writing and storytelling skills before you publish your first book. I found online writers’ workshops to be a wonderful way to learn. Others prefer to take classes and/or to read books on the craft.

Whatever you can do, it behooves you treat writing as you would any other career. You have to study, to practice, and to get feedback from others before you’re ready to hang out your shingle.

You don’t have to be the best writer in the class (or workshop) to go on to make a living. I was sure never the type to win awards or contests. But, hey, sometimes the ones with the most talent are the ones who never make it. Be willing to keep learning and adapting, and don’t underestimate the power of the will to succeed.

2. Figure out what your unfair advantage is and exploit it

In the process of enduring this apprenticeship period, you’ll probably learn what you’re good at when it comes to writing. It’ll be partly based on your enjoyment of said thing and partly based on the positive feedback you get from peers and mentors (OMG, William, you write the best fight scenes!).

Maybe you have a knack for creating creepy horror scenes that keep people turning the page. Maybe you can craft characters that feel real and are so fun that readers enjoy hanging out with them. Maybe you write dialogue that would make Joss Whedon smile in appreciation.

Whatever it is, it’s up to you to identify this natural aptitude and use it to make your stories stand out from the competition. Example? Well, in my case, I love to write dialogue. I once had an English teacher suggest I look into screenwriting. I’m not the best at world-building, action scenes, or arranging the prose in a pretty way on the page, but I believe my characters and dialogue are strong points. So, I take advantage of that strength. I build scenes in such a way that my characters can interact with each other a lot. It’s rare for me to send a character off alone for more than a few pages, because I know the story is more entertaining when my heroes are doing things together. In other words, I believe a knack for writing characters and dialogue is my “unfair advantage,” meaning it’s something I can do in a unique way that other writers might struggle with (just as I struggle when called upon to create awesome, original worlds or to pen epic battles).

As we talked about, it’s a competitive market out there right now, so it makes sense to figure out what you’re good at and use that to your advantage.

3. Have an attitude of gratefulness instead of one of entitlement

I’m not one to talk about mindset a lot, and you’ll never catch me writing self-help books, but, based on comments I see on people’s blogs and social media channels, I think a lot of authors set themselves up for failure by feeling that they deserve a readership just because they wrote a book. Writing a book is the beginning of the journey, not the end, so here’s a rare mindset piece from me:

The wrong attitude

What, I only sold seven books this month? I went on blog tours, I handed out flyers, I tweeted a zillion times, and I bought sponsorships. I sent twenty review copies out, and I gave away free samples. This game is so rigged. All the successful people are only selling well because they got in early. So-and-so doesn’t deserve to be a best-seller. I’ve read his/her book, and it sucks. If the people that read those sucky books just read my book, they’d realize how great it is, and I’d be a best-seller.

The right attitude

Seven complete strangers bought my book this month? Holy smokes, that rocks! What can I do to make sure their experience is great? Maybe I can post some extras on my blog or give away some signed paperbacks. Maybe if I keep writing good books and continue to develop my skills as an author, even more people will give my work a chance. If I work my a$$ off, maybe in a few years I’ll have earned a readership large enough to support me as a full-time writer.

~~~

Do you agree or disagree with any of my tips? Or would you like to add some of your own? Feel free to do so in the comments!

Related Posts:

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