Adam’s Kickstarter Experience: Final Analysis
This is the final analysis of my Kickstarter experience.
Though I learned a lot and and I can say I dared to venture where few do, it still did not go great. With only $902 from 25 backers, I only reached 13% of funding.
Much feedback I received pointed out that maybe I was asking for too much money. I’m not entirely in agreement with that, because the amount I was asking for was actually less than the successful campaigns I modeled mine after. What that tells me, and some folks have supported my reasoning, is that for publishing-related Kickstarter projects to be successful you need to already have a fairly large fan base. Though I have loyal readers who leave great 5 star reviews, I don’t have a huge number of them. I had hoped that after my personal support group who were able to contribute (and just about everyone I expected did), the well spring of supporters reached through viral marketing would kick in. It did not. Outreach through social media, or any media for that matter, is a very contentious topic on what works and what doesn’t. In my past few posts I outlined what I did and the adjustments I made based on feedback. You can take from it what you will (however, the way things are these days, my information may very well be outdated and “quaint” before long).
The only thing I can think of which I didn’t do a lot was direct email people on a frequent basis (weekly was what most people suggested). Others who had done Kickstarters told me that even after their campaigns were over they still had plenty of friends and family who hadn’t heard of their project. I’m finding that to be true too, despite having felt like I’d spammed it to death beyond good taste. A bit of advice I got from a guy in a NaNoWriMo group was that I needed to be absolutely obnoxious about getting the word out. He must have been right. Another thing I didn’t do that maybe I should have was to try the $5 “boost” on Facebook that allegedly gets your message in front of 100% of your followers. For $5 it just might have been worth it at least once.
Some interesting stats from my experience:
The average contribution was $36.08.
32% of backers were complete strangers (as far away as Sweden, Ukraine, and Brazil) and they were most likely to be the ones to leave personal messages.
32% of backers were from my primary writing community NIWA (though you could argue that they should be categorized under my “friends”, but I wanted to distinguish how important it is to have a writing community when you’re a writer).
36% of backers were friends and family.
Kickstarter has already encouraged me to re-submit and others have suggested I try another crowdfunding site like IndieGoGo who let’s you keep the money you do raise, but right now I’m feeling beat up, exhausted, and need to apply my energy towards other more pressing matters in my life. I will finish my book, however daunting it maybe, but it will get done.
My last duty was to send personalized emails to all the backers, then send a general update thanking everyone. You can bet when my book is done, I’ll be contacting those people to let them know.
Regards,
Adam Copeland.
