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Use Kickstarter to Market Your Novels Without Social Media

This is the eighth and last in a series of blog posts about marketing for fiction authors without using social media.

Kickstarter:

This is going to be weird that I put this here, but when I was looking through the worksheet “First Steps to Podcasting” in Writing Off Social—the Course Lite, a lot of the questions could apply when you’re setting up your Kickstarter.

You have to craft your Kickstarter to appeal to the readers who will find your campaign, and the amount of time to set up a Kickstarter is probably on par with the amount of time to set up a podcast. The major difference is that with podcasting, you’re in it for a longer period of time, while Kickstarter is usually less than a month, although authors will often do a Kickstarter for every new book.

I took Thomas Umstattd’s course, The Ultimate Crowdfunding Course for Authors and found it very helpful. I also read Russell Nohelty and Monica Leonelle’s book, Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. Additionally, there’s a Kickstarter for Authors Facebook group which was helpful, but only up to a point—after a while, the number of posts got to be too overwhelming for me.

I did a Kickstarter for a special edition of the first book in my Christian Regency Romantic Suspense series. My ultimate goal was to raise money for the human-narrated audiobook, but I’d heard that it’s exceptionally tough to raise money for audiobook projects on Kickstarter, so I instead focused on a Special Edition Hardcover of Lady Wynwood’s Spies, Volume 1: Archer.

I also made my Kickstarter an “early release” or “preorder” of the next book in the series, Lady Wynwood’s Spies, Volume 8: Traitor.

In addition, I offered Special Edition paperbacks for people who didn’t want to pay for the hardcover, and got a few people who wanted those.

Lastly, I had seen that lots of romantasy Kickstarters did well when they offered book boxes, and when I polled my readers, there seemed to be interest, so I also offered a book box with merch and fun stuff.

I did fairly well for my genre. Because the truth is that my genre is not a popular one on Kickstarter. Fantasy, romantasy, science fiction, and spicy romance are all very hot on Kickstarter, but Christian historical romance … not so much.

So the majority of pledges I got were from people I brought in, whether through my newsletter or Patreon. I did not get many pledges from people who happened to see my campaign while they were browsing on Kickstarter. So the organic growth on Kickstarter was almost nil for me.

However, Karryn Norton and Josiah DeGraaf both got tons of organic discovery from Kickstarter since they’re in popular genres. The majority of their backers were people who happened to find them while browsing Kickstarter.

So Kickstarter could possibly work quite well for a fiction author to grow their audience, but you have to do some work if you don’t have a popular genre on Kickstarter.

What I did was tell my newsletter about my Kickstarter 1-2 times a month for several months before it launched. That was partly because I ended up needing to postpone the Kickstarter due to some family issues, but it ended up being good for me to have the extra time to tell my newsletter about Kickstarter and get them used to seeing me talk about it.

Most of my newsletter subscribers hadn’t heard of Kickstarter at all, so I had to convince them to try a completely new platform. What I ended up doing was hiring a friend to do a video walkthrough of how to set up a Kickstarter account, how to make a pledge, and how to cancel a pledge. If I’d thought of it sooner, I’d have featured the video in my newsletter more times so that people could get more accustomed to Kickstarter as a platform.

I had many people pledge for the Special Edition hardcover—much more than I expected. I had fewer people want the Special Edition paperbacks, even though they were cheaper, and only 1 person wanted the book box. So it just goes to show, even your reader polls may not accurately reflect what your readers want.

If you plan ahead what you’re going to offer as stretch goals or flash goals or flash awards, and if you can write a few of your Kickstarter updates ahead of time, it ends up being less work during the actual campaign. Because it is a lot of work, especially in setting up the rewards and crafting a good Story (the info page) to hook readers.

I also had more work on myself because I was offering a Special Edition hardcover of an old book as well as an early release of a new book. If I’d been just doing a Kickstarter for the new book, it would have been much less work.

That said, I will probably do more Kickstarters to take advantage of reader psychology when I release special editions of other volumes in my series. People seemed really interested in the Special Edition hardcovers—especially since I put in a lot of work to make them extra special with color 2-page chapter headers and digitally sprayed edges—so I want to offer the other books in the series to them as Special Edition hardcovers, too.

Here’s the link to my Kickstarter again in case you wanted to see the kinds of rewards I offered and how I set up my Story page.

And that’s the end of this series! These blog posts were essentially what I wrote to Sandy and Mary K. as feedback on their excellent course, Writing Off Social—the Course Lite. I highly recommend their course, and a lot of what I blogged in this series will probably make even more sense once you’ve taken the course itself and heard what they have to say.

I’m not an expert in any of this, but I hope these blog posts about what I’m currently doing to market my fiction can help you come up with ideas for marketing your own novels in creative ways.

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