Have you had a project successfully funded on Kickstarter, or some other short-term crowdfunding platform?

...

Did you learn some hard lessons from an unsuccessful campaign?

Let's start a thread to centralize this knowledge so we all can benefit. What advice do you have about reward tiers? Fulfillment? Calculating shipping costs? When is it appropriate to try a kickstarter, and when should you hold off (ie, how does audience size/interaction/previous support come into play)? What is important for a kickstarter n00b to know before diving in?

Hit us with a wisdom bomb.

I would love some advice since mine is going on right now!

-IZZI

CHRISTINA'S BIG FAT POST OF KICKSTARTER PREP ADVICE

Kickstarters are fun and exciting and terrifying. I have run three of them now. But with the RIGHT preparation, they can be less awful! Here's some of my tips.

Gauge your audience.
Google Analytics and Webtoons/Tapastic subscribers are a place to start. Marketing wisdom says that you can only expect about 10% of your audience to give you money. But outright asking via a mini poll in your news section that says "Would you buy a print version of my comic? Y/N" is a slightly better gauge. But the BEST gauge is... actually running a Kickstarter and seeing if it funds. Crowdfunding campaigns are points of data, and failed ones can tell you just as much as successful ones in regards to whether or not you're ready to be making a print run.

Format your book for print and get quotes from your printer.
For most professional printers, you will need to provide 300dpi CMYK print layouts in PDF format to your printer. These are best created via software like Adobe InDesign. There are a lot of guidelines that I won't get into here, but suffice to say, you're not going to be able to throw the JPGs you made for your website at a printer and say "MAKE A BOOK" (or if you can, you'll be paying a price for their layout designers to do it for you). Don't forget things like title pages and front/back covers and spines, too.

Information a printer needs to give you a quote:

• Paper quality for the pages: Most of us want glossy text stock of some sort (unless you want it to be matte like a manga or something). Paper thickness is measured in pounds. More info here.
• Paper quality for the cover: If you're making a floppy 24 pager, this will probably be the same as your pages. If you're doing a graphic novel, you want a matte or glossy cover stock. I used 12pt for mine.
• Binding type: Your options here are case binding (hardcover), perfect binding (softcover), or saddlestitched (staple in the middle, the number of pages has to be a multiple of four).
• Size: Some printers have specific sizes they print at, but many will do custom sizes if you really need it.
• Colors: Your options here are one-color (black ink only) or CMYK (full color). If you CAN print black and white only, it's gonna be cheaper!
• Number of pages: Make sure you count the title page too!
• Special fancy things: Gold foil, spot UV gloss, and dust covers are some common ones.
• Quantity: All right, so this one's a big pain because YOU HAVEN'T RUN THE KICKSTARTER YET, HOW ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO KNOW? Ask your printer what their minimum run is (note that some printers won't do fewer than 250 books, so you might talk to more than one printer at once). I recommend printing a run of at least 100 if you're considering stocking these in a store or for conventions, though there are print-on-demand places that will print fewer.

Quote everything else.
Once you have the quote from your printer you'll have a starting number for figuring out your Kickstarter goal. Now you have to do some more calculating for:

• Packaging: I recommend buying corrugated book mailers in bulk and a couple rolls of packing tape. Mailing labels/black markers are also handy.
• Other potential rewards: Brainstorm things you can print at your local printer like postcards, prints or bookmarks (pro tip: Find printers on Yelp near you with good reviews. You can save on shipping that way!). Brainstorm things that you can commission from other artists (cross promotion WHOO!). Brainstorm things that you like making yourself. And maybe one or two things you've always wanted.
  
  Now if you're like me, you have a MILLION ideas about sweet merch (You KNOW you want a Wingbucks travel coffee mug and apron, right? RIGHT?!?) But you have to keep things:
  
  Legal: Logos that aren't yours, music that you aren't licensed to resell, or items you're not licensed to resell can bite you in the butt. Beware.
  Profitable: If you're spending $20 to make a reward that people are only paying $10 for, that's not going to get you closer to the funds you need. Crunch the numbers, yo.
  Simple: If you have too many options/addons/offers, people get very confused very fast. If you MUST make more merch, one neat option is Backerkit, which (for a fee) lets you manage your pledges and offer a selection of store items later when people are confirming their shipping addresses.
  
• Shipping: Put together groups of things roughly the same size and weight as the rewards you're offering, and weigh them on a food scale or at a post office. Then (assuming this is an English language book) look up addresses for the farthest city in the United States from you, an address in Canada, an address in England, an address in Australia and ask someone at the counter how much it would cost to send to those four addresses. You can now add those shipping breakdowns right into Kickstarter on each reward, which is pretty sweet. The most expensive one of these is going to be your "everywhere else" price.

Make a marketing plan.
Make a plan to let your fans and internet colleagues know what you're raising funds for, where to be and when to be there. List out all the places you can potentially talk about it, including:

• People you should email
• Every social media account you own
• Comic-friendly Facebook groups
• Your website and every place you mirror your comic
• Comic-friendly forums you frequent
• Comic-friendly news outlets that might be interested in writing about it
• Comic-friendly podcasts that might interview you
• Project Wonderful/TopWebComic ad buys

Especially for the news outlets, you should plan to reach to them a 3-4 weeks before and during the Kickstarter with a short solid pitch and firm dates so they have time to schedule you into their lineup.

Price your rewards
My rough recommendations for comic folks:

1. TIER ONE (usually $1) - Something stupidly simple. A digital wallpaper is fine, but even their name on the thank you page or a make-believe high five is perfectly appropriate.
2. TIER TWO (usually $5 or $10) - A PDF version of the book you're selling. This is easy and cheap.
3. TIER THREE (usually $15 to $25, make sure you get a quote from your printer before you set this price) - The book and nothing else. There is a SIGNIFICANT portion of your audience that does not give a flip about anything else. Give 'em what they want.
4. TIER FOUR (tier 3 + $10 to $20) - The SIGNED book and an easy flat reward that will not increase the shipping cost. Bookmark, postcards, prints, quick sketch, bookplate, stickers, a keychain... you can get creative here, but my recommendation is just ONE thing make sure it's not something you mind doing at least 30 of.
5. TIER FIVE AND UP ($50, $60, $75, $100 are good price points) - This is where custom art, apparel, mugs, tote bags, scupltures, plushies, cameos, lapel pins, or other stuff for the super-fans can come in if you want. Play to your strengths and the strengths of your story here.

AND KEEP IT VISUAL. Would you buy a shirt online without seeing a picture of it first? Of course not. Words are boring. When building your Kickstarter page, use good design sense and hierarchy (or bribe a graphic designer) to make your milestone maps clear and concise and your graphic callouts clean.

Prepare your graphic library
Prepare as much of the art you'll need as you can before you launch for any rewards you're offering. You'll want a nice big set of graphics for not only your general campaign, but the goodies you're offering and stretch goals you have planned. You're going to be using these like signs to guide people from your site, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr to your campaign. Include the Kickstarter logo and appealing art. And have general graphics with your art handy, just in case. You never know when you'll have to make something on the fly.

On the Kickstarter page itself, you'll want an appealing shot of the cover of your book, samples from the comic, pictures of every reward you're going to offer, and maybe some header graphics to add some flavor to the text descriptions. Yeah. It's a lot.

Make a schedule about what banners and images you're going to use where, and make different sizes if you wanna make sure your stuff looks good everywhere (here's a masterlist if you want specific sizes, but if you're busy, a 1000px by 1000px square image works ALMOST everywhere these days).

Peer review is essential
There are so many little bits and pieces to a Kickstarter, and you absolutely need to call on other professional comic artists and people who are familiar with Kickstarters in to look at your preview link once you get everything in place for launch. They'll be able to give you an extra pair of eyes and opinions for:

• Do you sound professional?
• Are your rewards interesting and easy to understand?
• Are your goals clear?
• Are you biting off more than you can chew fulfillment-wise?
• Is the pricing weird?

I'm pretty sure I'll think of nine more things to add later, but I need dinner at some point so I'll leave it here for now.

This is something I sent to a friend who had questions about crowd-funding, so some of the points are the same as Christina's (which are all great!) but there's some new points in there too:

PRE-LAUNCH PREPARATION
Once you've decided on the platform that works best for your project (Kickstarter is one of many options!), you'll need to take stock of several things:

What you'll ask for:

What is your budget? What's the bare-minimum? What's the Big Dream? Keep in mind many platforms are all-or-nothing, so you want to ask for something that you think you can hit. You'll need to be transparent with your crowd about what the funds go to and why they matter.

What you'll offer:

Most campaigns offer rewards to incentivize backers supporting at higher levels. Just as the classical radio station might offer a collection of CDs of favorite composers, you need to consider what you can offer to backers. Could be items, memorabilia, or even experiences. Take the potential expenses into account in your budgets so that you don't promise what you can't afford. Consider both your time AND your money! Aim for HIGH VALUE for the recipient, LOW EFFORT AND COST for you as a creator.

Who you can learn from:

Search for similar projects on your platform of choice. See what worked for similar projects. Reach out to the organizers of those projects (both successful and unsuccessful) and ask them for their advice. What they'd do differently, and what they'd try again.

Who is your crowd:

CROWD-funding does not work without a CROWD. Do you have contact lists? Social media followers? Clubs or organizations? How will you get the word out? Who will you contact? The more people you can reach, the more potential you have to make a crowd-funding attempt work. Digital is generally better than physical contact, because it requires less work for the end user. If all I have to do is click an email link, I am more likely to visit your crowd-funding page. If I have to take a flier home, remember to get it out, do a google search, and - ah, forget it, it wasn't that important anyway...right? Find your crowd, cast your net WIDE, and make it EASY for them to respond to your request. If you don't have social media networks, it's time to cultivate and grow those as much as you can before you launch your campaign. The same goes for email lists, mailing lists, and other forms of contact. If you have mostly physical contacts, then it is worth creating a re-direction URL that is easy for people to use, rather than the long gobbly-gook URL the crowd-funding platform will assign.

What is your narrative?

People respond to a simple and compelling story. They respond to clear direction and positive feelings. How are you presenting yourself? You get to make a first impression: What is it? Who is appearing on camera for the video? Can they bring ENERGY to it? What PERSONALITY do you and/or does your comic have? Can you engage the EMOTIONS of the person watching? Ideally, you want to bring out your best qualities in an engaging way. This should be in all forms of your presentation, including your page, your rewards, and your marketing.

How will you reach your crowd?

What avenues do you have to get your message out? Reach out BEFORE you start your campaign. Ask them to save the date. Get them thinking about why it's important.

DURING THE CAMPAIGN

Successful or unsuccessful, running a campaign is a full-time job. You need to be pounding the (proverbial) pavement every single day getting the word out. Most campaigns have a short burst at the start (30% in the first 5 days is typical) and then a lull for the weeks in between, and then a burst again at the end. At least, for short campaigns. And in general, short campaigns (30 days) are better for crowdfunding than long ones. A time limit creates a sense of urgency for contributors, doesn't wear them out with constant long-term bombardment, and doesn't wear out your staff trying to get interest.

Mixed in with your requests for funds needs to be other kinds of content, so that people don't just tune you out. This could be facts or something silly or fun that will make someone smile. The purpose of these, beyond reducing fatigue, is to build good will while maintaining visibility.

Consider ways to get people to visit your site or campaign again and again, and to share your organization with others. You have the resources of multi-media experiences online: USE THEM! Interviews, videos, podcasts, all are ways of reaching the audience in new ways.

SOME DO NOTs

While 3 of the 4 kickstarters I've run were successful, one was not. I learned a lot from it. Here's a few take-aways:

- Don't go in desperate: If you're telling yourself "This HAS TO WORK otherwise I'M DOOMED AND A FAILURE" then you need to step away from the Kickstarter idea entirely for a while. Desperate thoughts will sabotage your campaign in so many ways. They will sap your strength, make you present things in unappealing ways, and encourage bad decision making. Kickstarters work best when you're acting from a position of strength.

- Don't go up against Christmas. I've seen some people do this and come out well, but the holidays are a time when cash is allocated to giving gifts and cooking small feasts, not to strangers and their comics on the internet. There's also a ton of marketing noise going on that you'll have to compete with. This is not a hard rule (again, I've seen people do fine) but I figure, why make things harder on yourself?

- Don't forget to take care of yourself. Kickstarters are exhausting. They're like being at a convention 24/7 for 30 solid days. It's okay to take a day off. It's okay to not look at the stats. It's okay not to post something at all for a day or two, especially in the lull. There are services like Hootsuite where you can schedule your promotion posts months in advance. USE THEM. And let yourself disconnect knowing that it will be okay long enough for you to have a nice meal, take a shower, and get some sleep. You're no use to your project if you can't function anymore. Especially if you're so tired, you start to let defeat or despair or desperation creep into your tone. The only signal that sends is that your project isn't going to make it, which doesn't make people inclined to engage with it in the first place.

I don't have TOO much to add here, since I've only run one small-scale kickstarter in the past, but one thing I learned: Don't do physical rewards for smaller tiers. I offered a set of postcards as a $5 tier, and the only person who pledged that tier was in Australia. Ended up costing me $15 to ship it. Learn from my mistakes. :U

Delphina's list is really thorough! And all of the other advice from KEZ and Robin is great too. Be VERY careful to make sure you are budgeting everything correctly and giving yourself a little extra for surprises (things will always end up costing more than you anticipated them costing, no matter how many times you do the math).

I'll add a few tactics that I've used in running Kickstarters for my projects or for other peoples'. My promoting usually begins about a month before I launch a campaign.

Pre-Launch Marketing Army Building

Don't be afraid to reach out to everyone you know personally. I usually create a list of 50 people before I launch a Kickstarter that I feel are most likely to support me, not just financially, but also in helping to spread the word about the campaign. A month before I start the campaign, I message them or nab them in person and ask if they'd mind if I send them an emailed letter about my campaign. I've never had anyone tell me 'no', and it's never as awkward as my brain tells me it's going to be. It's pretty painless.

In my email, I describe the project, the campaign details (goals, timelines, etc), and ask them to give on Day One of the campaign and help promote Day One on social media outlets. If I know that person pretty well, I also suggest a tier level that I feel like they'd be comfortable with in terms of cost, and interested in terms of reward -- by asking for a higher tier, you're more likely to get a larger give out of someone.

That first day or two of your campaign is the MOST important (the last two days are a close second) -- that's when you're most likely to snag Kickstarter's administrative staff's attention to potentially get your project in their "Staff Picks", and early viewers of your campaign are more likely to be compelled to give if they see you are off to the races from the get go.

I email them again, along with anyone else I have on my "email list" (folks who have subscribed to one of my projects or the projects of whomever I'm running the campaign for) on Day One to remind them to take action. Having a good email subscriber list is VERY useful for this reason -- email marketing is way more effective than promoting your campaign on Twitter and Facebook (though those are also important).

Press Releases and Kickstarter Parties

Finally, during that pre-launch part of my campaign, I also write up a Press Release and look for leads (local and genre specific) for places to send my Press Release. I send out the releases 1-2 weeks before the campaign begins, typically, so that editors have time to review and decide whether or not they want to do a piece on the campaign right around the time that it's launching. Sometimes, doing another press release during the second half of your campaign can help give you a late boost, too.

And of course, once the the campaign is running, it's all about getting it out there on every avenue that you can. One of my favorite things to do is to set up a "Kickstarter Party" event live -- for instance, at a local comic shop OR a friendly and popular local bar. If you know any musician friends or comedian friends, partner with them to provide some entertainment; it works particularly well if they have their own following separate from yours and they help promote the event to that following. Promote the event yourself (reach out to papers, local event listings, friends, posters for the venue, etc), talk about your project, maybe do some simple/free sketches for folks who comes, and have your tablet/laptop ready so that folks who come into the event can give right there and then. This can be a very effective way to not only market yourself in your local community, but get backers by selling to them face-to-face and showing them how passionate about your project you are.

If You Should Fail

You still have a list of your backers. Reach out to them immediately. Come up with a plan that will let you still achieve your goal on a smaller scale (smaller budget). Let them know that if they give to you directly via Paypal, you'll be able to avoid the Kickstarter/Credit Card fees and still fulfill their rewards (or offer them a counter-reward for their tier). I helped a friend with this a few years ago -- he raised $11,000 of an $18,000 goal. Through good communication and good planning after the failed Kickstarter, he was able to still bring his project to completion and managed to walk away with about $10,500 of funds by reaching out to his backers individually, and without having to shed 8-10% of his funds raised in Kickstarter/Credit Card fees (about a $1,000 save).

Hope any of that is useful!

Some amazing stuff in this thread! Very good points to keep in mind, and Delphina's post is an amazing primer. Having a plan for promotion, or at the very least a 'library' of graphics with your banner on them that you can upload to social media every day or two during the course of the campaign, will help a lot over the course of the campaign.

Kickstarter can be a really great tool, but it's important to keep in mind its limitations. A major one is the way it handles shipping: the money that your backers add to their pledges to have their rewards shipped to you will all go towards your total, which represents a percentage of that number which you can't use to actually produce the rewards. What that % is varies from campaign to campaign, but the average is usually around 30%.

This can be mitigated by including digital-only rewards for some of the lower tiers (my campaign's $5 and $10 tier were all-digital), but it's better just to raise your goal amount to cover that number and make sure you don't get stuck without the money you need to send out rewards. Unless you pay for a service like BackerKit (which can link a backer's pledge to a Store where they can add extra items to their pledge, among other handy things), there's no good way to entice backers to pay more after the campaign has ended. Running out of money for shipping has caused major problems for a number of creators who 'successfully' concluded their Kickstarter campaigns, who had to pay the difference out of their own pocket or else delay sending out the rewards for months or years until they could raise more money.

One of Kickstarter's great strengths, on the other hand, is its excellent tracking and browsing systems. The dashboard shows you where people are finding you, and can show you where to focus your marketing efforts. If a certain website or social network is getting you a lot of pledges, make sure to keep posting there! Keeping up a campaign's momentum is critical.



This is an important note-- reach out to friends and let them know what you're planning, so that they can be on board from day one. Whether it's by pledging to your campaign, helping with outreach by promoting you on their own pages, or just retweeting/reblogging/sharing your own promotional posts.


Also a good note! There are a bunch of comics-oriented websites that accept press releases and are willing to cover indie comics. Some may write a story up themselves, while others might require you to submit your own press release and images which they'll post directly. In both cases they need a week or two of lead time.

I can't find the article I used two years ago for my first kickstarter which listed several sites and their submission guidelines, but here are a couple of pages with listings of comic-focused blogs and publications: CrowdCrux list of 20 sites, and this archived reddit thread.

I submitted a press release to Bleeding Cool which went live about a week after my submission, and got a few pledges that way.

Another useful resource for advertising, if you're willing to spend a little money, is TopWebComics-- they have a lot of viewers, and their banner ads can net a LOT of clicks very quickly. Their prices are very reasonable for the amount of views they receive, but they have a months-long queue for their advertising slots, so they'd need to be booked even further in advance.