Kickstarter Post-Mortem

Thanks to all who supported this. Sorry, we didn't get enough to push it over the line. But I've included links so you can get your books anyway. Meanwhile, there's all sorts of upside to this...

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One last look at what that might have been. I’ve already gotten new ideas for covers and titles. Next is a soft-release…

The Heart of Review is Humility

Also called: Eating Humble Pie.

While it’s easy enough to just toss out probable reasons or benign explanations for why something didn’t work, it’s far more rewarding to dig in and discover what you can.

What we learned here is key. But we aren’t done. The idea behind these is to set these Kickstarters to be recurring mini-events about four times a year. And we’ll learn from each one.

Let’s start with a model to compare this to.

There are three points to online success (which mirrors real-world success):

1. Provide a clear offer.

2. Show up consistently.

3. Build a community.

Providing a Clear Offer

On the face of it, I produced a longish sales page (revised a half-dozen times, after several complete re-writes.)

But it was probably too long. Maybe, maybe not. Because the people that showed up I mostly knew, at least by name. Because they were on my list for the most part - unless they found me on Kickstarter. Those were quite few, actually. For most of the length of this campaign, it was pretty much five of my subscribers and five from somewhere else.

In Kickstarter itself, there were 9 people who had signed up to be notified, but only one who backed me (for $1).

And that video was only watched four times. Which included starting it at all.

Of the various tiers, only two wanted the $30 set of three ebooks, the other eleven were happy with just the PDF Workbook, and then would increase their funding a few more bucks once I sent them an email.

Technically, with the two late subscribers who missed the deadline, their $30 would have taken the campaign over the edge.

In any case, the biggest mistake was clicking the wrong button that made the project go live without any pre-promotion. About four days of crickets. So the clear offer then has to arrive when people are expecting it. Soft launches aren’t as effective as even a little heads-up before opening the doors.

Show Up Consistently

This hasn’t been a problem with my output. I am there three times a week. During this campaign, I also sent out emails to my consistent newsletter readers - 6 updates over the 17 days, so another email which came out every three days. Regular newsletter-readers got these in between my scheduled ones.

While I, like you, dislike random hype-emails. Purposed emails, ones that tell the story of the release itself, can be made interesting. I know of some who email daily. But I don’t personally keep up with anyone who sends more than weekly, mostly because they don’t send out a quality newsletter with a story in it. Meaning - they don’t tell a story every time. And most marketers seem to be writing to other marketers, not readers.

I have no problem being a prolific author. I used to write-proof-revise-release one or two fiction short stories a week, plus the occasional collection/anthology as these built up into thick enough paperbacks. And meanwhile always sent a weekly newsletter out. 166 books in three years is just over one per week.

Now it’s three newsletters weekly, one of them being a simple copy/paste of earlier works. The one you are reading is to keep up with my current research into the writerpreneur area. These also tend to be book chapters.

So this area is the one that kept its head during the campaign.

Build Your Community

On the face of this - there are few writeups on Substack that effectively deal with this. Mainly, I think, is because there are no metrics that track the grown of any author’s community. What’s being pushed is subscribers and paid subscribers.

But those are all after the fact.

The trick is the two gulfs present - getting people to subscribe (relatively simple - write great content consistently) and getting subscribers to pay for the privilege of getting your work (much harder and less documented).

The main approach to this is to insist on offering your paid subscription model to your existing readers. And Substack itself is set up to automatically prompt you to ask them to both subscribe and to go paid.

There are some who say to have a weekly chat, to build up into a private Discord/Slack/Circle group for the paid members.

If you have only a tiny few paid subscribers, then there’s no one to chat with, particularly. On the other hand, that can be that “if you build it, they will come.” Too many successes I’ve seen manifest simply because the podcaster with no listeners kept going, kept visualizing and performing as if there were a massive audience out there already…

Is Their an Alternative Model?

I’m suspecting the conventional model is wrong here. And that is the core of good research: looking for commonalities and boiling these down to evergreen models.

At its core, the three elements above are correct.

But very inefficient. If you get the subject wrong, you’re offer has no takers - fail. If you get the price wrong, then you get few takers, or you lose your shirt on production. If you don’t promote to the right audience, you get no takers. And there’s no telling which one or which combination it is.

Suppose you simply apply the Content Marketing supposition that you need to build an audience and then ask them. Well, that model has usually required between 18 months to 2 years before you get enough audience to develop a viable demand. There are many reports of people writing on Substack to have many paid subscribers within six months.

Or - you can use the Substack model of simply creating content that you are most interested and emotionally involved in and posting these consistently to your newsletter, as well as being active on Notes for a limited time every day.

This follows the copywriting datum that you headline and your subheading (first paragraph) act as filters for readers. They self-select. And this is true for newsletters - you’ll attract people who like your work.

What’s interesting with this last idea is that it really is a Give-Ask-Accept model.

Amanda Palmer: Give-Ask-Accept

Amanda Palmer is probably the breakthrough in this. She came from a life of learning to ask instead of forcing to buy. She escaped from her straitjacket big label music contract and started giving her music away. Then letting her true fans contribute what they wanted. She started a Kickstarter for her next album and set a record of nearly $2 million from 25,000 fans. That got her an invitation to a TED talk:

And the success of that talk going viral excited someone to offer her a book deal, where she told her longer story, as laid out in her “The Art of Asking”.

In her book’s Appendix, there is a brilliant article by Maria Popova, where she points out that there is a natural cycle of open-handed giving and receiving that has been noticed through our cultural histories, although not particularly popular in our current day:

In Buddhism and other ancient Eastern traditions, there is a beautiful concept connoted by the Pali word dāna (pronounced DAH-nah ), often translated as the virtue of generosity. But at its heart is something far more expansive—a certain quality of open-handedness in dynamic dialogue with need and organically responsive to it. The practice of dāna has sustained the Buddhist tradition for two and a half millennia—monks give their teachings freely, and the lay people who benefit from them give back to the monks by making sure their sustenance needs are met.

In a sense, dāna is the art of not-having-to-ask—a natural and intuitive recognition that the energies poured into creating meaning (and what is art if not the making of meaning?) must be replenished in order for that stuff of substance to continue flowing through and fertilizing the ecosystem of interconnectedness in which all beings are entwined.

The cutative approach is to somehow give only with the expectation of a certain monetary sum in return - or, preferably, in advance. And so our businesses revolve around discounts and limited offers - rather than open-handed help and assistance without asking anything directly in return.

Certainly in Cialdini’s “Influence”, there is the principle that when you give gifts, this then sets the receiver as somehow indebted to the giver.

Before the direct mail expenses became too high, Nightingale-Conant would send free cassette-sets in the mail, knowing that it was a year-long process to get that first purchase from that individual. But in their experience, the certainty was there. Their metrics proved it. Life-long buyers resulted.

Come forward to today’s idea of “pay what you want” as Gumroad and others have implemented. Your value is much higher. And so the person is always ready to give at some point in the future.

So we then return to the idea of giving far more in advance than we expect. Substack has stories of people who simply found themselves getting paid subscribers “out of the blue” after their free readers were finding valuable materials given to them open-handedly and simply wanted to return the favor.

How Does This Build Community?

It’s what you ask.

Your readers know much about you from your newsletters - but too often, they are themselves a mystery. Once you start interacting with them on a personal level, then you can tailor your offers to those readers on a personal basis.

But the attitude has to go beyond the concept that the “audience” is a neutral and buying force out there, completely anonymous.

Let’s go back to the idea that a person has a certain number (on average) of people they can effectively network with. Dunbar’s number has this at 150. Authors usually sell only 250 books, which is explained as the immediate number of friends, associates, and family that they can influence. Plugging Kelly’s True Fans concept into this, let’s set $50K and a suitable annual income level for an author. Then with 250 people on their list sending them $200 every year would make their income.

Of course, that author would want to spend some time regularly interacting with these people to make that happen. And here, then is a possible marketing approach.

Consider the idea of four Kickstarters a year, and each of their True Fans then buying four sets of $50 offers. Or 250 fans on a Patreon tier where they pay about $20 per month. Or combinations of the above, plus buying your regular commercial books at going rates for ebooks, paperbacks, and hardbacks.

This does probably entail a larger number of free subscribers who are then moving on and off paid services. Or perhaps only buying one-off offers, or some combination. Your free newsletters continue unabated meanwhile.

The point is to open-handedly give and enable people to pay what they want to back your success.

ICYMI Offer

I now have the popular Kickstarter 3-ebook set as a bundle available on Gumroad.

Bundle of 3 Writerpreneur books plus beta-course

Also at that site are the PDF Workbook and the mini-course.

Future Plans

• Yes, there will be more Kickstarters. I’d like to ramp up to four mini-event Kickstarters every year.

• Right now, there are some cosmetic updates to these three books and then they’ll be shipped to commercial book outlets as ebooks and paperbacks. There’s also several ebooks I created during this research.

• And I am planning to personally contact each each and every subscriber who routinely opens my emails, just to find out who they are, what they really want, and how I can help them. That will take some time and organization.

• My backend of content on Substack has to be gotten into some sort of order, such that a paid subscription is itself an offer that can be promoted on its own. In addition, I’m considering more research on a Patreon account

• Yes, some sort of Discord/Slack/Circle discussion group is in the offing.

The trick meanwhile is to line these up so that they don’t stumble on each other - just not wanting to thin myself too much.

• And I have three more books to revamp by Walter S. Campbell (as “reviews”) so we can start popularizing his approach to professional writing. Maybe even prove that their’s demand enough for these books such that they bring them back out in print again. As I can, I’m going to work out how to make a correspondence course from his original books. Lots of work in this area.

Do let me know in the comments which of these are interesting for you personally.

And you can always buy me a coffee…

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