Kickstarter - Social Media Suicides
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
Marketing versus the Mob. There's a sizable difference. The Mob is dopamine-addicted. Marketing is built on people buying things.
I'm always researching when I'm not writing/editing/publishing. These next two books are very close to being published - meaning, I'm starting to ramp up my book marketing on the first and each of these may cross-over to the other as well. Again, marketing research. The initial launch is going to be on Kickstarter, and promoted through Substack and my email list.
So I've been researching Substack for references to Kickstarter, and hit the payload. Brad Guigar (@GUIGAR) showed up, I commented - and then he gave a list of articles and podcasts he'd posted on this subject.
I'm still digging through his long list, but a necessary pasture walk gave me the time to listen to Guigar's podcast episodes on Comic Lab (https://comiclab.simplecast.com). One was where cartoonists were in search of traffic compared to audience. Very interesting 1st half. But the following episode was about the Death of Social Media - which then cross-connected into my Kickstarter research.
He and his co-host Dave Kellett did postmortems of their recent Kickstarter campaigns. And of all things, they came up with similar results. Essentially, the three top places that sent them contributors were Kickstarter, Patreon, and Substack. Below these were their own websites, and emails to their lists. Wayyy below those five were - for both of them - anything from any social media.
Brad pointed out that these top three income sources were all commerce-expectant. Meaning that subscribers on these sites are actually expecting to eventually buy something. And I believe it was Brad who mentioned this to his son, a business aficionado, who pointed out the top three are all email-connected.
And those add up to the recurrent strategy of any entrepreneur is to build audience - which means getting their email by asking. They have to have some skin in the game, if they are ready to simply unsubscribe at some point.
This means I am probably going to set up an account on Patreon in addition. And this may be a bridge too far, as I can only do so much with what I have. And my Gumroad work as gone quiet. Mainly because sending out emails and blogging there produced few results compared to Substack. I get dribs and drabs of sales from Gumroad. Even though I have put nearly my whole library up there for sale. (But one thing I did discover is that I can put a single coupon up there that would give 100% discounts - handy for my top-tier of Substack and Patreon.)
This Comic Lab team also dissected the amount of effort they'd put into making videos and posts on social media - only to get negligible results for a high percentage of their marketing hours invested in making them. The numbers said that they could actually have ignored social media and the tiny amount of income wouldn't have affected their total or whether their Kickstarter campaign made its goals and got funded.
That's a massive time suck. Tiny ROI for huge time spend.
Their conclusion, even though they didn't want to accept it, was that social media was dead. The only reticence they had was that there was nothing coming up to replace those social media sites. Like that matters. If you want to jack your dopamine, support high school sports - better yet, pick up a printed classic in any genre - Barnes and Noble always have tons of these at the front of their stores.
Look, marketing is by definition: promoting to existing markets. When you have platforms like our current social media who are selfish and greedy, and are financed by ads, then you don't have buying public visiting there. That said, there was no discussion on whether Facebook ads were effective.
(I have a great deal of distaste on how Facebook scrapes your personal data to give “personalized” ads on their platform. So: I really don't care - I haven't and won't use them except for twice-yearly posting pictures of the calves and cows I have for sale on the local auction - they are posts sent by DM, not ads. So: to me the question is, “Who really cares?”)
There was only one social media that represented well - BlueSky. But why would I go there, since it's just an algorithm-free version of Twitter with a 300 character limit. I'd be better spending my time in figuring out how to set up on Patreon. Again - social media is designed to give you approval and a dopamine fix. Your buying audience markets aren’t found on social media natively.
Now, the other really core point from that podcast episode to cover is: having your own web site. Yes, this is so very far back in Web 1.0 that it's not funny. Our use of this is to build a website backend. Lulu will enable you to send orders to them via WooCommerce, a free plug-in on any Wordpress site. They print and ship for you. Simple. And you get higher royalties by selling at a lower price point than the big ebook distributors.
Boiling today's research down:
1) Invest in Substack, Kickstarter, and Patreon.
2) Set up your own website with for direct sales with a POD sales-delivery connection to Lulu. (If you have Gumroad for your digital downloads, keep it up to date.)
3) Start weaning yourself completely off social media. Discover where your audience buys things at (not just "hangs out") and get your products available there.
4) Get used to email sequences for your book marketing.
Currently available for beta readers (free, with expected typo-reporting):