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[Music] hello everyone and welcome to Rey live re's ongoing series of webinars where we bring on professionals from the world of publishing to show you how to write publish and Market better books my name is Martin I'm part of the team here at rezy based in London uh and we're very pleased to welcome you all here to this live stream uh where we're going to be talking about the wonderful topic of crowdfunding in publishing uh I'm really glad to see so many people have already joined us live uh if it's not too presumptuous please give

us a like uh it will really help us uh go a long way with this well uh I'm not going to beat around the bush too much we have a lot to uh cover in this one it's a big old topic so please let me bring on my guest who is a writer an editor whose work has appeared on slate MTV News and vice amongst other outlets she is the head of publishing for Kickstarter please welcome Ariana leard Ariana how are you hello so happy to be here Martin thank you so much for having me

oh it's an absolute pleasure I believe you are in New York currently I am currently in New York where it is quite chilly but getting a little bit warmer that's good like uh yeah I have some colleagues who are in New York and they were talking about the promise of a of a big storm or a big snowstorm a few weeks ago they just it didn't come it came but then it melted very quickly and that's the absolute worst uh yeah we have some of that where we get excited here in London where there's like

Speckles of snow and yeah very little of it sticks these days um well I'm really glad you can join us uh I believe uh you've been at Kickstarter for quite a few years now yeah five years that's so these days it's PR that's pretty much man and boy a career in a a career in one place nobody really stays anywhere for long so um is it a physical office or is it all remote it was a physical office when I started but since covid the company's gone fully remote that's good well it depends like if

you've got a good setup then it's quite nice all right well uh folks are going to yeah be watching here I'm going to be monitoring uh the comments everyone there's going to be a Q&A at the end if you want to blast over any questions I'll keep an eye on it uh but as soon as Oriana's done with her presentation we'll have a Q&A so uh sit tight Oriana if you need anything I'll be hearing the wings uh yeah just let me know thank you all right well so hello yep I'm Oriana leard I'm the

head of publishing at Kickstarter um do you want to share the slides yes beautiful um so here I am this is me uh you can find all of our wonderful publishing projects kickstarter.com publishing um you can find me on most social platforms at Oriana BK L YN for Brooklyn um this will be I'll talk for probably 15ish minutes depending how long-winded I am I'll give you a quick uh look at my my career what sets Kickstarter apart in the sort of crowdfunding landscape What U some stats about how publishing has done on Kickstarter why you

might consider this kind of uh crowdfunding campaign I'll do a handful of case studies um a uh a slide bonus slide about some very cool Innovative reward ideas and then I will open it up for all of your questions um as Martin says I'm not going to watch the chat while I'm talking because I get very distracted um but please I'm happy for all of your questions that I'm sure we'll get through uh at the end so this is a little bit of My Strange publishing Journey um I started my career way back at random

house before uh they had even absorbed penguin um I was a news editor for Alice obscura and MTV News I was a Matchmaker for ghost writers at Gotham ghost writers I worked for literary agencies book packagers um and then this on the on the right is my book that I published about five years ago it's grew out of a long running reporting project on underground and DIY art spaces all across Brooklin and the rest of New York City um yeah so I've been on all sides of the publishing landscape I used Rey a whole lot

I was a freelance editor for a long time before I came to Kickstarter so um definitely a fan of the services here so as I said I like to start with sort of what what makes Kickstarter unique um kickstarters are mission is to bring creative projects to life that is everything that we do comes back to that goal um we believe so strongly in that mission that in I think 2015 kstar a reincorporated as a public benefit Corporation um this isn't something that I knew about before I worked here but it's a a business charter

fairly strict that requires us to consider our impact on all the world with all of our choices um we can't be coerced by shareholders stockholders investors to chase profits if that comes at the expense of our mission which is again to bring creative projects to life so we're essentially a mission-driven for-profit organization uh we also it's a very progressively run organization we have strong values for diversity we do um diversity surveys we have pledge to keep um the uh I forget the terminology but the highest and the lowest salaries um have to stay within a

certain range of each other we donate 5% of our after tax earnings every year to arts and culture organizations and organizations fighting inequality um so it's a good company I feel pretty pretty honored to be a part of it on the more technical side kickstarter's funding model is all Oro that means that if you set out to raise $10,000 and you only raise $4,000 you don't get any of the dollars um people think that that seems scary but it was actually designed with creative people in mind the idea is that throughout your campaign you're going

to make a lot of promises about the thing you're going to create the rewards associated with it your timeline your shipping your budget and so if you get to the end and you've only got part of the money that you need you're actually in a very bad spot you're going to either have to sell fun to come up with the rest of it maybe produce an inferior product maybe not fulfill it at all all of which are are really bad outcomes so our goal is to make sure that nobody's trying to bring their work to

life with an incomplete budget another thing that I think is really important about Kickstarter is that we're in the business of giving you your audience uh we've been doing this long since long before um Everybody sort of realized that all the work they've been doing building up audiences on various social platforms can disappear in the blink of an eye when an algorithm is tweaked or uh changes are made internally so when you run a Kickstarter campaign during the campaign we give you a ton of demographic information um to help you figure out whether your Outreach

and promotion is working well uh we share where people are from what kind of device they're using to book where they've seen uh you know ads for your campaign things like that and then after a project is over we give you immediately everybody's first name last name and email address so these are folks that we expect you are going to be absorbing into the Greater Community around your work and that's an audience that we want you to be able to keep having access to long after the campaign is over finally kickstarter's fee is 5% this

is an industry setting fee that we did when we launched and have never raised um we take 5% of completed projects so if you run a campaign that doesn't reach its funding goal you don't owe anybody any money on top of this our payment processor stripe takes like a 3 to 4% variable that's based on where all the bank accounts are around the world so for a Kickstarter campaign if you budget 10% for fees you'll be more than covered and you'll be paying a lot less than uh many of the other places where you might

go to sell your writing do you want to go to that okay thanks Martin uh so some stats about Kickstarter reads which encompasses here publishing comics and journalism so kind of anything in the world of words uh we've had since Kickstarter launched in 2009 98,000 projects have launched $610 million have been pledged by more than 4 million individual backers 2023 was our first fourth best year ever in a row in publishing and Comics that's also true for games uh the current success rate for these categories is 63% which is pretty good it's higher than the

site average but another metric my favorite metric actually that we love to look at is projects with at least 25 backers we think this is an important indicator because 25 backers is a little bigger than your mom your best friend the folks who are sort of obligated to donate to any kind of project you put in front of them um so you know 25 backers means you're you're reaching outside that inner circle you're taking the project seriously you're marketing it well um so as it says the success rate in my categories for projects with at

least 25 backers is 85% so tremendously High well I think that's double actually the site average so let's talk about some of the benefits of literary crowdfunding or why would you do something like this Kickstarter is a platform that's designed to help you share the story of your creative work of course that means you're going to detail the plot of the book that you're writing but it also lets you talk about who you are what brought you to this work what inspires you your collaborators your budgets your timeline all the sort of the whole story

of what it is you're doing how you're going to do it when you're going to do it and why Kickstart is a platform that helps you connect directly with your audience this is something that is really not available uh in most other parts parts of the publishing landscape um you can talk to your your uh readers and your fans before the campaign to get them excited about it you can work with them during the campaign you can have surveys that say should we go with the blue cover or the red cover if we get you

know $1,000 over our goal what kind of extra rewards would you like to see um and you can talk to them as I said afterward um this is a way to keep you you know giving you that direct line between you know readers and writers between authors and their fans a Kickstarter campaign can help you build awareness of your work um you know through the course of the campaign you're going to be shouting from the rooftops to both the audience that you have and the audience that you want so you can turn a release of

a new book or a reissue of a previous book or something like that can really make it into a moment build up you know your brand awareness and Market it uh in all the ways that that you can um Kickstarter will you can allows you to sell through pre-orders or sell through your backlist um for legal reasons you can't actually call it pre-orders but a lot of authors run their campaigns in that way the idea being that you know the book is written it's edited it's proof R type set ready to send to the printer

so you're Gathering funds to pay those production costs and then through the rewards if you have other books you can sell them as individuals bundles um helps you get rid of that Overstock that you might have sitting in your your garage kickstar is a great way to test out an ambitious idea because as I said if you run a camp and it doesn't fund all you've lost is your time so if you think there's an audience for moving into a new genre doing a big compilation an anthology with other authors something else that's bigger weirder

more ambitious than you might be able to um stomach doing without having the benefit of assessing your audience and getting your money upfront Kickstarter is a terrific place to try to make that happen and then finally Kickstarter helps you Delight your readers with something unique you know know your your project will be to fund one main item but all of the rewards can take you in so many different directions as I said I've got a slide at the end that talks about some really unique and cool reward ideas but it doesn't have to be um

you know just swag there's all kinds of things that you can do to bring your audience and your readers into the creative world of your work and make them really excited to support you on this journey so now I'll go into some case studies this is obviously the place to start I imagine a large number of you may have first heard about Kickstarter when Brandon Sanderson ran his campaign uh last year this is the highest funded Kickstarter campaign ever not just publishing campaign it is actually more than double the amount of the previous High highest

funded project which was for watches there has never before been a publishing project I think even in the top 20 so to Karen up into that top spot was very exciting um if you are not familiar with with the campaign uh this was called a year of Sanderson um over the course of the early pandemic days Brandon wrote four new neverbe seen novels and so he created this whole campaign for all of 2023 his backers would get a package from him every single month four of those would be these brand new books and the others

were um themed swag boxes uh that were themed around the various worlds that he writes really high-end beautiful items um the was a major major project with massive production infrastructure um Brandon was not putting all these things in boxes for his almost 200,000 backers in his own house he's got a staff of close to 80 people and a warehouse out in Salt Lake City um he also came to the project with Incredible Community engagement he's a very well-known author um and he's known for his close interaction with his fans he's got half a million YouTube

subscribers and he does videos all the time um so while this is an incredible aspirational beautiful campaign that we were very pleased to support and have on our platform I don't want to set the expectation that this is the kind of thing that every author might be able to do but it is one of our shining stars so it seems like a good place to start um Brandon having done that kicked off a huge bump in special editions uh we're seeing these in all sorts of genres but in you know books overall uh these are

people who are really elevating these sort of books as art objects we're seeing all kinds of nerdy print production stuff we've got spot gloss and foil and sprayed edges and ribbon bookmarks and Vellum artart inserts it's really really exciting and also the kind of project that is perfect to fund on Kickstarter because getting the money up front understanding what size print run you want to make um is really handy when you're spending a lot of money on you know flashy production um another nice campaign recently uh Matt Denman ran a project for Dungeon Crawler Carl

he's a very popular lit RPG writer there's a huge games community on Kickstarter so lit RPG is a really nice crossover from publishing that captures a lot of the same audience um these books have been released in various bits and Bobs in ebooks and audio books and small collections so this was the first time the whole thing was collected in print um Matt did additional swag and book Advance book enhancements via his stretch goal so he said if we raise this much you're going to get a hard cover book if we raise this much more

we're adding a signature this much after that a ribbon bookmark this that the other thing like many many things um as the uh campaign climbed higher and higher he also had very cool quirky rewards among my favorites for $666 uh he promised to kill you off in his next book and for $777 he vowed to let you live um so this was a really fun campaign he took it with a lot of joy and it it went very very well it's a good example of the genre fiction we see on the site of which there

is a lot sci-fi fantasy Mysteries romance queer books we also see literary fiction really kind of any kind of project you can think think of you can fund on Kickstarter um so these are just some of the nice projects that we've had recently that I thought would be good books to share there's also plenty of non-fiction um this was one that I really liked Sky Warren wrote the bestselling author next door um she's a subject matter expert with a deep audience in sort of like how to for writers she is also herself a best-selling novelist

um catering to a really engaged readership uh the kinds of people that are likely to be on Kickstarter already looking at other books um this is a cool campaign in that she funded multiple formats at once paperback card cover ebook audiobook also these workbooks um so and there was a real sort of Choose Your Own Adventure uh vibe to the campaign you could pick whichever method you wanted to receive your book in ultimately um and yes she did beautifully $142,000 raised from just Shia 1500 backers there's a lot of other kinds of non-fiction that we

see all the time um there's a lot of cookbooks sort of business Guru kinds of project Memoirs um self-help in kind of all of its formats really anybody who's writing in non-fiction and has a good line to Their audience can find really good success here another area I love to see we've got a very strong community in children's books um this is a beautiful one the wonderful world of Zuri Rose uh we this was by a woman marginalized Community um and she wrote this whole story inspired by her life she was a floral arranger for

high-end weddings so there's in addition to being a lovely story uh she's got all these stem focused elements about boty and uh flowers sort of themed throughout the the book and she also had unique rewards you could get custom flower arrangements you could get little um details I think she had PDFs of like tell her your favorite flower and she would tell you some fun facts about them um so really bringing in that sort of that vibe to the project and we see children's books of All Sorts but really particularly the sort of our voices

own voices stuff we see a lot from like language culture and food of you know non-american societies a lot of projects for queer kids for disabled kids um the kinds of books that have been largely ignored by the the traditional publishing industry um tend to be the ones that can find a really good home at Kickstarter in children's books and Beyond so here's my bonus slide on rewards I will say again swag is lovely people really like custom merch but you don't have to doing a Kickstarter doesn't mean that you need to turn yourself into

a merch production facility you can do all sorts of things that are not going to cost you money to package and ship custom playlists editorial reviews writing backers into the story like Matt Denman did whatever your skill set is you can do consultations whether that's storytelling social media you know business stuff whatever humor writing um we see lots of people commissioning original art often from their friends people in their community that want to donate you know to help them Reach their goal uh people do book clubs whether of their book or other books like it

lunch parties you can do virtual or IRL cooking classes for sure um you can get other sorts of homemade Goods or handmade Goods um again often either themed to your project and or made by small businesses or folks sort of in your community we see this a lot with the romance novels that's where the homemade bath bomb came from also like candles that have a specific scent that factors into you know the story itself that sort of thing we're seeing a lot of Ip Crossover with stuff like tarot cards tabletop board games Illustrated Maps things

like that and of course with a lot of the children's books you're seeing handmade toys so those are just a few ideas my I think that rewards are so Central to the kickstarter proposition and that's the place where you can really come up with the most interesting and creative things that will be fun for you to make and also really really exciting for your readers to have finally here are some helpful links uh as I said the publishing Camp uh the publishing category on the site I would say my number one advice if you even

considering running a Kickstarter someday go to that link right now find five campaigns that you like and back them even for a buck or two follow find and follow those creators out in the world start getting a sense of how people are talking about their campaigns how people are running their project the Cadence of their uh updates the types of rewards they're offering figure out what everybody's doing unabashedly steal all of the best ideas and incorporate them into your own project uh I have a curated publish Creator tips page that's got a number of videos

just like this one of my face in various screens I've also got a lot of articles that I've commissioned around how to write a press release for your campaign how to build your audience how to promote your project I just had one uh from a youth Comics librarian out in California she wrote an article about how to get your Kickstarter funded book into a library and why you would want to um so there's lots of tips and tricks on that page that will be really helpful of course the kickstarter Creator handbook that'll take you through

every single step of your crowdfunding journey and then finally we have an experts page um It Is by no means exhaustive and you should certainly do your own research but it's got a lot of organizations and companies that you know do print production vinyl pressing make uh you know playing cards like all of the different uh elements of things that you might include in your campaign and some uh tips for folks who might be able to help create those things for you so that the end of my that's the end of my talk um I'm

going to drink some water and then open up the surely uh endless Scroll of comments and questions and I'm looking forward to answering all of them as best I can oh great well uh there have already been a few questions rolling in but I suppose for the folks who don't know exactly what the sort of shape and timeline of a of a Kickstarter campaign is like who just start with well what do people normally crowd fund for what are they looking to pay for normally when they when they come to kicks yeah totally so you

know I mean I do the publishing category so it's a lot of books a lot of people funding one book uh a series of books an anniversary edition an Omnibus you know various iterations paperback you know print book an ebook and audiobook that sort of thing um the the easiest way to do it is once you've got the book pretty close to done um and you just want to get the money to send it off to the printer so funding your print production costs um we also see lots of people funding earlier stages you know

their editorial costs their design costs um those sorts of things and so so long as Kickstarter basically it's just a forum for you to make a compact with your readers and your supporters so if you say the book is ready to go once I get these funds I'll send it to the printer it's going to be in your hands in three months or six months great if you say to them I'm still in the writing stages it's going to take me several more months to finish the writing then you know here are all the stages

of editorial and pre-production all of that you're going to have books in your hands in two years if people are like hey that's fine excited to support you on the way then that's great um so it can really you know a Kickstarter campaign must create something so there has to be one sort of like Central Focus um but it can be at any point in your journey whatever it is that you can get your readers to support I suppose for a lot of folks like the number one Baseline reward is the actual book itself right

you're paying for this as soon as we hit this it'll allow me to complete the book edit it publish it and you'll receive that first one and then could you sort of explain to me like um where the the idea of tiered rewards yeah so when you go to a Kickstarter campaign you know that's exactly right you've got you know your project video your project story and on the side you've got all of your rewards so those can be cost as little as a dollar as much as $10,000 that's the highest rewards here you can

offer on Kickstarter and you can offer anything you want in uh that anything that you think your your readers and your audience will be interested in I typically recommend starting with your main book tier and then building out above and below that um given the uh increasingly Sky Rising uh shipping costs it's often wise to not send anything physical below the book tier so you can do your digital rewards there whether that's as I said things like the custom playlist you could do a pretty PDF of 10 other books I recommend that are along the

same lines as mine um you can do I've seen people do sort of like digital recordings of notes from the field or outakes from the project um you could write a separate story things like that I would do all of that I wouldn't write a story for less than the book tier unless it's very short and very easy um and then when you're building above the sky's the limit you can make anything you want you can conceive anything you want you could do partner rewards you can do um I you know experience rewards really there's

that that's I think where you know the real excitement of the conceiving the campaign can come in I we got a question here from uhak weo uh what needs to be in place before utilizing Kickstarter website Facebook groups is there a sequential list available I suppose there probably is like a myth that I need to CFT from my book I'm going to put it on Kickstarter and you guys are G to somehow magically funnel hundreds of interested backers uh to come to me but I suppose it isn't that simple otherwise I'd be kickstarting we'd all

be very rich yeah no it is true putting your campaign up on Kickstarter does not alas mean that you will be showered by magical internet money um that isn't quite how things go uh you do need to bring some amount of an audience with you or you're not likely to be able to reach your goal the kickstarter algorithm works on attention so if you can bring people if you can sort of like Galvanize that attention at the beginning our system will see oh a lot of people are looking at this project we should keep showing

it to more and more people but a Rough Guide um we'll we track you can see this in your creator dashboard what percentage of your backings are coming through your efforts and which are coming from the kickstarter ecosystem for a publishing campaign you can say about 15 to 30% are likely to come through Kickstarter so that's not insignificant there's a good that's a good amount of um people and money that will come just by nature of being on the platform but it can't the whole story you definitely do need to have your own audience and

ways to reach them another way that I often say this and sorry this is kind of corny everybody thinks about the funding side of crowdfunding but you also really need to be thinking about the crowd because that's what you're doing with this kind of fundraising you're figuring out who is in your crowd where are they how do you find them what do they want how can you offer things that are going to get them to come in and join this journey that you're taking um so to the original question do you have to have a

Facebook account no but you do have to have ways in place where you can reach the people who are likeliest to be interested in your work um in fact these days social media is actually on the decline and we're seeing more uh newsletters and smaller groups kind of take over but you probably do want to have a more robust social strategy uh using whichever platforms you tend to already be on um there are probably no bad tactics when it comes to promotion so whatever Avenues are available to you you want to make good use of

them because I know like a lot of people who do start tend to um launch their campaign sort of with an existing list of backers sometimes maybe what it's like family I have a friend who ran I think a Kickstarter campaign for a kids book recently I think you launch it and then iide did I think it's quite daunting to see that 0% backed number is there is there sort of a an advised amount that you should kind of have already sort of banked away before you you launch a camp campaign um I wouldn't quite

think about it like that but I would say yeah you know you want you want to have a really strong first day that's an excellent predictor of crowdfunding success not to mention being very good for messaging and especially for morale one of the ways that Kickstarter helps you do that is you can put up a pre-launch page once your campaign has been approved for launch and you can have that up for as long as you want um it's a simple cover page that sits at the same URL where your project will eventually live it's got

your title sub title Project image and a button that says notify me on launch the idea being if you get a bunch of people following you they'll all get a system email from Kickstarter once you go live um and the conversion rate from pre-launch followers to project backers is quite high so that's a good way to help make sure that you're going to have that strong first day get that attention start the ball rolling really positively uh Carol's asking do we need to have a following before starting a Kickstarter campaign or can we start without

any followers it's sort of I guess run from that yeah I mean it's a similar question uh I think that it is a good idea to have some ways of accessing the audience that you have or the audience that you want I would say you know it also depends on the size of the project you're trying to fund if you're an emerging author who's only got a few dozen people on your mailing list now is probably not the time to try to roll out a deluxe leatherbound three volume Omnibus for tens of thousands of dollars

so you want to make sure that your ambition matches your reach so from the successful campaigns that you've seen from I guess maybe firsttime authors ones maybe with a limited platform uh have any particular places been have you seen whether any kind of place has been fruitful for it whether it's like forums or I guess uh reader communities or like do do people advertise on Facebook or something yeah sure I mean as I said there are kind of no bad tactics there are a lot of Facebook groups for authors um authors broadly and authors using

Kickstarter specifically I'm sure that there are similar communities on Discord and on Instagram and on YouTube and you know any place where you are otherwise gathering with other readers and writers um you're likely to find people talking about their crowdfunding projects uh oh I think JM just wants a bit of clarification what do donators get out of it or the backers if they get X they get X Plus why like the stock market or X if the project fails no it's nothing like that they get rewards so you can uh when you go to a

Kickstarter campaign you choose which reward you want to get and then if the project is successfully funded that's the thing that the uh the Creator will send to you uh okay I've got another little question here um Rand uh just wait let's see uh does Kickstarter have adverts is there any way I guess to uh to beef up your your presence on the platform um not as such uh you if you can't like pay Kickstarter to get more exposure um we Ki Kickstarter is actually a fairly manual promotion process we have a whole curatorial team

they are the ones who are deciding uh you know which projects to put in newsletters and to share on our socials and that sort of thing um there is also a lot of algorithmic recommendation um there's macros and carousels across the site every system email has a row of recommendations across the bottom and so as I was saying that algorithm functions purely by uh attention so if your project is getting a lot of attention it's likelier to get elevated into you know higher in search results into these macros that sort of thing an Miller has

a question uh how how does one determine how much to ask for so I guess this is about setting that initial goal because you have all your stretch goals and stuff but what's what is a sort of proven strategy for setting that initial goal yeah well there's probably not a proven strategy and uh it's certainly this is going to vary widely based on who you are your platform and your reach the kind of project you're funding um but the first answer is you need to make a a very good budget you need to get quotes

from printers and understand you know how big is the book how heavy is the book how many pages what is your production cost what are your shipping costs what rewards are you making how much are your costs going to be there that sort of thing um there's in fact that um Creator tips article um Creator tips site that I mentioned I have an article on there um how to create an expert Kickstarter budget written by Russell Niti who has run I think 62 campaigns for his Books and Comics um it's got a workshop a worksheet

in there so that you can start plugging in some numbers and getting a sense of your total um so that's the first step figure out how much money do you need to actually do this project the way that you want to um when determining your funding goal as I think I said a moment ago the next thing to determine is can are you capable given your audience your platform your network and your means of reaching them to get to that amount of money making sure there's a fit between your ambition what you want to do

and how much it's going to cost and you reach where your people are and how you're going to bring them into the campaign that's a question that only you can answer because you are the one who knows you know you're going to need to do a real honest assessment of who you have in your network what your methods are going to be to reach beyond that and see what you think is is going to be likely for you with an All or Nothing platform you don't want to run your campaign too aspirationally you do want

to try to find the number that's going to give you the minimum amount that you need to make this thing come true that is also achievable based on all the things that you can do okay Jasmine's asking for a bit of insight is there an ideal time or a month of the year in in which to launch a campaign yeah so the answer is it depends the answer is going to be it depends for probably all of these questions I will tell you this I'll tell you the basic ways that things run on Kickstarter um

January is pretty slow people are sort of recovering from all the chaos of the holidays February also kind of slow things to start start to tip up in March March April May extremely busy they sort of start tipping downward again in June um we all sort of forever run on an academic calendar so June July August tend to slow way down September and October are really really busy again and the first half of November once you hit that sort of midpoint in November it drops way off it is very difficult to run a Kickstarter campaign

um during the holidays it's just really hard to break through all the noise and everybody who's trying to buy things in December wants something wants to have something in hand that they can put under the tree next to the monora Etc and since a Kickstarter has a much longer fulfillment timeline than that it's not an ideal thing to be getting in December all that said there are pros and cons to being on the platform when it's busy as well as when it's slow when it's busy there's a lot more potential backers just sort of running

around and casually browsing but there's a lot more projects that are competing for those eyes so if you run it during a slower time you can kind of have a bigger fish in a small pond impact because there are just fewer other creators competing for all the people who might be considering backing a project right now um okay I've got a question here from Ed who I think sat on his caps lock and then um Let It Go a little bit after asking which genres do best on kickstarts you mentioned uh a few ones like

a fantasy and some literary but it also seems like a lot of stuff with maybe a strong but Niche audience seems to do well there yeah that's exactly right there are strong built-in communities for genre fiction but yeah I I started when I came to Kickstarter I was actually tasked with growing our journalism category and the way I would get the this question in those areas are people would ask me like what US states have the highest number of you know journalism backers for Kickstarter and the answer was New York uh Illinois and California but

that was because the three largest ever journalism campaigns had been for local media outlets in Brooklyn uh Chicago La so there's a bit of a you know this sort of it feeds itself if you uh are anybody who's going to be bringing in an audience that is going to increase the number of backers who are on Kickstarter right now looking for mystery novels or Memoirs or self-help books or you know that sort of thing it can be a really good place for a niche audience we try to cultivate that there's a lot of backers who

are really into like sort of witchy and new Agy type things so every nove or October we run a prompt called witch starter we encourage people to launch all of their spooky projects at the same time I think this is not 100% confirmed yet but I think we're going to do our first romance prompt in July encouraging people to do all their sexy sweaty books in the summer um so there's lots of different kinds of audiences that you can tap into um that are already extent on Kickstarter yeah I think it's you know a lot

of folks are sort of asking about where you get your audience and I think if you are looking to self-publish as a lot of folks watching I think are interested in it's pretty much the same thing we had someone on here previously talking about they written a memoir about their time uh their Adventure on a tall ship going across the Pacific or something and you know this is sort of book that will appeal to folks who love tallships uh people who are fans of Patrick O'Brien of the Master and Commander series and so it's a

matter of like going to those communities he went and found uh the tall ships of America organization and spoke at their Gala uh you know you go to groups who are big fans of Patrick O'Brien the people who run you know podcasts about this sort of thing folks who you know starve for Content or interested in this sort of thing and you pitched them this idea I've got this great thing you you know you if you know who these people are right then you know ideally know where they live and it's just a matter of

going there and then I suppose Kickstarter is the platform where you can send them instead of going like give me your email and maybe you know in about five months time when it's all done I'll send you an email and you can buy it this feels like it brings people in like all the like all the crowdfunding platforms you're making everyone you know pass of the eventure and the experience and they get updates about where you know they are with the production and the writing of the book and sort of gets everyone invested I suppose

it also turns those initial backers and investors into you know your street team your angelist yep yeah you're doing my job for me should I I can just turn turn my computer off and you can just do the rest T I just love the sound of my own voice as folks as folks in the uh in the audience will be able to attest if they turn up um some procedural ones here Carolyn Bowman do donators just put their donation on a credit card or they're backing it's just through card yeah anybody in the world can

back a Kickstarter campaign from anywhere if you have a credit card or a bank account um you can only launch a Kickstarter campaign if you have a bank account in a stripe approved country um and there are some that are not I think Cuba I think Iran I think India um those sorts of things but yeah the donations if if you are coming in as a backer you just need to have a credit card uh Melanie asks how does the author get the donor funds through PayPal direct bank deposit is it basically as soon as

you hit your goal does the money drop or is it a certain date yeah so the way the money actually works on Kickstarter is that during the course of the campaign no Money Changes hands if I pledge to your if I P $25 to your campaign stripe is going to peek in they're going to confirm that I am who I say I am that I have access to the bank account I've put in and it's got at least $25 in it then at the end of The Campaign once it has successfully reached its goal Stripes

got a two-e grace period where they now go and they start pulling all the money from all the places then they're going to take out their fee they're going to send Kickstarter R fee and they're going to deposit the rest in the lump sum directly to the bank that you have put in to your creator account which you have to have done before you can launch uh Annie and quite a few other people are asking about the tax implications is this considered an income is yeah how how does the tax work on this I am

like explicitly not allowed to give tax or accounting advice especially an international audience I will say we just there's a I should put this in my helpful links there's a Kickstarter has our own project updates which is our clever word for our blog uh the last article we published has a little bit of tax advice although like at the top in all caps it says you need to talk to an accountant about this to figure out the specifics of your country your state your income all of those sorts of things uh on other one Leonardo

asks what are the liability implications with regards to the contribution I suppose if uh yeah now get now we're starting to grill you if the backing gets uh you know fully funded the uh uh the author or the C the campaign starter gets the funds uh is there any recourse for a backer to go like they never deliver me the yeah um it doesn't happen very often but you know the answer is no that's sort of when you make a pledge you have to click some boxes that say I understand that Kickstarter is not a

store that rewards are not guaranteed I am deciding that I'm going to trust this person that they're going to do the things that they say they're going to do um the real thing for a Creator that's on theine line is your reputation if you don't do the thing now you've got all of these people who believed in you with their dollars who are going to be really disappointed if you can't create the thing that you promised so you know it really is about creating a sort of like a level of trust and a a compact

between the person offering the thing and the person agreeing to support that thing with their money uh carollyn asks what's the typical length of a campaign or maybe like tend to be the sweet Spa totally you can run it anywhere from 1 to 60 days we recommend about 30 days kind of about four weeks um most campaigns the majority of Your Action is going to happen the first week and the last week there's almost always a sort of plateau period in the middle um but we think it you do need that amount of time to

sort of like make sure there's enough space for all of your activations to come to fruition in the early days of Kickstarter back in 2009 you'd post your campaign on your Facebook page everyone you know would see it you'd be pretty much done it's not really so easy these days you have to be pushing in a lot of directions in a lot of different places many people will not see any of your posts even if you pay to boost them you'll also likely be looking to Source press um maybe you'll be doing interviews on somebody

else's blog or podcast or YouTube channel so you want to make sure there's enough time to get all of that stuff to like come to fruition um and we think about four weeks also so you know the sort of a well-run Kickstarter it's kind of functioning like a marketing campaign and that like tangible urgency is going to help Propel backers uh Propel creators to and often beyond their funding goal but in order to do that you really need this like strong concentrated burst of attention and maintaining that level of enthusiasm for much longer than a

month is going to be really exhausting and it's gonna kind of negate its impacts yeah like I say about Facebook there was there was a point in time where everybody seemed to be on Facebook maybe about 10 years ago and yeah like everybody would check it every day and there would be people sending out crowdfunding campaigns and yeah everybody you know would see it and now if I had to ask everyone I went to school with and all my aunts and stuff yeah I wouldn't know where to go Facebook's probably good if you got a

lot of you know aunts and and grandparents it depends where your people are exactly yeah uh let me see if I can dig up any more um let's oh you know just wants clarification do backers receive their money again if campaign amount is not reached so do you is the money taken out it when you back something is the money taken out of your account then or are you sort of pledging to sort of pay once it's complete it's a pledge yeah the money doesn't move until the campaign is fully funded by by putting in

a pledge you are obligated to pay that money if the campaign reaches its goal but if it doesn't no money was ever taken from you so it doesn't need to be given back all right so like if say for example you up on the internet and you've been drinking hard and then you see a campaign and maybe you pledge a couple thousand bucks you can always kind of Welch on it well you can modify your pledge during the course of the campaign but once the campaign is over if you've pledged that money you've pledged that

money it's gone yeah uh cool let me see if I can find just a few more here um let's see Nikki has a question I understand crowdfunded books are often not eligible for self-published book literary awards is this something you've heard of Ariana it's not something I've heard of and actually I mean I don't know I'm sure any award can have their own um specifications for what's allowed but we see crowdfunded books winning Awards a lot um we certainly there are Comics C crowdfunded kickstarted comic books that have won eisers we've seen definitely um yeah

I don't have anything to hand but certainly it is not true that all Awards exclude crowdfunded books I suppose it depends on the award I suppose there there is one publisher over here Unbound and I think a few in the US who will sort of have like a hybrid model where they will sort of you know like take some missions and then host sort of a semi crowdfunded uh page where you know you people can then pledge to the particular book uh but you know it's sort of traditionally published because they make all the editorial

decisions but there's crowdfunding in that sense those might not be technically counted as self-publishing so perhaps that's what you might be thinking of there uh George asks is Kickstarter only available to individuals or can companies use it to fund raise for book publishing as well I suppose like you have people like kickstarting entire companies right yes for sure I mean they pelaton got it start on Kickstarter all birds got their start on Kickstarter um but on the book side I work with a lot of Publishers um small Publishers like uh microcosm and PM press they

both run about a campaign every single month I've worked with larger Publishers there's like beautiful project uh rough trade books in the UK did a Kickstarter for a book on a sort of fan compendium about the movie The Shining uh it's almost a misnomer to call it a book it's actually a box of Unbound typewritten pages and the Box is patterned after the wallpaper of the hotel in the movie you get like key fobs there's all these interviews it was a very ambitious project the argument for a publisher is very similar to the argument for

an author you can imagine a small press like rough trade which doesn't have great margins if they wanted to make a really ambitious really expensive project like that that would blow up a traditional p&l but if you can assess your audience size up front set appropriate print runs raise that money first then you know that you're not going to going to bankrupt the whole company by doing a big ambitious project like that uh cool I've just put up uh the uh link to the publishing side what do you call your knowledge Hub I agree yeah

so if you want more information so lots of folks I think uh may not be super familiar with Kickstarter so just go to the website and I'm pretty sure on their homepage uh they'll guide you through yeah what the entire process uh looks like um uh JM asks what was your most successful Book Project I guess that would be Brandon sanderson's before that seemed to blown the roof off the entire thing before that what was what was your previous gold star number one slide the the the the previous biggest project was also Brandon Sanderson but

he only raised I think $7 million on his first campaign I'm just I'm GNA pull it up uh I think we have um there's a company I think they're in Texas that makes photo books of uh antique guns they are think our other highest funded so most funded I'm just looking right now Brandon Brandon oh there's a book called the book which is made by a team in Russia it's this like very big highly designed sort of coffee table book about um rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse it's got sort of like steampunk Vibes and all

these like uh futuristic inventions it's quite cool and yeah pistols of the Warlords is number four um the SCP Foundation art books uh that's number five and then another very recent project seasons of The Shadow Hunters is number six that's Cassandra CLA she's another bestselling she's a ya fantasy novelist um and she did a similar year of Cassie campaign she collected a lot of put in print for the first time a number of stories that had only appeared on Tumblr she also had a lot of she had one of my favorite Awards ever for I

think for $300 she would write the word or phrase of your choice so that you could get it tattooed on your body um so yeah these are you know will White's also in our top cherylyn Kenyan good night stories for Rebel girls those are some of the highest funded uh Kickstarter publishing projects okay so yeah like uh good I stories for Rebel girls like I've seen that in you know M I saw it in the tap Museum gift shop over here so is that something that has since seen like a traditional launch or they are

they still handling a lot like what was the process for that book well so that book happened before my time uh before I got here they have run a number of campaigns I think they've run six uh but yeah they launched I believe they launched their whole company on Kickstarter I think good night stories was their first ever book I think it was a runaway success even for them and that you know created a whole uh whole series of books and a whole company and yeah uh Ben Bennett asks do campaigners have access to real-time

data about the pledges uh he's anticipating budgeting is a little trickier if you're offering different tiers at very Vari price points yes you have real- time access to all that data you see everybody who pledges and how much they pledge for what reward tier you can also see when people adjust or cancel or increase um yeah there is definitely going to be some amount of guess work you won't know until it's over exactly how many books to print or stickers to make or things like that but most um most print production houses that you would

probably find are likely familiar with crowdfunding at this point and so they will work with you to understand your costs in ranges not necessarily only in specifics so um if you if I go onto someone else's campaign page will will I be able to see the sort of timeline of this person donated this amount this person backed by this amount no you can see the number of people who have backed at any reward tier that's true for live and also past projects but you don't get any you don't get people's in personal information but I

suppose if if you're interested to see how similar projects have done you can go check out their page and see like oh yeah this number of people have backed to this amount with this kind of reward so it feels like you you should fully do that I am an expert in Kickstarter because I stare at Kickstarter all day every day you too can stare at Kickstarter that's why I suggested backing some projects every project that has ever run on the site is still there so you can conduct all sorts of research and learn so much

about what has worked and hasn't for other people doing similar things great let me see if I can pull one more uh otherwise uh might be time to draw this to a close Oriana I want to thank you so much for your time this has been really useful uh folks if you're still sort of in the dark with any aspect of this I imagine if you go to kickstarter.com uh there'll be a lot of plenty of resources uh to sort of uh fill any knowledge gaps you might have have uh are there any sort of

uh last sentiments or thoughts or or Pearls of Wisdom you might want to share with the folks before we close up today you've all asked such good questions I feel like these are all the things that I tend to cover in these sorts of talks um yeah I I hope that many more people try it Kickstarter is a pretty incredible way to build your community um increase enhance your brand and raise much needed funds for your literary work so great to see more authors on here all the time great uh thank you Ariana thank you

everyone for tuning in today uh if you enjoyed what you saw today and would like to see more follow us uh here on YouTube or head to blog. rey.com and see what other events we have coming up uh in the coming weeks I think we have uh some live critiques our first line frenzy with Rebecca Heyman is back and we'll have another uh live editing session with Tom Bromley so plenty of stuff for everyone to get involved in thank you very much for tuning in thank you Oriana catch you all soon bye thank you so

much for having me