Kickstarter 101% in 5 days

How I did it, what I learned, what you can take away

Running a successful Kickstarter for a children’s book

This has been a little bit of a journey! Worth it to write things up for myself and others in the same boat in the future. I hope this adds value to others who want their dreams to come true also. This is a pretty giant post, so I put the tl;dr at the top.

Where I am at currently: at the time of this writing, I am 5 days into a 30 day Kickstarter, funded at 101%. I have proof copies of my book, but have not printed, shipped and sent my books out yet.

The takeaway tips:

• People buy from people they like
• Get friends who are experts in fields that you are not; their experience is worth it’s weight in gold
• If you can automate it, automate it. Takes so much pressure off the daily grind.
• Making it successful is all about the pre-game
• Sad-but-true-news for writers and artists: It is 1 part product, 9 parts marketing (which isn’t inherently negative)

Background

I’ve been a writer since forever, getting published traditionally as a poet and as a speculative fiction author. I spent most of my career as a tech and management consultant, and writing fell a bit more by the wayside.Being now a father of two (4yo girl and 2 yo boy), I found myself painting them, writing stories for them, living their emotional life and growing together. Taking a career break in the past few months; I found myself with time to spare.

The ideas

I initially wrote four books in a single week and a bit; crafting the story and doing the illustrations. As I get better as a painter, I often go back to them time and time again to redo the illustrations from scratch. Even if they were never published, the act gives me a lot of joy, and I catalog old versions to track my artistic growth.

My main problem is also my strength – I am a “Renaissance person”, interested and capable of many things; which helps me cross-leverage skills into different domains, but makes it very hard to position or market, and sometimes it makes me or my products/services very hard to understand!

Here’s a list of the six books I currently have:

• The ABCs of AI, a story-within-a-story of my kids learning about AI and using it to make an ABCs book of each letter
• What’s Bigger Than That? A book about space, and the relative size of things compared to their soft toy Flopsy.
• We’re going to see the cats today, a story about disappointment. A true story of my daughter visiting a cat cafe and finding out we didn’t book; and working through her emotions.
• My grandma died, a story about grief. A true story of my daughter dealing with her emotions at the death of her great-grandma, and her reaction to her mum’s sadness.
• Yum Cha, a fun literacy/simple first words book about my son eating at a Chinese brunch.
• Birds, a fun literacy/simple first words book about my son chasing pigeons.

The advisors:

• I had some beautiful conversations with fellow small press publishers, who gave me an insight into how they did their work, what channels they used, and what their goals were. Before this conversation, I was hoping to find a small press publisher to do the publishing work for me; but I took their advice – no one will care about your work as much as you do, and unfortunately, if you really believe in it, would will probably have to publish it yourself. I was a complete publishing noob (and still am, this being my first Kickstarter), but they certainly helped me work out things like which printers to use, even basic things important to children’s bookselling like format, sizing, colour, etc.; what booksellers tend to want to see, etc. Key tip: it’s not what you want to write, it’s what will sell
• I talked to agency after agency, and whilst useful to me overall (I am a complete marketing noob) most were trying to push the product they were trying to sell. I don’t blame them – it is business after all – but this being my first Kickstarter and the amounts being relatively humble, my budget didn’t really support extended marketing campaigns of the type they were selling. I did learn things like market positioning, the modern demands of social media, how to get reach, etc. Before talking to them, I had not appreciated the true cost of social media spend required – we’re talking A$2,000 in ad spend a month, and it is unlikely my initial strategy to push leads directly to Kickstarter would see an ROI. So, I did not pursue this path. Key tip: you’re going to have to invest in your own marketing learning and do it yourself.
• My cousin is a marketing professor and used to run his own marketing agency; he was incredibly useful in helping me do everything from bouncing ideas off to literally authoring the Kickstarter page for me in the middle of the night. Key tip: tell the people the story behind the product, and focus on how it makes the purchaser feel and look. My tagline for the ABCs book eventually became “Are you an engaged parent concerned about how AI will change the future for your kids? I was scared too, and I did this with my kids to learn together. You can use our story to invest in your kids also.”
• Work colleagues had run successful Kickstarter before; and gave me their insights and support on how they found success. Key tip: engage the community.
• My wife and kids were my cheer squad. Key tip: talk to the people around you, and ask for their support, a good positive network will be a lift to your endeavours.

The product itself

My ideas evolved:

1. First I wanted to do a set of six, all in one go. Crunching the numbers (see next tip), I could run scenarios – if I sold X thing to Y person, I guessed I could make this amount.
2. I then did a big survey at a soft launch party – I got about two dozen people to give me feedback on draft books that they saw; and used that to refine the product positioning
3. I evolved my thinking to pair up the books – two on STEM, two on EQ, two on First Words. Trying to figure out whether to do the set of six, the pair of two, or a single one seriously drove me a bit crazy
4. In the end, I took the route of doing a single humble product, with the intent to build a reputation and drop feed the books into the world.
5. Market testing via the survey identified that it should be the ABCs of AI, which I knew. But it also yielded the interesting result that Space was my second most popular book.

Research!

I looked at perhaps two dozen other successful and a dozen unsuccessful children’s book kickstarters. I learned a lot about:

• How others designed their rewards
• Where their backers came from
• What their romance videos looked like
• How they structured their pages
• How many backers for how many rewards
• What they set their goals at
• The expected quality of imagery, video, frequency of communications, etc.

Prep:

• Print proofs, so that you can make your romance videos and product marketing
• Soft launches and customer surveys
• Talking to your friends and family and other contacts about it. This part was hard – I don’t want to turn my friendships into selling relationships, so it’s the kind of thing you say once when preparing, once when launching; and a big thank you when you succeed. More than that – people, even close to you / don’t super care.
• High-quality photography and illustration were key. I’m lucky to know photographer friends, be able to do my own graphic design and illustration, and be tech-capable to AI image generate the rest
• Setting up your own website, social media, et al. I’m a techy person, but even then it took a really long time. And I am generally not on socials, so Re-learning all of it was a pain. I also found myself getting sucked into browsing Insta and Facebook again. Biggest change for me was automating my posts with tools like Mailchimp and Buffer. Helps me not need to be on the platform all the time.

The campaign

Do the cost numbers. Build a giant spreadsheet and track every spend dollar.

• Supplies (omg, the cost of art supplies and a watercolour-specialty scanner!)
• Marketing spend, even things like the launch party catering
• Printing
• Packaging
• Shipping (both wholesale and to the customer)
• Warehousing/the cut that the distributor takes
• Taxes
• Kickstarter Fees
• Stripe Fees

Do the revenue numbers to guess the result:

• Draw up your entire rewards plan, and the pricing of each reward
• Make a guess of how many people purchase each reward
• You have a good guess at the revenue, enabling you to set the goal.

Kickstarter is excellent at giving you the data:

• Projects that reach 20% funding are 73% likely to succeed
• Only 33% of children’s books succeed
• There is a sharp drop off in success for goal amounts >US$10k
• There is a sharp drop off in success for projects longer than 30 days
• The algorithm boosts projects that get to 30% in 2 days and 50% in five
• You should mail Kickstarter a month or two in advance to see if you can get them to feature you

I sold to three audiences:

• Business contacts
• Friends, family and fans
• General public

My rewards are probably easier for you to see rather than explain:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/remarepress/the-abcs-of-ai-stem-and-eq-multi-lingual-childrens-books

For business contacts: by biggest bumps came from tech friends who wanted to sponsor their kid’s school, or to buy a bunch of copies to hand out almost as business cards. You can see the highest-tier rewards are designed for them. Because of the nature of my book, tech companies wanted to make my series a part of their organisation’s pledge 1%. This is pretty common in the other books on Kickstarter that I saw as runaway successes.

For friends, family and fans of my work: I designed a middle “art lovers” and “buy multiples” tier at very competitive pricing address them. A lot of people without kids just straight up gave me money. Some very expected champions emerged – people I haven’t talked to in years came off Facebook and bought five. Others I thought were certain to buy have not (yet).

General public: this is honestly where future sales and kickstarters will come from, and the people I want to find in doing my work. The biggest bumps in this came from when my champions of the product re-posted on their own social channels. I hope to get more of these elusive people via ads, and now I have the funding to experiment with this.

Who was not very helpful

I had one beautiful supporter (thank you Sharon, from Loose Parts Press), who gave me a lot of initial advice and support.

I found the self-publishing community to be quite a challenging place. It is a large space of people doing very diverse things – fantasy novels and biographies vs. my children’s books – who perhaps (imho, wrongly) feel like we are all competing against each other, which seems to be a bit of a strangely competitive mindset. Perhaps I’m talking to slightly introverted creatives who don’t like the marketing/sales aspect of it, which seemed to track with some of the vitriol I received online. I admit, before I got myself really on this track, the marketing aspect was really daunting for me too.

Understandably, the most negative reactions I got – sometimes, really nasty stuff – comes from fellow authors, who are perhaps using me and my books as a rage against the machine about AI. I’m not responsible for the movement of AI, of course, but I do want to get my kids prepared for it.

As a person that’s mostly done B2B service businesses; the visceral reaction from a B2C product space, especially when we’re talking about what is quite personal products, has been a unhappy revelation.

I now put my face on my ads, so people can see a bit more of the human they are interacting with, and this has proven so far to reduce the occasional negative comment.

Any final thoughts?

It was my first one, and I set a humble goal I thought I was certain to meet. In hindsight, I could probably have doubled the goal and spent a lot more time chasing the number over more days – at the time of writing I still have 27 or so days; but from an emotional point of view – a furious week-ish or promotions and then success – it was well designed for me personally.

Other than that – I feel like I have the funds to spend (in much smaller ways) on experimenting on Facebook/Instamarketing now, to find my core audience. If anyone’s got a secret formula to actually get great ROI from direct facebook marketing, I’d love to hear it!

I will also be offering my marketing lists discounted books in the future, just so that loyal repeat customers continue to get great deals and the value from my books.