I’ve been watching a lot of Kickstarters lately. And more particularly, watching some people who I knew were going to have their campaigns blow up worry about basic success. I think I’ve got a pretty good sense for where a campaign is likely to end up now.
And I really wish I felt confident that I have a big enough audience to pull off a five-figure kickstarter for the next book of Rita. Well, we’ll see how it goes – I’ll probably aim a little higher this time, and hopefully there will be some new readers brought in who pump it up a lot by buying book 1 along with book 2.
I’ve watched enough Kickstarters to know that the magic number seems to be somewhere around $10k; if you can set and achieve an initial goal above that, you’re going to have a ton of inertia, and roll on through several stretch goals and a lot of units sold. And I know that ultimately being able to do that is a function of the size of your audience. Mine, I think, is just not quite big enough yet. Maybe by somewhere in the middle of Drowning City it’ll be that big. I can only hope. I could maybe squeeze out like $7-8k if I asked for it, but that would largely be on the backs of a couple large donors rather than on a ton of people buying the book, and that’s not going to build any inertia.
It’s a damn good thing I’m not counting on this to pay my rent.
Ah well, guess I’ll shower, and debate if I want to spend two hours on the bus to go pick up my wallet. I do have this nice new computer with killer battery life that’s aching for its first outing… but I also know I can’t be guaranteed the two seats I need to spread out computer and tablet. And I have a page for tomorrow that still needs a LOT of work.
When I’m ready to start preparing book 2 of Unity (which should be in a couple months, if I can manage to keep my comic updates going at my current rate and if the number of strips left is what I think it is), I was planning only using Kickstarter as basically a pre-sales channel. I also keep the goal purposefully low – just enough to barely cover the cost of printing a run of books – because I see Kickstarter as basically the only cheap marketing I’m going to get.
Fortunately, I’m in a situation where I can self-fund all the publishing, and the cost of printing a run of books falls well within what I’m comfortable spending on a hobby every couple of years. This time around I also know what NOT to do with, say, Amazon-based distribution; the person I used for distribution last time around set things up in such a way that it got short shrift on the catalog data. (The trick to getting a book listed correctly on Amazon is to sign up as an Advantage vendor, rather than a Marketplace seller.)
I’m just hoping that this time around I can get stuff listed well enough – and that people will be interested enough in buying things – that it will also help me to put a dent in my inventory of book 1, which is still taking up rather a lot of shelf space in my studio. :)
One of these days I should really look into getting Rita on Amazon.
I, too, can afford to fund all the publishing myself, but I really like the way Kickstarter makes sure a significant chunk of my books are spoken for! I printed 400 copies of Rita 1, and was down to 300 after fulfillment. I’m hopeful that new readers buying book 1 along with book 2 will make a decent dent in the 250ish books I have left…
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I meant by using Kickstarter as a pre-sales channel. Also, there’s several means of getting the word out about a comics kickstarter (such as Comic Rocket’s crowdfunding page, which I unfortunately can’t find right now which completely destroys the point I was trying to make but oh well). Also I like it as a forum for sharing information about the development while it’s in progress.
The two things you’ll need to get a proper catalog listing are an ISBN (which you get from Bowker, which are a bunch of scammy assholes, THANKS PRIVATIZATION) and an Amazon Advantage account. Note that AA uses the same login process as a normal Amazon account, but you don’t want to use your existing Amazon account’s email address. It’s a kind of complicated/stupud/historical-reasons problem that I found out about the hard way.
Anyway, once you have your stuff published through Advantage, you can also do consignment sales via Amazon Marketplace (which will use your regular Amazon account), which gives you better pricing and inventory flexibility.
By the way, what printer did you go with? For my second book I was probably going to go with Keness again (since I don’t need anything fancy but DO need to be able to do proper bound trade paperbacks – book 1 was 180 pages and book 2 will probably be close to that!) but I like to weigh my options.