My Kickstarter Failed

This is what I learned

I ran my first ever Kickstarter from 9^th July to 9^th Aug. I wanted to raise £3400 for my new series, Arabian Dreams to print 100 copies of the special edition hardback and to pay my artist and editor. After 30 days, I managed to secure 43% backing, with £1465 pledged from 31 backers. With Kickstarter, if you don’t raise the full amount, you don’t get anything. These are the lessons I learned.

Start gathering support as early as possible. My pre-launch page went live three days before the actual launch. Most Kickstarters seem to be in pre-launch for several months before their actual launch. This allows for gathering as much support in advance of the campaign as possible. Therefore, when the campaign does launch, you have a group of people already waiting to back you.

Set a lower initial target. I noticed that a number of campaigns had set low initial targets and reached them quite quickly. However, Kickstarter allows you to continue collecting pledges and therefore, you can include stretch goals. So I should have set the initial target for just printing of the special edition and made everything else a stretch goal. This does feel like gaming the system a little bit, but it is also about setting realistic expectations.

Paid ads raise awareness but don’t necessarily lead to people becoming backers: I spent around £!00 between YouTube, Google Ads and LinkedIn on promoted posts and adverts. All of them reported a lot of impressions, but the click through rate wasn’t that impressive and none of them led to backing. This could be down to my lack of experience in refining the targeted audience or my Kickstarter page not being convincing enough to convert those who did click through into backers.

Most of my backers were people I know or have interacted with on social media: Friends and family tend to be the initial backers for most Kickstarters. The real measure of success is how many of the backers are from your other connections. Kickstarter allows you to generate unique links for each of your social platforms. The majority of my referrals came from WhatsApp, with only a few coming from Substack, BlueSky and YouTube. LinkedIn was my lowest performing platform despite using promoted posts and many of the people on there being people I have actually worked with in the past.

Updates can be multimedia: I put out about 9 updates during the month to let backers know what was happening with the writing of the book. It wasn’t until the final week that I worked out that I could put out images and videos too. This is something that I will take into consideration in a future campaign, as a 60 second video is probably easier to digest than a written post.

Reward Tiers and Add-Ons: I had various tier levels with the top tier including all the main rewards, including the hardback, both ebooks, being acknowledged as a backer in the special edition and a T-Shirt. This and the special edition hardback were the two tiers that got selected the most. Then following closely behind was the next highest tier, paperbacks of both books. From the add-ons, the most popular was being included on the acknowledgement page and the free ebook copy of The Adventures of Some Kid.

Collaborators: Kickstarter allows the campaign manager to add collaborators and include a list of trusted people and companies that you can use to help you design your whole campaign, help manage fulfilment and even promote your campaign for you.

So what will I do differently the next time:

Start the pre-launch campaign at least two to three months before the actual launch

Start recruiting backers as soon as the pre-launch campaign has started

Use the services of a campaign promoter/social media marketer because that was the most exhausting thing about the campaign.

Set a lower campaign target just to cover the initial printing costs and use stretch goals for everything else.

Continue building my audience on social media, but do not neglect WhatsApp as that’s where my main support base is.

Use multimedia updates and post updates more regularly.

Have a clear core offer for reward tiers that are appealing at every level.

I hope you have found this useful, and if so, don’t forget to subscribe and like the post. If you have ran a crowdfunding campaign and have additional tips, please do share them in the comments. Until next time, Keep Dreaming, Keep Writing, and Let Your Stories Shine.