Crowdfunding: a kick into print

and what I learnt about myself along the way

Hello, all you lovely new and not-so-new subscribers and supporters, and thanks for opening and reading this post. Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of clearing the clutter, I may have mentioned in a post last week that things are a’changing here on my Substack too.

Today, I’d like to share an article I wrote for Writing Magazine some years ago about my experience crowdfunding one of the books for the Hysterectomy Association. I’ve recently had several emails asking me about crowdfunding for books, and it seemed like a good idea to share this article. It’s been edited and updated as necessary, and I should point out I no longer use Facebook or Twitter, and I’m falling out of love with LinkedIn too!

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The Anatomy of a Crowd Funded Project

I began collecting stories from women having hysterectomies in 2007 with a vague idea of producing a new book for The Hysterectomy Association. The book would serve two purposes, firstly to normalise what is often an isolating experience, and secondly to provide another, long-term source of income for the association. Life got in the way though and the book remained on my ever-increasing ‘to-do’ list.

Crowdfunding first crossed my path in 2011, but it was another 12 months before I connected the two and realised that here was both the means and the motivation to finally get started on the publication process.

In 2013 my crowdfunding project (http://kck.st/Xqw63e) was successful and a new book, ‘In My Own Words: Women’s Experience of Hysterectomy’, was published on 31st July 2013. It took just 29 days to raise the finances; this could have been shorter and raised more had I stepped out of my own way during the process.

The project was successful because of just two things:

• I had good networks to work with.

• I created a project plan and - with a little variation on timing - stuck to it.

Crowdfunding is the means by which a large number of people give a small amount of money each to fund a project in return for some sort of benefit.

I used the website Kickstarter to manage my particular adventure but there are many others available. Although it’s based in the US it has a strong UK focus, collects the money for you, pays the funds directly into your bank account in sterling, and is specifically for creative projects. However, it is an all-or-nothing system; if you don’t get pledges to the total amount before the project ends then you don’t get anything and the project fails.

All crowd-funded projects, regardless of their focus, have five stages.

1. You put together a project pitch.

2. You let people know about it.

3. If you are successful you get the money.

4. You work on the project.

5. You deliver the rewards.

It sounds quite simple, doesn’t it? But there are a few nuances which, if overlooked, can make it much more difficult to get to your goal. A plan is essential and the one I put together consisted of a budget, a set of messages, a timetable for promoting the project, and a pitch page. Once I had these in place I could start fundraising.

Budgeting

Crowdfunding isn’t all one way. You don’t just hold out your virtual hand hoping people will give you money. You are encouraged to give something of value in return to your financial backers. In my project, it was a set of ‘rewards’ ranging from advance copies of the book to tangible business benefits like website links. Each reward was given a value in line with what it would cost me to deliver it.

I also created a budget for producing the final book that included costs for the time it would take to produce the manuscript, copy editing, proofreading, cover design, and printing. I also added the fees Kickstarter would charge if I were successful.

The amount I wanted to raise was £2,500 as this would cover the costs of both delivering the rewards and the production costs. In the end, I raised £2,595 through Kickstarter and received another £2,000 separately as well making a total of £4,495.

Messages and timetable

In order to communicate successfully with someone you need to understand who they are and what might motivate them to engage with you. It’s also important to remember that every crowd-funded project will have at least two audiences: those who are likely to buy the finished product, and those who support you because they like you or what you’re trying to do.

When I analysed my audiences I realised I had three different groups I could approach:

1. Users of the Hysterectomy Association because they wanted the book and contributed to it.

2. Business contacts from my day job as a social media strategist because they might be interested to see how crowdfunding works.

3. Other authors I’d interviewed on my blog because I’d supported them in the past.

Of course, these motivations might cross network boundaries; users of the association could be authors, and business contacts might have experienced hysterectomy themselves. On the whole though, each network would have a different reason for their interest and my aim was to create a set of messages specific to each one so I prepared by creating:

• Posts about the project for the Hysterectomy Association and my personal blog.

• Details of the project for my monthly newsletters.

• Three personalised emails to be sent to members of each network with slight variations in content to suit their needs. Paid subscribers can find a copy of the emails at the end of this post. I used Mailchimp to send out the messages.

• A set of 30 status updates and links to be used on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

All were created in advance of the project starting as I wanted to save time by copying and pasting on the right date. I added them to a timetable along with ideas I had for other updates, posts, and interesting information to share during the 30 days of the project’s life.

Every communication also needed to leave the recipient in no doubt about what I wanted them to do. Therefore each message, whether email or status update, had to persuade the reader to do something ranging from clicking a link to learn more, sharing the details with others, or backing the project financially.

In the first week, my aim was to use blogs, newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to encourage as many people as possible to tell others about it. In order to be successful, I needed to reach a much broader audience and I knew that it would be my own network of contacts helping out by sharing, retweeting, and commenting that would get me there.

Pitch Page

A crowdfunding pitch page is really just a sales page, and all good sales pages are never about you or the features of the product; instead, their aim is to explain the benefits of buying whatever it is you’re selling. Good sales pages also have a core message, and the one I wanted to get across was just how powerful and positive a force other people’s stories could be. In other words, it’s not about you! This message was reinforced in the page copy, the video, and the messages I sent out.

Every crowd-funded project is encouraged to use video as it conveys a great deal of information in a simple way for those who don’t have time to read through a long set of details. In most cases, they are ‘to camera’ pieces but at the time I wasn’t that comfortable in front of a camera so it was time to find a different approach.

In the end, I persuaded my better half to do a quick film of me waving at the camera. I added this to a PowerPoint presentation containing details of other books I’d written and three of the shorter hysterectomy stories. I created a voiceover and it was all saved as a WMV file for upload to YouTube, Vimeo, and Kickstarter. I embedded the video in posts on my blogs and shared it on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

With hindsight, the biggest mistake I made with the video was ignoring my own advice and forgetting it shouldn’t be about me. I suspect some people didn’t watch to the end because I began by talking about being an author. A better tactic might have been to save that information to the end because the most important part was explaining how beneficial a book like this could be for women.

What I achieved

• 83 people backed the project on Kickstarter with an average pledge of £31.27.

• 96 people ‘liked’ it on Facebook.

• The video was viewed 402 times, 266 of those views were on other websites.

• Bloggers from the UK, US, Middle East, Australia, and Europe wrote about it.

• The Twitterati got behind it and shared it, in fact, one follower shared it 21 times.

• Email marketers sent it to their mailing lists on my behalf.

• 70 (80%) of the pledges came as a result of email messages sent out.

• The project link trended on LinkedIn’s update search for the keyword ‘hysterectomy’.

• I received more stories from women.

• The association received anonymous donations directly.

• The co-founder of WordPress backed it financially.

• I was offered a job by a global SEO expert on the basis of the email he received from me.

What I learned

My Kickstarter project started on 7th February and ended on 9th March. Whilst it was running I learnt a lot about myself. Mostly I learnt about fear. A project like this relies on engaging a network of people who already know, like, and trust you. It also requires you to put your head above the parapet and ask for help.

I planned for my crowdfunding project pitch to be live for just 30 days. This meant that I had to work fast to get the message across to the various audiences I’d targeted. The problem I encountered was myself; I hadn’t appreciated just how hard I would find it to ask for help, and my biggest fear was how it would look to my business contacts if it failed, especially as my day job at the time was as a social media strategist!

As a result, I didn’t stick to my carefully planned timetable, and it was only by the skin of my teeth that the project was funded. As it was all or nothing - if I didn’t get the whole £2,500 in pledges of support, I wouldn’t get anything - this meant I could have ended up wasting a lot of time and effort.

As a good business buddy of mine succinctly put it at the time, ‘You need to get out of your own way and just get on with it’. The project was funded with just 24 hours until the deadline! The graph shows the dates I finally sent the messages out.

The benefits of crowdfunding

Aside from the obvious benefit of raising finance for a new book, the biggest benefit is that it helped with ongoing marketing after the book was published. Not only did I gain an audience actively interested in the project because they received a reward, I managed to gather a group of other evangelists who had helped by spreading the word. Each of these also helped out when the book was published by sharing it with their own networks too.

Top ten tips

According to Kickstarter's current statistics, only 42% of all projects have been successfully funded. In fact, 9% have never received a single pledge. Today, on the 20th of September 2023, only 37% of publishing projects have been successfully funded.

When I analysed current publishing projects this month there were 62,650 projects in the category. Of that category, only two are not about writing of some description: literary spaces aka bookshops, and radio/podcasts. Whilst, there is a lot of projects listed in this single crowdfunding site, I still believe it can work for any book and any author as long as you remember the following top ten tips: