← The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
Kickstarter Tips for Authors: Rewards, Shipping, Marketing, and Lessons Learned
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Welcome to the Creative Pen Podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more@thecreativepenn.com and that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show.
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Hello Creatives, I'm Johanna Penn and this is episode number 859 of the podcast and it is Friday the 17th of April 2026. As I record this in today's show, I'm sharing all kinds of tips about Kickstarter and crowdfunding, what it is, why to do it, facing your fears, tips for campaigns, and how to avoid biggest mistakes with excerpts from previous episodes with Orianna Leckert, Head of Publishing at Kickstarter, as well as Russell Nolte, Sasha and my own thoughts. So that is coming up in the main section of the show after what is quite a long introduction, as there is a lot going on this week in publishing, In writing and publishing. Yes, I will talk about the draft, a digital thing. But first on writing, there is a new excellent writing Story Bundle. Now if you've never bought a story bundle before, it is a bundle of ebooks from different authors and this one is nonfiction with books on building story, email marketing, marketing, Kickstarter publishing, picture books, bundling and anthologies, mindset and Attitude, creativity in turbulent Times, indie author survival, and more. It is an excellent bundle and I always check these out and this one I bought immediately because there's some really great books in it. So have a look and see if you want to do that. It is a much better deal than buying the book separately and it is a form of direct sales so the authors get more money. That is at storybundle.com writing storybundle bundle.com writing and that is a limited time deal, right? So lots on publishing and distribution news today. First up, good news from Spotify. Spotify has expanded their audiobook features and printed book sales Go live in the US and UK from their blog post. Just over two years after launching Audiobooks in premium is now live in 22 markets and if you are a Spotify user like I am, maybe you're now listening to Audiobooks on Spotify as I am. As they say, we've grown our catalog nearly fivefold from 150,000 to more than 700,000 titles. We pay out hundreds of millions of dollars annually to authors and publishers, bringing new audiences to audiobooks through a platform millions already use every day. Now we've Got more coming. Readers in the US and UK can now purchase physical books via the Spotify app on Android coming to iOS. So if you have an iPhone like me in the next week, this is through the partnership with bookshop.org by connecting digital discovery with physical book sales, we're giving listeners more ways to experience the stories they love while supporting authors and independent bookstores. So I've mentioned this before when they talked about this a month or so ago I talked about it. But essentially for many indie authors our books are available in print on the US bookshop.org but not necessarily in the UK. Now hopefully that will change over time, but certainly bookshop.org does have some and not others. So if you are having a look at buying print books through Spotify and Bookshop, then have a look and you could email Spotify and say why isn't this book available? And in that way hopefully we will convince them to do more. In terms of that integration then Page Match, which allows listeners to move seamlessly between audiobook and printed or Ebook edition, is expanding to more than 30 additional languages including French, German and Swedish. That was launched in English in February and has positive reactions from listeners. So essentially they looked at some stats. Many users have recently started streaming audiobooks for the first time. Those who use Page Match stream an average of 55% more audiobook hours each week than other listeners. 62% of page matched audio book titles on Spotify are books users had never streamed previously. So this is essentially you can take a picture of the print book and then go to the audiobook on Spotify and it will find where you left off. So that is very cool. More updates included in the press release on the Spotify blog and it's always good to see further innovation as they have a huge subscriber base worldwide. So then the big news this week has been both Draft 2 Digital and Barnes and Noble Press announced changes for self publishing. Authors and Draft 2 Digital outlined the reason why in their blog post. An email to authors this week like many platforms, we've seen a significant increase in automated and low quality account creation in recent years. This onslaught from automated content farms threatens reader trust in indie titles and risks indies being associated with low quality slop, which none of us want for sure. From the Draft2Digital blog for the first time in our history, we're introducing account activation and maintenance fees for many existing drafted digital authors, especially those with regularly selling books. These fees do not affect you. Here's how they'll Activation fee for new accounts if you already have a drafted Digital account. This doesn't apply to you. New accounts will include a one off fee of US$20. This activation fee, combined with our verification tools and human reviewers will help us maintain a secure, high integrity publishing environment. A modest activation fee can make a real difference and allow team to remain focused on supporting genuine authors like you. So that's one of the things is this activation fee for new accounts, then an annual maintenance fee. An annual maintenance fee of $12, so that's around $1 per month, will apply to accounts whose earnings from book sales, meaning your net proceeds after Draft 2 Digital's commission, total less than $100 over the preceding 12 month period. If you earn $100 or more from your book sales over 12 months, you will not be charged this fee. They go on to say Drafted Digital is primarily supported by earning commissions on book sales for accounts that earn less revenue. A small annual fee helps offset a portion of the steadily rising costs we pay to maintain those accounts, including compliance, security and infrastructure upkeep. They say maintenance fees will start going into effect in 30 days on May 14, 2026. The bottom line our goal is to keep Draft 2 digital a place where authors can publish with confidence. That means continuing to invest in our tools, maintaining strong relationships with retailers and protecting the legitimacy of indie authors and the trust that readers place in indie books. If you have any questions, go to your account status page or read the updated Terms of Service. Reach out to the support team. We appreciate your trust in Draft two Digital and we remain committed to developing and protecting for indies to reach readers. Okay, so first of all we all knew that something like this had to be coming because we are all getting increased spam ourselves every day. I don't know about you but I get probably five to eight emails a day right now that are various forms of scams and spams and just ridiculous amount of stuff. And some of the emails are very very good and you all know that too. And just a reminder, there are emails going out with my name and my picture asking people to pay to be on this. Those are all scam emails and so it is easy to see how much more scams the platforms have to deal with. Drafted Digital are a small team, a small company of people, actual people who care about authors and books. They are not a global behemoth like Amazon and other companies that can spend a lot more money to do automated infrastructure. So they have to do something. I personally think $20 for an activation account and $1 a month for maintenance is most of what we do costs far more than that. Most of what we do in a normal week or a normal month, like buying a coffee or two, costs far more than that. So I absolutely support what they are doing. You know that I'm a fan of AI assistants, but I also appreciate how bad things are getting in terms of spamming and scamming. And so I really want the companies that we work with to do a better job of removing a lot of the scam type mass produced AI books. And you know that I'm not talking about real authors using AI as helping tools. I am talking about scammers and spammers. And there is a difference. And I want readers to know that there is a difference. So science fiction and Fantasy author Kevin McLaughlin, who is also the current president of Nink Novelists, Inc. Did a Facebook post about this, which I'll link to in the show Notes with a Q and A with Chris Austin, the CEO of Draft2Digital with some more clarification with the rapid growth of AI, mass produced books have risen by a lot and some quotes from the interview some months drafted digital declines as much as 70% of the titles uploaded to Draft 2 Digital, and the fallout from this on the retailer and library end has been a steady increase in hostility towards indie authors. Because Apple Overdrive, Barnes and Noble, and other drafted digital partners can't easily tell an indie author from a book spammer, they have a tendency to tar and feather us all with the same brush. Chris mentioned that libraries have been pushing back hard against indie titles because of the raw quantity of spam flooding the market. Clearly none of us want this. I mean, part of the wonderful emancipation of being an indie author and these companies like Drafts of Digital was the opening up of things like library distribution. We didn't used to have that and then we got it eventually and none of us wants that to go away from the interview. Mass upload accounts are easy to spot, but the book spammers have figured out a workaround. If they want to upload 50 books a month, they can now open 50, draft two digital accounts and upload one book per account per month, keeping the numbers low so they look like a regular indie and don't get attention. So they are getting through. Hence the activation fee for new accounts, which will stop people doing that. So this is about Indie authors are having our overall reputation with retailers and libraries badly damaged by the amount of book spam hitting the market right now. They are working to mitigate that damage and I'm definitely grateful for that. Kevin McLaughlin summarizes this the bottom line is simple Book spam, which I've taken to calling the mass upload of poorly written, poorly produced books to retail channels represents a growing threat to indie publishing as a whole. As retailer trust in authors plummets, so too will our reach. And since they cannot tell us apart from book spammers, the long term results of doing nothing will be a gradual erosion of indie publishing as a whole. The only other viable solution I could think of would be implementing a per title setup fee. That's something I doubt any of us want, but the impression I'm getting is that increasingly something the retailers are considering that would end book spam cold. It would also end hobby publishing and make publishing from developing nations extremely difficult. Draft 2 Digital is trying to proceed with the minimum impact changes they could think of, which would also have the desired effect chasing off the bad actors currently messing things up for everyone else, Kevin said, Given what I know about the why, I couldn't come up with a better solution that would impact fewer authors. These aren't the easiest times to be a writer, but having information arms us to handle the challenges ahead more easily. So yes, I agree with all of this and I support Draft 2 Digital's move. I want our reputation as indie authors to keep going up, not down. And yeah, we have to be careful. And again, just to be clear, I personally do not think it's hard to tell the difference between a author committed to quality and excellence who uses AI as a tool to make better books. It should be very, very easy to tell the difference between them and a book scammer who uses AI to mass produce terrible quality books and publish them without care for their audience. There is a real difference between these authors and I'm not talking about the volume of publishing either. I'm talking about the quality of excellence. And personally, I use AI tools to try and be more excell. I think these tools are so good now we can use them to help us become better authors, better publishers, better marketers. And that's the level of quality I want to be committed to. And so I want us to have tools that reward excellence and get rid of box scammers. I think this should be something we care about. So back on to what else is happening. There is clearly something in the air as Barnes and Noble Press also emailed authors this week. They said to continue providing the best experience for our author community, we're introducing a few updates to Barnes and Noble Press policies. These changes are designed to protect independent authors as well as maintain the quality of the content on our platform. Now, I don't use Barnes and Noble Press, but many authors in the USA do. So first, a change to minimum retail price for printed books. Barnes and Noble Press print books must have a retail price of US$1499. So fourteen $99 or more due to increased shipping and printing. This change helps ensure that authors can cover costs and earn royalties on sales. Starting 22nd of April 2026, our platform will not allow the creation of new listings for less than $14.99. If you have any titles retailing for less than $14.99 on May 14, we will begin removing those listings. They actually say on the blog post we recommend that you consider the perceived value of your Barnes and Noble Press ebook or print book to customers when setting your retail price. Now personally looking at this, $14.99 seems pretty expensive for a paperback. When I look at what I'm charging for my some of my print books on Amazon in the usa, I mean I have novellas, I have short nonfiction, I do have some much longer books but and those ones are more expensive. But I do wonder if this price change is essentially favoring traditional publishers who price higher than indies. A lot of indies. Over time we try and price so that a lot of our customers can afford us and hopefully buy our books and see us as not a bargain basement but those readers who read more often value, you know, value pricing can be seen in different ways. So this is really interesting. Also here in the UK we have extremely low print book prices. People go into a bookstore and they can get two books for that kind of price. Two books for £10. I mean there are lots of lower cost book shops here, including traditional publishers. So I think this is really quite interesting. So that's one angle. Is this too expensive? But the other angle is is it time we just all put up our prices? Will that drive more people to Amazon? Will that drive more people to subscription models? And what about the voracious genres where people read super fast? What about low income readers? This is such an interesting topic. I think I'm not going to talk too much about it now, but I suspect the discussion over pricing related to the Barnes and Noble press announcement will coming thick and fast in the author community. So I might revisit that another time. I haven't changed my own prices as yet, but this is something to think about. They also have a new title limit. A single Barnes and Noble Press account will have a limit of 100 individual titles. Each title can be available in print and digital format and count as one of the hundred titles. So that'll be 100 titles in total. So that might be 200 if you have both print and digital now, starting May 14th, if you have over 100 titles listed, we may remove titles from sale at our discretion, or you can go in and remove them yourself. So this won't affect most authors. But if you have been publishing for years or you're in a high volume genre like romance, or you publish a lot of novellas, you might be up there. And again, this may be something that happens on other platforms. Hasn't happened yet, but that's a very interesting limit as well. There are some indie authors who publish for other people. There are people who do anthology publishing. There are lots of different reasons this might affect people other than what we might call book scammers. So in general, these changes mean it's only the beginning of what's going to come. And as ever, any technology revolution involves good things and bad things. I don't want this all to be thrown at. Oh, AI is all bad. And a lot of the drama in the author community I see as kind of doing that now. The Internet has some awful things about it, but also some amazing things. We would not even be able to publish our books, most of us, without the Internet. So the same technology that allows some really awful things also allows some really amazing things. Most of us would not choose to live without the Internet at this point. The same will be increasingly true with AI we will adapt as we always do. Humans might resist change, but we certainly adapt to it. And this industry, indie authors, the publishing industry will adapt. It has to. We will figure this stuff out. And I'm personally grateful for companies like Draft2Digital who are trying to help indies and trying to protect us and readers from book scammers. I want our reputation to remain high for excellence. So. So let's all personally just commit to that, to being excellent and use technology to help us be better and publish better. And personally, I'm grateful for companies like Draft2Digital who are trying to help indies, trying to protect us from the book scammers, trying to protect the reputation of indie authors. So yes, let's commit to excellence, all of us, however, we use AI and adapt as the industry will continue to change. Personal news in keeping with the main theme of the show, today my Kickstarter has launched for Bones of the deep over@jfpenn.com bones so in 1999, I sailed on a tall ship from Fiji to Vanuatu in the South Pacific. And something about that Crossing has never let me go. I've talked about it on my books and travel podcast a while back and I've wanted to write about it. I just couldn't find the right story. But finally something clicked and Bones of the Deep has finally arrived with a setting that takes you out on the open ocean, the stolen bones of a merfolk culture, and a crew who can't escape. But these aren't the mermaids you grew up with. This is an ancient civilization coming to reclaim what is theirs and there's nowhere to run. This is a thriller with teeth, an ocean crossing, a scientist with a secret, a captain on his last voyage, and a crew who don't know what's beneath them. They should have never left port. So I hope you like the sound of the story. You can find out more over on the Kickstarter. It is a standalone, fast paced thriller. The exclusive signed first edition hardback is available at Kickstarter. Has has has silver foil. Yes it does. It has custom end papers that I did myself. It has sprayed edges. It has a ribbon. I do love a ribbon. Also, the paperback, large print, ebook and audiobook are all available months earlier than on the other stores. They will be available in the summer but you can get them early. And there are also bundles of all my other stories in different formats. You can also join me for a discovery writing webinar. Yes, I am still a discovery writer if you would like to learn more about that, about my writing process. And we have such a good time doing these. We actually do writing. So it is a working webinar and we do writing together and it's great fun. And there are also a limited number of consulting sessions for one on one sessions with me available. Check it out now@jfpen.com bones depending on when you're listening to this, that will redirect after the campaign. But this campaign runs until 4th of May 2020. So only for two weeks essentially and then it will be done. So on my Masters I finished my essay on the theological aspects of assisted suicide. That was a hell of a fun one, that's for sure. And I'm now moving into researching and writing my dissertation. But since I have all summer for that, I'm refocusing on my author business for the next month. I'm actually really thrilled about that. I've closed my loops in my Master's course and now I am doing the Kickstarter, doing the market, the fulfillment as well as doing two AI webinars I have coming up. Yes, I finally have time to do some webinars. My last AI webinars were back in September 2025 and a lot has changed in the more than six months since then. Opus 4.6 changed the game, Claude Cowork, Claude Code changed the game and yesterday 4.7 launched along with a whole load of other things. And so what's possible now has really moved on in terms of agentic AI AI. So I'm doing two webinars. Firstly the AI assisted artisan author that covers all the basics. If you're early in your AI journey, come along to that. And if you came last year but you're still early in what you're actually doing, it is still useful because so much has changed. And then I'm doing an advanced session for those who are already using a lot of AI in their various processes. I'll be talking a lot about process thinking and process redesign, building skills and using Claude Code and Claude Cowork for AI and more. I'll also be just delving into a whole load of stuff that I'm I've been looking at as I try to essentially automate my entire author business so I can focus on the things that I love best, which is for me it is quite frankly book research and writing books. I mean the whole rest of it. I would love to just outsource to Claude. So we will get into that. I mean obviously this bit of the podcast is me, but there's lots that I am doing with that that you might find interesting. You can get tickets for either webinar or both webinars and they will be Saturday 16th of May and then Saturday the 23rd of May if you want to attend live or ticket holders, get the replays, the slides, the advanced people will get some of my skills and more. There are discounts for patrons and also for those who attended the previous AI webinars. I emailed you with a discount as well, so check that out. Links are at thecreativepenn.com live L I V E thecreativepenn.com Live thanks for your emails and comments and photos this week. Louise said. Absolutely loved your words of wisdom at the beginning of the episode. You managed to shift my attitude this morning such that my day will be a good one. Oh thanks Louise. Mermaid Scribbler said. What a great interview with Sarah. I enjoy both of your podcasts so to have you in one place was a treat. Since you like K dramas, I wanted to recommend one of my favorites. Master's Son by the Hong Sisters is brilliant. A horror rom com with brilliant music. That sounds good. And Julie said. I truly enjoyed this podcast. I'm especially grateful for the permission to write and market in my own way at my own pace. I've just published my first book in January. Sales are slow, as are reviews, but the ones I've received are so positive and better. Sales days are ahead. Yes, and indeed the long term view will help you there. June Truly okay, please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@thecreativepenn.com or on the YouTube channel, or email me. Send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. JoannaTheCreativePenn.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. And just As a reminder, joannathecreativepen.com is my email. If you get an email from someone who claims to be me and it is not from that email, then it's not me. I've been getting so many things lately about people getting these, so obviously there's nothing I can do about these scammers. Joanna the creative pen.com if you are concerned so today's show is about my Kickstarter. So no corporate sponsor, but thanks to the 18 new patrons who've joined this week and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to all my backlist videos and audio and and articles on writing, craft, author, business and AI tutorials. Last week I shared a video on how I made my book trailer for Bones of the Deep with Claude Midjourney, Elevenlabs and Canva, which was a lot of fun. And you can see the book trailer on my Kickstarter jfpenn.com bones if you didn't know, the Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee and month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. So if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us@patreon.com TheCreativePen right, let's get into Kickstarter. Kickstarter tips for rewards, shipping, mindset marketing, and lessons learned. In this episode, I've included excerpts from my own previous solo show about Kickstarter, as well as clips from interviews with Orianna Leckert, the head of publishing at Kickstarter, Russell Nolte, who's done lots of successful Kickstarter campaigns and teaches direct sales, as well as Sasha Black, who did a six figure campaign last year as Ruby Rowe. Plus, I have added my updates to the end of the episode, filling in any last thoughts. The full episodes are linked in the show notes if you want to listen further. What is Kickstarter and why use it instead of doing a normal book launch? Here's Orianna Leckert, head of publishing at Kickstarter, and the numbers she shares will be higher now as the episode was from February 2025 Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform.
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We are unique in the crowdfunding landscape for a few reasons. We are only for creative projects, so you can't use Kickstarter for medical bills, inside investment funding, charitable donations. Every project has to create something new to share with the world.
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Have you got any numbers on how
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big the Kickstarter industry is now with publishing or anything you can share around that?
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Yeah, I would love to tell you. So first I'll tell you Kickstarter Overall, by the numbers, since our inception there have been 273,000 projects funded. Eight and a half billion with a B billion dollars pledged from more than 2024 million backers. In publishing specifically, we've had 69,000 projects launched, 3.2 million unique backers, and over $380 million pledged to campaigns. I have lots of other stats, but a few things I'll share. The publishing category has grown year over year every year since 2017 in terms of number of projects launched, number of projects successful, and the overall percentage of success rate there has never been a dip since 2017. Another stat that I really love about the publishing category. If you look at campaigns that have at least 25 backers, the overall success rate is 84%. I think that's really telling because 25 backers, that's like a little bit more than your mom, your best friend, the folks who are essentially obligated to support anything that you do. So if you can get a little bit beyond that sort of inner circle, your chances of succeeding on the platform are tremendously high. Another thing that I wanted to call out, I just got some new numbers around this. The average backing amount per backer across the whole category has nearly doubled since 2020. So we used to see an average backing of $40 and it's currently at $72 per backer. I think this is clearly around the trend of special and deluxe editions, but it's a great indication that the backer behavior on Kickstarter is just very different than sort of your general book buying public. People don't come here looking for 99 cent ebooks. You know, the lowest bargain basement prices. Folks are really willing to pay More because they understand that this is a different kind. It's not exactly a purchase. It really is supporting bringing a strange and wonderful new thing into the world that wouldn't exist, exist before. People are also much less, much more forgiving about timeline. If you buy something most online booksellers, you're expecting to have it in your hands within a couple of days. People wait months and sometimes years to get their Kickstarter rewards, and they don't mind if the creator is clear and transparent. You're also doing the work of demystifying the publishing process. Why does it take so long? Where are books printed? How long does it take them to ship via freight over the ocean? You know, what do all these things really look like? So it's really interesting just figuring out what your backers want and will bear versus the general book buying public out in the world. And people thought Kickstarter was just for like desperate people who couldn't get a book deal through the traditional systems. And the change has been so dramatic of people understanding that Kickstarter can be transformative for an author's career and that it can work for traditional publishing, indie publishing, hybrid publishing, all kinds of authors. Kickstarter is really about collapsing the boundaries between a writer and their readers, a publisher and their fan base, any creative person and their audience. And there's so many benefits to doing that. You get to thrill your backers with new and exciting rewards. You get to turn what can be a sort of not boring, but like just a standard book release into a moment. You get to build your brand, your profile, get press. You get to test out ambitious projects. You get to understand so much more about your audience and what they want and how you can give it to them. And it's been really marveling seeing the great success that people can have on our platform and outside of it.
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Why Kickstarter and not a usual book launch? So benefits for backers. If you back a Kickstarter, you get special editions, bonus content, interesting merchandise, bundles, digital specials, print specials, early access, and all of them pretty much are really cool books from creators you either already love or those you've never heard of because you just want to see their cool stuff. And I've started buying books from people I have never heard of because I think their books are really cool. So once you start supporting campaigns on Kickstarter, the algorithm will recommend campaigns for you. It's essentially a different way of shopping for great books and other products. And it's just another part of my ecosystem for how I shop. It's a form of direct sales, so you also have a closer connection with the creator. You can message them, for example, and they get it, rather than buying through an online retailer or bookstore. In terms of benefits for creators, you get to know people in a more personal way through the campaign, messaging with people and connecting more than you would when selling through a retailer. When you don't know who is buying your books as an author, you can make more money more quickly and retain a higher percentage of the royalties rather than wait months or years to get paid and have a large percentage taken out by everyone down the channel publishers, platforms, distributors and retailers. Brandon Sanderson's $41 million Kickstarter was clearly the pinnacle of what can be achieved, but many authors are happy making a few thousand for their book project upfront and use campaigns multiple times during the year. Kickstarter takes 5% for their fee, although of course you have to factor in the cost of production and marketing. But even then I make more profit on my book sales through selling ebooks and audiobooks direct and also printing with bookflo Vault with Print on Demand rather than. Well, I make more money with Book Vault than I do with KDP Print or IngramSpark. Another way you make more money is that the average order per customer is higher with Kickstarter than sales on the usual stores. The average order on my campaign was 37 pounds 24 pence or that's around 45 US dollars, which is at least four times higher than I might have made. Selling Pilgrimage Pilgrimage in the usual way on the major retailers you get paid two weeks after the campaign finishes, so the money is in your bank account much faster than if you sell on retailers. In terms of cash flow, make sure you time your campaign so you get the money before you have to pay for printing, shipping and other significant bills. There are many creators who now make
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Kickstarter at the core of their business business.
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It's a spike income model rather than a monthly income which most indie authors are used to. Now. The monthly income model is fantastic. I love getting money every month, but it also has the effect of making indie authors behave as this is like a normal job, as in work every month, get paid every month, put out another book so that you get paid in another few months time. With the Kickstarter model you can get a bigger chunk of money in one go, so you could potentially move to a big launch and then take more time off before ramping up to the next launch months later. And amusingly, this sounds a bit more like traditional publishing. It's just as an author, when you get that amount of money, it's much bigger. So that kind of launch tempo is an attractive prospect. If you think about, okay, if I just get this big spike of money even once a year, that's really cool. And then of course you can sell it later.
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What are some of the fears that might stop you? I held back from doing a Kickstarter for years, almost a decade in fact, where I backed campaigns, but I resisted doing a campaign for my own books.
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This entire experience thrust me out of my comfort zone and into a new way of creating, launching and connecting with readers. Pilgrimage is my first memorial memoir, my first special hardback with colour photos, and my first Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. So I had a lot to learn. The book is very personal and I bare my soul about some dark times. So that was terrifying in itself, let alone trying a new product edition and publishing platform. On the evening I click the launch button and yes, you have to actually click an actual launch button. My heart was hammering out of my chest. I have not felt that nervous since probably the first time publishing on Amazon. I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of being embarrassed if my campaign didn't fund. I wrote a book on marketing how to market a book so I would be mortified if I had not funded. In fact I even changed my target from £5,000 to £1,000 the night before as I was so terrified it wouldn't fund. I was afraid of getting something terribly wrong and ending up out of pocket through issues with printing and shipping. I was afraid of letting backers down by promising something I might not be able to deliver. I was afraid I had over committed
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myself to a whole load of work
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I would might even resent doing. I am a one person business and although I work with freelancers, I still do pretty much everything myself. I am a control freak, you might have noticed. So yes, there was a lot of apprehension and fear.
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Another fear might be fear of failure that you will put up a campaign and no one will buy from you. But one answer is just to do a modest campaign, you don't have to do special hardbacks or merchandise. As Russell says, somehow all of the
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teaching that we have given over the last two years has been executed in this way that makes it seem like you have to do this enormous campaign with like sprayed edges and like big beautiful hardcovers and interior illustrations and vellum and all of that stuff. And I want to say first that is absolutely not true. Like you don't have have to do any of those things, if you look at the two of the last three campaigns, all I was offering was paperback books and ebooks and then audio commentary for one of the campaigns. And so you can do a Kickstarter. And I often will tell people, especially if they're not a already successful author, like, do a campaign that is small and easy to get data on before you do something big.
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I think one of my resistance to this was the sort of, oh, I'm
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actually gonna have to do a more higher touch thing. But as you say, the reframe is, oh, my goodness, this is amazing, because I actually do get to connect with people.
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And just yesterday, I sent a signed
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book sign my book pilgrimage, which I
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did my last Kickstarter on. And this guy was like, I bought it for myself.
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Can you sign it to me? Because I'm gonna do the Camino in a wheelchair.
- [39:45]
B
Wheelchair.
- [39:45]
A
And I was just so touched by emailing him back. And I just felt, oh, my goodness, I am having connection with this person that if they just bought a book on Amazon, I would not have had.
- [39:57]
B
And so now it's almost like I.
- [40:00]
A
I feel like you're saying, which is
- [40:02]
B
this totally different view of my business,
- [40:04]
A
which is this direct first means a
- [40:07]
B
much more personal way.
- [40:08]
A
It really is like we're in that thousand true fans moment that we first talked about 20 years ago.
- [40:17]
B
Tips for campaigns. In this section, Orianna shares her thoughts on rewards. And then I will go into some more of my tips.
- [40:28]
C
The rewards are really, like, at the heart of the Kickstarter proposition. And what makes this kind of fundraising so interesting and kind of thrilling? Basically, basically, Kickstarter. Your process is you're saying you're inviting people on a creative journey. You're saying, I'm gonna make this cool thing, I want your support, and in exchange, you're gonna get stuff. You're gonna get to be part of my process. So obviously, your main reward is going to be your book or your series or if you're a publishing company, your season, whatever it is, that's your main tier. And then you're going to build everything else out above and below that. And then a lot of people think the rewards means swag, no merch, which I don't. You know, it's fine, but merch can really be. It adds a lot to your production costs. It's causing you to, like, learn how to produce all kinds of things that maybe you've never done before. And so that's not the only way to do it. If you're going to do some merch. I think it's nice to come up with some, some custom items that feel really related to the work that you're doing. If you've got a romance novel with a pivotal scene on the beach, maybe you make some candles that smell like the ocean, maybe you do some kind of handkerchief that's printed with the pattern of the dress that your heroine is wearing. But you can really think beyond merch into digital rewards, experiential rewards. There's a lot of parts of the writing process that can be sort of like pulled out and packaged as rewards. Things like notes from the field, outtakes, deleted scenes. I've had people write bloopers, you know, as if it were like a comedy movie, like added new scenes or novellas. Other pieces from different works that you've done, certainly your backlist and other books that you've written, those can all be included. We've seen people do tours of the writers studio, things like that. Also think about what skills you have in addition to your writing. Perhaps you are excellent at marketing or social media or poetry. You can, can offer webinars on those sorts of things, other kinds of ways that people can experience the sort of creative practice that you have. And then you can get into like high end exclusive one off crazy rewards. One whole section of Rewards I love is naming rights. We've seen all kinds of. We'll name the dragon after your dog, we'll name the illness after your mother in law, we'll name the hero after your son. There's a LITRPG novelist named Matt Dinnemann who he does, he did this really well. He writes these sort of like big cast, you know, there's dungeons and you're in an intergalactic reality TV show with hundreds of characters. And so in his last campaign for $666 he will kill you off in his next book. And for $777 he'd let you live. He'll write a whole scene around you personally and that sort of thing. Yeah, so those are just some. I mean you can also do book release parties, you can do book clubs. If you're writing children's books, you can do coloring pages or supplemental material for teachers or other educators. The sky is really the limit and it is based on your creativity and the things that both you can make and that your audience wants. So this is another opportunity. Talk to them, ask them if I'm going to do a piece of swag. Would you rather have an enamel pin or a makeup bag? You know, if I'm going to do alternate covers. Would you like the blue cover or the red cover? See what your people are interested in and then figure out whether it's possible for you to deliver it.
- [43:57]
A
Learn about the platform from experts I've been publishing and selling books through online retailers as well as my own store since 2008. I know what I'm doing doing, but I still had a lot to learn with Kickstarter. It's essentially a completely different ecosystem with different rules and a different audience, so you have to learn the ropes. Even if you are super successful in other places, you might crash and burn on Kickstarter unless you understand how it works and change your approach accordingly. Start backing campaigns, see how it feels to back Kickstarter campaigns and discover what draws you in as a reader and a fan of specific things you might find projects you love of outside of books. There's plenty of other projects outside of books. You can browse the publishing category to find new books and also use the search to find things you might like. In this way you can support fellow creators and learn how the Kickstarter site works for discoverability and marketing. Make sure you go through the kickstarter.com resources so they have a creator pack and will give you direction on the campaign. Also their terms of use really important to read their terms of use as there are some assumptions you have because what I did and you will have because we publish on other platforms that are incorrect. So do not assume you know what you were doing if this is your first campaign. Once you have a draft of your campaign, ask specific people to review, view it before it launches so you can share a preview prior to launch and get feedback on your page. This helps you refine your story and the rewards. Answer any questions before the campaign goes live and it can also help pique the interest of your audience. So I asked specific people who had done Kickstarter campaigns for help at different stages of the process and this was really useful too. Review common mistakes from other campaigns campaigns if you examine how others made mistakes, you can learn from them. The most common seem to not finishing the book before the campaign, getting the financials wrong for production, shipping and for any other rewards. I know some authors who have ended up breaking even or sometimes even out of pocket from campaigns. Don't do that. Not making the most of the story sales page and including everything necessary so backers understand and want to support the campaign. So essentially not being clear enough, setting unrealistic goals like expecting to make six figures on a first campaign, not allowing enough time for everything, not seeking feedback from people who have done it before, not marketing the campaign enough, over promising and under delivering, and poor communication with backers about the status of rewards. Set aside more time than you think you need. The campaign ended up being far more significant than I expected in terms of workload and time to complete. Everyone told me that beforehand, but it was still a surprise. It took time to prepare the multiple additions for the rewards. I usually produce an ebook, paperback and a large print edition and I narrate my own non fiction audiobooks. But for this Kickstarter I also wanted to do this special hardback with colour photos, flyleaf cover, silver foil. I wanted to create a special print product I could be proud of. I'm proud of all my books in terms of the content, but the usual paperback print on demand books are more about the content than the true beauty of the product. Product For Pilgrimage A Book of My Heart I wanted a special edition. So I worked with Jane on the design going through my photos from the various pilgrimages to find those that resonated with the content. For example the cadaver tomb at Canterbury and my Compostella from the Camino de Santiago. Once we finished I had that proof copy rushed so we could turn around everything and I love love love the hardback. It has a silken finish cover and it feels lovely and weighty. The pictures came out well as the paper is of a higher quality in weight to allow for colour printing and overall I am incredibly proud of the finished product. I even sent a copy to my mother in law which I have never done before and yes she thinks it's good. I definitely should have allowed more time as I spent most of the Christmas and New Year period working on the book, recording and editing the audiobook and preparing for the campaign. I also didn't have time to prepare, record, edit and produce the writing, setting and sense of place course until after the campaign and it was really hard to find the energy to do this afterward. It took time to build the Kickstarter campaign page, create the video and incorporate feedback. Most authors don't write sales pages anymore. Sure we write a sales description for the book page on the retailers, but we don't often do a whole page for multiple editions. On Kickstarter. You're basically writing a sales page for your campaign which they call a story. Some of your existing audience might just click through and back the campaign without reading it, but most backers will check out the details to find answers to any questions they have. It is a very long page and you also need a video or you don't need a video, but it's highly recommended you use a video which is best to record at the last stage when everything else is done done. You can still see my Kickstarter video on my campaign page so I won't go through everything in detail, but the key aspects are who the campaign is aimed at, why the campaign is important to me and the book, what products were available, pictures of everything as the page should be really visual and I included the images in the video as well. Sample chapters and sample audio specifications with weight, pages, listening time, table of content Content About Me the author, stretch goals, add ons, and any questions, risks and challenges. So it's pretty long. Then the reward levels have to be set up carefully for each pledge level with shipping costs as I said and specific details about what's included. Eventually I felt like my page had way too much information, but since I didn't really get many backer questions, I guess it did what it was supposed to do. I rewrote and edited that page so many times, adding and changing the order of things, responding to feedback and switching things around,
- [50:58]
B
but hopefully I can use
- [50:59]
A
that as a template for other campaigns. It took time to prepare the marketing for the campaign. I'm pretty low key for most launches these days. I publish a book, send a few emails to my lists, announce it on the podcast, do a little social media, update my websites and move on to the next book. So this was probably my biggest effort in terms of launch since my first novel back in 2011. I only had a two week campaign so I needed to make the most of that window. Now I'm going to detail the marketing in a separate section, but it took a lot of time to prepare the various things and execute them as well as keep the energy up for promotion during the campaign. Pain Two weeks was definitely the longest I would want to do as I was really over it by the end. It took more time to create and deliver the extra stretch rewards I promised. Since I had pretty low expectations of funding, I set my first stretch goal at £10,000 for lessons learned from writing a travel memoir. When I promised it, I thought it might be a few pages of tips and I didn't even think we would get there. But I am incapable of delivering something that is half done and so we did hit 10,000 and I did write essentially a short book on the topic, which I then formatted an ebook and recorded as an audiobook record. I did it as usual, as I do now. I'm actually going to turn that into a proper book at some point so the content will get reused. But that definitely took more time than I expected because I hadn't prepared it in advance. It took time to figure out the backer spreadsheet and check all the fulfillment details. So once you finish your campaign you send out surveys for mailing addresses and to fulfill rewards. But I also needed to turn the backer report into a printing order for Book Vault and that was nerve wracking indeed. The spreadsheets were different formats and then we spot checked the orders to make sure people got the right books based on the their orders. I was petrified that some people might get the wrong book and I checked and checked and checked and checked both on the spreadsheet and then once the orders were loaded I checked Book Vault as well. I was worried I'd have to resend the right book which would end up with me out of pocket because they'd have to do double printing and shipping. But thankfully all the checking made everything good and I haven't heard from anyone who got the wrong it took time to follow up with backer payment and address issues, so most backers were easy to deal with. They received the updates and Kickstarter emails, they filled in the surveys and I didn't have any problems. But there were problems with about 5% of backers, most of which were not their fault. There were failed payments when banks thought
- [53:55]
B
Kickstarter might be free fraud.
- [53:57]
A
They were missed emails because of issues with deliverability. So backers didn't receive the rewards or they didn't fill in the survey and return their address. Which meant I couldn't do the order with bookvault. I had to do it later or manually.
- [54:10]
B
I had to follow up with every
- [54:11]
A
single one of these, some of them multiple times, and I slowly reduced my list of outstanding backers. So here's a tip. If you back a Kickstarter campaign, please log on to Kickstarter a few weeks after the campaign has finished and check for updates. It's possible that you are not receiving the emails from Kickstarter and the creator may need details from you in order to fulfill your pledge. It took time to figure out the tax implications. This is not legal or financial advice and your taxes will vary by jurisdiction. So please ask your accountant how you need to treat Kickstarter or any other book related income Income Wherever you are in the world, you will need to pay tax on the income because we all have income tax. But the complicating factor is whether you also need to consider sales tax and this definitely differs by jurisdiction. So I went to my accountant who said that we should handle it as per any other book sales. Essentially, I followed my accountant's advice, which treats backers in the same way as my customers who buy on Shopify. Ask a professional in your jurisdiction about taxes and finances even if you're in the uk. I cannot answer any questions. I'm not an accountant. I haven't had much time to do anything else as I felt like I couldn't start anything new until everything in the campaign was finished. As soon as the campaign window closed I felt like I had an open loop in my brain brain. I desperately wanted to close it in order to say the project was done. I have now delivered all the book and course rewards and these lessons learned
- [56:01]
B
are really the last part of it.
- [56:03]
A
I've talked before about the different kinds of energy you need as an author, starting energy, pushing through energy, and finishing energy. Once the campaign was funded, my finishing energy kicked in and I was driven to get everything finished as soon as possible. I sent the digital rewards out within a few days of the campaign closing and also shipped the unsigned books, ordered the print books. Then of course I went and signed them and then I recorded the course. It has been my primary focus for
- [56:33]
B
the last few months and I haven't
- [56:35]
A
been able to do much else except the podcast which is my weekly commitment to you. Once again, I should have blocked out the time. Bonus. Don't plan an international speaking and book research trip during the campaign. More tips Be careful with international shipping and fulfillment of signed books or products. Shipping costs can sink your campaign if you get them wrong, so be very careful with this area. I have sold books in 175 countries countries and this podcast has a listenership in 228 countries. So I really wanted to have a completely international campaign. I wanted to ship Pilgrimage in any format to any country. So originally I thought I would just charge a bit extra for the book and include shipping. But once I set the book editions up at Book Vault and I had the weight and dimensions sorted, I started checking the shipping cost costs to different countries. For example, we lived in New Zealand for seven years. My husband is a New Zealander so we go back.
- [57:43]
B
So I was like I definitely have
- [57:45]
A
to sell in New Zealand. And of course the shipping to New Zealand is very very different to the US for example. It is crazy how much shipping costs vary and I discovered I couldn't just assume it would all wash out and I'd end up making a profit somehow. I had to be a lot more careful with the calculations. So I focused on my biggest markets, which are in terms of my book sales, the us, uk, European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. I added a note on the campaign to say I would add any other country for print shipping if people contacted me. As it turned out, no one asked for any other countries, so that was
- [58:24]
B
the best way to go.
- [58:24]
A
In the end, if you're in a country where the shipping is outrageous, if you're willing to pay for the shipping, then that's absolutely fine. It's just for the campaign, I had to face focus. But of course you can try to
- [58:37]
B
prepare for everything and then something unexpected
- [58:39]
A
and out of your control happens. A big spanner in the works for my campaign was the Russian hack, which took down the UK Royal Mail just before my launch. And if you're not in the uk, you wouldn't have heard about this because I guess in some ways it's a very small issue, but it basically took down the Royal Mail and a lot of shipping went into flux. So it specifically hit the international side and. And other shipping firms ramped up to take the slack, but it made planning for the launch difficult as the prices were shifting. I didn't know how delivery was going to work, and even for posting in the uk, it was hard because the Mail offices were getting backed up. So, once again, I'm grateful for bookvault's adaptability because I could check different addresses and shipping prices even as things change. And they added new providers for shipping, and about 95% of my shipping ended up being within an acceptable range of what I charge. So do your research. Weigh and measure your items so you can get exact quotes for each. And also check what kind of packaging you need. So you, if you are doing your own shipping, you have to actually type in the shipping costs per reward and per country. So it's a lot of manual setup to get it right, but this is critical. So check and double check. And in fact, I triple and quadruple checked, then went to sleep and then the next day checked again. And having spent, what, 13 years as an IT consultant prior to this career as an author, I. I will always remember and have learned from the fact that something just might not be working. And then literally, if you just go away, go to bed, come back the next day, it will probably just be working. Sometimes that actually works. So, yes, I did that. And every time I checked, pretty much I found I typed something in that didn't quite match as you also have to retype if you include include all the books in the add ons, you have to type it again. And I didn't stop checking until the day before the launch and then it was right. I was happy and yeah, I'm really happy that everything seemed to be fine.
- [60:51]
B
Revisiting this section made me laugh because as I record this in the week before I launch Bones of the deep, international shipping is again disrupted, this time by the war in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz being closed, which is affecting fuel prices, which is affecting shipping, which yet again stresses how important it is to check your shipping just before you go live. Because as I do, this book vault just emailed to say that they are adjusting their shipping rate. So I need to go in and adjust my shipping rates now. Of course you can add shipping later. Kickstarter allows this, as does Backerkit and other services. But the reason I include shipping at the campaign level is that as a backer I get really annoyed by being asked to pay this later. It seriously annoys me and in some cases I've been stung later by being asked to pay a lot more shipping than I expected. So I want to include it at the backer level so that people can make an informed decision. Since I hate it myself as a customer, I don't want other people to feel the same way. Now it doesn't mean you have to make the same decision, it's just the reason why I make it decision. Also, I will ship pretty soon, I guess. So as long as I can build in a little bit of a buffer, I know it's going to be okay. I finished everything, the books are ready, I just need to get them printed and in the post. So asking people to pay a little bit extra, let's say an extra 50 cents or a dollar in their pledge is not that big a deal. But you being out of pocket for every book shipped may well be a big deal if you get a lot of sales. So balance this out when you do it, but certainly be aware that something might happen to you to impact your shipping, your printing, all of this kind of thing. So make sure you allow a buffer. So in the interview I did with Sasha Black, who writes as Ruby Rowe, in December 2025, we talked about her issues with fulfillment and Sasha does a lot of complex printing, shipping from abroad and custom book boxes and more. Her last campaign made over six figures, but of course it had its challenges. So here's Sasha with some of her tips and then Oriana to close out this section with some other mistakes, stakes
- [63:10]
E
the first thing is kind of even before you start your Kickstarter, the pre launch follower counts are critical. So a lot of people think, well, I guess there's a lot of loud noise about all these big numbers about how much people can make on Kickstarter, but actually a lot of it is driven by you, the author, pushing your audience to Kickstarter. You need more pre launch followers than you think you do. And lots of people don't put enough impetus on the marketing beforehand. Almost all of our Kickstarter marketing is beforehand because we drive so many people to that follow button. And then the other thing that we do is that we do early bird pricing so we get the majority of our income on a campaign. On day one. I think it was something wild, like 80% this time was on day one one. So that's really important. The second thing is it takes so, so very much longer than you think it does to fulfill a campaign. And you must factor in that cost because if it's not you fulfilling, you are paying somebody else to fulfill it. And if it is you fulfilling it, you must account for your own time in the pricing of your campaign. And the other thing that the amount of time it takes to fulfill is directly proportionate to the size of the campaign. So you do have to think about that. The other lesson that we have learned is that overseas printing will drag your timelines out far longer than you think it does. So whatever you think it's going to take you to fulfill, like add several months more onto that and put that information in your campaign. And then the last thing I think which was really key for us is that if you have have some profit in the Kickstarter because not all Kickstarters are actually massively profitable because they either don't account enough for shipping or they don't account enough in the pricing. Thankfully, ours have been profitable, but we've actually reinvested that profit back into buying more stock and more merchandise, which not everybody would want to do if they don't have a warehouse. However, we have, we are stockpiling merchandise, merchandise and books so that we can do mystery boxes later on down the night. It's probably a year away, but we're buying extra of everything so that we have that in the warehouse. So yeah, that's like depending on what you want to do with your profit. Like for us it was all about buying more books, basically. I think the other thing to think about is what is it that you are doing that's exclusive to Kickstarter because you will get backers on Kickstarter who want that quirky, unique thing thing that they not then going to be able to get anywhere else. But what about you because you've done more Kickstarters than me. What do you think is the biggest lesson you've learned?
- [66:09]
B
Oh well I think all of mine together add up to the one you just did. Although I will comment on the you said something like £75 per pre launch backer that is obviously dependent on your tiers for the rewards. So most authors won't have that amount. So my average order value which I know is slightly different but I don't offer things like book boxes like you have. So a lot of it will depend on the tier. Some people will do a Kickstarter just
- [66:38]
A
with an ebook, you know, just with
- [66:40]
B
one ebook and maybe a bundle of ebooks. So you're never going to make it up to that kind of value. So I think this is important too is have a look at what people offer on their different levels of Kickstarter. And in fact this is here's my AI tip for the day what you can do. What I did with my Buried in the Drowned campaign recently is you, you know and I'm happy uploading my book. I uploaded it to chat and said tell me like what are some ideas for the different reward tiers that I can do on Kickstarter? And it will give you some ideas for what you can do, what kind of bundles you might want to do. So I think bundling your backlist is another thing. You can do them as upsells or you can just for example for me I think when I did Blood Vintage I did a horror bundle when it was four standalone horror books in one of the of the upper tiers. So I think bundling is a good way. Also upselling your backlist is a really good way to up things and also if you do it digitally. So for ebooks and audiobooks there's a lot less time in fulfillment. What are some of the top mistakes you see that mean the pain doesn't fund or there are other issues?
- [67:50]
C
Yeah, totally. I mean the biggest mistake I think think authors make or any creator is overestimating their abilities to reach their crowd. I think making sure that your ambition matches your reach is the number one most important thing to come close to guaranteeing that you will be successful. If you are an emerging writer and you're still building your audience and you don't have that many followers or subscribers out in the world, you should not try to fund a multi volume leather bound Omnibus figure. Do a real honest assessment of who's in your crowd, how to find them, what percentage of them are likely to support what you're doing, and then find a project that feels realistic based on those numbers. That's really the biggest thing conceptually as far as like tips for a project page. Again, back campaigns look at what other people are doing. But a project page can be either as simple or as complicated as you want to make. You definitely want, obviously, obviously, talk about the book, what is in it, what you're, you know, do a trope card if you want. We're seeing those all over the site, but just what kind of book it is. And like specs also page count, trim size, cover design. Obviously, if you're doing a special edition, exactly what sorts of bells and whistles with a prototype, if you can. But then you can be really expansive from there. What are your inspirations? Who are your collaborators? What brought you to this work? What are some of the things, things that make you excited about your writing practice, your timeline, your budget, what made you choose these rewards and how you're going to produce them? All those sorts of things will make backers feel both more trusting that you will do the things that you're promising and just more excited to be part of your journey.
- [69:34]
B
Marketing your Kickstarter campaign. Let's talk about marketing. First, a snippet from Orianna and then I will share specifics around marketing, marketing tips, many of which are useful if you are launching in any other way. It doesn't have to be just for a Kickstarter campaign.
- [69:51]
C
Being on Kickstarter will help you grow your audience, but it's definitely not everything. You really do need to bring your people first. Our algorithm works on attention, so any project that's getting clicks, getting backings, getting comments, our algorithm says, oh, people want to look at this. We will expose it to more and more people. And that means, you know, raising it up in search results, slotting it into various of the macros and carousels around the site. Our recommendation engine powers recommended projects on the top of campaigns, at the bottom of emails. We are doing a lot to make sure that projects are being surfaced to folks who want to see them
- [70:30]
B
talk
- [70:30]
A
and share about the book while you are writing it, even though you might not know what it will turn into. I always share my book research and projects in progress. So this was nothing new. But Pilgrimage was years in the making, so I have years of sharing aspects of it. I've shared pictures from every Pilgrimage walk on Instagram, fpenauthor and Facebook fpenauthor and sometimes Facebook the Creative Pen. I've talked on this podcast about each walk and I've done solo episodes and blog posts about each on my books and travel podcast and blog. I also did a poll and shared my book cover design process and then I did an article on why I ignored target reader feedback. In the end, all this meant that many in my community, including you, listening, you became aware of my solo walking and also my ecclesiastical interest, my architecture interest, and you've enjoyed my photos along the way. If you follow me on social media so when I announced the launch it was the culmination of years of build up. Set up the Kickstarter pre launch page as early as possible and keep promoting promoting it so you can launch a pre launch page once Kickstarter has approved your project and you don't have to have finished everything to make it available. Just complete the personal and business setup and fill in enough detail so they can verify your identity and judge the campaign to be real and within the guidelines and not just a scam or a spam campaign. So I started to promote my pre launch page. By the time we went live I had people so signed up on launch those people get an email from Kickstarter. So those people were responsible for my campaign funding within the first few minutes and then took it to 5x the target within the first 24 hours. And then I started to email my lists and all of this type of thing. But it was those pre launch signups that really kick started. See what I did there? The whole thing. Now the benefit of using Kickstarter for multiple projects is that previous backers are notified of your new project. This compounds the effect over time and why those who use Kickstarter successfully do multiple campaigns. Kickstarter SEO and Marketing Potential on the Platform Kickstarter has its own ecosystem. There is a discovery algorithm that can help you find projects you might like as a backer and there are also different ways to search, but only certain aspects appear in the search. So your title subtitle as well as your header image need to be optimized so people can find you your story. Sales page needs to be clear with a compelling pitch. People also have to want your rewards, so marketing has to be baked into the products you're offering and who you're trying to attract. Your video doesn't need to be a professional level product, but it does need to connect with potential backers. So take the time to make a good one. And if you've never made a video before you will need time to upscale. Kickstarter also has social media use kickstarterreads and Twitter iickstarterread. If your project funds quickly and has a good trajectory, you might get picked for the Projects we Love badge which also gives you better discoverability and I got that pretty fast. You can also tag Kickstarter on social media and inform them of your campaigns Content Marketing Content marketing is offering something useful or interesting or inspiring or funny or entertaining for free in order to attract your target market. So they buy your book. This might be an article, blog post, video, audio, podcast, social media, whatever. For fiction it is usually a free book or a short story or other free examples of your writing that draw people in. Content marketing is my favourite form of marketing as it is about attraction not interruption. It also involves creating something in the world that lasts over time as opposed to an ephemeral spike ad or social media post that quickly disappears. Each has its place of course, and I use the them all. This podcast is content marketing, although it now also provides direct revenue in the form of corporate advertising and Patreon support. Thank you patrons and advertisers and I
- [75:08]
B
consider this to be part of my
- [75:09]
A
creative body of work. My books and travel podcast and blog are also content marketing. For this launch I did content marketing on my own sites and shows as well as other people peoples which I arranged and recorded in advance. I've also mentioned the campaign in the introduction to every one of these shows leading up to the launch and during the launch I was on some podcasts Sacred Steps with Kevin Donahue, Wish I'd Known Then for Writers with Sarah Rosette and Jamie Albright, Travel Writing World with Jeremy Bessetti and Into the woods with Holly Wharton. I also did several podcast. I did one on this feed, I did another one on the books and travel feed. I also included two chapters from the audiobook on the books and travel podcast.
- [75:58]
B
All of these took time to prepare
- [76:00]
A
and produce, but each is a chance for another person to hear about the book. Plus they are evergreen and Pilgrimage is available for everyone to buy now so I can point people at Pilgrimage on other stores.
- [76:14]
B
Use a redirection.
- [76:15]
A
You are for all my marketing I used jfpen.com pilgrimage which I can redirect using Pretty Links plugin on WordPress and point it to wherever I want it to go. Before the launch it went to the pre launch page, then the campaign itself and now it goes to the book page and once I build a special landing page it will go there depending on where you're listening will depend on where it goes, but that's jfpen.com put pilgrimage the URL needs to be easy to say out loud for use in podcast interviews and audio first media Email your list multiple times Some things change in book marketing, like the emergence of new platforms like TikTok, but one thing has stayed the same for decades. If you have an email list, you can always sell books. Your email list consists of people who have opted in to hear from you so you can email them about normal launches as well as your Kickstarter campaign. I have two email lists, one for the Creative Pen around writing and the other around JF Pen for my fiction. I emailed both lists multiple times at different times in the campaign. I use ConvertKit for my email, but there are other options for authors use specific referral links for different aspects of the campaign. For tracking return Kickstarter allows you to create different tracking links so you can link revenue to specific marketing events. For example, I used one link for my Creative Pen email list and another for my JF Pen email list and yet another for my Facebook advertising. You can also add the Meta Pixel and Google Analytics code to the campaign, which can also help with figuring out advertising. And if you don't know what those are, don't worry, you don't have to use them. Book Images and Social Media I initially mocked up the book using cover images on MockupShots.com and then resized them in Canva in order to create social media images. I later did a book photo shoot with the hardback in different places to give me more marketing assets to to play with, all of which I will use over time as part of ongoing marketing. I prepared and scheduled social media posts to go out every day and I did that in advance primarily for Twitter hecreative Pen, my Instagram and Facebook fpen author and also Facebook hecreative pen. It was a lot of work but I really enjoyed it weirdly and I need to do more of this for my other books especially as with Shopify, Facebook and Instagram link directly into my store so I can tag books. And these days social commerce is a lot smoother through mobile so someone can see an image on social click through and buy immediately. I also I did some quotes from the book so I did pictures. I also did quotes and I blatantly used our cute British shorthair cats Cashew and Noisette for marketing reasons. Reasons. I use buffer.com to schedule my social media, but there are other tools. I also asked some friends who are travel influencers to share the book and I sent them the hardback in advance so they could review if they liked. Thanks to Sarah Baxter and Alastair Humphries for sharing the book and especially big thank you to Anna McNuff, who gave birth to twins that week and still managed to share About Pilgrimage Pilgrimage
- [79:55]
B
Backer
- [79:56]
A
Engagement during the Campaign and Use of Stretch Goals let's be clear, it was not natural for me to push a book every day for two weeks. I also felt awkward about engaging with backers multiple times, let alone the wider community who I was sure were sick of my book. But I did it anyway as it was only a short campaign of two weeks.
- [80:18]
E
Weeks.
- [80:20]
A
I sent four updates during the campaign to backers, some of which are visible to the public on my Kickstarter, and then I sent updates afterwards with delivery of the rewards. Although I did resist the stretch goals, as I mentioned earlier, I went with notes on writing a travel memoir and the backer Live Q and A. I did Scrabble to decide on and deliver those as I really didn't think I would need them. Crazy. I had such low expectations of what I might achieve. But next time I will definitely plan stretch goals in advance and in more detail. Facebook Advertising I did some Facebook ads for the campaign, although I should call them meta ads because they're also on Instagram. I primarily aim them at my email lists and people who follow my pages, but also some wider reach using lookalike lists and walking interests. I used a tracking link so I know that the revenue that came in through people backing it more than paid for the ads, so I would do more of this next time. Some marketing things I didn't do. I didn't try to get any press or traditional media attention, mainly because I would have had to approach outlets much earlier in the process. I didn't have the hardback finished until a few weeks before the campaign rather than a few months before, which is when pitching for press is a better idea. I also didn't collaborate with other creators on Kickstarter, even though I knew other authors doing campaigns at the same time. A couple of people asked me about cross promotion, but their campaigns were not at all related to Pilgrimage. And as with all book marketing, there is only a point to cross promotion if you target the same readers. I had intended to do some Facebook, Instagram and YouTube live videos, but I struggle with live videos in general and especially when I'm tired, so I didn't
- [82:17]
B
go ahead with those.
- [82:18]
A
I might consider more of those next time, and my tip is do a survey for everyone. So as part of a campaign I previously backed, I noticed that I didn't actually need to do a survey for the digital backers because they could just get the rewards if I emailed through Kickstarter. And sure enough, you can just email the book funnel links, the course discount code, etc. Through the CAN campaign. But this was a mistake. I should have done a survey for everyone. If you do a survey, you can get the real email, as some people use a cloaked email, and you can also include a checkbox asking people if they want to sign up for your email list. So while you do get the email addresses of everyone who backs your campaign in your backer report, you cannot just upload them to your email provider and start emailing them about your own other books. Kickstarter's Terms of Use include the when you use Kickstarter and especially if you create a successful project, you may receive information about other users, including things like their names, email addresses and postal addresses. This information is provided for the purpose of participating in a Kickstarter project. Don't use it for other purposes and don't abuse it. This is about data protection and privacy laws. Basically, Kickstarter is the platform in this instance, and people have signed up to receive emails from Kickstarter but not from you. All emails about the campaign go through Kickstarter and you don't have permission to
- [83:53]
B
just upload that list to your own
- [83:55]
A
email system and start sending more emails. They have not specifically said they want that unless they have in a survey with options opt in which I didn't do. Of course there are indirect ways to attract people to sign up for your list. My book pilgrimage includes ways to hear from me further, so some backers will go on and sign up for my free Thriller ebook@jfpen.com free or my author blueprint@thecreativepenn.com blueprint. You can also do updates later, for example, when you have a new campaign, and in this way Kickstarter acts as a different ecommerce system for email. Should you consider a Kickstarter campaign for your book? To be honest, only if you consider this to be a career you want to invest in and a platform you want to do more than one campaign with. If you just have one book or a couple of books, or you're just starting out, or you don't want to do marketing and connect with readers, then definitely don't do a Kickstarter.
- [85:00]
B
It is not some magic button that
- [85:02]
A
will make you money, like uploading to Amazon is not a magic button that will make you money. It takes time and effort to have a successful campaign, but if you do want to build a long term author business, then selling direct should have some part to play. And Kickstarter is a great way to make more money per book and connect with readers. It's really only the beginning of the trend of authors selling direct, so don't worry, you can learn how to do this over time.
- [85:36]
B
Update for Bones of the Deep my seventh Kickstarter campaign in April 2026. It's been interesting to revisit my lessons learned and other people's tips and really there are only a few things that have changed for me. Firstly, I absolutely love doing Kickstarter campaigns. I am not nervous at all. I am just excited and so thrilled to be able to produce gorgeous hardback editions of my books. This I am so grateful to those of you who back the campaigns. I love delivering beautiful books and new stories or non fiction to my readers. I love doing the discovery writing webinars, I love doing the coaching. I love being able to help people. But I'm a creator.
- [86:19]
A
You know.
- [86:19]
B
I just love producing beautiful things in the world that I am proud of. And on my wall I have, I have a lot on my wall. But one of the things I have is create a body of work I'm proud of. And and I am so proud of the books I produce this way it makes me feel like a real author. I know it's crazy and ebooks, the content is essentially the same but I just feel like a real author. When I get to sign a beautiful hardback with foiling and a ribbon and getting photos and emails from readers who receive the books. It means a great deal. So yeah, I absolutely love love it and for no other reason. This might be a reason to do Kickstarter so you can feel that way too. In terms of other changes, I mean since Pilgrimage when I did my first campaign, Book Vault has expanded their custom printing. So the custom end papers, sprayed edges, foiling, silken lovely paper, the ribbon, the photos. These gorgeous editions just get better and better every year. And I love saying I made this. I would love to get my backlist into special editions. That might be something I try and do like a couple more each year or something like that. But I just feel like I'm sure you have a shelf at home as well with your books on. But on my shelf at home most of my books are still in paperback. I do have some hardbacks I did through IngramSpark and even Amazon when they introduced it but they're just not as great as the book vault ones. So yes, I guess there's ego there. But hey, we are all this sort of mishmash of ego and self doubt. So anyway, I'm still doing similar kinds of rewards than I've always done. I mean, maybe that's not a surprise. The book is in all editions. It's all finished. Every single campaign I've done, the book has been finished. I've not had to do any kind of writing or production. Even the audiobook narration is done. So I can essentially fulfill immediately. Yes, I will do the live discovery writing webinar and potentially the stretch goal Q and A the consulting session. But all the writing of the book is done. The bundles I can easily do and my backlist gets bundled in the add ons. So I have a repeatable process now which just makes things easier. I mean even the campaign text itself, I'm copying and pasting the old campaign and then adjusting it so I've got a process and that really helps. I'm also using a lot more AI, specifically in the images and the video. Video. I love making book images with chat, GPT and Gemini Nano Banana. I love making story images with midjourney. I use 11 labs for my voice clone with audiobooks for my fiction. And of course I fill in all of those details in the AI section of the Kickstarter page so you can go and have a look at that and model it as you like. I know many people are worried, but for me, as I said a bit earlier, there's such a high barrier to entry to do a Kickstarter campaign. I mean it is very, very easy to just mass upload ebooks onto Amazon or Draft2Digital or any of these sites. It is not easy to do a Kickstarter campaign. So it is just a completely different place. And so from my perspective, using AI as an AI assisted artisan author is completely great. I love it. I haven't had any issues from readers. And yeah, I mean I've been doing this for nearly 20 years and I hope you would know I have integrity around my youth. So back on on the campaign, I still like the spike income. But to be clear, my campaigns have varied considerably in terms of finances and that would be normal because they're all so different. My highest campaign was writing the Shadow which made over £36,000 which was US$48,000. My lowest was the Buried and the Drowned, my short story collection at just under £8,000 which was just over $10,000. Now that's still amazing for a short story collection, but it's not a surprise at how different these audiences are, how different the offerings are. But together my six campaigns so far have made £105,000 which is just over US$140,000 which I am very very happy with. And of course that's just the beginning as then you put those books on the normal stores. So I've got JF pen books.com, creativepenbooks.com and then all the usual retailers. I still love the project approach as discussed with Sarah Rosette last week. The short term Campaign focus I am very good at sustaining marketing energy for a short period and then I just drop it off again and this feels sustainable for my career unlike constant social media or ads. In terms of marketing, I do rely a lot on the pre launch sign ups which I do over months of build up as I talk about my writing process on the the podcast here. I also email my lists and announce it there slowly. And I will of course be scheduling social media. I will be scheduling a few ads direct to the campaign page. Now I have claude code to help me set them up and run them and crunch the data which takes the strain off. So basically I feel like it's pretty low key. Once I've got it all ready I will definitely be doing more Kickstarter campaigns, probably a non fiction one next. And I'm so glad I was able to get over my fears and do that first one. So I hope that encourages you to consider what might be possible for you and your books. So if you'd like to check out my campaign for Bones of the Deep, even if you don't want the book, you can always model the sales page or check out the book trailer. It's@jfpenn.com Bones that link will go to the Kickstarter campaign from 20th of April until early May so the 5th of May 2026 and will then redirect. That's jfpen.com Bones. So I hope you found this roundup episode interesting and useful for your own campaigns and I hope it might go some way to alleviating your fears around Kickstarter if you haven't yet done a campaign there. I also think there are no AI books book scammers book spam at all on Kickstarter since there is such a high bar to entry doing a campaign. Let me know what you think. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes at the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel or email me joannathecreativepenn.com send me pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery or churchyard. Next Monday I'm talking to Adam Leipzig about navigating uncertainty and fearless persistence in a long term creative career. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time.
- [93:23]
A
Thanks for listening today.
- [93:25]
B
I hope you found it helpful.
- [93:28]
A
You can find the backlist episodes and show notes@thecreativepen.com podcast and you can get your free author blueprint@thecreativepen.com blueprint.
- [93:40]
B
If you'd like to connect, you can
- [93:42]
A
find me me on Facebook and X at the Creative Pen, or on Instagram and Facebook at Jfpen. Author Happy writing and I'll see you next time.