This post ran on Kickstarter on Wednesday and was locked to backers only, but we hit our stretch goal later that day and I feel that it's too good a post to leave locked forever. So I am reprinting it here (without modification) for people to consult in the future. :)

Good morning, backers! Today we are at a stunning 386% funded, with about 48 hours to go! We really are in the homestretch now, which makes it a good time to tell you why I don’t expect us to garner any more money!

And it has to do… with METRICS.

This is a super crunchy business post, which means only backers will get it. Thank you for backing, and if you want to share it so that other people will toss in a buck to read it, I think it'll be worth it.😊

LET'S TALK AUDIENCe

Most of you know I’ve completed 18 successful Kickstarters. Of those, 13 were fiction projects, and the remainder art. This distinction matters because few things are as apt to attract random backers as fiction projects. Most other crowdfunding campaigns are easy for browsers to evaluate: an art project can be gauged within a few seconds, a music/film project might require the commitment of a couple of minutes of listening/viewing to samples… projects based on nonfiction topics will draw people based on their topics, and product-based Kickstarters have natural audiences.

Fiction, though, is a very hard sell. If you’re an established author, you’re asking people to spend more than a few minutes reading samples to see if they’re interested; if you’re a new author, you’re asking people to trust that you’ll deliver. It is, in short, the wrong tool for attracting new backers, which is why most of the successful fiction Kickstarters you’ve heard of… you’ve heard of. Because their authors are well-known.

For this reason, I never target fiction campaigns at strangers. They’re intended not just for my readers, but for the super-patrons who are aware of crowdfunding at all, and are familiar and comfortable with being online. This isn’t even 10% of my readership… it’s more like 3-5%. And complete strangers who have never heard of me? I’m surprised if even 1 in a hundred backers turn out to be newbies.

So the first factor in gauging the potential success of a fiction Kickstarter is understanding your target audience: the subset of your existing fans who are likely to notice that you have something going on that’s not the latest release of a book at retail.

Next factor?

LET'S TALK SET-UP

Given that, the next most important factor is how you set up the project. Knowing what you want to achieve and how much time you have to spend on it are of paramount importance here. When I design one of these, here are the inputs to my thinking:

• How long do I want to spend in fulfillment? As a single-person business that makes money by producing creative content, my main activity should be… producing creative content. I don’t want to spend months hip-deep in packages and spreadsheets. I choose each prize I offer based on how long it will take me to craft and send it.
• What can I afford to offer? Every prize has to make back its Kickstarter cost before it can contribute to the cost of the content I’m trying to produce. By Kickstarter cost, I mean not just the monetary cost of producing the prize, but the time I spend researching it and fulfilling it. (This means that new prizes are more costly than ones I’ve done before because I need to do the legwork of figuring out whether people want them, how to produce them, how to price them, etc.)
• How much money do I need? Yes, this is the last consideration. Does that sound strange? But it doesn’t matter how much you need if you don’t have the overhead to run the project. You have to know first what you can commit to the campaign before you can set your monetary target… and if you don’t have the resources to get you to the number you need, then… you can’t run the project.

Worth repeating: if you need $10,000 and you can only spare $2000 worth of time, money, and effort… then you can’t run the project. Your resources limit what you can accomplish.

But Jaguar! I hear you saying. Isn’t the point of Kickstarter to get the resources you don’t have?

And I say: the only thing a Kickstarter will deliver is money. Not all problems can be solved by money. Thinking that with enough of it you’ll be able to handle anything is naïve. That project that asked for $5000 and got $500,000? “Oh, I’ll just hire people to help me!” But have you tried to hire anyone? Do you know what’s involved? How will you pay them? What if they flake? Have you tried ordering $500,000 worth of anything? It’s not much like $5000 worth of anything. Do you even know where you’ll put all those pallets when they arrive at your house?

So many problems. If your goal is to continue to do the thing that matters to you (in my case, produce creative content), then don’t put yourself in a situation where your job becomes ‘I consult spreadsheets, pack things, and ship things for a living.’

Let’s return to this project, then, and have a look at some statistics.

JAGUAR PREDICTIONS

Let's haul out the charts!

My typical fiction Kickstarter (audience: existing super-patrons; resource allocation: low; target-to-fund: low) is designed to get me very close to exactly the amount I’m asking for (usually $1000-1500). I plan to sign and draw in 25 books. This takes me 5-15 days, which I feel is a reasonable time allocation, and if all 25 sell, I’ll hit the goal. I throw in a $1000 original art tier because it’s never a bad thing to aim high, and my original art tiers usually sell. The unlimited ebook tier usually brings me some gravy, but most of my money will be made on the autographed books because the Kickstarter is aimed at super-patrons who value collector’s items, and a $10 ebook is more of a casual browser prize.

Based on this design, I predict that most of my fiction Kickstarters will earn me about $2000ish, and I’ll wrap them up within a month. As you can see from the data, this is usually what happens. The average here is skewed a bit because of a few heavy-hitting projects (which I'll discuss under Wild Cards), but in general I have a sense of how many people to expect and how much they're going to contribute.

The best part of managing your time and expectations is that you can run multiple Kickstarters with little effort. Unlike the famous writer who ends up with the $100,000 Kickstarter they need a year and a half to manage, you can drop 2-4 Kickstarters a year if you wanted, and still have plenty of time to write.
averages

That brings us to this project! This time around I need more money, so I designed accordingly. The 25 autographed books that would usually have gotten me over the $1500 target, plus the $1000 original art tier that would probably go, would only get me to $2500. So I designed six more premium prizes, based on cameos: five $250 minor cameos, and one $1000 one. The latter was a gamble—I wasn’t sure it would fly—but I was fairly confident that the minor cameos would pick up some backers, and if all five of them went, I’d add another $1250 to the total, which gets me very close to my $4K target.

It’s important to remember, designing projects, that nothing is ever certain. People’s monetary situations change, and readers come and go… so there’s never a guarantee that because you sold out a certain prize before, you will again. But you have to design and pitch the project as if it can succeed if you want it to have legs…! So I did, and thought that at most, it would bring in about $5000. That it’s at $7600 right now honestly is a surprise, which brings me to my last discussion here…

WILD CARDS

If a project succeeds beyond my projections, it’s always because of a wild card, and that wild card is invariably one person, or maybe two, who feel strongly about that particular piece of fiction. You can offer all the stretch goals you want, but in my experience the single biggest mover in a fiction Kickstarter is that one super-patron who really loves that project. (This is another reason why it’s good to use Kickstarter for existing work, rather than new work.) Again, I am talking strictly about fiction here… when your stretch goals are ‘unlock a new plush animal design!’ or ‘at this ridiculous amount I will design an entire new set of cloisonné pins!’ then you can get strangers piling in on your project to propel it to the stratosphere. Novels are a different ball of wax.

Because fiction Kickstarters break expectations based on whether a few people really love the content, I’ve found it useful to give them something to aim for: invariably new content. In the Major Pieces and Court of Dragons projects, that new content was ‘more short stories’; in the Dreamhearth project, it was ‘an entirely new novel.’ (Even Black Blossom offered new content, in the form of shorts; those are now in the back of the second edition.) For this project, I looked at my writing schedule and decided that an extra $5k would be enough money to pay for my time writing a book I didn’t have on the schedule for another year and a half. That gave me $10K as a goal for adding a second book as a prize. If we hit $10K, it will be because one or two people love the Alysha stories enough to push us to that ceiling, at which point we will stop funding.

So: keep an eye on the totals from here on out. If we jump up to $10K, particularly on the last day, you’ll know it’s because someone—at most two or three people, but historically it’s one person—wants that second Alysha book and has the money to make it happen.

CONCLUSION

There are a few things I’d like you to take away from this post, then:

• First, keeping statistics is enormously helpful. Start with your first project (or first anything you’re selling). Your predictions won’t be trustworthy until you have enough data, but committing to tracking the information will change how you approach your projects… and for a lot of people, it inspires confidence, because you feel like you’re in control of your assumptions and projections.
• Second, designing your project to hit the target is important and rarely emphasized. If you’re asking for $2000, make sure you have $2000 worth of stuff that you can deliver in a timely way. Don’t leave this part up to chance. Run the numbers.
• And third… when I am excited about a project doing well, I mean it. I’ve backed… checks 128 projects over the years, and I’ve often been reduced to tossing in a dollar to show my support instead of backing for the prize I really wanted. I never assume that my patrons are flush in the pocket at the moment I show up asking for support; and I never feel entitled to their money, particularly in instances where they are overpaying for a product to help produce it. Someone giving you $10 for an ebook you both know will sell at retail a few months later for $5 is a gift, and it’s right to be grateful for it. And project overfunding is inevitably the result of super-patrons wanting to show you how much your work means to you. That’s always special, and if I seem hyper-excited about it, it’s because I think it’s worthy of hyper excitement.

That’s all I’ve got today, backers! We’re into the final 48 hours, and as you now know, I don’t expect any significant movement until Friday, near project close! We’ll see what happens… together! Until tomorrow, then… thank you for your support.❤️