Crowdfunding Questions Answered

A fellow author asked me this question recently and I thought, this would make a good Q&A post for the blog.

"What platforms do you use, and which ones do you find best?" (

I'm mainly on FB but my newsletter is my biggest and best platform. I use my Insta and tiktok a little during my lead up to laughing on Kickstarter, but I haven't been consistent there and/or cultivated a strong following .

I find that my absolute best marketing is to have partner authors who I've traded swaps with. Because I maintain my NL year round as my big connection piece I usually collect swaps year round by sharing active campaigns and collecting contact info and then remind swap partners of the quid-pro-quo right when I go live which gets me a huge bump at the forefront and gives me another audience to advertise to for weekly backer updates and I swap only with other campaigns during those updates. I only advertise one crowdfunder at a time in my NL or updates since I don't want it to become just another piece of ignored junk mail. a lot of folks will overstuff their platforms and that's not good for anyone.

Since my biggest sales source is my relentless comic con schedule and I have a heavy emphasis on live sales (I sold around 100k worth of books last year [10 months, since I take it easy over the midwest winter months] with 75% of that being directly hand-sold over the table). I always have my next campaign setup in prelaunch and have a QR code set to direct people at the table to it. Whenever I make a sale, I also tuck in a card with that QR code as well. They just bought a book and I know they're going to love it and want the next thing. My live events are also the biggest grower of my newsletter--since I've already engaged with a person in the flesh and made a (hopefully good) connection they are a prime candidate for an invitation to join (plus the front and backmatter of the books ask for this as well.) The open rate on the segment of people who've met me is far higher than with others. A lot of author friends consider me the guru on this subject and I write about it in "Sell More Books at Live Events."

With doing a collection, you should draw heavily on the efforts of the group. for example, I'm in this collection right now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/justinrose/magic-and-majesty-a-midwest-fantasy-sampler and it's at 151 followers

The editor asked us all to aggressively and independently promote for a couple weeks on our individual platforms. He may have learned that from me as he was in my Twisted Yuletide holiday horror collection (I run a horror anthology series and when I am curating submissions I factor in an author's platform, newsletter count, and willingness to share/promote the work during the lead-up and through the campaign. I've had contributors say that they don't want to post/promote and I told them this collection isn't for them, then.) 

I'm also a big fan of knowing what to do with the funds for a campaign. I purchase print runs rather than utilizing PODs and generally make no money off of my crowdfunders. That 5-10k that I generate in revenue all goes towards the production costs--but I have a bunch of stock left over that I can sell since I have a workable strategy in place to distribute those books to fans and get paid to do it, and be paid much better. Here's my math on it: 

Let's say I have a new book to launch and use a POD for it and know that people want the special editions. Hypothetically, I'm going to say there are 100 books sold. 30 digital copies at $10 ea, 30 regular paperbacks at $25 ea, and 40 hardcover special editions at $55 ea. That makes $3,250 which is $2925 after platform fees. Production costs for the paperbacks will be about 210 to have made and shipped. Special editions on a low qty for hardcover at a POD (48 hour books), I did a quote at 50 copies for the settings of my last book, will cost $2306 for 50x copies shipped; that's 10x more than needed but it's good to have a couple extras in case of damages or for other concerns. That's a lot of work to earn $109--but if you sell those remaining 10 hardcovers at $50 each you'll earn just over $600.

Conversely, my last non-anthology campaign was for the above fantasy hardcover book and I bought 500 copies for $3450 shipped, plus 500 paperbacks for about half of that (but they also had color interior and foil covers, so they become a preference for shoppers over the regular editions,) making the production total $5175. By those same numbers above I have to eat $2250 immediately, however I now have a product that I can sell without having to pony up POD money every month while reordering books to resupply my inventory, and I expect I can fully sell out this stock on the one item over 2-3 years... my expected earnings on the total product run then are over $34,250. If I knew I could spend $2,250 on amazon ads to generate $34,250 in royalties I'd do it in a heartbeat. Of course there are other relevant expenses in this  (table costs for cons, etc.) but after having tested and out discovered what works reasonably well for me I now have multiple titles on my table which stand out to a crowd (special editions) and which have already had all, most, or a significant amount of their production costs taken care of making my table more profitable (production costs are only 20-50% of POD, meaning the difference goes in my pocket) and the value of the book is higher justifying a few extra dollars on paperbacks and gaining  $10-20 extra on hardcover special editions.

TLDR: thinking long-term about funds application earns an extra $32,000+ (POD costs being $7/PB and $40/HC being instead closer to $3/PB and $8/HC)

Of course, all that data shifts if I were planning to write steamy romance of any subgenre. All those rules fly out the window--but that's not what I write and have discovered the above to be how I can stand out in the