Betsy Miller last visited my blog when she explored the nuances of coauthoring and collaborating. I am thrilled to welcome her to Creator’s Roulette now to talk about crowdfunding! As one of the members of Thinking Ink Press, Betsy has much to share with her in her experience with the writing and publishing communities. Let’s get to know her and learn from her.
Betsy, welcome to Creator’s Roulette! Tell us about how Thinking Ink Press came to be.
Thanks for inviting me, Kriti. It’s nice to be here in spite of the fact it’s such a strange time in the world, when we’re all hunkering down to deal with the impact of the coronavirus.
Thinking Ink Press is the brainchild of a small group of writers who met at the Write to the End writing group led by Keiko O’Leary. The group was open to all levels of writers, but Keiko set up a separate monthly meeting with a focus on publishing for those of us who were writing professionally. We talked about various writing projects and this led to conversations about forming a small press. Anthony Francis, Liza Olmsted, and Nathan Vargas opted in, along with Keiko and me and we launched Thinking Ink Press in 2014.
This meant a lot to me personally—to have a team with an assortment of skillsets involved in the business formation and not to have to tackle everything by myself. I was also happy to have a home for my book The Parents’ Guide to Perthes. Perthes is a rare childhood disease. My nonfiction publisher decided not to publish this book since they prefer books with a wider appeal, and Thinking Ink Press gave me a business framework to publish it. (You can reach me in connection with Thinking Ink via email at Betsy@ThinkingInkPress.com.)
Vincent Scott, who was previously here on Creator’s Roulette, told us about comedy in sci fi and has a book coming out by Thinking Ink Press. That was the first time I heard about crowdfunding in publishing. What does crowdfunding mean?
The idea behind crowdfunding is that individuals or small businesses may want to create a product, but find it challenging to pay all the costs upfront to produce it. There are several crowdfunding platforms, such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo where you can set up a crowdfunding campaign. Crowdfunding campaigns include a creator and backers. The creator develops a campaign, which is like a sales pitch plus a business plan summary for a product. The campaign runs for a set amount of time and offers customers the chance to back the product by paying for it in advance and receiving rewards. Then the creator uses the funds to produce and deliver the backer rewards, which typically include the product plus some other fun options.
It’s important to use a reputable crowdfunding platform. We used Kickstarter to crowdfund The Hereafter Bytes. Kickstarter has rules about what kind of projects they accept. They use an all-or-nothing model for funding. If your funding goal is $1,000 and you reach $900, then the campaign fails, and the backers aren’t charged anything. Our campaign for The Hereafter Bytes met and exceeded our funding goal, which is wonderful. If you’re less sure about meeting your goal, then you might want to try a different platform.
What do you have to do to set up a successful crowdfunding campaign?
You have to be prepared, and I’ll circle back to that idea later. Before I talk about that, I want to say that my experience with crowdfunding The Hereafter Bytes isn’t typical for a couple of reasons. First, we were funded within a few hours of launching, which was completely amazing! Second, we had launched on March 11, 2020, so while I was trying to mentally process how to adjust our campaign to deal with unexpected early success, the coronavirus was hitting the world hard, crossing borders and throwing peoples’ lives into turmoil. As hospitals in hotspots scrambled to care for the sick, countries all over the world began closing businesses and schools, and implementing shelter in place restrictions.
With all of this going on, I wanted to be as transparent as possible about what we were doing. Due to Kickstarter policies, we were unable to end the campaign early and had to stay with the original campaign end date of April 1, 2020. Since we were funded so fast, I wrote FAQs for our campaign to explain how we would allocate the extra funds—that they would still be allocated for backer rewards and for publishing and promoting The Hereafter Bytes. I had set a modest funding goal of $800 for The Hereafter Bytes, which is less than the Thinking Ink Press budget for publishing the book. I had done this intentionally because Vincent Scott is a new author who hasn’t had a chance to build an audience yet and I wanted to be sure to hit the funding goal (remember Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing funding policy).
Next, I created Updates—which are emails sent to backers and I also sent messages to the folks on our email lists. I included news about the campaign and reassured everyone that we were continuing as planned. Thinking Ink works remotely with our professionals, so we were still in a position to commit to doing that. We already had an editor lined up to work on this book and an artist available in the timeframe after the campaign finished and we received the backer funds.
On preparing to crowdfund…
The first time you crowdfund is going to be the hardest, so I’d recommend learning as much as you reasonably can before you start. Try backing a few campaigns—ones that you really do like—to see how the process works. You can also read about what’s involved in running a campaign. I like Madeleine Holly-Rosing’s book Kickstarter for the Independent Creator because it’s short and practical. Another book you may want to try is From Spark to Finish by M. A. Hogarth, who is a writer and artist. Both of these writers have extensive experience running successful crowdfunding campaigns.
Here are some big picture things I’d recommend:
- Understand the process and costs involved in publishing the book or producing your product. You will need to generate enough funds to cover the backer rewards including shipping costs, and you’ll want to generate additional funds that you can use to offer your book or product for sale to the public.
- Be prepared to spend some money for professional graphics to use in the campaign and try to enlist at least one helper.
- Connect with your target audience before the campaign and build an email list of people who are excited about your book or product.
- Think about whether you’re the sort of person who would enjoy running a crowdfunding campaign. You might have to try it to be sure, but some people know right away that it’s not for them, which is fine.
Have you launched books in this manner before?
Yes, back when Thinking Ink was just getting started, I ran a small, successful crowdfunding campaign for The Parents’ Guide to Perthes. We used Pubslush—a crowdfunding site for books that no longer exists. It was basically a preorder campaign since this is a book about a rare childhood disease. The only reward tiers were to buy books, donate books to a nonprofit, or make a pledge with no reward. I was already connected to the online Perthes community because I interacted with them a lot as I was writing the book. They were excited to have a resource since Perthes can be hard to understand. I’m very glad we were able to publish this book—it’s still very popular within its niche.
Thanks, Betsy for sharing these insights with us. I am so glad to hear that Vincent’s campaign went well and grateful that I was a part of it.
If you could magically Kickstart anything in the world without having to do any work, what would it be?
Connect with Betsy on her Author Site and Twitter. You can to opt in to her Thinking Ink Press email list here or follow Thinking Ink Press on Twitter for updates.
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash
Image of team work on Unsplash.
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