Hi friends,

Since we first launched Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter in October 2021, there has been a seismic shift in the way Kickstarter has been perceived in the indie community. We have no problem taking our share of the credit there, but it takes a village, and so we wanted to go over everything that’s changed on the platform since 2021.

Mindset shifts

• Brandon Sanderson broke open the fiction category - In March 2022, Brandon Sanderson launched a “secret” Kickstarter that raised over $41 million and became the highest-grossing Kickstarter campaign ever by a wide margin. This showed fiction authors, and especially fantasy authors, that they could make serious money on Kickstarter. Prior to that campaign, it was hard to find 5-10 fiction campaigns live at any one time. Now, you would be hard pressed to find a time when there weren’t 100+ fiction campaigns live at any time.

• The community grew into something massive and powerful - Whether it’s our Writer MBA community, the Kickstarter for Authors Facebook group, Kickstarter specialists that will help you run and fulfill your campaign, or just the general discourse of the indie community, there are exponentially more people who can help you with Kickstarter now than there were in 2021 when we had to introduce the concept to the whole community.

• Special edition Kickstarters - Prior to 2021, there were many different varieties of fiction campaign, while now people seem to be using Kickstarter mainly to produce special edition Kickstarter campaigns (which we’ll talk about later) with all the bells and whistles. There has been a standardization of what a campaign looks like for both good and bad.

• Competition ramps up - Along with Indiegogo, Crowdfundr and Backerkit have emerged as direct competitions to Kickstarter on a global scale, while platforms like Zoop (Comics), Seed and Spark (Movies) and Gamefound (Games) have build category-specific platforms for crowdfunding.

Platform changes

• Late pledges - Since the inception of Kickstarter, backers have had to pledge while a project is live, or not at all. Other platforms, like Indiegogo, allow for late pledges after a campaign is over, and now Kickstarter does, too. At the bottom of the basics section of your campaign, you can enable late pledges and allow backers to pledge even after your successful campaign ends. Unlike a live campaign, funds are deducted from backer accounts immediately, and you are paid weekly for any new funds that might accrue. Another nice feature of late pledges is that you can turn them on at the reward level, so if you want certain rewards to keep going and others to end when a campaign is over, you have that flexibility. You can also set a different price for late pledges so that people who back while it’s live get the best deal. Finally, I should mention that yes, your campaign has to successful fund before late pledges works. You can’t keep limping along with a failed campaign forever.

• Images in your rewards and add-ons - The singular biggest change for creators is the ability to upload imagery in your rewards. It used to be that we had to create clunky lists in our campaign pages, but now we can create graphics (or you can hire companies like Bookbrush to do it for you) where people can easily see what they get in every pledge. This added the most new complexity to a campaign, but overall we think it’s a good change.

• A redesigned home page - The discover tab (where you look for new projects) used to be on the left and now it’s on the right. Additionally, the top menu has every category now, with dropdowns that make it easier to search for projects. This had the effect of basically eliminating the landing page for each category.

• Pivot to video - When a backer searches for a campaign, the video starts playing automatically when you hover over the image. This makes a video even more important AND makes the first couple of seconds critical to get attention.

• No more total pledges in the Discover tab - You used to see the total amount a campaign has raised when searching for a project. Now, you have to click on a campaign to see how much it’s raised, though it will tell you how funded, or overfunded, the campaign is at a glance, making pricing more interesting. Do you make a lower goal so you can be more overfunded?

• The new story editor - There is a new editor on the story page, but if you’ve used any text editor on the internet, then you’ll probably get a hold of it very easily. The one nice change here is that they now have a navigation pane on the left side that lists out all your headlines for easier backer navigation.

• Upgraded backer surveys - Kickstarter completely redesigned the backer survey tool to help integrate it better into the fulfillment cycle for publishers. They have simplified set-up, improved reporting, implemented SKU generation and improved address collection. Additionally, they have made it easier to update project status (and also constantly send you pop-ups to update your status even if you are just a collaborator on a project and not the one responsible for fulfillment).

• Integrations with Jellop and Pledge Manager - While Kickstarter is a great place while a campaign is live, it’s always been clunky before and after the campaign. Integration with Jellop allows for campaigns to advertise more easily to drum up interest in a campaign, and Pledge Manager integration helps with fulfillment. Honestly, though, it’s pretty clunky for books and comics. These are great solutions for bigger, more tech-forward campaigns, but I haven’t seen success using either of them myself. I worked with a Jellop campaign earlier this year and they seemed to lack a basic understanding of the comics category. Meanwhile, Pledge Manager sets up all the fulfillment stuff for you, and I prefer to be more hands-on, so that when something is wrong I can change it myself. I hope Kickstarter develops their own solutions, or natively integrates with these ones better, because right now I don’t think they are good solutions for authors.

• Kickstarter built their own in house performance marketing team - If you don’t want to work with Jellop, or another performance based marketing team, then Kickstarter created their own internal performance marketing team. They metrics they benchmark are 12% of funds could be attributed to advertising, and you could expect a 2x ROI, meaning if you made $10k from ads, you should expect to spend at least $5k for it. However, these are just projections. What I have generally seen is a 1.8-2.4x ROI on ad spend when I work on projects that use performance marketing.

• The prelaunch page has been beefed up. Now you can see the Project We Love and categories on the page, and you can write a whole blurb or additional marketing information on the page instead of just the one sentence logline.

Now, let’s get into how we actually build these new “stacks”. We’ll talk about the Special Edition stack and the non-fiction stack. Plus, I’ll share our one page simple Kickstarter page worksheet and our Kickstarter checklist.

The Special Edition stack