About two years ago, I did one of the toughest things I’ve done in my life: run a Kickstarter project called Sabre: the Early Future Years. With story by the legendary Don McGregor and art by the equally legendary Trevor Von Eeden, I believed that all I needed to do was post the Kickstarter, do a little bit of publicity, set up some great rewards, and quickly bask in the glory of a project that was completed and made lots of money.
Of course, I was completely wrong. The project failed, despite all the encouragement I got, despite all the social media and other promotional work I did, and despite the insane number of hours I put into the project. There were so many things wrong with the project: my goal was too high; fans didn’t know enough about the creators; my rewards were too confusing; the project wasn’t completed at the time I asked for funding.
In other words, I needed a guide to help me through the process of setting up this project. Somebody, as it turns out, like Madeleine Holly-Rosing, who’s written a detailed, thoughtful guide to creating and managing Kickstarter projects that gives anybody the right advice to avoid all the pitfalls that I hit.
Holly-Rosing should know all about this. More masochist (or more committed) than me, she had a project fail dramatically and then jumped right back on Kickstarter to deliver a new version of that project. She shares her advice for avoiding that failure by helping us learn from her mistakes.
In 100 concise pages, Holly-Rosing delivers a book that’s all about the nuts and bolts of a project without offering any fluff. She provides thoughtful and insightful knowledge about practical issues like estimating international postage fees, setting up your Kickstarter page effectively, and setting achievable goals. She even offers spreadsheet templates to help readers calculate costs and determine how much to reasonably ask for at each level.
This is the advice I wish I’d had when I first started my project. Thank goodness this advice can help everybody else with their projects. Its small cover price will pay you back tenfold in the stress it will save and the confidence it will give. Now if only I had a time machine to go back and fix my mistakes…
