(Or, The Joy of Independence)
I’m in a mood this morning.
I really should be making some words, meaning writing fiction rather than writing this piece, but I’m not. Which is probably not a surprise given I’ve been focused on hitting the Go-Live button and then supporting my latest Kickstarter. It’s all good. I planned to write this piece later in the day, but a person is often best served to go where their brain goes, and apparently, my brain has decided the schedule will flip.
Alas.
So instead of fiction, I’m thinking about Kickstarter.
Not just mine, but the whole ecosystem of the platform and how its profile seems to have grown. I’m also thinking about other writers and how they use Kickstarter. This is something I do a lot of. How are people presenting things? What’s interesting? Are new trends moving the landscape one way or another?
You might find that kind of research mind-numbing, but these are the kinds of things I like to do. It’s fun, mostly. Call it my ideation and analytical sides mashing together.
And it might surprise you just how much diversity there is in projects.
Regardless, it seems to me that a lot of new writers are flocking to Kickstarter, which makes me ponder how long it will remain a viable launch platform, but that’s another conversation altogether. I’ve been using it for some time and finding what for others might be small potatoes, but which I consider to be success. I’m getting what I want out of it, anyway, which is to move a few books and enjoy the emotional tie and personal flavor that comes with direct sales.
Don’t get me wrong.
Wide sales are great. I love you all. But something special this way comes from delivering your work to a real person with a real name and real address, and who sends me the occasional attaboy, or pat on the back when I mess something up and then make it right.
Anyway, as noted, my latest project—and last one for a little while—is now up.
Holiday Hope is a genre-spanning collection of short stories that each touch on the hope inherent in the winter holiday season. I’m quite happy to have it out. I hope it does well.
Recently, though, I’ve spent a bit of time scanning other people’s projects, and—really for the first time—I’m seeing a larger number that appear to be failing.
I put it that way—appear to be failing—because I’m not in those writers’ offices, right? I have no idea what they are doing or not doing, and I’m looking at their projects in snapshots of time. Perhaps they eventually succeed?
But looking at them from the outside, I’d say they seem to be failing.
Unfortunately, sometimes just scanning the project’s presentation makes it obvious why that failure is occurring, but oftentimes that package seems fine, but the numbers are still not numbering. That’s a real problem. It’s possible those “failures” are about audience size—that the author simply overestimated the pull of their audience, or maybe better put, didn’t know how to design their campaign properly for that audience size. Kickstarter can and will do only so much, so we need to bring readers on our own just to get things going.
I, for example, do a lot of smaller projects on Kickstarter. Holiday Hope is one of those.
I know they are small. I do my math first, and I don’t set them up for failure by assuming I’ll wind up with a couple hundred backers.
A creator’s base skills are also in question, I suppose. A fair eye for graphics and a mind keyed at least somewhat toward marketing are valuable in creating your presentation, so the ability to create graphics (in particular), or get someone else to do them, is a true value when it comes to making a nice presentation. Some of that can be learned, but a lot of it is feel and vision. In other words, building a good Kickstarter pitch is equal parts art and science.
Personally, I feel comfortable with some of those things, but I spend a lot of time listening to feedback on others.
At the end of the day, though, a lot of the element of presentation is a matter of taste and design. A beautiful Kickstarter is in the eye of the beholder, and we all get to be our own beholders.
Finally, though, there’s the question of effort.
I’m focused on that now because when I see a nice-looking presentation that still fails to get energy, I ponder if the author’s real issue is a lack of basic support. Because, for me, anyway, the act of running a Kickstarter takes energy.
Every day.
I ponder if some of the newer writers on the site simply aren’t putting in the work it takes to manage a project well. I suppose that sounds judgy. I don’t mean it to, but I can see how some will take it as such. Perhaps the way I look at things causes me to put in too much effort? I don’t think that’s the case, but I’ve been wrong before.
These things are in my thoughts today, though, because—at least for me—running a Kickstarter release takes a serious amount of work (both before and after launch), and the return is always an interesting mix.
Let’s talk a moment about what a project’s return is, as in, let’s talk about how much one of my projects makes as a matter of the effort that I put into it. (Your mileage may be different, but this is me talking, so I’ll focus on me!)
If you look at a live project on Kickstarter, it’s easy to see a project’s earning numbers and backers and make assessments. Bigger numbers are more better, right?
But when you’re scanning those pledged numbers, you’re missing a LOT.
My friends, Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, often suggest they can tell what a project makes or doesn’t make to a pretty close margin, and they often point to projects that they say are funding, but actually losing money. I think they tend to overstate that message, but they are 100% right that it’s possible to do all the work to run and fulfill a Kickstarter project that successfully funds, then actually lose money—even at the higher levels of funding.
This piece is turning out to be focused on work and effort, though.
Work and effort, and return on sweat equity.
So…here we go.
Let’s talk about return on Kickstarter investment.
For an example of what I’m talking about, let’s pretend we run a small project that funds at $1,500 (which is a little high for most of mine, but I like round numbers).
When we see that $1,500 at the top level, we should immediately start asking questions.
First, we should probably drop that number by $50-$100 simply because some backers will cancel out when Kickstarter charges their credit cards. Let’s say $50 goes away. So that $1,500 is really $1,450.
Then Kickstarter and Stripe (their payment service) will combine to take something under 10%.
For simple math, we’ll say Kickstarter and Stripe fees are $150. That’s a little high, but not so high that it changes the point of this conversation.
That means our new total is $1,300
If the project sells all digital books, then we’ll have no printing and shipping costs, so that $1,300 stands, and we’re all good.
But a vast majority of Kickstarters sell print. Specifically, paperbacks, hardcovers, and those ubiquitous Special Editions that are so amazing (and that I made the cornerstone of my Saga of the God-Touched Mage re-release). If these are included, estimating your final profit gets more complicated because now we need to understand how printing and shipping impact the bottom line. These are variable, but you can figure them out. For small projects like I run, special editions really bump the income reported at the top of the page, but also serve to drop overall margins considerably. Hardcover and paperbacks, the same. The level those margins fall to depends completely on how I choose to price the books and how many of each I sell.
More hardcover pledges mean smaller margins.
Let’s say that I price my books “properly,” though (whatever that is—something else we need to think through in advance to keep the project from losing money), and that my small project is a no-bling effort (meaning just books, and no snazzy special editions). For these releases, I personally attempt to design the projects to yield a margin of about 70%, which, again, depending on the relative volume of print to digital orders, works out to between 65%-75%. Usually.
So, if we say 30% for printing and shipping, it will cost me about $450 of my $1,300 to fulfill that example project (the 30% applies to the full $1,500).
My net is now down to $850.
I am also a businessperson who assigns the cost of development (acquiring cover art, printing proofs, or any of the other things that can cost a chunk of change). Other people do not attribute these costs to their Kickstarter project, but since I view Kickstarter as an initial publication of an entire project, I do.
If I’m on a total DIY thing, and since I live with a world-class copy editor, these costs are pretty low: Stock art for covers, hopefully a limited number of physical proofs. Maybe a few odds and ends. Since, as I noted, my sweetie does my last-pass copyediting, that saves me a large sum. Since I’m into round numbers, let’s pretend I spent only $50 on this small production.
Now, all total, that $1,500 Kickstarter is now down to $800 of profit.
Sounds … well … that’s good, right!
Yes. It is good. $800 for a small, no-bling effort is okay.
If you look at $1,500 of revenue as the project’s baseline, or $1,300 (after drops and fees), the profit margin here is between 53% and 60%. Less than my design of 70%, but still a nice enough number.
At least all by itself.
But, Let’s Go One More Step.
Because, as I started with, I’m thinking a source of failure may well be a lack of effort—or, maybe not so much a lack of effort as a failure to understand the amount of work it can take to succeed, and therefore a failure to do that work.
Call it being oblivious—something I often am.
It’s no sin to mess something up if I didn’t know how to do the thing, right? That is literally the root of how I learn best. Screw up, then do better next time. It’s a rugged life in ways. Emotionally straining at times. But that kind of dogged persistence, together with a lot of luck and general fortune of life circumstance, is what has gotten me to where I am.
Anyway, just how hard is it to run a Kickstarter?
Since I am the one writing this, I’ll use myself as my example—specifically, my recent projects.
Holiday Hope is my fourth launch this year—after The Cruise Brothers in January, The 10th Anniversary Edition of Saga of the God-Touched Mage in the summer, and 1101 Digital Stories in an Analog World that ran just before Holiday Hope.
I track my time, of course, because of course I would track my time.
After Hope finishes, I project I will have spent roughly 300 hours (combined) working on the Kickstarter efforts of these four projects. Not writing. Not releasing wide. Not putting any books in my new store. Just designing, creating, and testing the base structure of the project, calculating shipping, revising it all over and over again, then communicating with backers (and prospective backers!) while the project is running, and fulfilling the project (delivering the books!).
By my math, that’s roughly 75 hours per Kickstarter, or nearly two full work weeks each.
Those hours get spread over more than two calendar weeks, of course, but adding them up comes to two full work weeks.
(And my projects tend to be on the small side!)
After the dust settles, my back-of-the-napkin mathing says that, averaging everything out, I’ll clear maybe $10 an hour for that work.
And that’s assuming Hope succeeds well enough to fund.
Fingers crossed!
This number makes sense in the context of the sample project I just laid out.
Divide that $800 by 75 hours and you get $10.67 an hour. That’s above minimum wage (by a little), but it’s still not a lot of return on sweat equity.
Running Kickstarters, it seems to me, is not a simple little process.
Maybe it’s just me.
Dunno. I could be working harder than anyone else.
Overworking, you know? Putting effort in where effort is not needed to be put.
But, to my view, there is a LOT that goes on behind the scenes when it comes to Kickstarter. Just like there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes for pretty much every aspect of running your own Independent publishing business.
This is not for the faint of heart.
It’s hard work for limited and variable compensation.
At the end of the day, as I scan failing (?) projects I see on the platform, I’ve come to this maybe weird conclusion that I do Kickstarters because I know how to do them and because I love what they mean for being independent in today’s world. I like connecting directly to readers that way. But I’m a grizzled veteran, right? I’ve got my mind set in a certain way, and I’m inclined to power forward as long as I see the way forward.
And here’s something I couldn’t stop thinking about: how many of these writers are on Kickstarter because it’s all the rage? How many are here because they’ve heard this is an easy way to make some money? If it’s a lot of them, what do they feel like now? Are these failures a learning moment (which is great!), or are they going off to lick their wounds, never to return?
Did the failure set them back?
A lot of these unfunded projects seem to be new writers. If so, how dogged will they be?
Who knows, right?
Ultimately, I’m just whistling into the wind on this one.
I’m ruminating on something I have no idea about.
Maybe I’m dwelling on it because I’m getting to the end of this long run of inverting my plans to have me focus on getting “business operations” cleared out so they aren’t clogging my pipeline anymore. Maybe it’s just the normal anxiety that comes with another launch. Or maybe it’s the general, big-picture relief I’m feeling after being successful in getting these projects closer to the end zone so I can move on to new ideas.
I’m very much in reassessment mode right now—which is normal.
Maybe you are, too. I think that’s natural as we head toward the end of the year.
My last Kickstarter of the year is titled Holiday Hope.
And the holiday season is here.
We’ve just passed Halloween, which, for reasons, is always a big deal for us in the Collins household. Then will come Thanksgiving, and Hanukkah, and Solstice, and Christmas, and the lead-up to the New Year.
It’s a good time to be assessing things, you know. A good time to count blessings and pay attention to the good things in life.
$10/hour or not, being an Indie makes me happy,
I am a human. Not an AI. You can tell because keep a Patreon page where I talk about writing and being a writer (among other things). In other words, I post a lot of things there before I post them here. This post, for example, was there first. I also share occasional work in progress for Patrons only, and give special discounts and sometimes even free books to Patrons at various levels. If you’d like to support me–or just this blog–you can do so by clicking here:
