My First Kickstarter - What I’ve Learned So Far (Patreon)

Catie here!

As most of you know we’re currently running a Kickstarter Campaign to turn all seven of the System Apocalypse comics, based on Life in the North, into a full trade paperback novel. I’ve been working as Tao’s assistant for a few months now, and planning this campaign was one of my first major projects.

When Tao asked me to start figuring out the logistics of the campaign, I didn’t really know where to start since I had never run a crowdfunding campaign before. That said, it was a great opportunity for me to get my feet wet with learning how to plan and execute a major project.

Here are the major things I had to take into account:

Product:

Of course, the first major consideration is creating a product that backers want to support. In our case, creating a trade paperback of the comics seemed like like a great idea for several reasons:

• It is based on a series that that is quite successful already
• The original comic issues were already created and published, meaning that outside of variant covers and some new artwork, we had most of our content already
• It was the logical next step in developing the System Apocalypse comics brand

Costs:

In order to figure out what our fundraising goal would be, the first major thing I had to figure out was the cost of creating the trade paperback. In our case, this came down to researching the most cost-effective methods for printing and fulfillment.

Printing:

I shopped around for quotes in a few places in both Canada and the US, thinking that perhaps producing it here would keep our shipping costs down. We ultimately decided that should the campaign successfully fund we would use Print Ninja, a printing company based out of China.

Print Ninja ended up being the most cost effective choice because they have the experience and capacity for large scale projects such as ours, meaning that even with factoring in shipping back to the US, our costs would still be lower.

Fulfillment:

For fulfillment, we ultimately decided to go with Fulfillrite. Having compared it with a couple others, Fulfillrite seemed like the best choice, since their fees are reasonable and they are highly experienced with crowdfunding campaigns.

In general, when deciding on a fulfillment option it’s important to keep in mind that there are a lot of associated costs, including account fees, storage fees, shipping costs, packaging costs, pick and pack fees, etc. We considered doing the fulfillment ourselves, but ultimately determined that the savings were not substantial enough to justify managing the logistical end of things. Better to leave it to professionals to make sure that things would go off without too many hitches.

Other Fees:

Other fees to keep in mind are the Kickstarter fees. If you successfully fund your campaign, Kickstarter takes a percentage cut of both your total amount raised, and each donation from backers. It varies depending on the cost of the tier, but common wisdom is that you should account for about 10% of your total amount raised to go towards Kickstarter fees.

In the end, our minimum viable goal ended up being in the ballpark of $8200, which was higher than we had hoped, but that had a lot to do with the fact that we are raising funds to create a 174 page trade paperback. The scale of the project necessitated the cost, to a certain degree.

Rewards:

The next major hurdle was planning the rewards. What I tried to keep in mind when it came to planning the rewards was keeping them realistic and manageable. We didn’t want to increase our fulfillment costs with the rewards, so we ultimately decided to focus on digital. This also means that we can fulfill rewards right away after the campaign ends, rather than having backers wait to receive them.

Luckily, in our case, Tao has a lot of digital products associated with System Apocalypse that we were able to use, including individual comic issues, System Apocalypse ebooks and audiobooks, the System Apocalypse Short Story Anthology, as well as the digital and physical copies of the trade paperback itself.

For the upper end tiers, we thought it would be nice to include backers in the book to thank them for helping us. For the top reward, we wanted to give an experiential reward, so we decided on giving backers an opportunity to sit down for a virtual chat with Tao to talk about anything really, the System Apocalypse series, his other book series, indie author life, you name it!

Creating the Story Page:

Creating the story page is a difficult balance of telling backers what you are creating in a format that is both visually appealing and also tells backers everything they need to know about the campaign.

For the story itself, we created a combination of banners showing some of the artwork from the comics, and some storyline snippets to give backers an idea of the narrative structure of all seven of the original comics.

The page has bios of both Tao Wong and J.C. Grande, the illustrator, in order to bring more context to the creators behind the scenes. In addition, we included “Why fund this project?” and “Project Timeline” sections to be as transparent as possible about how long it might take.

Social Media

As I’m sure you can guess, social media and/or spreading the word about the project is maybe the most important detail, outside of actually creating a product that backers want to support. At the end of the day, it might even be more important, since backers can only fund your campaign if they know about it.

At this point, we’ve largely spread the word of our project through existing platforms on which Tao has a following including:

• Our Facebook Fanpage
• Newsletters
• Patreon
• Various LitRPG Facebook groups

Final Reflections:

In sum, it’s important to note that planning a crowdfunding campaign is a big, involved process in which there are a lot of details to account for. But basically, you need a solid product, a good understanding of the costs to produce and fullfill it, enticing (but realistic to produce) rewards to encourage backers to support it, and a good support network and/or social media plan.

While you’re here, the project is still running until Wednesday March 10th! If you’re interested in supporting us, you can find more details about it here:

URL: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1291219509/the-system-apocalypse-a-post-apocalyptic-litrpg-comic?ref=user_menu

Feel free to leave comments and feedback. If you’ve ever run a Kickstarter campaign, how did it go? Share your wisdom!