A few thoughts about crowdfunding my book
Hey everyone!
In this post, I’ve decided I would share some of the things I’ve learned about crowdfunding my book, plus the good, the bad, the ugly, what is working, and what isn’t, and what my future plans are from here… in the hopes that it might be helpful to other creators here.
If you haven’t heard of Publishizer yet, it’s at publishizer.com and it’s a crowdfunding website for authors which allows you greater control over how you sell your book compared to Amazon. You can offer different packages and reward levels, and the more preorders you receive during your campaign, the more interest you will receive from higher-tier publishers through the platform (more on that later).
If you want to check out my current campaign (183 preorders so far) it’s here: https://publishizer.com/unlimit
And if you like the book and decide to make a pre-order ($15), just ping me and I’m happy to directly answer any questions about the process here or on WhatsApp. 🙏
The case for crowdfunding your book
Crowdfunding is an excellent way to test various strategies to promote your book before you send it out into the market. You can experiment with different advertising messages, ways of positioning your book, and talk to hundreds of potential customers in a short time. The response and feedback are invaluable and offer many insights about how best to present your work to make it appealing to customers.
There are also various perks that you can offer to reward your readers, which have nothing to do with your book itself. You can test out these different perks and offers quickly and easily with your crowdfunding campaign.
In my opinion, and many will likely disagree, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing is sort of like the retirement home for books and the final resting place in their product life cycle.
Amazon is a huge platform, and it is easy for your book to become lost in it. There are restrictions on how you can price your book, and you can only sell your book at one price (for example, $4.99). Additionally, you don’t get the information from your customers, so you have no way of re-engaging them or creating an email list from readers who download your book.
You can, however, add a special offer after the title page of your book where readers can download a bonus or join a community that you have created, although you will get fewer people than if you could just get all of the email addresses of everyone who downloads it.
Limitations of Amazon
In my opinion, crowdfunding is more profitable overall than KDP self-publishing. So I am not in any rush to upload my book to Amazon.
That’s why when the book is close to being finished, I will launch an Indiegogo campaign and try to send as much traffic to it as possible. For the Publishizer campaign, I have mostly tapped into my personal network of friends and acquaintances, but for the future Indiegogo campaign, I will try to send traffic by using newsletters and also publishing excerpts of my book as samples.
Looking back, I wish that I had not published on Publishizer and instead went with Indiegogo for a couple of reasons:
- Publishizer takes 30% of what you raise, while Indiegogo takes 10%.
- It’s much easier for backers, in general, to discover your project using Indiegogo. Publishizer’s overall traffic is kind of low, and they won’t send cold traffic to your book campaign, so you’re on your own. Also, there are some services like BackerClub.co which can promote your project but only for Kickstarter and Indiegogo, not for other platforms.
Here are results from marketing collaborations with backer newsletters (found this list from another project and saved the ones with ROI, this is not mine):
- BackerSpaces03 ($899) 17 ($3,023)
- BackerSpaces ($599) 19 ($2,612)
- BackerMany3 ($599) 14 ($2,513)
- BackerSpaces02 ($599) 18 ($2,382)
- BackerMany2 ($599) 13 ($2,211)
- BackerMany ($599) 16 ($2,196)
- BackerLatest Newsletter_BL ($399) 12 ($1,456) ← fake pledges, all dropped
- Backercrew ($399) 7 ($1,207)
- KICKSTARTECH ($899) 6 ($1,034)
One advantage Publishizer does have is that it is good for making connections to publishers, although I have realized over the last few weeks that not all publishers are the same.
My goal with this book is to create something that will outlive me and benefit future generations after I die. So if I do go with a publisher, getting a great one will be very important.
Out of the ones I’ve seen so far on Publishizer, “PostHill Press” is probably my favorite.
They were the publisher of choice for the most successful book on Publishizer, “The Choreography of Customer Service:” https://publishizer.com/the-choreography-of-customer-service/
I have noticed that PostHill has published a number of other titles that I’m familiar with, such as the “5 Second Rule” by Mel Robbins. They also seem to have a pretty strong PR arm, helping their authors become featured in major publications like Forbes.
Another plus about Publishizer is that they use flexible funding, so even if you don’t hit your goal of 1,000 pre-orders, your campaign is not a failure. Also, the CEO is very accessible and can do certain things to help out, such as extending your campaign if you need extra days (I will probably take her up on this, I initially intended to run my campaign for 60 days).
Outreach and tools of the trade
To promote the crowdfunding campaign, I have set a daily goal of contacting at least 50 people every day. Or make that 100 people. No, 50 again. The point is that it has varied a bit, and although I have tried to be consistent, I’m doing the best I can 😅
You can see the promotion list I made before the campaign of people to contact here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xl7xGklyg8k0oIC4JL3Yfmwo1fEryU7a54crmrmsVOw/edit
At first, I was struggling a lot with the outreach, at least initially. I kept wondering why my response was so low. But I am progressively getting better and better and updating and editing my messaging all the time.
One important lesson that I’ve learned about doing this type of outreach (actually learned, because I knew about this and ignored it): don’t skip over the niceties.
If you are tapping into your network and contacting your acquaintances and old friends, use a lot of positive words in your messages and show that you care about them. Make an effort to make them feel good when they read your message.
Ask them how everything is going with their work. Ask them if they have been in good health. Ask them how their children have been doing. And if you ask them for a favor, offer to return the favor if needed.
If you show that you care about them, even if it’s just a formality, people will respond to your message more positively.
How I Manage to 10x My Efforts
For social media outreach, I am automating much of the process using a tool similar to Su Social (Susocial.com). You can collect Facebook users from any link (such as a post or a group) and automate direct messages as often as you like (I automate about 50 per day to Facebook friends). I also send messages manually to everyone who views my stories.
This automation tool also allows you to send messages on other platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram, but I haven’t started with those yet because I haven’t figured out who I want to target exactly.
For sending mail merges (mass customized emails), I am using the Streak extension for Chrome (streak.com). I’m using the free version, which only allows 50 emails per day to be sent. If I manage to get a decent response rate, I am considering spending $59 for the premium version so that I can send 500 a day.
For the logo and branding of my book, I used Namelix.com – a fantastic tool. All you have to do is input a short description about your book and some keywords, and the AI will generate hundreds of potential logos and style ideas in less than a minute.
Launching on Amazon
When I do finally launch on Amazon, I will probably follow the same launch strategy that I used for publishing my previous books. However, it is more difficult to get reviews on Amazon nowadays, as it requires reviewers to have purchased at least $50 in merchandise through their store in order to write a review.
In any case, here’s an overview of my Amazon launch timeline that has worked well for me in the past:
My strategy is to focus on a hybrid effort for the launch. Do a free promotion for the first three days that your book is live and just flood the market. Send all of your friends and family to download your book those first three days and encourage them all to write reviews.
You’ll shoot up to #1 in the free chart, introduce a bunch of new people to your work, and start building up your base of “1,000 True Fans” – people who love what you produce, start to follow you, and snatch up everything you do.
Then, after those three days are over, run a 99-cent promotion and just dominate the rankings.
Here’s a working procedure of my ideal launch schedule for Amazon:
Day 1: Publish the book.
Days 2-6: Get as many reviews as humanly possible. E-mail everyone you know. Ideally you gave out a bunch of copies to beta-readers a few weeks before publishing. Now’s the time to get in touch with them! This is also an ideal time to run your free promotion: ask people to download the book from Amazon for free, then write a review. It will be listed as a “Verified Purchase” review.
Days 7-9: get blasted out on 99 cent promo sites
Days 10-16ish: remain at 99 cents and get as many downloads as possible
Day 17ish: change to real price
I have more resources for promoting your free / paid promotions here: https://openworldmag.com/dominate-amazon-bestseller-54-resources-kindle-countdown-promo/
And here: https://openworldmag.com/hack-kindle-free-promotions/
At any rate, one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive a huge spike in paid sales is to do a 99 cent promotion with Buck Books.
There are a TON of newsletter promotion services out there, both for free and 99 cent Kindle promotions. Successful Amazon but I’ve always had solid results from Buck Books. The service used to be free but they currently charge a small fee to schedule a promotion with Buck Books – a fee well worth it as driving a huge sales spike in a short time frame is most important part to a successful launch.
Once Buck Books does your promo, keep your book at 99 cents for a week afterwards. If your copy is really great and you have some shining reviews, people will naturally discover the book and buy it. This signals to Amazon that the book is quality – and they want to promote quality books to their readers.
At this point, you want to increase your price as your book should be in the “Hot New Releases” category and Amazon will start sending traffic and customers to your book.
Post Launch Plans
After the book launches on Amazon, I will go on tour and travel to as many countries as I can, giving talks and building up my brand (Author – Publisher – Entrepreneur strategy, as Guy Kawasaki calls it).
The formula is rather simple: you perform searches for coworking spaces in the cities that you plan to visit and send them a message offering to host a workshop for their community.
When I published my previous book “Dr Growth,” I went on tour and spoke in more than twenty countries this way, and picked up a whole bunch of clients for my agency along the way – around 45 recurring income clients at its zenith.
I also have created this list of coworking spaces in various countries around the globe and their contact information. Feel free to make use of it if you want to go the public speaking route: Coworking Spaces List
There’s a lot of bad and useless advice when it comes to self-publishing out there, so I hope at least some of this was helpful.
This is not one of those huge success stories where I raised $800,000 or anything like that but just a stepping stone in the publishing adventure of an everyday person with a laptop 🙂
Good luck to all of my fellow authors out there! I’m just a simple independent solopreneur author/publisher myself, but I wanted to encourage others that if you are willing to work really hard, you can make it as a successful author and build a career with your books.
Here’s the campaign again if you want to check it out, subscribe for updates, or get in touch.
Thanks everyone! Happy publishing ✍️
