Some lessons learnt on crowdfunding halfway through a campaign

Welcome back.

I hope everyone is having a nice weekend. Yesterday I got to see Belle & Sebastian perform their album If You’re Feeling Sinister at an open air concert on Valencia beach. They’re one of my favourite bands and that very well may be their best albums, so it was a great night.

Work wise I’ve (hopefully) done my final amends on the last issue of Jayk’s Case, the Cyberpunk 2077 miniseries I’ve written at Dark Horse.

I also got an unusual private commission to write a story essentially as the basis for an art collector to get a full issue of original art but have it actually be like an actual comic as opposed to just random pinups, which has been fun as it was with a character that I’d like to write officially one day.

I’ve also been going back and forth on a new crime pitch with an editor at one of the final publishers I’m yet to work with and I’m hopeful that will get the green light in the next week or two.

Besides that all my focus has been on the Kickstarter I currently have running for the next book Chris Matthews, my Mugshots and Exorcism Island co-creator, want to do together, THE GODS AND MONSTERS OF HEDGRAVE, which you can grab a copy of here - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/burntbarncomics/hedgrave/description

Which brings me to the topic of today’s newsletter…

THE HARD LESSONS I’VE LEARNT SO FAR DURING THIS CAMPAIGN.

This is the 12th Kickstarter campaign I’ve run, so I’m well aware of the the stresses and strains of the platform such as battling through the quiet middle where getting new backers feels about 1000% harder than it was in the opening four or five days.

However, this new campaign has thrown up several challenges, which I did half suspect may arise, but have found especially prominent beyond my jitters going in.

When I discussed the idea of doing this with Chris I made my calculations of what success would look like based on several of my previous Kickstarters.

The trio of Weird Work campaigns, which attracted a steady number of growing backers from one to the next going from 428 to 497 and topping out at 520 on our final campaign.

Metallic Dynamite, the sci-fi anthology I put together, which got 519 backers.

And finally Quarantine, which got 515 backers.

I felt like I’d proved I could get well over 500 backers on various campaigns, so made a plan based on us being able to get 425-450 backers on Hedgrave.

With two weeks to go we’re currently at 238 backers, around 25% below where I’d like us to be at this point and I think there are multiple reasons for that.

1 - less people backing comic on Kickstarter

Kickstarter has added some nifty new backend analytics, so I can see that of my previous campaigns the highest percentage of return backers is the 14% from our Mugshots campaign, which makes sense as that was Chris and I working together, and then the return rate on the rest of the campaigns lands somewhere between 6-11%.

That means their are at a minimum 500, but probably more likely 800-900, people who backed my previous campaigns but haven’t currently jumped onto this one (I can’t see what backer crossover is over the various campaigns).

Now, it’s been six years since my previous campaign, so there’s a good chance a bunch of these people may just not be using Kickstarter anymore, turned away by the bad actors who funded campaigns that they never delivered on, the proliferation of horny comics on the platform these day, or they simply just lost interest and moved onto other things.

They may also just not be into this new book, which has a different look and vibe to the art of Weird Work or Frank At Home On The Farm.

Or the cost may be out of a lot of peoples’ budgets as the world teeters on the edge of recession. As we decided to do this as one complete book, as opposed to in issues like with Weird Work or Frank, I essentially took the cost of the three separate issues of Weird Work, which equalled a similar page count of 104 story pages and came to £24 and used that to get £25 for our 110 story pages (120 pages total) new perfect bound graphic novel - rate of inflation and all that. But perhaps paying out for the whole thing in one go is a little less attractive than grabbing issues over the course of 14 months for less each time.

This isn’t just a problem I’m facing. Several other campaigns running currently or just completed have seen serious backer number drop off compared to the creators’ previous Kickstarters and even Kickstarters for previous issues of that same story.

Whatever the reasons, the backer pool I thought I could rely on has been smaller than anticipated. However, on the upside over 50% of our backers have been new, not having backed anything of mine on Kickstarter previously, potentially having found us through our published work.

2 - Underestimating the need for new

The particular circumstances of Chris and I’s lives have meant that for this campaign we got everything we needed ready in advance, two covers and the opening four interior pages, and then Chris had to get back to work on other projects he has going to pay the bills.

In the past when I was a corporate copywriting fat cat I was paying Shaky or Clark in advance and they were working non-stop on the comics, so that meant new pages would be coming in as the campaign was running that I could share to encourage more people to back us. Having something fresh to talk about is definitely a real bonus when marketing the campaign, as with Hedgrave I find myself with little to shout about as all the artwork is already out there as we’ll only get on with the rest of the book if we hit our funding goal. This has for sure hurt my ability to get new eyes on the campaign as we’ve gone along.

For example, we currently have 390 people watching the campaign that haven’t backed us yet, and being able to get them excited with new art I think would be a great way to convert them into supporters. However, that is just the reality of this being a different type of campaign, which is actually intended to fund the work instead of just recoup as much of the cash I’d already laid out as possible.

3 - High targets can hurt

This kind of follows on from the above. The target was based on generating the absolute minimum amount of profit that would support Chris to spend 8 months working on the book and hopefully cover a month or two of the time I’d spend writing it.

As mentioned, previously I was looking to recoup money already spent, so although I really needed, say, £12,000, it was better for me to set a £4000 target, so I could hit that quickly and then see how much more I could raise. Whereas here we absolutely need what we need. And having that £18,000 target I believe puts off a lot of potential backers who want to know whether or not something will fund before the pledge. That makes total sense to me, as if you have a monthly budget for comics you want to know what you’re spending, as opposed to having to check back later on what is actually going out of your bank.

I’m pretty sure if we’d have set, for example, a £8000 target, which we’d have hit within the first week, we’d have significantly more backers now as your campaign then gets put into Kickstarter’s FUNDED algorithm getting it more exposure on the platform and ultimately leading more people to jump on.

We just couldn’t risk doing this, however, and topping out at say £15,000, leaving Chris committed to drawing a full graphic novel for less than minimum wage. Again, we didn’t have many options here, but if you can I would always recommend keeping the target low, as I believe more often than not you’ll actually raise more that way with people seeing it as a surer thing, plus it means you get to stretch goals quicker, which plays into point 2 and the benefits of having new stuff to talk about and promote with.

This may sound a bit negative, but I am confident that our campaign will fund. The book itself is quality and we have an awful lot of watchers and kind people supporting us by sharing the campaign, so I believe we’ll get there. These are just some observations that I hope could be useful to anyone thinking of trying a crowdfunder or planning to return to the platform after several years away.

Share any thoughts or opinions you have in the comments, as I’d love to hear from people on this.

That’s all for now.

Stay safe out there.

Jordan