I Talked To Kickstarter's Head of Book Publishing

today I'm chatting with Ariana who is the head of publishing at Kickstarter the place I'd love to start talking about is actually Brown and sanderson's recent Kickstarter campaign because as I was reading his most recent book you me and the nightmare painter the other day I saw that your name was actually in the acknowledgment section so I'd love to know what your experience was like working on that campaign and kind of what was going on behind the scenes cool well first thank you so much for having me this is exciting I haven't done a live

interview in a while excuse me if I keep checking my hair I came to Kickstarter at the very end of 2018 I actually got here to grow our journalism category um and then you know I did that for a year and a half it was covet everything was insane uh I wound up working I came to the publishing side at the very end of 2020 and so I was still working that was uh at the tail end I think that was shortly after his first campaign Brandon Sanderson because of course the award-winning one the one

that broke all the records was not their first time on the platform uh they the first time they did it they only raised I think seven million um so you know like exactly um so I was already acquainted with the cosmere team from that project uh before the big one came through and so I you know behind the scenes we talked about it it was super top secret obviously so um you know I knew that it was coming we all had sort of like we thought it was going to be a big deal seven million

no slouch um but I don't think anybody including Brandon and the team expected it to go quite as crazy as it did it was thrilling obviously there has never been a publishing project I think even in the top certainly the top ten possibly the top 20 all-time funded uh Kickstarter campaigns so to now be like number one by like you know I think by a hundred percent I think the the next highest funded project is like 20 million so yeah it's pretty thrilling it's great for for books it is obviously dramatically changed the nature of

the conversations that I've been having with folks in the publishing industry it's a pretty big deal for books for authorial autonomy for you know sort of like taking control of one's creative and financial life and future um not obviously everybody could be a Brandon Sanderson but I think it really opened a lot of doors and opened a lot of people's eyes for like what's possible here and how exciting it can be so you were talking about how Santa's Kickstarter really changed the nature of your conversation with a lot of Publishers how would you kind of

describe those conversations that you're having with them behind closed doors what I'm excited to talk to Publishers about is the way the kickstarter can be used as a direct line to sort of like most die-hard fans in a way that isn't really otherwise available through the traditional trade book selling process um you know that's part of that's part of the thrill of Kickstarter is that you're sort of put into really close communication with the both the audience that you have and the audience that you want so for those the audience that you have you get

to really like let people feel like they're an intense part of your creative process because they are you can you know ask people before you start what kinds of perks what kinds of rewards what kinds of projects they want to see during the course of the project you can enlist them in your promotional efforts you can uh you know have people vote on like iterations of the project you can use stretch goals to make them more and more excited about the things that you're doing for them and then when it comes to the audience that

you want a well-run Kickstarter should function like a marketing campaign you know so you can make a splash you can raise your profile you have an excuse to like shout from the rooftops about this thing that you're doing especially the sort of like limited term of the All or Nothing fundraising uh you know you get this sort of like tangible urgency of like now or never do or die all or nothing you know we gotta and that's sort of like the agreement you're making with your audience like look I'm gonna be screaming about this thing

every day for about a month and then you'll never hear me talk about it again so I think that's some of the stuff that I like to talk to Publishers about and individuals you know it really I think that Kickstarter can be uh used by any sort of person at any stage of their creative Journey at any level of their um kind of uh you know whatever size Their audience is to get that direct line and to you know thrill people with this creative Journey that they're taking that limited time aspect of it is so

powerful I think because I've never spent 400 on a set of books before but then when sanderson's Kickstarter came along I was there you know lining up to to put that charge through my card and I'm really grateful I did because the books are like these really cool special editions and everything I think it's interesting what you're saying about how it is this kind of complement um in the way that you're presenting this to Publishers because when some of this initial success with the kickstarters of Brandon Sanderson for instance started coming out I think there

was a bit of conversation around oh is this antagonistic towards traditional Publishers is this taking away their lunch how would you describe their sort of reaction to this do they see this as something that is uh kind of taking away some of their appeal or do you think it is a different type of thing altogether and it coexists alongside the traditional publishing model oh yeah I think you just need to not you personally but one needs to just expand the way that you can that you're thinking about it you know it's not it's not a

threat it's not a cannibalization it's a whole new way to reach your audiences I mean Brandon Sanderson is obviously the biggest highest profile example but I'll share another one um the fantasy writer Charles Sewell recently ran a campaign which I thought was a very Savvy on his part and the Publisher's part so he had a new book coming out uh I think what I think in like three or four months for when he ran the campaign traditionally published with harpercollins and so in the course of writing that book which is a fantasy novel he's sort

of like he had started thinking like oh wouldn't it be amazing to do all of these like big illustrations these like maps of the worlds he's like extra I can't remember crests and various things um and I don't know you know what conversations went on between him and his agent and his publisher but it was decided that if he wanted to do a book like that he would need to do it independently and so what he did was bring that out on Kickstarter as essentially like a Kickstart to the marketing campaign of what would then

be the traditionally published book so it was a limited edition oversized volume like the kind of big weird art book that does not that maybe defies a traditional p l um and so he only made it in a limited edition marketed to like his most die-hard fans harpercollins was on board they let him do an Instagram takeover for a couple of days they sent you know they let uh you use their mailing list to like spread the word for him and then they use that as a springboard for the marketing for his traditional book so

that was fulfilling when Harper Collins was publishing the actual novel so a new way that like people were thinking and talking and posting photos and videos about him and about his Works um helped Market you know the book too so I just use that as an illustrator to say like there's many ways that Kickstarter can work in concert or even augment the efforts of the traditional publishing industry and of course there's plenty of ways that it can circumvent it there are lots of authors historically who have been unserved or underserved or ignored by the traditional

publishing industry and therefore Kickstarter allows them you know this autonomy and this like way to communicate directly with their audiences audiences that often especially when you talk about marginalized authors or really Niche authors the traditional Publishers have like not believed existed or really didn't know how to reach so Kickstarter you know brings back that autonomy lets authors sort of like pave their own their own Journey for sure I think what's exciting to me as an author is that ability to bring more Niche books to the market that would maybe struggle more if you were going

through a traditional traditional publishing model like had a conversation last year with Aaron a reed who did the 50 years of text Adventures games um on Kickstarter and it's an incredibly Niche book about uh you know this sort of very small sub-genre of video games these text-based interactive fiction games and just sort of chronicling those over the last five decades and he raised half a million dollars not half a million dollars sorry he raised a quarter of a million dollars for that and that kind of blew my mind to think that you can have something

that is such a niche passion project like that that you can put out there and because Kickstarter is a place that seems to really reward originality and uniqueness um maybe even more so than the traditional publishing or even the self-publishing worlds which both tend to have you know defined genres and certain audiences that they go towards would you say that Kickstarter seems like a very good place to go if you have a more or unusual ideal yeah oh yeah I mean I I while you were to I remember that text-based Games book and it was

incredible there was another book not long after called shift happens which was this big oversized Deluxe book about the history of keyboards talk about a niche interest I think you raised eight hundred thousand dollars like Kickstarter is absolutely what yeah exactly I'll find out I'll send it to you that's incredible right and so yes I mean I think firstly we are in like this moment we're in that sort of like a thousand true fans kind of moment you know for we're in a bit of a backlash I think from a few years ago when like

the whole deal was you needed to have a huge number of social followers and that was the way to indicate that there was an audience paying attention to you but now I think you're far more likely to reach that audio you know like you're better off having like a hundred or a thousand paying newsletter subscribers than ten thousand or a hundred thousand followers on any given social platform because those are you know we're so saturated all of the algorithms are being tweaked every day to make it harder and harder for you to break through if

you're not paying for it and you know like uh that direct line those true fans they've asked for you to be in their faces in their inboxes well as you were mentioning before that um book by Charles saw that raised over sixty thousand dollars he only had you know 816 backers for that project I would love to talk more tactically about you know what you see as the differences between campaigns that are succeeding versus campaigns that aren't quite reaching the Mark I'm coming at this quite selfishly because I plan to be doing a Kickstarter for

my next fantasy novel Kingdom of Dragons very soon um I've got the cover design all sorted for it so hopefully we're going to be getting close to figuring out how to go about that soon but you know coming into this is a first time Kickstarter author what would you say the most common mistakes that you see in new Authors making on Kickstarter the biggest mistake is not making sure that your ambition matches your reach so whatever you want to do whatever it is that you're making uh this is the corny line that I wind up

saying all the time everybody's thinking about the funding side of crowdfunding but not everybody's thinking about the crowd that is specifically what you're doing with this kind of fundraising it allows you you need in order to be successful you need to know who is in your crowd where they are how to reach them and what's offer that's going to compel them to open up their wallets and click on the buttons to like fund what you're doing so you know if you want to make a an oversized hardcover multiple hundred page uh photo book about keyboards

you have to make sure that there's enough people in your audience that care about keyboards and are willing to like spend that kind of money on a sort of like book as art object so you don't have to have you know you don't have to have Ambitions of raising 700 Grand and you don't have to have thousands and thousands of people in your audience but you have to know what is available to you based on who's in your communities how would you approach the idea of setting your funding Target because I know this is something

that a lot of new Authors or just anyone coming to Kickstarter really can struggle with this idea of okay well I don't want to set my funding Target too small because it might uh you know constrain the upside that's happening from the project but I don't want to set it so big that we never reach it and the thing falls through so how would you be thinking about this particularly from the perspective of you know an author coming into Kickstarter yeah you know I mean a lot of homework you need to app shops get those

samples understand your page count your trim size your budget you know like all of your actual needs we encourage people to think about your funding goal as a floor not a ceiling so you want to ask for truly enough money to actually make the thing I mean we see a lot of people running campaigns with like a 500 goal which like we all know that's not going to get you you know your 500 page hardcover volume like you should because you know if you succeed having asked for less than is required you still have to

make the thing so now you're in a bit of trouble you do want to ask for what you actually do really need and also what you need to make the work of running a campaign worth it you know I mean if you're setting a goal of 500 and you only raise a thousand bucks has that been worth all of your time all of your effort all of your marketing you know should you maybe have been better off waiting built your community a bit more until your network could bear a five thousand or a ten thousand

dollar campaign thus actually justifying all of that time and effort um that's a decision that every Creator will need to make for themselves but uh yeah I think you know we also get a lot of people saying oh well you know once the goal is met people will stop backing the project that's not true we don't see that at all I mean in fact psychologically a campaign that has already hit its funding Target is likelier for people to back it because it's much more likely it's going to get made it no longer feels like taking

a wild leap of faith um and you can use the mechanism of stretch goals or just your sort of like Network and your promotion to keep encouraging people to get on board um you know and to if you decide to improve the quality of the product itself you know if we get another thousand dollars we're going to add French flaps or a ribbon bookmark or a full color signature for like extra illustrations you know like whatever that stuff is to keep making the book itself more and more exciting and to keep encouraging people not just

to back it but to tell their friends and you know hopefully get more people in the door what would you say is the best approach that authors should be taking to promoting and marketing and Kickstarter put your pre-launch page up like one to two weeks before you launch and consider that the beginning of your promotional period uh we see an extremely high conversion for pre-launch page followers to project backers and they tend to do it right away day one often the first hour this is excellent for having a strong first day which is good for

morale good for messaging very good for your overall chances of success so I would say efforts put into promoting that pre-launch page will absolutely pay dividends and be very very good for for any writer we also will see a lot of people put up the pre-launch page and say launching soon and wait to actually press that launch button until they've got you know 50 100 300 pre-launch followers to make give them the confidence to actually go live um so you know there's many ways that you can do that but yeah we absolutely recommend the pre-launch

pages are pretty new we launched them maybe a year and a half ago and they've really kind of dramatically shifted the way that people are promoting their projects and how they're considering you know the length of the campaign do you have sort of any interesting stats uh that you know book publishes or write should be knowing about Kickstarter as they go into it in the publishing category on Kickstarter the all-time dollars pledged is 349 million um the category has been on a steady upward trajectory since 2015 every year over year there's more projects launching more

projects succeeding and a higher success rate the current success rate in publishing is 54 that seems low so let me also tell you another stat that we look at is the success rates of projects with at least 25 backers this is because there's always going to be a sort of like undercurrent of folks who are like closing their eyes pooping out a campaign and just waiting to be showered by magical internet money um the 25 backer Mark is a real indication to us that you know you've gotten that you're actually taking it seriously that you've

gotten Beyond Your Inner Circle that you're really doing the work of building an audience and reaching that community so with that wind up the success rate in publishing for projects at least 25 backers is 83 so that's a pretty huge difference uh the success rate for projects with at least 10 backers is 70 so you're if you're doing the work if you're taking the campaign seriously if you're you know thinking about your crowd and how to reach them and building that audience before during and after any campaign that you would run your chances of success

here are very good that is an osm stat it's it's crazy to me because like 25 backers doesn't seem like a material difference but the fact that that is enough to kind of separate you from 54 success ratio to like 83. that's yeah that's that's pretty awesome to know um that honestly gives me a lot of confidence as a writer yeah yeah well you know I mean because that's that's what it's about you're that's what you're doing here you're building your audience you're you're you know sort of assembling your community you're reaching your crowd and

yeah you don't need to have exactly as we were saying about Charles Sewell you don't need to have a hundred thousand followers on Instagram and you don't need to raise you know a hundred thousand dollars if you understand what your community wants and are making something that they're going to be thrilled to have you're gonna do great is there anything else that we've sort of missed in this conversation like anything else you think is important for authors to sort of know when it comes to approaching Kickstarter I think that uh the first and most important

step that anyone should take if you're even considering funding on Kickstarter is to fund some projects on Kickstarter go on the site right now back five campaigns even for a couple of dollars although you might as well get some cool new books while you're at it but back those campaigns follow the creators out in the world and just watch what other people are doing in addition you know Kickstarter is a massive Archive of Kickstarter so you can use you should absolutely be researching what people are doing now what people have done in the past find

all of that's you know all of the success and all the stories and tips and tricks that I share are from being extremely extremely intimate with what goes on on the platform so study it you can sort the site by successful projects based on a number of backers or number of dollars or like date funded Etc look through wow people describe their campaigns how they structure their project Pages you can see every reward and how many people have backed it so you can start to get a sense of like what do people prefer uh 20

song playlist of tracks that I listen to while writing or I will call your mother on her birthday you know like what sort of like and like feel the best ideas that's what this is all about things watch look at the Cadence of how often people are doing backer updates look at the comments and how people are answering them look at the videos and how people make them it's all here Ariana thanks for joining me to chat about Kickstarter yeah Jed it was an absolute pleasure