Kickstarter thoughts: promotion both far and near

Before diving into this week’s thoughts I wanted to follow up from last week and report that the second volume of Molly Danger did, indeed, fail to reach its funding goal. When all was said and done Jamal Igle was able to raise nearly $22000, a figure I can only dream of accomplishing, but it fell far short of the necessary $50000 for the project. Igle has posted his post-mortem where, just like I reported with Zoe of The Last Cowboy, he allows that his base goal turned out to be too ambitious. He plans to re-launch the project with a leaner, meaner campaign on June 1st.

Again, this is one big benefit of Kickstarter, so long as you have the gumption to face it: if you fail, no money changes hands and you can just try again. If Igle had instead done this campaign on Indiegogo, he would have gotten that $22000 (minus whatever cut Indiegogo takes), but that’s less than half of his minimum estimate, and then he’s got backers expecting delivery of a product and rewards he might well have to dig into his own pockets to afford.

Now if you don’t mind the possibility doing that, Indiegogo might certainly be your better choice, especially since I did mention last week that any crowdfunding attempt is going to eat up time and energy. With a non-Kickstarter model, you’ll get at least something out of that effort, and certainly don’t need to worry about the heartbreak of coming close to your goal only to fizzle at the last moment. Kicktraq.com tries to help those projects out with a specific listing section so they get brought up in front of potentially interested eyeballs, but it doesn’t always work.

Which brings us to promotion. There’s a lot of advice out there on this topic, from people probably better qualified to speak on it than me, but I guess I can talk to you from the perspective of someone who doesn’t consider himself any damn good at it and yet still succeeded. One thing I ran into was that over a year ago I had helped out a crowdfund for a certain webcomic listing site, one of the rewards of which was being able to get a couple of free advertising days . I had used one, but was jealously hoarding the other until our Kickstarter was underway — only to discover that the site had all but gone under in the meantime and there was no longer a mechanism for getting the word out. Oof.

So yeah, a lot of advice will tell you to pre-seed your campaign’s promotion as early as possible, but beware the quixotic realities of the Internet. One or more of your chosen promotional paths may no longer be there when you need it.

Depending on Kickstarter itself  for promotion seems iffy at best. The standard “curve” for campaigns you’ll hear tell of is a rush of activity early on, then a dry spell, and then another rush at the end, and I think part of this phenomenon is that the beginning and end of your campaigns are the only times you’re guaranteed to be easily visible at the top of one of Kickstarter’s discovery lists: ‘Newest’ and ‘End Date’, respectively. I don’t know how Kickstarter’s default sorting of ‘Magic’ works, but it sure never liked us. If you’re lucky enough to become a Staff Pick, that can help, but unless you have an existing fan on Kickstarter’s staff it’s hard to count on that, plus it’s still no guarantee of success. No, the Catch-22 of Kickstarter’s default sorting system seems to be that the most popular projects with the most money pledged, i.e. the ones that least need the promotional help, are the ones that will be most visible to new prospective backers.

So what can the rest of us do? Well, there’s reaching out to appropriate websites to try to get a feature article or at least a press release printed that could raise awareness of your project, but to be brutally honest it doesn’t seem like something which will magically propel your project into the stratosphere unless you really go viral. And despite the best efforts of professional marketing teams trying to follow the directives of clueless executives, no one has a sure-fire method of making something go viral. We managed a featured interview on Bleeding Cool, which is one of the biggest comics sites on the Internet, but I didn’t see any big uptick in visits or pledges because of that. There wasn’t even all that much referral traffic to this site that I could tell — maybe half a dozen, trickling off into nothingness after our article left the front page.

You may therefore feel like you’re doing a lot of work for very little return; fortunately, if you happen to be a fellow webcomicker, you are more than likely used to this feeling and prepared to carry on in spite of it. This is what I did, along with shamelessly feeding on my own. Friends, family, acquaintances, and whatever fanbase you have willing to open their wallets are all fair game during a crowdfunding drive. I quite literally spent several days going through my entire list of Facebook friends sending personalized messages to nearly everyone on it, along with a convenient link to the project. Those that didn’t have Facebook got an email or text. I tried not to be spammy, which is why I took the effort to personalize every communication rather than doing a generic blast. I talked the campaign up at every party or gathering I happened to go to. Hell, I even told one of our waiters about it after conversation turned towards comic conventions.

It was exhausting. I am not a natural at this. And yet every time I felt like it was pointless and I should just give up, another pledge would come in as a result. People I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years were responding with, “You have a comic? Cool!” and offering up money, as well as helping spread the word to their own friends.

Many more never pledged or never even responded, but at least they knew. I had taken a lesson to heart from our very beginnings, where we printed up a limited run of sneak preview minicomics for our first convention, and though we started out selling them, by Sunday we were just giving them away. Then for the next month or so I suffered through friends and colleagues going, “Hey, do you have any left I could buy off you?” I didn’t. I had given away dozens of them to people who probably put them in the trash without much of a glance, because I had taken the silence of those close to me as disinterest.

Never again. I bugged the crap out of everyone I could. If they couldn’t or didn’t want to pledge, fine, but I at least would have minimized the situation of May 11 rolling around and someone I knew telling me, “You had a Kickstarter? Oh, man, I totally would have been in!”

Now is this a sustainable model in the long run? Probably not, but at least for your first go-round with a modest audience, I think you’re best off not depending entirely on the kindness of strangers, even if the dividing line between ‘acquaintance’ and ‘stranger’ is pretty thin. Hell, Jason Brubaker talks about how he was emailing friends of his wife who had sent him invites for their dog’s birthday party he never went to. Even if you’re naturally someone like me who doesn’t want to be pushy and bothersome, committing yourself to a period of more-or-less shameless self-promotion and putting yourself out there with personalized communication seems like a must. Or at least the biggest help.