This morning I’ve been grappling with an interesting question: should I Kickstart FROZEN DREAMS?
Background: I’ve been using Marian Call’s spreadsheets to calculate my Kickstarter budget, and this has required me to do some budgeting and other assumptions. Right now I’m looking at a bare-bones minimum budget which will get me good art, decent copy-editing (if not full editing), and some ISBNs. Thanks to the Patreon and a couple of other places, I can forecast that existing cash flow should be able to cover that by about July or so.
Now, the issue at hand is: if I do a Kickstarter, and if it’s successful, I can reduce the time I have to wait to start some aspects of production by up to three months. Two to three hundred bucks should shave a month off, with a month for every two hundred bucks and change. The problem is that two hundred bucks is about thirty or so people, which is pretty close to the number of people who I can reasonably count on to buy a book, if only to humor me*. Is the reduced turnaround time worth the extra effort?
This isn’t a depressing question, but it’s an interesting one. And it’s what I’m thinking about right now.
Moe Lane
*I hope to sell more. But hope is not a plan. This is the plan.
I would be interested in supporting the kickstarter. This book is quite engaging.
And I’m not generally interested in this type of SFF – I’m a Mil/Space Opera Sci-Fi type normally.
Glad you’re enjoying it! Although it absolutely needs to have its bolts tightened in a bunch of places. 🙂
I’m working on it. I found a couple of minor copy-edit things, I’m about 1/3 through so far.
You know more about the nuts and bolts of KS than I so preemptive apologies if the question is uninformed, but are you looking at our has always seemed that using KS is essentially a secured loan – leveraging future sales to fund production costs – and KS takes a piece for their work as middleman and guarantor. If I understand correctly, is speeding up the release worthy the price you pay for the service seems to be the real question.
It’s not an uninformed question. Basically, I’m in a good situation in terms of self-publishing because I do have a writing income, which I can use to pay for stuff like artwork and editing and so forth*. But it’s a finite amount, so if I can generate enough funds from Kickstarters it can make a positive difference in how many books I can self-publish in a year until I have an audience that will buy my books and generate revenue for the new ones that way. Does that make sense? I mean, there’s a limit to how many books I can write in a year, but right now the limiting factor is my production budget.
*All business expenses, and thus all tax-deductible. That can help, too.
There’s a lot about the business of self-publishing genre fiction here: https://madgeniusclub.com/
And here: https://kriswrites.com/
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I don’t see any way that Kickstarter would make much economic sense.
I shall check them out.
The second site is a lot easier to navigate than the first, and has more of the business side.
The first is a good resource for layout, font, cover design, marketing,
writing itself, etc. There is information about the business, rather than the techniques, but it’s not easily searchable.
Rather than *just* technique.
(Bloody touchscreens.)
Have you considered traditional publishing? The worst they could say is no. Actually the worst they could say is HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! But they generally have more tact than that.
I did, right up to the moment when I imagined what I’d say in response to certain editorial suggestions. 🙂 Why not just speed ahead? If this works they’ll call ME.
And you’re on your publishing schedule, not theirs.
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Unless that’s what you want, of course.
At this point, only an utter fool, or someone already established as a bestseller, would go to the major existing publishers. What they offer is in no way equitable with what they demand.
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Seriously, those extortionate contracts that record labels used to force on bands? They were downright *generous* compared to Random Penguin.
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(Not to mention that several of us would outright refuse to buy the book if it was published by Tor.)