Final Kickstarter project report

Unfortunately, my Kickstarter project to help fund the cover art for the sequel to DeadDwarves Don't Dance was not a success. I did get 14 fine folks out there to pledge $301, but that wasn't enough to meet my goal of $1350.

Don’t worry, though. I'll still publish the book, hopefully later this year in time for Christmas. But, I won't be able to print up any cool posters of the cover art. Too bad. I was looking forward to sending out Igor's great artwork to the suppporters.

(If you'd still like to help, the best way to do that is to post reviews of my books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Goodreads, and so on.)

Anyway, I had some very good suggestions on how to create a better Kickstarter project, which you can read in the comments for this previous post.

One side effect of the project as that I was able to sell several copies of DeadDwarves Don't Dance to people who read my Kickstarter project.

The project ran from June 2 to July 2, and I used Amazon Associates links back to my Dead Dwarves Don't Dance book page in the project page. Based on the Associates report, I earned $5.21 in advertising fees over that period and also sold 9 copies of Dead Dwarves Don't Dance. That's the best free advertising I ever experienced.

So, even though I didn’t raise the money, I hopefully did get a few more fans.

Now, for those authors out there who are considering Kickstarter, here are some things I learned:

1.    Successful projects seem to have more updates. So update at least once a week to keep people's interest. I didn't do this, and it probably hurt me.

2.    Build a larger community before you setup your project. I have 172 followers here on my blog, 77 twitter followers, and 53 Facebook friends. There is probably a bunch of overlap between all these. But, still,  172 followers were not enough to garner enough pledges. So, if you're an author with fewer than a couple hundred people in your hardcore fan base, I wouldn't expect to earn more than $500, so set your Kickstarter goal appropriately.

If any other writer out there has setup a Kickstarter project and has differing opinions, go ahead and comment below! I'm just one person with one project under my belt, so I could be very wrong.