This is a big one, folks, so prepare yourselves!
After a great deal of research and herbal tea, I have roughly mapped out my publishing plans for the next few months. I haven’t worked out timelines yet, but I do have the steps more or less in order, so I thought I’d share them here. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts/opinions, as you in all likelihood know something I don’t. Thus, without further ado …
My Winter 2014 (and possibly Spring 2015) Publishing Game Plan
- Cover reveals for Imminent Danger and Chasing Nonconformity. As you may know, I’m going to split (at some point) from iUniverse and re-publish Imminent Danger via KDP and Createspace. The sequel is getting into the latter stages of editing now, and both books have beautiful new covers, so I’ll be hoping to get you lovely people to help me out with cover reveals in the next month or two.
- IndieGoGo Campaign. Okay, this is the big one that I’m really excited about. After that potato salad Kickstarter went viral, I thought to myself, “Self, you can totally run a crowdfunder for your book. It may fail miserably, but you can sure as heck try!” So sometime in the next few months (currently looking at ~December) I’m going to run a crowdfunder for Imminent Danger/Chasing Nonconformity! The concept is pretty simple — you donate a certain amount (to help me pay back the cover designer and assorted publishing-related expenses) and then in return you can choose from a whole bunch of perks. There will be the obvious ones, like eBook copies and signed print copies, but then there will also be some fun stuff (I’m thinking a swag bag with assorted Imminent Danger themed goodies). So if anyone’s run a crowdfunder before and has any tips, please share them!
- Re-publish Imminent Danger. Once the campaign’s over, time to re-publish Imminent Danger with its pretty new cover! I’ve also made some minor edits to the book (nothing massive structurally-speaking, just little tweaks to improve the flow of the book), so it might be worth checking out. (wink wink) Also, I’m planning for the IndieGoGo campaign that you automatically get an eBook copy of the new Imminent Danger regardless of how much you donate, so that should be an easy enough way to update your virtual library.
- Publish Chasing Nonconformity. No timeline yet on this, as the book’s still being edited, but we’re looking at Spring 2015 at the moment. Once the sequel gets published, I can obviously start sending out all the Chasing Nonconformity-related swag from the IndieGoGo campaign.
- Write the third book, tentatively titled Cerulean Bound. Spoiler alert!!! I’ve got the plot mostly worked out (well, the start and the end, at least, lol), so now it’s a matter of writing the darn thing. The first book took me 7 years from start to finish, and the second’s going to take 5, so hopefully we can cut this one down to a year or two.
That’s the plan! Questions and comments welcome and encouraged. Have a wonderful week!
Unrelated media of the day:
Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/J6vwIhD
Michelle Proulx - Author 
Here are my thoughts on various points:
1. I shall commit to a re-tweet.
2. IndieGoGo – great idea! Personally I like Kickstarter better, but would go with IndieGoGo myself, because Kickstarter isn’t available in Germany, yet. My experience with both is only as a backer and observer. For games I had the impression (small sample size, though) that March / April are favourable months.
3. Republishing Imminent Danger – great idea and now that you’re not with iUniverse anymore, my suggestion would be to rethink the price point. 9.26 Euros for the e-book is quite steep, when other books are at half that price.
1. Huzzah!
2. Well, IndieGoGo struck me as slightly better than Kickstarter just because with IndieGoGo you still get all the funds you raise even if you don’t meet your goal. And since I’m not at all sure I’ll meet my goal (although fingers crossed!), I’d like to make sure that A) I get all the money I raise so I can pay some of my staggering publishing debts, and B) People actually get their perks, which presumably they want considering they funded me in the first place.
3. AHHH 9.26 euros? Good lord. The price I gave iUniverse was $2.99. Apparently that translates to 9 euros. No idea what happened there, lol.
I’m working on my second, should’ve finished it by now, but these things can’t be rushed. I know some writers work much more quickly, but I’m not one of them 🙂
Neither am I apparently, lol. That being said, I’ve heard that the more novels you finish, the faster you can write them — just experience, I guess. Hopefully we can both get to James Patterson levels of book production at some point 🙂
Super smart to have a written plan. Good luck reaching your goals! 🙂
Thanks! I also have an elaborate Excel spreadsheet listing the minute details involved in every step, but I thought that might be a bit too intense to share, lol.
I suggest you read this article on crowdfunding creative projects: http://www.thedoubleclicks.com/2014/10/20/one-weird-trick-for-a-successful-kickstarter-project/
Amazing article! It just keeps going and going with amazing advice. Have bookmarked, and will definitely refer to again when I start seriously planning. Thanks 🙂
Good luck. Never considered trying a crowdfunding thing, so I’m curious to see how it goes. Sure you have some sweet rewards for people.
I’m curious too, lol. I’ll be coming up with more sweet rewards, but right now I’m pretty pleased with what I have. I’m sure I’ll be writing lots of blog posts about it too, so stay tuned 🙂
Atta girl – all you need is a start and a finish, the rest will take care of itself! Well, sort of… ha! Heck, one of my books got me so interested in the end that I wrote it backwards for half a dozen chapters!
I’ve actually tried writing out just the scenes that I’m most excited about, and filling in the rest … didn’t work out that well, to be honest. I think it’s because no matter how much I plan, the book kind of writes itself as I go, so if I try to mess around with the order, bad things happen, lol.
Yeah, mine kind of do that too. Any chapters I skip ahead to write, end up being junked as better ideas flourish. My only successful ‘formula’ to date is to have a firm ending in mind and then write towards it in a linear fashion.
I mean, I think the only time the “skip around” thing works is if you’ve decided beyond question of a doubt that a certain scene’s going to be in a book. Then you can write it. You’ll have to edit the bejezus out of it once you actually get to that point in the story, of course.
Yes, the editing is necessary because so many elements could have changed between the original write and the ‘fill-in’ write.
It’s about time, woman! I’m working on book number four–you gotta catch up.
Gah, I know! Cut me some slack here — you don’t have to run everything you write past my mother before you can hit publish. Consider yourself lucky 😀
Hit me up during cover reveal time! I’d be happy to share your books’ faces on my blog. ^_^
Wooo! And they’re really pretty faces too, so that’ll be extra magical 🙂
I still need to read your book. I keep spacing it! It’s encouraging to hear how long it took you to finish each of them. Makes me feel better about getting close to year 3 on mine 🙂
Oho, you got lots of time left on yours. Don’t even start to panic until you hit year 5. Then you gotta pick up the pace 🙂
Having run an (unsuccessful) Kickstarter campaign for my wife’s book tour, I can say that I did give IndieGoGo some consideration. I had hoped that the networking and the Kickstarter name would make K.S. the place to go, but as you said, with IndieGoGo we could have at least kept some of the money even though we didn’t raise anywhere near our goal.
Out of interest, what was your goal, and how did you calculate it? I don’t suppose you wrote some blog posts about it I could read thoroughly and take notes on?
I have some posts (you can just search for Kickstarter and find a couple on the subject of our campaign) but nothing I remember going into too much detail on. The actual campaign was to raise $2,500 (which would have given us about $900 which we needed to put together a local book tour). I came to that through a lot of math and research… the share that goes to Amazon and Kickstarter, the cost of goods for backer rewards, etc.
Yeah, I’m definitely going to have to do some math to figure out exactly how much I’m making off each perk. Question: how much were you aiming to make off each perk? Like, if the perk cost $15 (including shipping), how much would you have made the perk cost? I’ve been going in with the mentality that a lower price is better to entice buyers, but then I wonder if I’m selling myself short and cheating myself out of potential funds. Thoughts?
Physical rewards/perks were set to cover the costs of the item+estimated shipping related for the item (very important, because physical rewards have high shipping costs to some places, especially international shipping). Then the cost of the tier was sort of aligned in a way that tried to balance value for the backer with value for the campaign. It isn’t easy, but the best way to start: determine the cost of producing the reward and the estimated shipping for the reward, generally enough to cover shipping to most anywhere within your own country. In our case, we had domestic shipping built into the reward tier, international shipping was $15-$20 more.
The hard part about this? You can’t count on bulk pricing discounts. Yes, we priced shirts from Uberprints.com, and knew what the cost of production on paperback copies of my wife’s book were. But we couldn’t estimate how many we would end up needing to fulfill if the campaign succeeded. So we had to assume some worse case scenarios, like, “How much will the shirt’s cost to produce per unit if we only have 3 backers buy them?” You want to avoid putting yourself into a position where producing/shipping perks or bonus items will eat into your funds to such a point that you don’t end up really making your goal.
Thanks for this! It really is an insane amount of work that goes into the planning process. I’ve been looking at stuff like t-shirts and mousepads, and thinking “the more I buy the more I save” but you’re right — if only 3 people buy it, prices are going to skyrocket. You had a spreadsheet to sort this all out, right? Looks like I need to open up Excel and start spreadsheeting *cracks knuckles*
I just realized that I rambled without actually answering your $15 hypothetical question. Hah! If production+domestic shipping for something was $15, I would probably have put that around $25. But it really depends on what it is, and what utility it has for the backer.
Fair enough. I’ve been looking at somewhere between $5-$10 profit for each perk, depending like you said on what the perk is. It’s a decent amount, but not huge enough that people are like “Why is she charging $50 for a single ebook file?”
And, in fact, here is the link to our old Kickstarter campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1379316356/through-the-eyes-of-a-stranger-the-book-tour
Perfect! Thanks, I’ll check it out 🙂
Impressive plan, especially the crowdfunding bit. Good cover images can cost quite a bit, but they’re worth it. I keep reading how the best way to generate interest in your books is to write more books. I didn’t find that I got faster with each book — more the opposite. I was so jazzed up about the first one I couldn’t stop thinking about it and working on it. Couldn’t sustain that over 4 books. Good luck with the plan. I look forward to your cover reveal!
Well, I’m naively hoping that I get faster with every book, just because 7 years is ridiculously long to spend on a single story. I have too many books I need to write, lol. And thanks for the kind words!
I’m also hoping my publishing will accelerate. My editor set me a solid timetable for the second book, and thanks to her, I’m on track to release by the end of October. I largely winged it with my first book, which is why took three years to become an eBook. I’m looking at half that this time around. Many lessons learned are being applied.
And it’s true that I managed to avoid a lot of the mistakes I made with Imminent Danger when I started working on the sequel. So clearly what I need to do is tell my mother to start making me solid timetables, and then I can halve my time like you?
Yes, if your mother is attuned to your work pace. Having a schedule has made a huge difference, but there have been times when I wondered if I could stick with it. I did, so it was feasible.
Sounds like a plan… more than what I have so I can’t criticise.
Re KickStarter/crownfunding: We were talking about that today to get a new coffee machine at work. I’m not a coffee drinker but every time I’m in the kitchen to get my Milo fix, there’s someone fighting with the innards of the thing. Apparently some people are actually going out and spending up to $10 a day (!) on coffees from the shop. We thought if all the coffee drinkers in the office put in $10 per day for a few weeks we’d have about $1,000 for a really good quality machine. Then someone pointed out that the dud on the bench over there cost 4 grand…
So, KickStarter to buy a new coffee machine?
You’ve probably already thought of this, but what about getting one of those cup machines — you know, the Tassimo one, the one that takes K-cups, whatever the heck it’s called. You can buy huge packs of cups at Costco for super cheap. Although if it’s a 4 grand coffee maker, I get the feeling you’re used to a slightly higher quality of coffee 😀
I haven’t but someone might have. Honestly, I don’t miss it!
Good luck. Sounds like a plan. Let me know if I can get the word out.
Thanks 🙂 I’ll hit you up when it’s time!
A plan! Huzzah! (to quote you) 😀
As I’ve run an Indiegogo campaign, my only advice is, make sure everyone knows you’re running one. As I’m too shy to bother people, I had a bunch of friends come to me afterwards asking why I never told them about it.
Also, I agree with everyone that said to go with Indiegogo. They give you the money as soon as the backer pledges, which is great. Whereas with KS you may end up with nothing…
I’m looking forward to helping any way I can 🙂
Oooh! Did I know about your IndieGoGo campaign? Send me a link so I can check it out and ruthlessly steal all your ideas please 🙂 And thanks for your offer of help — I’ll definitely be taking you up on that!
It was on https://www.indiegogo.com/campaigns/help-bring-pearseus-to-life but it ended ages ago! 😀 I don’t even think I knew you back then, as I hadn’t even started my blog. 🙂
Oooooh I’m totally stealing ideas from you. I can’t believe I didn’t think of including quotes from reviewers. And I love the “name a character!” perk. Definitely taking that one too. Thanks for the inspiration 🙂
That perk is the reason why all my books have very few names, with the exception of Mad Water, which is loosely peppered with them! 😀
Also I just watched the campaign video and it is PHENOMENAL.
Lol – I’m so glad you enjoyed it! We had fun making it 😀
The outdoors scenes (with the toy car) were actually shot at my old school. A little private joke… 🙂
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