My first Kickstarter campaign did not succeed.
My goal was to raise money to make my upcoming book, Angel from the Rust, into an audiobook. When the campaign ended, we were almost exactly halfway funded–just $5 over 50% of our goal. But Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform. So if a campaign doesn’t reach 100% of its goal, it’s simply not funded.
So what’s next? We get up and try again.
Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.
– Denis Waitley
Not funded…but not over
Despite the failure, I’m re-launching my campaign (with some tweaks).
My backers have been so gracious to support me in my first Kickstarter, and my hope is that they will help me in this new campaign. If everyone shows up and backs the campaign on day one, we will exceed our funding goal within the first 24 hours. (More on that in a bit.)
Projects that reach their funding goal within their first day after launch grab Kickstarter’s attention. Kickstarter will see the project holds a lot of promise and drive more traffic to the campaign. From this traffic, we will get even more backers. That’s the plan anyway. So having backers show up on day one is a great way to see this campaign skyrocket.
The new campaign
I’ve been doing work on my end to see this new campaign succeed, researching what has worked on other publishing campaigns and making necessary tweaks and changes. Here’s what I’ve changed since the first launch:
- Lower funding goal — For this new campaign, I’m shooting for $1000. My first campaign goal was $3,500. We raised about half that: $1,755. If everyone who backed the first campaign backs the new campaign, then we will reach funding (and exceed our funding goal) easily. It would be great if we could get to $2,800 (how much it costs to produce an audiobook) by the end of the campaign. But if we don’t reach that, I will pay the difference out of pocket.
- New tiers — I’ve added 2 more tiers. The Archon tier ($100) and the Olympus tier ($500).
- New rewards — I’m including other ebooks I’ve written as rewards. The new tiers, Archon and Olympus, also have new rewards that make them unique.
- Stretch goals — If we meet certain stretch goals, new addons (in the form of swag bags) will be unlocked.
You can check out the preview link here and have Kickstarter notify you when we launch: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jasonlink/post-apocalyptic-sci-fi-audiobook-angel-from-the-rust
