Crowdfunding can be a great way to sell your book if you already have a following. There are lots of things to consider if you embark on crowdfunding, from logistics to reward tiers.
When self-publishing a book, you don’t have many options to get your book to market. If you release an ebook, you sell it through the main online retailers, such as Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and Google. You could sell ebooks directly, but there’s a big advantage to having a global marketplace stocking your books.
The most common way to sell a print book is to use Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which lets you sell both digital and print-on-demand copies of the book. You could sell print books directly, but you’d have to deal with logistics and shipping costs, which would eat into your profits.
Another option is crowdfunding, where interested readers contribute to your publishing project in advance. In return, they can choose from various levels of rewards, ranging from a digital or physical copy of the book to more expensive rewards, such as signed copies of the book, early access to the book before general release, and having contributors’ names printed in the book as acknowledgements. Premium rewards can include deluxe editions of the book or one-on-one conversations with the author.
Crowdfunding isn’t exclusive; you can still sell your book in digital and print formats through the usual channels once the crowdfunding campaign has finished. Crowdfunding can provide income early in the book’s life, unlike other self-publishing methods, which pay you as the book sells.
Case study: Joanna Penn, author entrepreneur
Joanna Penn is a prolific author of thrillers and books about the business of writing. She wanted to do something a bit out of her comfort zone that fit with her interests in reading, writing, and traveling. She set out on three pilgrimages, including one along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. This “travel memoir about pilgrimage […] doesn’t fit my audience,” she says. “It is a completely new thing. So I didn’t really think anyone would buy it. To be honest, I thought a few people would buy it because they’re fans of me as a person. But it really seems to have resonated.”
Joanna crowdfunded this book, entitled Pilgrimage, hoping to raise £1,000, and eventually raised £25,000 on Kickstarter from nearly 700 backers, showing that readers sometimes follow authors down unexpected paths.
Joanna produced the book, hired a designer, paid a printer, and handled the shipping. When the crowdfunding campaign was complete, she knew exactly how many copies to print. “I only have to print the number of books that are actually ordered,” she said, which avoids having boxes of unsold books gathering dust.
Listen to Joanna Penn on the Write Now with Scrivener podcast:
Case study: Glenn Fleishman, author, editor, and crowdfunding consultant
Glenn Fleishman wears many hats. He’s an experienced technical author and journalist, and he’s obsessed with the history of printing and type and has written several books about the topic. He is also a crowdfunding consultant and editor. One of Glenn’s recent projects was Shift Happens, by Marcin Wichary, a book about the history of keyboards, which raised over $750,000 on Kickstarter with more than 4,000 backers.
I chatted with Glenn about crowdfunding. He rejects the idea that some people have about crowdfunding, thinking that going that route means that you are a failure. It’s the publishing industry that has changed; the entire ecosystem has been upended in recent years. Publishers have given up on nurturing authors who start out, become mid-list staples, and possibly break out with a hit novel that can then generate sales of older titles.
Glenn told me that his mantra about crowdfunding, which he attributes to Brad Guigar, of the Comic Lab podcast, is “First comes the crowd, then comes the funding.” This means that authors must build an audience before launching a campaign.
“You need to have your own mailing list. You need to reach them directly. You need to grow that list,” Glenn said. And you can’t do this overnight. You develop this list of readers from people who have bought your previous books, who have visited your website and signed up for a newsletter, and who have interacted with you on social media.
Glenn tells some authors who come to him, “I don’t think you’re at the point you need to raise the money. Maybe spend a year building an audience. Write articles, set up that newsletter, start figuring out a way where you can get a thousand people [on their mailing list].” In short, build your author platform. As Kevin Kelly has said, you need 1,000 True Fans who “will buy anything you produce.”
When you set up the crowdfunding campaign for your book, there are many things to consider. If you sell paperback or hardcover copies of the book, you have two options. You can have the precise number of copies printed (with a bit of margin to cover lost or damaged copies) and ship them yourself. But shipping, especially internationally, can be expensive and is labor-intensive. You can find printers and shippers who work with small print runs to handle this for you, saving you a lot of time and potentially fulfilling requests from your fans in countries where you don’t live.
Crowdfunding allows you to offer a wide range of options to fans who support you. At a basic level, contributors can opt to get a digital copy of a book, pay a bit more for a paperback or hardcover, and your true fans can go for higher rewards. For a collection of comics by Tom Tomorrow that Glenn worked on, rewards ranged from a digital copy of the book to a guitar signed by Eddie Vedder. Other options are signed books; books with a tipped-in signature, which is like a bookplate; personalized inscriptions; contributors’ names printed in the book; original artwork or sketches for books such as comic collections; and limited editions with special bindings. Above all, make sure you have enough reward tiers so casual fans can buy your book at its basic price, and true fans can give you more because they want to support you.
Glenn pointed out that crowdfunding isn’t for first-time authors unless they already have an audience and a mailing list. It’s for “later stage” authors who capitalize on a fan base. It’s also not for authors who find it difficult to meet timelines. Crowdfunding campaigns include a specific delivery timeline. There may be setbacks, and the logistics involved in handling this process mean that missing deadlines can result in disappointed fans, who may not want to buy other books from the author. It’s a lot of work to manage a crowdfunding campaign, and this is time that the author won’t be able to use to work on their next book.
Crowdfunding can be a great way for some authors to expand their income and reward their most loyal fans. But there are a lot of moving parts to a crowdfunding campaign, and authors who use this method to sell books need to be aware of the complexities and the time involved. When successful, crowdfunding can be very rewarding, both financially and personally. But don’t dive into this before you understand everything involved in selling your book this way.
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.