Today Russell Nohelty joins me to discuss his method of using kickstarter to publish. This isn’t just the same old get your book paid for by others, but a definitive plan to grow your audience and remain as close to revenue neutral as possible. We have talked though audio launches, games, comics and merchandise but this is the first time we have someone focused just plain old books. If you want to learn more of How Russell does it you can back his kickstarter about kickstarting books.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Joe: Hey, it’s Joe Solari. And welcome to the business of writing today. I have Russell Nohalty on how you doing Russell?
[00:00:09] Russell: Doing great. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:10] Joe: Well, thanks for coming on. I know you’re really busy right now with your Kickstarter campaign. And that’s what we’re here to talk about is how authors can use Kickstarter and figure out some ways maybe they’re not most typically used to.
You know, finding their audience and and, and selling more books. And this is kind of Metta because your Kickstarter is about
[00:00:35] Russell: Kickstarters. It is my friend said it’s the most Russell Nohalty thing that I’ve ever done in my whole career. And I kind of have to agree with them because a lot of my stuff is kind of like just doing the weirdest thing possible.
And so to have a Kickstarter book, raising Kickstarter funds to show authors had to kickstart their books better is is just a very weird meta commentary. But it also makes complete sense because a lot of [00:01:00] people don’t know about Kickstarter. They’ve never used Kickstarter before. And when we were talking about how to do this, obviously we were talking about like, just the spectacle of it and the stunt of it.
And like, just, just like that, it would be a good that how else could we possibly launch this book, but more so, like, we wanted people to go through the process of backing, kickstart. Because if they’re going to run a Kickstarter, the most, the best thing that they could do for research is just start backing them.
And if they’ve never made an account before, then at least now they have that Kickstarter account so that when they go to launch their Kickstarter, they’re more
[00:01:35] Joe: cool. Cool. Well, you know, I’ve had people coming to me when I mentioned Kickstarter as an option and specifically said like, no, this isn’t something you should do as an author.
And I don’t necessarily agree, but there’s some folks out there that, that, you know, it’s, it’s kind of on that spectrum of like, like traditionally published is [00:02:00] this ultimate thing that is true justification of you as an author and then, okay. You could be indie published, but to go do something like. Kickstarter, oh, I wouldn’t want to do that.
But you and I were talking before this call, it’s like some pretty big name authors have done this. There’s been Brandon Sanderson and Michael Sullivan is, you know, put multiple six figure Kickstarters up there. My question is how, how do you, when somebody thinks of this as having some kind of stigma for being a publishing platform, what comes to your mind is kind of the, the counter-argument or what you feel they need to understand to see that
[00:02:39] Russell: it’s not.
Sure. So I think the biggest thing that people think is that as they equate Kickstarter to go fund me, and they’re two very different platforms with two very different things. So most people, if they have experience with crowdfunding, it is with GoFundMe, which is a platform that people go to raise money for.
I mean, all sorts [00:03:00] of things, but like generally like funeral costs and hospital costs. And I guess travel costs. I’ve seen people trying to raise money for like elective surgery on their Kickstarter is like the opposite of that. Because in order to be on the Kickstarter platform, one, it needs to be a creative project.
Now creative could be everything from a drone to a book, to a music album, to a theater. But there has to be a physical, tangible thing that you were giving away that said that is in exchange for money. So GoFund me, you’re basically giving money to, with no expectation of any return. Whereas Kickstarter is a platform where people are pledging money and in return, they are getting a physical or digital objects.
So by those, so they’re getting your book in exchange. They’re saying, I’m going to give you $25 in return. I’m getting a physical copy of the book, a digital copy of the book, a one-on-one with you, a VIP, but some, some thing is tangibly there that they were exchanging money for. [00:04:00] So I think that it is it’s weird because people always talk about Patrion.
Like there’s no stigma against Patrion and authorship. You know, every time I talk about Kickstarter people like, well, I have a Patrion, but like I don’t have a Kickstarter which completely baffles me because in the parlance of just the action that a buyer will take a Kickstarter is the same action that you would take on Amazon.
You go to a page, you choose which version of the book that you want, what additional rewards you want, and then you buy that thing and you’re exchanging like an amount of money for an amount of good and on Patriot. It’s the, it’s an entirely different functionality. You are not exterior. You’re you’re exchanging money.
Correct. For almost access or like some extra stuff behind the scenes. So the way that you sell a Patrion and I have nothing against pastry Shaun, but it’s completely different than how you, you, you, you, you, [00:05:00] you would, you do a book like you don’t go to Amazon and say, I want I’ll pay you a dollar a month, Amazon, and you give me a coloring page.
And like some, like some process book pages. Like that’s just not a thing that like most, most readers understand, but all, all readers understand going to a website and giving money in exchange for product. Right. Right.
[00:05:29] Joe: Well, I, I, the other thing that I think authors can be my my OPIC about is their audience.
Right? Like they, they’re just, they think everybody’s a book reading audience in the sense of. There there’s, they’re only prepared to pay me this little bit of money for this story. And one of the things that I’ve observed from doing Kickstarters and seeing other people’s Kickstarters, one of the first things that they see is, wow, my existing audience, part of them are already on [00:06:00] Kickstarter and they’re spending thousands of dollars where I’m selling them a $3 book.
They’re spending thousands of dollars on things like games or technology. And I’d love to hear kinda your experience around like the audience, like learning more about your audience. That’s already on Kickstarter and then finding new audience
[00:06:24] Russell: on kicks. Sure. So I’ll relay a story that I got an email the other day from a re re a writer who said I was on Kickstarter doing board games and films.
And I never even thought that I could use it for a novel. So you’re right. A lot of people, there are a lot of categories on Kickstarter. Like film is a big one. Music is a big one. Board games is the biggest one. And there’s a good likelihood that a lot of your fans are on Kickstarter. Even if they’re not doing books.
Comics is a huge one. So like, you know, if you have fans who are readers, a lot of them also like comics and comics [00:07:00] is the most successful category on Kickstarter as a, as a percentage of how many fun, like over 60% of comic campaigns. So successfully funded had to about 35% of publishing projects. So like there’s a lot of categories that people are using Kickstarter for.
They’re just not really using it for novels. And so the. The thing that I always tell people when it comes to Kickstarter is the thing that Kickstarter gives you that no other category gives you, except for your own website is backer data. So you actually get the emails, the amount that people pledge, the names of the people that are buying your books, which, you know, I spent a lot of time on Kickstarter with knob, with, with comics and some with novels.
And then I had the same thing. People told me Kickstarter’s not where you raise funds for books. So in 2018, I was like, okay, like, I’m going to, I’m going to be a quote, unquote, big boy writer. And like, I’m going to launch these books on Amazon, not on Kickstarter because like, I, even though I hadn’t run a half dozen or dozen Kickstarters at that [00:08:00] time, like.
Like got caught up in the, oh, Kickstarter is not for real authors hype. And so I launched books in 2019 and they were terrible. They weren’t, they weren’t terrible. They just went so bad. And I used every piece of the formula that people give out. And because my books were not like P and romance or sweet romance or a military thriller or or crime thriller or or colonization or scifi colonization, or, you know, the, the categories that like people are giving this information for.
Like, I love Mark Dawson. Mark Dawson writes thrillers is the second biggest category on kicks on on Amazon. And like, they’re just more people that are there to buy those kinds of books than on, than I have access to because I write fantasy and specifically like mythological fantasy without. So there’s just far less people there.
And so I needed to [00:09:00] maximize the dollar spend for the people that I had on, and that brought that’s what brought me to Kickstarter. So I went back to Kickstarter with those same books that failed so badly on on on Amazon. And we were able to raise over almost $10,000 to clear out all of the debt that I had buying that series and pay for more well more books in that series that went so poorly on Amazon, like has, has, has funded 11 books.
So we’ve already, we’ve, we’ve, I’ve written 11 books. We haven’t launched the last seven, but the money we’ve raised has paid for all of the books that I have launched in that series. And if I didn’t go to Kickstarter to to raise money, I would never have been able to make money on $3 or $4 a book because I just, I was so far in the whole.
That I felt like I couldn’t spend more money on marketing and Manhattan because the books that were in successful bought, like they were successful, they just weren’t successful on, on [00:10:00] Amazon. And this is the, this is the thing that I talked to people about Kickstarter all the time. It’s look like if you’re writing in a hot genre with hot tropes or like, that’s your thing.
If your thing is like churning out books fast with like sexy covers or, or awesome covers in like the right job. And like, that is your thing. Like, you can make the thing on app, but the Amazon thing where you can, like, it’s just, that is what Amazon is, what Amazon is currently built for. Like, if you’re writing romance for thriller I’m not saying you’re going to guarantee be successful, but like, if you’re writing like a book every month or every two or three months, at least, and you’re J and you’re using all of the tricks of advertising and stuff, like, yeah, that is a, there’s a, there’s a way there’s a very good chance that you will like do well on Amazon.
However, the vast majority of authors don’t write fast, they don’t write a note genres and and they don’t spend a lot of money on advertising. And for those authors, like, they are dead in the water like there, but [00:11:00] before they even hit launch, like they’re almost guaranteed to fail on Amazon because Amazon is not set up for standalones.
Not say you can’t have success on stand-alone just generally, it’s not that a percent of. It’s not set up for people who release one to two books a year, but Kickstarter is started is set up for the weird, the weird off-brand genres. And that is because the reason Kickstarter really exists is to kickstart things that are not commercially that, that, that are not commercially viable already in the market.
So the people who are not, who don’t find the thing they want are going to Kickstarter or Indiegogo, or one of those places to, to find those things, to find things like board games, like board games was a dead, literally like dead in the water before, before before Kickstarter, because there were not, there was not a big enough audience to warrant the literal entire industry.
The entire industry exists because Kickstarter has allowed fundamentally [00:12:00] changed how. Games come
[00:12:01] Joe: to market now. I mean, you come, you’d be stupid not to be on Kickstarter first.
[00:12:06] Russell: Exactly. And if you think about like, that’s just a weird category, like, like it’s, it’s a category that, and like all of the categories are like drones was a thing that started on Kickstarter.
Pebble watches was a thing that started on Kickstarter. These are things that people wanted, something interesting and new, but they were not seeing it on the open market. So Kickstarter is a place that is that the backers have made to fund weird things that generally are not on the open market. And so if you write thriller or romance, like maybe Kickstarter, isn’t the best OD option for you though?
I think if you can bring your own audience, it is. And I think that there is some viability to that too, but Kickstarter is made for the people that are making things a little bit weirder than normal, not releasing a book every three weeks. Like not following tropes, like all of those things. It’s just 90% of all.
Fall into that category. You’re you’re [00:13:00] you’re, you’re, you’re going to have more success on Kickstarter because instead of making $3 a book you’re generally making somewhere between 20 and 25 and $30 every time someone backs up.
[00:13:10] Joe: Yeah, I think that that’s, you know, from my observations of Kickstarters that I’ve been involved in is, you know, you just have such a,
[00:13:19] Russell: like,
[00:13:20] Joe: I think the number of the sacrament had was like an average customer spend of like 66 bucks versus, you know, page reads.
So you can get away with even a smaller audience too. But what I’d love to hear from you, I got, I got two things that you made me think about the first I run into kind of coming off. The same thing is my understanding is kind of from what you’ve already shared is, is that you’ve come into this because you do kind of some off, you know, off tropes.
Also that you you’ve been in comic books and graphic novels. And that’s another industry where like a lot of authors think that [00:14:00] someday they want to do a graphic novel, not understanding that there’s a, there’s a path to that a lot quicker and less expensive based on what we’re talking about right now, which that being kickstart.
Can you kind of elaborate on your experience with
[00:14:16] Russell: comics and yeah. Is another comics is another category that literally wouldn’t exist. Like the comics industry would not exist. Independent publishing would not exist in the way that it does now without Kickstarter, Kickstarter allows comics to exist really like, and truly the Renaissance in comics where you’re seeing all of these like books from all of these cool creators, myself included, but including thousands of creators every year from Brian Polito and and Scott Snyder on that.
Is because of Kickstarter because it is expensive to make comic books. It is the, the, the public that the publishing industry around comics is one that it is paid for play. Like they will not even look at your comic unless you have super paid for. [00:15:00] So so you really have to pay for your book and make your book.
But the beautiful thing about calm about comics is self publishing all the way back to at least the eighties, but even before then, like elf quest in the seventies probably is that there’s no stigma about self publishing. Like in fact, the way that you have success in comics is to self publish and then a publisher will pick you up.
And the truth, if you’re doing really cool work. So like, it’s not just a, a like, oh, well, I guess I’m going to self-publish. It’s like, no, like you make the comics and then like, good things will happen. Very few people, especially in nowadays come from anything but self publishing at the beginning, at least then building their own audience there.
So yeah, I come from a world that is made for Kickstarter. Like the way that, you know, generally we do a Kickstarter and then you go to sh to build your brand. That being said, [00:16:00] comics is very broken because once Kickstarter is over. Like there’s very little money in the aftermarket after a Kickstarter, unless you’re going to shows.
So the beauty of being a novelist is the aftermarket. After an, after making a Kickstarter is enormous. Like you still have the entire Amazon Google play all of the, every other category. That’s, that’s there for you already exists. It still exists. And you’re adding Kickstarter at the beginning instead of kind of the most money you’re gonna make an a comic will generally be like from the Kickstarter.
[00:16:34] Joe: Well, and I, yeah, I know like with games that that whole model has just been changed, right. Compared to comics in the sense that big game stores are watching Kickstarter and they’re buying stuff, advanced copies of stuff on Kickstarter to bring into their game star posts, to like the comic book. Where, you know, the cabal is not there.
They’re keeping the kind of the [00:17:00] regular,
[00:17:01] Russell: you know,
[00:17:02] Joe: comic bookstores. They’re not looking to buy stuff on, on
[00:17:06] Russell: Kickstarter. There are some really cool ones, but yeah, I w and there’s no, like, there are very few advertising options for comics after the Mo like, there’s no, like no one has a book on like Facebook advertising for comics.
So the beautiful thing about novels on Kickstarter is you can utilize Kickstarter to let’s say, break even on funding, or like break even on your production costs. And maybe get a little bit more break. You have down your production costs, have the little nest egg, instead of going into your launch negative, even like, no matter how much you will make on, on, on your, on your book, like you, everyone hits the publish button in the negative.
Like, I pray, like, I know pre-orders can pay for things, but like the minute you hit until you get that pre-order money, like two 60 days, right. You’re in the negative. The only thing that you have to be like, well, did I make my pre-order numbers? So, and if with KU it’s even worse, because like, there really is [00:18:00] no pre-order, you just are literally hitting the button and just like hoping that you are going to be able to slam the algorithm with enough ads to bump you into the top 10 or 20 or a hundred or 200 in your category, and then be able to like, live onto the live on that journey as it goes down.
But with, with, with with Kickstarter, even if you’re using U you can still release a book before you go into Kau on Kickstarter. And instead of like, let’s say a customer, a thousand dollars to like, make the book like you make, you make a thousand dollars or even $500 on Kickstarter, you’re still cutting a huge part against.
Money. It’s going to cost you to like launch that book and it gives you like another, however much you raise on Kickstarter funds towards slamming through ads on your launch, which we all know is like a big part of success is how much money you have after the launch.
[00:18:52] Joe: Sure. Well, you know, when I first got thinking about Kickstarter with authors, it wasn’t on the actual book.
It was on [00:19:00] the idea of audio, right? So audio here’s, here’s this, this thing that. For you to own your own rights and to do it the right way, you need to have some pretty significant capital. And how do you go about doing that? And I mean, it’s been proven multiple times. We’ve had people on this podcast that have talked through it that and, and now with BookFunnel, it’s even easier to deploy that audio, but like that becomes a way for an author that doesn’t necessarily have the cash to go hire a narrator to go and get that money ahead of time and then go back and get that product made.
That’s all to say to your point. What I, what keeps going through my mind is this, it’s a really interesting model in the idea
[00:19:46] Russell: of If you break even on
[00:19:49] Joe: Kickstarter, then what ends up happening over on Amazon is all just kind of a bonus, right?
[00:19:56] Russell: Yeah. I mean, I mean, just imagine like you go into your launch [00:20:00] even like zeroed out or with $500 up instead of $4,000 down or $2,000 down.
I mean, you mentioned audio, but I’ve never met an author no matter how successful they are, that, that, that was happy with the amount of formats or they didn’t want to expand their brand into board games or, or movies or on some way, like every author, even if they’re making a million dollars a year, like they want to expand their brand into something else.
As my friend as my friend, Matt says, like Kickstarter is an avenue that people are willing to buy from you, like, why would I not use that? Like. Even if the money is not a hundred percent necessary to make the book, like these are buyers who want the thing and they’re willing to give me, you know, 2, 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 20, a hundred thousand dollars, like, why would I say that’s not worth pursuing?
And he’s you know, he, he runs a, a pretty big publisher, but he’s like, you know, they want it here. Like, there’s a, there are buyers [00:21:00] here. There are super fans here that want the audio commentary, or they want the VIP invites or they want like the pins or the buttons, or like, whatever else I’m offering like that, that’s what they want.
And so I’m, I’m shooting myself in the foot by not by just saying, no, I don’t want that $14,000, which is usually his, his books usually raised back 10 and $20,000 on Kickstarter, even as they go on to sell in comic book stores and everything. And I think that’s a very astute point of like, if I told you.
That you could go to this new this new platform. And like, it was potentially going to like give you $20,000 of additional revenue. Like, why would, why would you not pursue that? And I know that authors do because they go to radish or like Trumbull Wombo or blah, blah, blah, like whatever the new fiction app is, like, they’re loading their books on there and spending hours upon hours doing it for very minimal gain.
So like, w why, why, why is Kickstarter different? It’s just another avenue for you to [00:22:00] make money on a book that most people desperately, or at least wants to have. You know, even if I didn’t need Kickstarter, I would still want that 10 grand, like, I’d still want, like, I’m not going to say no to 10, 20, 30, 40, $50,000 a year, like on that platform.
[00:22:16] Joe: Well here, here’s another way to think about it just from a purely business perspective. For your book to be successful on Amazon, it needs to have the absolute best cover and editing and formatting that you can afford. So now by applying this new model we’re talking about here is rather than me trying to bootstrap this thing, and maybe I can afford, you know, a thousand bucks.
And I really stretching myself out on that first book and I’m going to have to apply that to not only the cover, but my editing and formatting. Now, I, I kind of flip the script here and I go, and I get the amount of money I need to do that. [00:23:00] Right. Get guaranteed some sales on that platform, but now have the money so that when it does come out, it does have the absolute best cover, the best editing I can probably better than I could afford on my own penny.
Right. So now when I do go onto the traditional platform of Amazon, I’m bringing a much better product. I’ve got a better shot of that being successful than if I was just trying to do it kind of the way that we hear in most, you know, self publishing groups, which is scrape up some dough to get a good cover and
[00:23:32] Russell: hire an editor.
Sure. I mean, I will say that, you know, the, the, you, you want to have a cover before you go to Kickstarter. Like it’s like, it’s, it’s just like any other platform, like you’re going to have a lot better success. If the book is done, then like, if you’re still in the process of making it, but one of the biggest downsides, the Kickstarter is people can put books up that don’t have covers or editing or anything.
And like, it really brings. Like the quality of the overall platform and the people that are looking at the projects. So you don’t have to have a [00:24:00] new one that maybe don’t have to have like your final cover, but like you need to have a pretty good cover. The thing that I will say to counter that is Kickstarter allows you to, to test out your marketing copy before the plan before you go live.
So I don’t spend any money on advertising on Kickstarter. Like I have not spend money. I spend maybe $200 a year, which like I made over $60,000 this year. And I’ve spent like $200 of advertising. It’s a pretty good ROI. As far as Yeah. I think that the thing that it does is you can, you can then say, oh, well that cover doesn’t convert like that.
Or you can say, I want to hire a Rebecca Franks to like, do a cover and that’s a thousand dollars. So like, I’m going to go and get this $200 cover, which like is a good cover. But like, if we raise $2,000, I can go and hire her or I can hire a steward block, reckons hire like the absolute best cover artists in the genre to do this cover.
But I at least have like, what would be the cover that at least as the Kickstarter exclusive [00:25:00] cover or something? Yeah. I definitely think, I mean, you queue out the tree Kickstarter like platform, whereas like you’re not going to go to Amazon and just write my cover is forthcoming on part of it. Like you would have something, so people need to have.
Especially if you’re like a brand new author, but really you’re not going to do this if you’re an established author, but like as a brand new author, like you don’t want to come out and say like, here’s my stick figure thing of like what the cover’s going to be like, we want to make a good impression is one of the biggest things that people don’t do is they don’t make it a good impression.
They think like they can just put a page together and like say anything in it. And like money is going to come. And if you look at probably the projects that are funding now, but certainly if you look at like a lot of the failed projects that comes down to like, just the poor this idea that like, I’m going to raise some money on Kickstarter and then I’m going to have a real launch.
And and then they make a dollar or they make zero, they make $10 or $20 or $50. And most of it is because like, they’re not [00:26:00] working on the page, they’re not creating a sales page that is like attractive to buyers to come and give them. I just had somebody I did cause we’re doing this, this this campaign right now and somebody who was in our Facebook group for our sprint or we’re doing a sprint with us tier where if you pay a hundred dollars, we’re literally all going to be, I’m going to show you all of the tricks.
And then we’re all going to launch a campaign in January. And so someone asked about their campaign that was going now. And I did a little, like, here’s the things you were doing wrong. And he changed all of this stuff. And he said in one day he raised like 55 extra dollars, which like is not, it’s not a huge campaign.
So like it’s 30% more funding probably or 20% more funding of his campaign, just like following the general principles of like making a sales page look and feel better so that people had a good experience on the page.
[00:26:46] Joe: So to that point, and I completely hear what you’re saying, and that is what would you say time and financial budget?
An author would need to put into, you know, get, make the video [00:27:00] and get the. This may be a preliminary cover or the final cover. What, what, what have you kind of seen as those kind of time and money commitments to,
[00:27:08] Russell: for a successful campaign? Well, I mean, generally I have, I have clients that pay me like a hundred dollars a month to do this work for them and to, and to like be there while they’re doing campaigns and, and like, they’ll, they’ll hire me like 1, 1, 1 hour, 30 minutes a month to just look at their new thing.
So I literally copy and paste most of my campaigns now. So it takes me very little time because I have the system, I have the system that works. I mean, if you don’t have the system, you know, you have to learn how to write sales pages, how to write copy, but imagery is good. You have to figure out how to do a video.
For me, a video takes 30 minutes total, like maybe spend a little bit more time dropping an imagery, but you know, it’s three it’s my, my videos are three parts. You know, there’s an intro, there’s a product demonstration. Then there’s a plea and it takes like two [00:28:00] and a half minutes to record. I know what I’m going to say.
So I, you know, it takes me 15 minutes to record and maybe 20 minutes to edit and then I upload it and then there’s a sales page. It really depends on how extensive your world is. I think probably a thriller page or a page like a romance page could take an hour or so a fantasy page. There has like a big overarching world probably would take a couple hours.
But literally once you have the page built, when you run the next campaign for that universe, like, I mean, I’m seriously, I copy and paste. I copy the thing. And then I, like, I edited a little bit of it, but mostly it is like a hundred percent copy and paste for me at this point. So but yeah, I mean, there’s a bunch of like buyer’s psychology principles that I learned in writing sales pages from all of the courses and stuff that you take as a business, just like a business human you take like copywriting and all of that stuff and learning all of it at the beginning over many courses, and then distilling it down into a Kickstarter.
I made it took a lot of time to get it right. That said before [00:29:00] I ran a campaign in 2016, before I really mastered this stuff and I raised $3,500 from from like 150 backers for my first novel campaign. So I’m not saying it has to be perfect, but yeah,
it depends on how much you understand about business and selling. If you know nothing about business and selling, it’s going to take you considerably longer to make a. Then it does. If you already know, like how to make a, how, how to make a blurb and how to, how to like attract someone to your page, to your book and like the things you have to say to make them buy, or
[00:29:35] Joe: they can just sign up for your Kickstarter right now.
[00:29:39] Russell: They absolutely can do that. And like, that’s. Yeah, so a Kickstarter novel.com. We have this book, get your book selling on Kickstarter. I’m like I’ve had courses for years on this topic. So like a hundred, 200, $500 courses on like business selling and, and and Kickstarter and, and like all of this stuff.
And this is the first time that I’ve really Monica, really? [00:30:00] So this is all Monica. Most of this is Monica. Most of this is, is Monica taking all of the breadth of information that I’ve had over the years as I, and I, and I’m training her to do the Kickstarter, like in like techs and stuff. Every morning, we meet about, you know, what we’re doing today and where we are and taking all of the information and like distilling it into a language that, that writers understand authors understand, because the thing is, I know Kickstarter, but she’s like one of the foremost publishing experts in the world.
And so like, she is, she is taking all of these things and translating it into. Words and actions that authors authors can take, because I’m not, I’m not so great at like speaking the language of authors. I think I’m competent at it, but she is fluent in it. So so we’re a take. And one of the cool things about this campaign is she’s running her first campaign.
So like she, a big part of this book is her [00:31:00] distilling the information that she learned throughout the process into the book, as she’s teaching these principles. And we’re teaching these principles about how to design a sales page and how to do a video and how to do all of these things. Because the thing is it’s, it’s very daunting.
You look at a page, you go to my Kickstarter novel page and look at all the things that are happening. Like there’s a lot going on, but when we break it down for you, each section takes maybe five or 10 minutes. If you know what you’re talking about, like one of the sections in my city and spindle Saya campaign was about.
Well, like he’s a little bio of each character, you know, like probably know your characters, if you’ve written a book, what if I’m it’s about the world and about the mythology of the gods who are in there. And then there’s their section said that are made for just like buyer’s psychology, like getting you excited about the book.
And there are parts about like where the money is. So there are all these pieces that seem like, wow, I could never do this, but like a big part of that, the beginning part is the blurb. Like you got a [00:32:00] good blurb. If you got a good blurb, you can literally pretty much just lay it in at the top with a little bit of tweaking.
And like, while you’ve got the beginning of your page part of it is about like, about about how to create like sales buzz and how to reach out to people and all of these things that I’ve been doing sort of organically. And I’ve been teaching organically for hundreds upon hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars sometimes is.
Is is in this book, which is $10 for the ebook or $25 for the paperback or for a hundred dollars. You get all of the stuff I talked about and we’re doing a sprint group, which is starting in right now, but really at the end of November, I’m going to create a page from scratch. We’re going to all launch a book together and we’re going to create, start, try and start creating a community of people who are using Kickstarter repeatedly, which is, you know, in comics, they use Kickstarter sometimes 10 times a year, 12 times a year.
Like I literally have friends who are always launching [00:33:00] Kickstarters. I actually have people. My friend, Joe, who runs microcosm publishing literally always has a Kickstarter live 12 Kickstarter’s a year and he runs. You know, he does a company that does, you know like 50 or some odd books a year, but he’s still using Kickstarter for a part of his catalog.
And he, he, he meets with the Kickstarter team and he’s like, which of the books that we have coming out would be good for Kickstarter, which of these. And I mean, he, he makes, you know, let’s call it two to $4,000 a book sometimes way more than that. But like, generally I see like $4,000 of book, but like it’s $4,000 of like free money and I mean, free money because like he’s already printed.
He’s already doing all. He’s already got a team of warehousing who like has to ship the books out. So like all of these things are just like an extra source of revenue. Like my friend, Matt, he’s already got a warehouse. So people who are like delivering books. So what does it matter if they have to deliver books to Kickstarter and the Kickstarter people on top of all of the books they’re already doing?
So I mean, if I had to, I [00:34:00] wouldn’t, I’m never planning to do this again. Like this is way too much work, like the cake, the sprint group to like, do on a regular basis. So the, one of the things we’re trying to do is like a thing we’re never planning to do again. So for instance, at $500 Monica is giving as is, is doing consultation may or Monica are doing competition and Monica never does a consultation.
Like she’s never does it. I do it very sparingly and very sporadically on a do I feel good today basis to do it? So like these are things we’re not giving out often. We so the sprint group is something we never planned to do. Again, I know a hundred dollars is a lot to to like spend at one time.
But if this is a thing you’re going to be using over and over and over and over again for the decided future of your business, you know, $100 Sloan had to do it right. And be able to make a page and then have me critique a page or Monica partake a page or your, your other people critique a page is going to be huge.
And most importantly, the thing that, the thing that is the hardest part about publishing platform is there is [00:35:00] no community of backers and no community of authors really who are doing this work. They’re not getting. Did, they just don’t exist right now. And it’s because people generally will come to the platform one time and be gone or they’ll come to the platform and they don’t know what they’re doing and they’ll fail and then they’ll be gone.
Or they’ll, they’ll come to the platform and be really successful and then never talk about it again. They’ll never talk about like raising $2 million or 50 or $60,000 or whatever. There are so many creators who have used the authors who have used Kickstarter one time and you would have no idea that they could start her that one time, because maybe they’ve done a board game, but they’ve done a movie.
Or if they’d done something they’ve done a special edition of like one of their books and they just yeah. Or gotten their audio done or like, whatever the thing is, what I’m trying to do is what I’m trying. The main thing that I want to prove out during this campaign. Kickstarter is a renewable resource that you can continue to come [00:36:00] out with and make it a part of your launch strategy.
You don’t have to do a 30 day campaign. I’ve done everything from five days up to 60 days. And like, so you can run a one day campaign, a five day campaign you could do. So for instance, Lindsay broker, I know she has a Patriot on, and she, she releases her books in the Patrion and I’m wide platforms for a week, or she used to at least, and then she cuts everything off and puts it in KTU where, like in that same vein, you could do the same thing with Kickstarter.
You could, you could say, Hey, I’m wa I’m going into Kau in like a week or like in a month, but here is how you get this book. If you’re not in, if you don’t want to get to the NKU it’s here, there it is. Cut it off. And now like, I’m, NKU the rest of the time or for the next 90 days. So there are all these, so, and you could do that every single time you launch two or three months before you launch a book and suddenly.
Like you’re making, I mean, for me this year, we made $60,000. Last year I made over $70,000. I’m not saying you can [00:37:00] do that. Part of the reason why I can do that is I’ll go to the book and I’ll raise $10,000, but I’ll do it four times. And doing 10 to $20,000, four times is 60, $80,000 over on the, over the course of it.
And if you, if we, if we start making this renewable resource and that we keep going back to the, that suddenly backers come suddenly backers come back and it builds out the category, just like board games, just like, just like just like comics, just like some of the other categories and we can make it.
That is incredibly helpful. And most importantly, like gives you additional money for like the rest of your launch while providing you backer data that you can then use to create lookalike audiences and custom audiences and all of these things that we have to do anyway. But right now we’re guessing like right now we’re guessing that people click on your page.
They are people that I should put into a lookalike audience or a re target [00:38:00] audience. But if you are on Kickstarter, you literally see them buying and like, well, no, this person, this person spent $70 or over four campaigns, this person spent $200. This person is a good person to put in a custom audience.
And I want people like this person or these 20 people, instead of saying, and instead of saying oh these people on my list say they bought, or these people on my list, like have complaints or they have. Well, I can literally go into my master database of all my Kickstarter backers and say, oh, this person spent $200 last year.
Like not that, not that the other people’s opinions don’t matter, but like the person who like has spent a bunch of money, their, their, their opinion of weights 200 times more than this other person. But right now we’re guessing right now, we’re saying, oh, well, this person may have bought, or this other person may not have bought.
And we’re just, we don’t know. But Kickstarter gives you some degree of certainty that people are actually buying [00:39:00] in your audience, which is what you need. If you really want to scale your business. If you’re the way to scale, you need to know who actually is buying and who is just blowing up. And frankly, the people who buy usually for me, don’t actually engage.
They just want to buy, they’re not the ones who are reaching out. They’re just the ones who are like, every time they’ll spend, like I’ve never met you before you spend a thousand dollars on the, my campaigns never talk one time. And like, so those are the people that I want to emulate more than the people who are, who are like reaching out with suggestions, unless those suggestions from people who are actually interested in my work.
Hmm.
[00:39:36] Joe: One point I wanted to kind of backtrack to that you mentioned earlier was the idea of this being a renewable resource and, and the opportunity to build a community here. I think that’s one thing that is really interesting about what you’re doing with this is that you’re trying to see that author community, which is important because while there’s the Brandon Sanderson [00:40:00] novel, that was basically an old novel that he made special.
When you look at something like what Michael Sullivan has done repeatedly. And if you get, you can watch the videos on my channel and listen to the podcast and past episodes Robin and Michael will explain that there, this is how they go to market. They first launch on Kickstarter. That is where their audience comes because they get the book six months before anybody gets it in the general public.
And when you start to see how they built this system, where it’s not just about getting in and you get at a good price too, right? It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s a reasonably priced product. And like some of the people you mentioned, of course, they’ve got a lot of infrastructure they put in place over the years, but.
And their situation, the real benefit comes to the fan. And that, like, if you know about it, you get that book at a good price, [00:41:00] six months before it goes to market. And this gets back to, you know, what you were talking about earlier about what happens on the sales platforms? A lot of the stuff that people are paying extra money for the Sullivan’s get, because when their book comes out, six months later, he’s got this huge audience it’s Reddit already.
And on the day it comes out, they’re putting reviews, right? Like he’s gets hundreds of reviews in the first hour because they’ve read the book and they’re ready to go. So I
[00:41:33] Russell: think it’s a, it’s an arc team that actually pays you to be
[00:41:38] Joe: right. Like, and You know, you can it’s easy for an author to go, oh, Michael Sullivan.
He’s been traditionally published. He’s been doing this for yeah, he has. So, but he’s also available that you could talk to just like you and understand like, this is why they’re doing it. Like he’s, he doesn’t, they’ll never go back to traditional publishing.
[00:41:57] Russell: Right? They wouldn’t go ahead. There’s one [00:42:00] rather big use case for Kickstarter that we haven’t talked about yet, which is the, the general way that you make money on Amazon is you have a book that is five books or more the series that is five books or more long, so that you can run ads to book one and lose money.
And two, three, and you usually break even on book four and start making a profit on. I’m not saying this is every series, like, but generally, like if you, if you are thinking about the books that, that are doing well, they’re in series that are at least five books or longer long, or a person who has had a series who has a series that’s very long and is doing other books, but they have a lot of people that are, I followed them on Amazon.
So one thing that Amazon allows you, that, that, that, that, that Kickstarter allows you to do is without touching the Amazon algorithm. So like, you don’t have to worry about cliffs or anything like that. You can build up a rather long series through, but you don’t have to launch those books one at a time.
So you can, let’s say only write two books a year. You can, you can, over the course of three, two and [00:43:00] a half years, you can write up a five book series on Kickstarter slowly, make money on them, lose a, a break, even build up a little bit of nest egg, and then slam through Amazon and all the other platforms at once with a five book series, instead of losing money, losing money, losing money, losing money, losing money, and making.
So I, and I know this works because I’m doing it right now. So I have a series that is, I have, I have 11 books in this one series, four of which haven’t been released anywhere yet. And I’m waiting until that whole living book series is done before I bring it to the Amazon or the other, all the other places.
Like not at one time, like not like on one day, I’m not releasing them, but I have the launch strategy, which allows for all of these books to be successful because I can, I can just spend way more money on advertising than most authors can when I have a 5,000, $10,000 nest egg. Yeah. And to your
[00:43:54] Joe: point, you’re when you do decide to advertise [00:44:00] because of the data that you have from Kickstarter, you can build better quality lookalike audiences and set up, you know, different types of advertising that authors wouldn’t be privy to.
If they didn’t do something like that.
[00:44:16] Russell: Absolutely. I mean, a lot of the beginning of advertising is finding the custom audiences. They’re finding the people who convert the, finding the people, you know, it’s putting a book on at $5 a day on BookFunnel or something and seeing which w which advertising and which of those people convert and like which audience converts and like kind of spending several hundred dollars to do that over the few months before a book or series launches and Kickstarter allows you to say, wait, I have like 2000 people who bought this series over the course of the years, that the year that I’m building it up or two years on building it up, let me use them to make a custom audience and let me use them to make a look alike.
And so all of that stuff is helpful for advertising and a way that [00:45:00] any author can benefit, even if they are NKU because K U is also, especially from the beginning of K U cause like once you’ve got a bunch of books that are, that are launched and you’ve been running advertising for a bunch of times, like you kind of have the audiences that work, right.
Or you have, you have the data of which ones work, which ones, which ones are going to convert, which ones aren’t. I mean, I’m not saying you’re not always adding more, but you know, once you’ve done 10 or so launches, like you kind of know which ones are great and which ones are terrible, but this allows you at the beginning, the first couple of books, the first book that you’re launching, the first couple of books, you’re launching to really have a huge leg up on people because not only do you know, who’s clicking, you know, who actually converting and the type of person that’s converting.
[00:45:43] Joe: No, I, I, I, I’m a big believer in how this can be a strategy that is Maybe the next way that wave for authors to think about versus just going to that traditional, when we were talking about where it’s like, put your book out on Amazon and [00:46:00] hope.
[00:46:00] Russell: Yeah. Or like just slam a lot of ads and no, you’re not going to make your money back.
I mean, like that’s kind of nuts. Most authors are going to slam a ton of money on ads and not make their money back because they just don’t have enough books to make their money back. This is not like if a mathematically, they just won’t.
[00:46:17] Joe: Right, right there. It’s such a low margin product and it costs so much now per click.
It’s it’s really, it’s getting super,
[00:46:23] Russell: super tough. Right. I mean, whereas you look at like Mark Dawson and like he’s got 20 books in one series. Yeah. Like he could spend $20 to get a reader and still make $50 on that reader. If they read through the whole series. I’m not saying he does that, but. And all. So, you know, I, when I put these books on Amazon, I started running ads and I was like, wait, let’s just, this is not working like this.
Like the math does add up. Like I don’t, I don’t have a series that hits all of the tropes of the sort like they get like the quick click of like, whatever it’s mermaids or demons, or like sexy, sexy tigers, or like, whatever the thing [00:47:00] is. Like, I just didn’t have enough that I just didn’t write that kind of book that someone would look at it quickly and be like, I like sexy tiger books.
I’m clicking on that. And this is nothing against people that write sexy tiger books, like awesome for you. Like it’s just for me. And for most authors deed, majority of authors, they don’t write those kinds of books that are just going to be like the instant K you download, or the instant click buy, because like they’re not the thriller, you know, they’re kind of weird mystery novel that like doesn’t fit into any of the weird cozy mystery or other tropes.
And so, and, and even if I do get that quick, like I’ve only got two books. So like the odds that I’m going to. Like make enough money. It’s going to be, there’s going enough readthrough to actually make it function is minimal. So I have already built up over, over. I I’ve paid off all of these 11 books that I’m launching.
I’m going to relaunch the four that already out. And then all 11 books, I’m going to like take all of them. I’m going to lodge all them, but I’ve already paid for all of them. So when [00:48:00] we, when we, when you go, don’t do the last campaign. If I raised. $11,000 again, and it costs me two or $3,000 to print and ship all of this stuff.
I will literally have like a seven, $8,000 war chest just to run ads for this hugely long series. And it’s I don’t think it’s an edge case. Like I think most people that write in series could benefit from this. Even if you’re writing a huge saving, if you’re writing a series that’s hugely popular and a huge, they knew like in a hugely successful genre, unless you on people who really can’t benefit from this are people that are writing to the tropes of the month.
Cause like, then you’ve got to make, get the book and like you got to launch it. But like if you’re writing something, that’s an evergreen trope you can, you can benefit from, from doing this and you, you likely will benefit from it because even if you’re making three or $500 per book and cutting your costs down, that’s still three to 500 bucks that are the different hundred dollars that you’re gonna have either to cut your production costs or to to spend [00:49:00] directly on average.
Well, I think that’s
[00:49:01] Joe: you know, from a business perspective, that’s, it’s such a tipsy probabilities of success so much if like, Hey
[00:49:08] Russell: I’m neutral
[00:49:09] Joe: on my costs, right? I’m not saying I made any money yet, but I’m not starting the game at, you know, minus 3000, $10,000. Right. Granted you have this takes time because you do have to invest to get a successful camp Kickstarter campaign.
Th that that’s such a powerful thing that authors don’t look at is, is that, Hey, if, if you just knew that at least you broke even just psychologically, you’re going to have a better launch because you’re not going to be like, oh, this has to work or I’m going to beat in cat
[00:49:40] Russell: food. Yeah. I mean, I’m, so the thing that blew my mind is that people go into launches unprofitable.
I’ve only done it on the one series in 2019 that I tried releasing and it blew like I’ve literally never gone into a launch unprofitable ever in my [00:50:00] entire career because of Kickstarter. And except for the one that I launched in 2019, and it was absolutely the most dreadful, mentally challenging time of my whole life.
Like it was so bad that by the end, like I was legitimately suicidal because I thought it was going so bad. And part of the big part of that was like, oh my God, I’m $8,000 in the hole. Oh my God. Like I am in the hole. And every dollar I spend on advertising. Puts me further in the hole. It doesn’t help me get out of the hole.
So like, how am I ever going to get out of this hole? And Kickstarter allowed me to not, I don’t make a ton of money, but what I, I, you know, I make good money enough to like, keep the business going and like enough to like, pay for all of this stuff. But like, I’m not like at the end of a campaign, I might have $2,000 of like profit or $3,000 of profit.
Something like that the most I’ve ever had is about $8,000 in profit after. It’s like, it’s not like I’m, I’m burning up the the the, the revenue charts or the profitability charts. What I’m doing is saying, oh, here’s $2,000 [00:51:00] here. And a thousand dollars here, and $5,000 here, and $6,000 here. And over the course of a law, a couple of years, you have like a $30,000 war chest that you can use to like, do a whole lot of stuff with.
And, and that is really, to me, the value of Kickstarter is having that ability to go into a launch, as you mentioned, revenue neutral, because it is a complete it’s completely game. It was completely game changing to me. It could be able to say out if I sell 10 copies of this book, whatever, like I still, I already made all of my money on this book.
It’s great if I make more, but I don’t have to worry about. Well think about
[00:51:40] Joe: this one. So we can just do some quick math here, right? So to get a rank on Amazon of a hundred thousand means you’re selling about a book a day. You’d agree with that. Yeah. And let’s say the book you’re selling for 4 99, so that means a hundred thousand above or selling more than a book a day.
There’s 8 million [00:52:00] titles. So only one and a half, one, one, and one, and a quarter percent of the people have a chance of, of selling a book a day, which is, let’s say 2000
[00:52:13] Russell: bucks. Right?
[00:52:14] Joe: So, I mean, that’s the pro that’s straight probabilities from using the data that’s on Amazon is anybody that, that isn’t already established, right?
If you’re, this is your first time you’re doing this at best. You’ve probably got about a, a one and a quarter percent chance. Of getting 2000 bucks back in a year.
[00:52:35] Russell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s also white authors who have things out the back, but I think it’s a good, I mean, that’s like most books are not going to be profitable.
Like what if someone said most books sell a hundred copies? Like the average book that a publisher puts out sells, I think 3000 copies, something like that across their life or, or, or that may be even high. And that’s like, okay, so an average publisher will make back $35,000, which is what it costs [00:53:00] to make a book like roughly.
Like that’s what, that, that’s what they’re looking at average way wise. It costs about $35,000 to make a book. And like, that’s the number they’re trying to hit. Just the plate, another game. And there’s just a play for another day. And that’s really what kickstarted allows you to do. Like it allows you to play another day.
It allows you to live, to fight another day and publishing, I mean, not to get like more down about it, but like it’s a war, it’s a game. It’s a word. Like it is a war that says, okay, I launched this book and like, it didn’t make me go bankrupt. Well, I can live to, to make the next book. And I’ve talked to a lot of publishers in my life.
And like, that is generally they’re like, if I can just break even on a book and like live to fight, to find the book that does really, really, really, really, really well then, like I have I’ve, I’ve made it through that month. And like, that is the success for me. And to me, that is how I think about. It is, it allows you to, to take more hits.
It allows you to make more books. It allows you to try audio books or to try [00:54:00] translations or to try something else that will, that might hit because, you know, one of 10, only one of 10 books that an average publisher puts out are going to hit or like they’ll pay for the other nine. But like, for me, I’d rather like pay for all of the nine and then get a hit on the 10th.
So like now I’m not, now I’m not in the hole for nine books. And just hoping to make it out of there on the 10th book, I’m actually make breaking even on the nine bucks so that the 10th book can like make me a significant profit. And that is how I’ve always sort of played the game with publishing much, much with the mentality of a, of a traditional publisher, which is this book just needs to break even.
And if it does better than that, like I can, I can. I can do enough things to make a book breakeven. And that’s what like a publisher is thinking is I know I have enough levers and mechanics that this book that I can make this book break. Even if it goes, if it, if it has a massive hit, like I can’t predict that, but I can [00:55:00] do everything in my power and I can do what I can to make this book break even.
And if I can just break even, and break even, and break even, and break, even I’m going to get better as a writer, I’m gonna get a better as a publisher. I’m going to get a better as a creator. And eventually just because I put so much stuff out, like there will be a hit, it might take five years. It might take 10 years.
But like, if I can just keep doing that and getting singles and getting singles and getting. Then I can clear the base, then I can, then I can make it up. And I don’t want to, I don’t want to put any like rosy pictures in people’s minds about Kickstarter. Like you’re probably going to make some within 500 and a thousand dollars, your first campaign.
That’s just how it’s going to be. But like, you still have to get a cover. This is what I like. You still are going to have to buy a cover, still going to have to get editing because they’re going to have to get formatting. This they’re going to have to like, to like make a table of contents and all of these things are things you still have to do.
And so Kickstarter allows you. Yes, you do have to do some work to get those things set up [00:56:00] usually before a Kickstarter, but there are things that you already have to do to make the book launch anyway. And that, and, and, and, and, and so you do that and suddenly like Kickstarter is just another app. ’cause you’re going to have to do this stuff anyway.
And yes, you can do like a temp cover a Kickstarter exclusive cover for like the campaign and they get another one later. But the big thing is considering you’re already doing all of the stuff to get your book ready for launch. You’re already gonna have to get a blurb and test copy and get a logline and get a title and all of that stuff.
Like you might as well, like put another platform before you launch and like make, even if it’s only a couple of hundred dollars, it’s still a couple hundred dollars that you’re not probably gonna make on Amazon. I had a woman who told me after I did a Kickstarter talk that she made, she had a book and it raised $500 and the race like 250 the first day.
And I said, is that the best they’ve ever had as a publisher, as a publishing books said that the number one most sales day, most revenue you’ve ever made. She said, yes. And so it was [00:57:00] $250. Like that’s not a huge money, but like for most people that will be the most they ever make on publishing in one day or in one month.
Hey,
[00:57:08] Joe: Russell can you really quickly remind people where they can learn about the Kickstarter and then your stuff, and especially on the Kickstarter, like you know, when does that end
[00:57:19] Russell: time-wise and sure. Well, the Kickstarter is that kickstart your novel.com or you can go to Kickstarter and look up, get your books selling on Kickstarter, and it should be the only thing that comes up it is is, is going until the 13th.
But every week we have things that are opening and closing as far as free workshops that Monica is putting on. So this week if you’re listening to this, when it launches Monica is offering a free work, a free two hour workshop or a free, I don’t know, think it’s two hours, but a free workshop on buyer psychology and how to, and how to include buyer psychology and your Kickstarters and your book.
And these are, these are an every week she’s going to do another one and every, and that means that you get, if you do [00:58:00] today, if you sign up today or this week, you get four additional courses that are all $97. For, for literally the dollar or more that you spend on the campaign. So it’s a great deal. She has, she has one plan for each week.
So I recommend even if though the campaign goes for awhile you, you do today, you, you back immediately because none of your money comes out until the 13th of November. That’s the thing about Kickstarter is even if, even though we funded, no money gets the ducted until November 13th or November 14th.
So you can back now and just plan that in a month. You need to have that money. I highly recommend the hundred dollar or $150 here because that’s going to get you the, the, the sprint with. Which is going to give you access to the Kickstarter group right now, like today you get access to the Kickstarter group that you can ask questions in.
It also, if you spend $150, get my crushing on Kickstarter, course, it should have immediate access to as well. And then and you can find all of the information on@kickstarternovel.com. I [00:59:00] will say just one other thing is if you’re thinking about Kickstarter, you should go to the page or go to Russell, multi.com and look up and look at my other books and look them at other campaigns because it will show you what a Kickstarter, when I will show you how to make a Kickstarter to look like that, to model that page.
But even though you can model that page, it will show you the buyer psychology. The book will show you the buyer’s psychology of why we do it, not just that week. There’s also a really long Kickstarter playlist on youtube@kickstarternovel.com forward slash YouTube, that you can find a whole bunch of our our, our courses, our, our, our, our I did a bunch of and a bunch of videos with Monica.
The beginning of the campaign, I did a an online writers’ conference for four hours, four and a half hours a couple of days ago. That’s on that playlist. So even if you just go to the Kickstarter novel.com forward slash YouTube, you can see a whole bunch of information and sort of see if you jive with like mine and Monica’s teaching styles, which are very different and complimentary, but they are very, they’re very different [01:00:00] from each other.
And you can find my work@russellmulti.com, but yeah, Kickstarter novel.com is where you can find the book.
[01:00:05] Joe: Cool. Cool. And I think the other part that shouldn’t be lost is that there’s, this is also, you’re building this community right there. You’re going to be part of, for that a hundred dollar level.
They’re going to be part of the sprints. It’s not just about learning how to do this and getting Russell and Monica’s time. But what’s interesting to me is that there could be some groups that form out of this around genres and, you know, products that are coming to where you guys can start working together to support each other and being one of the first movers in this, because this is for authors.
This is really kind of Virgin territory.
[01:00:45] Russell: Yeah. I mean, I, that’s a great point is we really want the community is the best thing that you get at that hundred dollar level, because you’re going to get with people who are serious about taking Kickstarters. Seriously. Not that I don’t know. Other Facebook groups, but because they are free, you [01:01:00] don’t know the quality of the advice you’re going to get.
Whereas the quality of advice that you get is going to be very high because all of the people that are in this group have paid to get in the group and they are there to take a Kickstarter and their career seriously. So we have we have a lot of heavy hitters already in the, in the, in that group. And we, we can’t wait to welcome you because what we are hoping is that January we all launch a book and then June people will launch books again.
And then like maybe September or January, or at least every Chinese worry they’ll do it. So like, they will be sort of the thing that was so helpful for me was having a cohort of people who kind of launched together and we could all rely on it. And in comics, it’s, it’s made my career and in novels, I hope that we can, by having a bunch of people who were all sort of collaborating together on cool books and launching together, it will make sort of a.
A community of success that will breed more success and we hope to welcome you in there. Awesome.
[01:01:55] Joe: Well, Russ, I really appreciate you taking the time to come talk about this and help folks [01:02:00] understand how to use this platform because, you know, I’m, I’m a big believer in not just Kickstarter, but authors, really thinking about how their intellectual property can be deployed all kinds of different ways to get them to you know, find audiences and make money.
So I really appreciate your sharing this and for those that are watching this, like the opportunity to, to be part of this and see how. T how this can happen now, like this, it’s not just about, oh, buy this book. I think there’s an opportunity that you guys are providing where not only can they see how you and Monica are doing this, right?
Like, because you think about this again, we go to that metal level. You guys are selling a course, essentially selling courses on Kickstarter. Right. I get that a hundred dollar level. You’re selling a paid community. That’s a one-time off deal, but still there’s like, you guys are making money from your knowledge.
Like let’s not lose that. And people can learn maybe some [01:03:00] ways that they haven’t even thought about yet from you and Monica about how they can really exploit their ideas on this
[01:03:06] Russell: platform. Absolutely. I’m thank you so much for having me. It’s been super fun.
[01:03:11] Joe: Cool. All right. Well, thanks a lot. Russell’s great to have you on and I guess I’ll be seeing you at 20 bucks, right?
[01:03:17] Russell: Yeah. Sounds great. All right. Later, later,