KickStarter Marketing With Paddy Finn

TRANSCRIPT OF JOE SOLARI AND PADDY FINN ABOUT KICKSTARTER MARKETING

[00:00:00] Paddy: What you’re doing there is, you can ask for those bigger numbers later down the line, but I saw this one Kickstarter and it was doing just a PDF. I was like, okay, actually, I’m gonna click just to see what it’s like.

[00:00:11] Joseph: Hey, it’s Joe Solari, and this is the business of writing. Today we’re gonna be talking Kickstarters from the other side of the ocean. We have Paddy Finn, how you doing Paddy?

[00:00:20] Paddy: I’m great, Joe. Thanks. How about yourself?

[00:00:23] Joseph: I’m doing good. I’m doing good. So I know we were talking a little bit before we got fired up here, but and it was some good stuff, but we gotta make sure we get this all recorded.

So people that are interested in, understanding some alternative ways of publishing and getting their content into their hands of their audience. You’ve come to some pretty interesting ways of doing this on some ways that you don’t typically hear about at most, publishing conferences.

So why don’t first get started with who you are and your business and the current project you have going right now on Kickstarter. And then we’ll go from there. Sure.

[00:00:57] Paddy: Yeah. I’ve currently got a Kickstarter running it’s called way star. It’s a game that we are designing. That’s kinda like Dungeons and dragons and we’re actually using their open gaming license.

We’re using some of the rules and repackaging it for our own thing. But. If you wanna, if you’re in the Kickstarters or D&D or TT RBGs, you can check that out on Kickstarter by just typing in way star. Otherwise you could find everything about me on PattyFinn.com, but how did I get into it? Yeah, it’s a bit of a weird scenario.

I started out as an indie novel publisher. I just used novel publisher to differentiate from an in the table without gaming publisher, because there are two very different things. And I went fulltime back in 2018. I went to 20 books London earlier that year, and I decided, okay, I had goal by the end of this year, I’m gonna be full-time.

And November rock rolled around. I went full time. With only a few novels, I had a wife and kids mortgage, all that stuff, no savings. Don’t recommend this by the way. The next few years were a bit hairy, but things actually worked out really well. We released a box set at one point and it, I think it’s brought in about a hundred grand a hundred thousand dollars in about a year, which did you know?

That was good. And then

[00:02:05] Joseph: What genre were you writing? Just so people , can frame that up.

[00:02:08] Paddy: Sci science fiction. So I write science fiction, see there several different pen names. One of them is Killian Carter. That’s my main science fiction. In case anybody wants to look that up or whatever.

Yeah, I kinda, I got to the point where I saw some success in the indie novel publishing space, and I’d climbed to a point on the mountain where I could look around and see other opportunities in the lay of the land. And I saw I recently not recently, a few years before that I started playing Dungeons and dragons.

So that was in the back of my head as well. And I saw this opportunity where it was like that tabletop role playing game market is doing some interesting things or it looks like it’s about to do some interesting things. And it actually can tie in very nicely with the fantasy side of writing novels.

And so I developed this long term strategy and pivoted hard into the tabletop RPG, Dungeons and dragons thing. And, penny dragon games, my second company was born star key and press is what publishes our novels. And a lot of the focus then went onto the new thing and, we are still making some.

Money on the novels. Most of it is via Kickstarter on the games and we are circling back in the next two years to the novel side of things. Yeah.

[00:03:15] Joseph: Great. So when you started playing role playing games, that wasn’t when you were a kid, it was recently or

[00:03:20] Paddy: yeah. Long story short, cause it is a very long story.

I grew up in a cult and people talk about, the sat panic of the eighties and, kids weren’t allowed to play Dungeons and dragons from a certain background, all that stuff. I was like, never mind in the eighties, this thing still is still alive in certain groups. So when I was a kid, I wasn’t allow, I love final fantasy.

Like I had to play it in. I had to wake up at like early hours of the morning and sneak it into my, PlayStation and play it when my parents would never find out like I had comics and stuff and they would, if they found my comics, they would take them away and throw them in the trash.

So I, we, I was, it was a very conservative sort of traditional thing. Not that I have any problems with conservative or traditional, but when it gets to that extreme it’s, that’s not necessarily a good thing. So I didn’t get that opportunity to play Dungeons and Dragons, even though I really wanted to, as a kid, it, it ticked all the right boxes.

It’s all about storytelling and being creative and doing that with a group of people. But later on in life, I kinda got away from the cult thing. I kinda left that behind about five, six years ago and had taken Dungeons dragons on around the same time. And yeah, just fell in love with the game. Collaborative storytelling. What’s not to love?

[00:04:30] Joseph: Yeah. It’s an interesting thing because usually you hear like folks that talk about it. It’s something they’ve always done and it’s pretty interesting.

It’s that’s even, more original.

Remember few in is always weird. So was my old house, so to years you did first Kickstarter in,

[00:04:48] Paddy: are we in now 2022? It was coming. So in 2020 that was when I made the decision. Oh, we’re doing really well with the novels instead of, I should have doubled down on that. If you were going to be. Conventional and reasonable, but then I saw this other thing and I was like if my intuition is right, if my gut feeling is right, I calculate some of the stuff and I could see that this is going happen.

Then jumping on this thing into a new market that is where the indie publishing indie novel publishing market was maybe in 20 12, 20 13. , if anyone who’s in that industry knows if you had been writing novels back then and you still are, and you had a consistent workflow throughout that whole thing, you’d be in a very good place right now.

So that was the reasoning. I saw that I jumped on board and yeah. What was the question again?

[00:05:29] Joseph: Just talk I was just kinda reflecting back on that first one, because I actually backed that. And I remember cause my kids played Dungeons and dragons and I saw, oh, this guy and, you were just getting started.

[00:05:39] Paddy: It’s it was like a supplementary thing, something about a winter world or, yeah, that was our first one. We’ll probably get into this a bit later, but that wasn’t originally the first one was we’re actually releasing it up, launching that on Kickstarter in March of 2023.

That, that was the supposed to be the first Kickstarter. But we ended up taking a big step back and we did that winter wastelands thing, which was a little experiment to see what happened. It was like an investment in my education, cuz I didn’t know what Kickstarter was. I was coming into this thing completely clueless. And I reached out to a few people to help me, but like what do I expect when I do this thing? Most of ’em just say, look, just run a, run, a tiny Kickstarter. I’ll learn that way. And I did and I’m glad I did. But yeah then we went through a really aggressive growth strategy where it was like running a Kickstarter every three months and we kinda let led off that this year.

But then next year we’re gonna be doing one every month. And yeah we can maybe talk about that later too, but essentially we went about Kickstarter crazy. And we’re now on number seven or eight, so yeah.

[00:06:39] Joseph: Yeah. So I think it’s good. We just kinda start talking about some of this stuff go, like you do this first one and what did you learn from there?

And kinda like, how has it helped you refine your process to get to the point where you, somewhere along the line, either hit your head and that suddenly seemed like a good idea to do one a month.

[00:06:56] Paddy: That’s pretty intense, right? Like you must be doing a lot of preplanning. Yes. Yes. I’ll I’m gonna try and frame this as much as possible in a an ind novel publishing way because. That’s where a lot of people are coming from, and it is where we’re heading back to eventually.

And , it might seem like a lot of this stuff doesn’t make sense, but there is a method to my madness, believe it or not. But yeah, we started out with this first little one. We wanted to do like a six figure Kickstarter and I realized that wasn’t going to happen if I didn’t know what I was doing, I couldn’t expect to make a lot of mistakes and make six figures at the same time, or it was very unlikely.

So I decided right, curb the expectations launch a smaller product that we can fulfill in three months. So we can use all those lessons on the next kickstarter as soon as possible. So the small kind of I actually expected to lose some money in it and we did. So I think it, it came to about $5,000, but cost us about $7,000 to fulfill, which I had planned for.

Now I’m not saying you need to do that in your first Kickstarter, but if you wanna grow as fast and as aggressively as we did, you do have to expect to take some risks to grow your audience, to invest in your it’s kinda when you’re learning Amazon ads or Facebook ads for the first time, you have to throw some money into the pot and watch it just burn away because go to heaven, learning.

Yeah. You’re learning what not to do. So that’s what the first kick started was all about what not to do. And we did learn, I said we didn’t learn a lot of lessons on the next one we did, but once we learned the next one or launch the next one, three months later, it did make six over six figures.

So yeah, it was it did what it was supposed to do.

[00:08:33] Joseph: And so in that what are some of the things that was it about audience building? Was it about fulfillment? I’m sure there’s probably some lessons learned in all those areas, but what are. Yeah, show us the scars. Patty, show us the scars.

[00:08:44] Paddy: I, I’m known for wearing my heart on my sleeve, so I have no problem showing scars. You guys might wanna look away yeah, it was all those things. And more so there was an element of fear in it too. You’re walking into unknown territory from, for me or for you, if you’re going to go and run a Kickstarter for the first time, it is new, it’s a new platform.

There are new tools. There is fulfillment, oh, what’s, what do you need to think about in terms of logistics? Extended distribution, fulfillment partners manufacturers, like what’s all that, it’s, this is all new stuff. I can’t do that. Even I was afraid to hit the approval button, so when you launch a kick start. You kinda go through a little checklist in the back end, it’s enter your bank details. We’ll confirm your ID. How much money are you hoping to make of this thing? Whether you wanna launch those sort of things, and then you want, you, you submit it for approval.

And I was afraid to submit it for approval. Cause I was like, what happens after that? I don’t know. I Am I committing to this crazy thing? Or, but it turns out it was like, you just hit approval. It gives you a link, you can start promoting your stuff and you can still change things around. So there was just like that.

Not knowing and learn, learning those little details along the way. And then yeah. What is, what does it take to fulfill am I in a position where I have a huge enough audience where I can go and get someone else to print my stuff and look, do the shipping or is my audience still quite small?

So I order only 300 books instead of 2000 and fulfill it myself and we ended up doing. That we just did it ourselves the first time. And then we realized this is really hard work. We need to get someone else to do this, but we wouldn’t have realized that if we hadn’t learned that lesson and audience building your first Kickstarter.

And I would say all of your Kickstarters, it’s all about building an audience. But especially that first one, right? A lot of people start a Kickstarter thinking, we’re, it’s gonna do this. Gonna make money. Yada. Yeah. It’s no don’t expect to make a profit off of it, but you will build an audience.

Even if it’s tiny to begin with. We got about 120, 130 people or something like that. And then the next one was like over a thousand, right? So you need to start somewhere, take baby steps. The first one is gonna be huge. Yeah. On the next one, maybe it will leave.

[00:10:45] Joseph: A lot of people forget, like stuff that I’ve been doing a lot of writing about and talking about is this whole idea of this audience is an asset, right?

Like owning somebody’s. I know this sounds horrible. The way I put it, but owning people’s attention is a really powerful asset in today’s world. And then we forget about the old crossing, the chasm ideas of Hey, you need to early adopter audience before you can get your majority audience, you can’t jump right to the majority audience.

You need those first hundred, right? Because the other 900 they’re like, eh, this is this guy’s first Kickstarter. Forget about it. I’m just not gonna do it. But they see, oh, he fulfilled one, the hundred people, nobody like is upset. I’ll give him a shot now. But if yeah, those are just natural steps in a business that you have to go through.

You can’t circumvent ’em and expect it to be successful.

[00:11:34] Paddy: No, you can’t. It’s. I wrote an article recently in a kind of exclusive little group I’m in, on circle the platform. That I recently discovered is a new thing apparently. Or maybe it’s not new, but it’s the first time I discovered it. And it was actually entitled, like the biggest shortcut no one is telling you about.

And if the shortcut you’ll make millions and the shortcut is there are no shortcuts because if you start looking for a shortcut, you’re taking the long way round, right? Yeah. So it’s the same thing. I, and I did, I used this as I used myself as an example here. I was like in the Kickstarter that made six figures.

Our second one, I did try to take a shortcut because I wanted to grow faster than we could grow. And I invested $30,000 into a promotion that I would got, I guess the decision was more emotion based than it was rationale. And it did not pan out the way it was promised or sold. And. That sort of was a big setback, right?

We still made a six figure project. That was great. It was a success, but there were setbacks off the back of it that took us a long time to we dug ourselves the whole, and it took me the guts of six months to a year to dig myself out of it again. So look for shortcuts, get yourself in.

It’s just general impatience, right?

Success’ seven year, but they, and they did say it, but you didn’t really hear it, that it took them 12 years to get there. Yeah. Cause you don’t wanna hear that part, right? No. And how much hard work it was the first 10 years, that there was all those setbacks and just.

Hope that it was work out and grinding out books and finding your voice or whatever you know of is is getting right. So

that’s one of the things that one of the strongest components of Kickstarter is the ability to build an audience. It’s amazing. Like I don’t wanna be selling like a Kickstarter jockey or something. I’m not like affiliated with Kickstarter in any way or trying to sell them. It’s just a platform that I’ve come to love because like, when I look at Amazon, for example, You can build an audience on there, but how connected are you to that audience?

Do you have a direct line of contact with them? No. How much data do you have in that audience? That’s really limited because, and it makes sense. Amazon doesn’t wanna give you that data, that’s their customers. They’re just giving you access to them to a degree. Whereas with Kickstarter you have everything you have, you have how many audience you don’t even know how many people you have on Amazon.

Right? know, whereas kick Kickstarter, like I can look at my backend and I know at this point we now have 10,000 people who have backed us, right? So those are people I can now access. Anytime we launch a new product. And the great thing about Kickstarter is it automatically informs all those people. Every time you do launch a new campaign.

And so your audience just keeps building and building, and it becomes this compound effect where, eventually you’re going hit. Critical mass. And it’s just insane, but the fact that you have direct contact, you can send them messages, their names for fulfillment purposes, you have their address as well.

Obviously, there you, there are agreements in place and things where, you’re not gonna misuse information, et cetera, but it’s just the amount of power that gives you over understanding where to put your spend, where to put your marketing dollars. How, you can strategize a lot more effectively instead of just going, oh, I’ll throw a bunch of ads at Amazon and we’ll see what happens.

[00:14:50] Joseph: And then what you’re doing is you’re building their audience instead of building your own audience. To this idea of your, an audience as an asset, you have that information. Now, if Kickstarter goes and does something stupid and blows up their own business, you still have the list. You can go say, Hey guys, we’re gonna go over here now.

And we’re gonna play on this platform, or we’re gonna go to Patty fins. Patty finn.com. And we’re gonna do this over here now. Exactly. You can’t do that with these other guys. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you in a world where there’s of content being created good, bad, whatever you, there’s, a lot of content that’s getting thrown at people.

The audience is the key component that you be able to have their attention and manage in way that like, Hey, I know this is stuff you like, you probably wanna be, take a look at this and oh yeah, you’re right. I love, waiting. The other thing that I found when we first were looking at this, that I think authors just completely don’t grasp is even within their own audience, people that they’ve been selling books to.

Their willingness to pay a higher ticket for stuff. Can you kinda talk to that? Like where you’ve seen people cause authors be like, ah, 3 99 for a book and it’s yeah, but that guy’s dropping 12 grand a year on games.

[00:16:01] Paddy: Yeah. It’s so the game, a gamer’s mentality is very different when it comes to the audience.

Amazon, I I don’t wanna sound like I’m dumping on Amazon and I’m not doing that at all. I love Amazon and they’ve helped me get to where I wanted to be and I still use them, but it’s, it is a different audience. And it’s not just a gamer audience. It’s, it is people who will re know.

I’ll give you an example as a gamer, as someone I’m a super backer on Kickstarter, which just means I back, 50 plus Projects in a year or something like that. And I do that for marketing research. Of course it’s not that I’m interested in the products, which

to two on a Kickstarter, that would be like an average pledge for a lot of people because they, they’re so invested in what you have to offer. But all you have to do is look at Brandon Sanderson and what he did, the I don’t know, you have to go check this out yourself, but the leather bind copies of one of his Kickstarters was like, they were 30 to $50, something like that.

But people are willing. If they are invested in you as an author, not just, your story, which they will become. If you keep giving them what they want they’ll start to invest more in you rather than just what you’re creating. They’re gonna invest in whatever you do, right?

So I know there’s this whole thing where genre readers, won’t cross genres. If you change from romance to fantasy or whatever, which is true because it’s a very different product, but there are a core group of people. You’re true fans. If you wanna call them that, it’s like the 1000 true fans concept.

If you have those core group of people, they’ll follow you no matter where you go. Whether that be on the Kickstarter or different genre or anything. So it’s a matter of trying to build that core audience and foster your relationship with those people and make sure you take care of them rather than trying to appease the masses, which tends to water down.

And then you end up with a very little if even at all, a core audience.

[00:17:51] Joseph: And you know what my observation is that the more you focus in on that core audience and really making sure that signal is clean. Every time you send that back into the market with whether it’s a book launch or a Kickstarter, all these algorithms, look at that and say, oh, you’re giving me an above average conversion rate.

I like above average conversion. And I can tell a lot about these people you sent me. So I’m gonna go find a group just like that and send them that same information versus what a lot of authors think is the idea of traffic. If I just send you everybody, that’s gonna be put good. And it’s no, certainly Amazon doesn’t need traffic.

It’s the last thing they want. Yeah. Yeah. That’s so true. And when you can’t differentiate the audience, because what you send them is a mix of true fans. And discount shoppers and people that have never bought from you. And just because you got their name on a list, you send it there, fingers crossed, they buy something, you just look like a garbagey signal and they don’t know what to do with it.

Whereas I’m a strong believer in like you would get better results, taking a hundred person Kickstarter list and marketing to that books and get better results on Amazon than you would with a thousand person list that you got, from doing free promotions

[00:19:02] Paddy: hundred percent agree with you.

Like I’ve done those free promotions in the past and I’ve an organic list and I could see, the difference between the two it’s the same as the difference between night and day. And I was like an early adopter when it came to book bub ads. I dipped my toes in when everyone’s afraid of them, because bub takes all your money when you run ads.

And I was so I, I have this mentality where I like to look at what everyone else is doing. And then I look the other way to see what they aren’t doing. So yeah, everyone was doing Facebook. Everyone’s doing Amazon, Amazon, of course. All right. But Facebook is, it’s very general, first of all, you don’t have people who are already in the, in buying mode.

They’re browsing social media. Second of all, the targeting for your is pretty good, but you don’t really know. It could be, are they the kind of people who are gonna go buy the book or they just someone who maybe clicked on a book, one you don’t really know versus book bub, which is people are there because they love books.

They, the readers, that they buy books, maybe they are looking for a deal. So there is that to consider. But again, it was like, because I was one of the early adopters of that. And there weren’t a lot of people doing it. It was a really good way of sending more laser focused data to Amazon, and then it became more popular and stuff.

And I dunno what it’s like now, cause I haven’t used it in a while, but yeah it’s getting the right people and the right eyes on your page. Its more important than getting a huge number of people. Yeah, I agree.

[00:20:24] Joseph: Yeah. How would you like, I’m sure there’s a lot more lessons you’ve learned and you can probably drop some of, as you go along, but how would you think about who is Kickstarter good for and then who is it not good for?

[00:20:35] Paddy: Give you a very high level answer for that one is it’s good for anyone with a great idea. It, it doesn’t have to be physical products. You could just. Audiobooks eBooks, whatever. It could, it doesn’t have to be a new idea. It could be, you want to reprint some of your books. You want to rewrite one of your novels.

You wanna get a, an editor because you didn’t get an editor to do it the first time, whatever you can recycle material, but as long as you’re doing something different and the people, it isn’t for are people who wanna make a quick buck, right? It’s not, it’s definitely not a get rich quick thing.

It’s not a shortcut thing because, so what I find is some people reach out almost of in desperation. I’ve seen this once or twice where they’re not like making the headway, they want as fast as they want in other areas or other platforms or markets. And they look the Kickstarter and they try that and they don’t get the results they want.

And those results are, I wanna make a million and my first Kickstarter of course.

[00:21:30] Joseph: But I think that’s some of the things that Russell has been really good about. And Monica been good about helping people understand with Kickstarters is like, Hey, he works. He uses it really for publishing. He’s like different you and not selling these other kind content experiences, but because he wasn’t able to do the traditional rapid release, it’s this is how I, I build an audience, I get my money.

I never go in the hole. I get a bunch of these done. I get five books. Then I go launch on Amazon, like really deliberate and talking with him the other day he was sharing how one of the things that they’re experiencing with people in their accelerator is that they’re like what now? It’s you do it again.

[00:22:10] Paddy: Yeah, like exactly it worked. So just keep, keep cranking the wheel. Yeah. It’s like that’s one of the things people come into the, to it, with the idea of I’ll do a Kickstarter. It’s that? It’s not a Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a long game for me. And I think anyone who want to use it seriously as a tool to build their business and their audience and put, get a great product and content out there for people, which should be your desire.

You wanna help people by getting awesome stuff into their hands and as many people as possible. If you wanna do that, it’s gonna take time and it’s gonna take multiple Kickstarters. And it’s like it’s being consistent, so consistently doing great Kickstarters again and again, the same as, if you want to make it as an author, you need to consistently put out books.

And the same series perfectly, again and again obviously there are outliers and whatnot, but generally speaking, those are the, there are strategies for success and you need to of stick to that strategy because if you just your toes in, you’re not going, your results are gonna be very limited.

[00:23:07] Joseph: And what’s been your biggest Kickstarter to date?

[00:23:10] Paddy: So the one we’ve just launched actually two weeks ago way star. And that’s an interesting one, cause Kickstarter also has categories similar to, your genres on Amazon. So you have a category for literature, which is if you’re gonna launch a novel or something related to books, it’s gonna go on there.

You have games, which is what through the market I’m working. Within that you have like sub genres that you have to be aware of. They’re not necessarily selectable on the platform, but you just know what they are. So in the tabletop industry where I’m working, you have things like card games, you have board games, you have tabletop role playing games.

So they’re all very different. And sometimes they’re very different audiences that invest in those or are interested in those. And even inside of those, if I drill down into tabletop role playing games you have the elephant in the room, which is Dungeons and dragons. Everyone knows what that is.

And then you have a lot of smaller tabletop role playing games. So this Kickstarter we launched recently was our first diversion away from Dungeons and dragons in terms of us building our own system. So normally we would market to people who usually just want Dungeons and dragon stuff. Because it’s kinda that’s like the Kindle on the minute, right?

It’s a low bar to entry. There’s a huge audience. There. It’s a big voracious audience and they just want loads of more content. And it’s a good place to start, but we do want to start going into the other side of the market where we’re not just relying on D and D stuff. We wanna build our own brand and our own base of audience.

That is interested in us as a company and what we’re doing rather than just a D and D thing, but we’re we’ll continue to do the D thing. Don’t get me wrong. It be silly not to, but we’re moving into this thing. So what we’re doing is building going wide, almost going wide

yeah. And it’s a new audience. And despite that being a new audience it’s double it’s well projected to be double our previous Kickstarter. So we should have ended around $300,000 or just north of that.

[00:25:05] Joseph: Yeah. Great. Great. But in the context of gaming Kickstarters, like there’s some. Really heavy hitters that do millions of dollars on Kickstarter.

Now it’s taking ’em 20, 30 Kickstarters. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:16] Paddy: There are. There are, I won’t say there’re outliers, there’s quite a few instances where people launch their first Kickstarter and they hit over a million dollars. Like I’m not saying you can’t do that, but generally the people who do that, they have a huge following on YouTube or they have a huge list or they’re, someone who was working in the industry for a long time, even if this is their first Kickstarter.

So I don’t want people like looking, Brandon, Sanderson’s a great example. His first Kickstarter was well over a million. His second one was it over 40 million? Yeah. He does have a huge existing, existing audience base and a lot of contacts in the side of things. Yeah.

You kinda have to read between the lines sometimes.

[00:25:50] Joseph: For arguments sake, assume that all those backers, which it isn’t true because I back that campaign and I’ve never bought one of books. But let’s assume everybody, except for me was already one of his customers through Trad pub. He’s still in a better spot because now he has other names, phone numbers, and mailing addresses.

He didn’t have that. His publisher probably didn’t even have that. Like he circumvented that whole system and changed the paradigm. Now it’s a direct relationship where there’s very little friction from this point forward and he can decide maybe he just wanna go back to trad pub. Yeah. Or maybe he somewhere along the line, it’s figured out, oh, now I’ve got a publishing house that I’ve built all this profit.

And I will just keep doing, he doesn’t have to go back to kickstart. He can just bark it to that list.

[00:26:33] Paddy: Exactly. Exactly. This is. My, my theory long term from a business perspective is, regardless of what Amazon’s doing or whatever platform you’re selling on or whatever you’re selling, the principle I keep in mind is the more direct the relationship you can help with your audience the better, because, and I think that the people who ha are able to maneuver things so that they have as many people, one step away from them rather than 20 steps away or whatever a mailing list, a platform like Kickstarter, whatever, if you, the people who have that access to their audience are gonna be the people who are still around in 20, 30, 40 years time.

People who don’t, I, we don’t know. We don’t know that’s the problem you don’t know, but at least if you have access to your audience and you’re always gonna have them. There’s a hu there’s huge security in that as well. There’s some certainty in the future because.

[00:27:22] Joseph: You’re always gonna have them. That’s where all the income comes from. It’s all derived from some, a group of human beings buying from you, at different buying occasions that you call an audience. We just sometimes forget that because it’s like it all came through Amazon.

Their friction, they can that, Kickstarter it’s friction, it’s less friction, a lot less, but any of that friction agents, all that stuff, that’s the stuff that’s in danger of getting taken out as the system gets more efficient for, one of the things that I’ve noticed on the gaming side and how I learned about this was every summer we go out to Portland, Oregon that’s where my wife’s family’s from.

And there’s a really big game store there called guardian games. It’s amazing. It’s nothing I’ve ever seen. And The guy there was explaining to us like, oh, this, this particular game started on Kickstarter and what’s end up happening is it’s like this loop is closed. And some of these big game designers now actually sell packages for gaming stores.

Like that they there’s a it’s a expensive package, but it’s so they can get that early bundle because they know, oh, we like, we know our fan, our customers like this guy’s games, we get it. And then now you cut out all this distribution. It’s crazy how, like how efficient it can be if you can find the right people

[00:28:37] Paddy: a hundred percent like the distribution side of things. Like when I first came into it, like I said, there was that element of fear. Cause I didn’t wanna about distribution.

Fear is always rooted in ignorance, right? It’s you’re afraid of something because you don’t understand how it works. And the best way to to fix that fear is to educate yourself. And the best way to educate yourself is off to expose yourself to things. You’re the source of that fear, right? Is to just try it, see what happens, learn from the experience.

Sometimes learn the hard way. And, but once I’d reached out to fulfillment partners and the started doing my own hard copies and print runs and working with shipping people. Once I get over that sort of, that. I looked back and I’m like, why was it? What was I afraid of? It’s actually, it’s so easy and it’s not as complicated as I was led to believe, or maybe I blew it up on my own mind, but I think it’s one of those things where, you know, like marketing, a lot of people are afraid of marketing because it’s like this, what is marketing?

It’s and I think that some people in that community blew it up to be a bigger thing than it actually is. And then it gets blown up even bigger in people’s minds and they don’t wanna do it. So especially creative people because they just wanna keep writing books or whatever. And, but when you do marketing, you realize it’s just all marketing is it’s communicating with your people.

[00:29:48] Joseph: Yeah. That’s all it’s yeah. It’s still true. And I I think it was Katie cross. We were talking and she was like when you’re getting overwhelmed by all those things oh my God, like with direct sales, what about the tax issue? It’s Okay, let’s stop for a second.

Is it really about the tax issue or are you trying to create obstacles? Because you’re afraid to go where this might take you. Because if it’s that like the reality is that money will solve any, like you, you should hope that someday you have a sales tax issue. Like I make, I have to collect sales tax in so many places.

I have to hire somebody full time to deal with that. That’s a high class problem. it. When you frame it that way, it’s okay, then let’s figure this out. But a lot of times it’s to your point of that whole fear, it’s these are just things that you’re like, just it’s oh, I can’t, that door is locked.

I can’t go through it. We didn’t even try the doorknob.

[00:30:35] Paddy: Yeah. I think that’s the idea behind that book. The obstacle is the way it’s like you create these obstacles out of fear, but that’s a sign. That’s what you need to. That’s the way you need to go rather than turn away from it. It’s a sign.

If you’re experiencing discomfort and fear, when you’re doing venturing into something new, it’s a good thing, right? It means you’re doing the right thing or you’re heading in the right direction. But of course, because of whatever we tend to freak out and run away and, unfortunately, and instead of doing the different thing and learning a new skill set or using a different platform, you’ve getting considered before, or, like kickstart I was afraid of Kickstarter in the beginning, but I didn’t let that fear make the decision for me or turn me away.

I faced it head on, I learned what I needed to do to overcome that fear. And I’m so happy I did it because like the, where we’ve gone since starting Kickstarter, like we couldn’t have experienced that same growth in the we could have, but it would, I don’t know. It would’ve been a lot more, let left a chance.

Rather than something we had control over. If we try to do that on Amazon, because we have access to all this stuff we can decide when, we send these people the things and spend money on the marketing and know where it goes and measure everything and analyze everything and have meaningful data.

Yeah. So if you’re approaching something new, whether that be Kickstarter or anything else obviously you want it to be a calculated risk. You don’t wanna like just mindlessly throw money away. You need to make sure there’s gonna be POS most more likely some sort of benefit there, but like face that fear, overcome it and do the new thing.

And you’ll look back in a few years and go, wow, I’m really glad I did that because now I’m, I went off the beaten path. Now I am at the top of the MI and it’s amazing. Look at the view.

[00:32:14] Joseph: So in that same vein, like how are you now that you’ve been doing this for and. Figured out, how are you nurturing that audience? And what are some of the things that you do that you feel are helping you continue to grow and keep people wanting to come back and buy more stuff from you? Yeah. I

[00:32:28] Paddy: I was trying to think about what I said this. So I look at my audience to see way I look at my kids, which might sound weird. So I have three children and one of the things that keep saying is mommy or daddy, I’m hungry, mommy, or daddy, I’m hungry. You feed them five minutes later, mommy, or daddy, I’m hungry.

They keep going back because you keep feeding them. So that’s the main way I. I believe from my experience that you can nurture an audiences, you keep giving them what they want. You keep giving them love that. Yeah. The stuff they want. And that’s feeding them, your content, your books, your novels, your Kickstarter projects, whatever.

So that’s what we do. But we also try to keep them inform. So Kickstarter has something where you a function where you can write updates. Cuz what happens with Kickstarter is someone is investing in an idea most of the time, they’re not even investing in something they’re going to receive immediately.

So it’s like you’re promising them that you’re going to create a book, a novel, an audio book, a gaming book in six months to two years to whatever. And they’re trusting you with their dollars and going okay. I’ll I believe I have faith in your promise. Go make the thing and so they then have to wait for however long.

And one of the ways to kinda keep them in the loop and nurture that relationship is to keep them informed, post updates, at least once a month, let them know what’s new. How closer have you progressed to the end goal? Is there a new piece of writing like that you’ve written that you really like, is there a new character you’ve developed that you wanna share with them given little glimpses into it?

What is, what about the cover art? Give them a, just let them see behind the curtain. And again, you’re mailing list as well. Like we have a mailing list and we’re growing it aggressively and we send a, I signed a newsletter every Monday. And it’s called magic item Monday, and it has a new magic item in it every Monday, because that’s what they want.

They love magic items. And then we have monster of the month. So at the end of the month, they get a monster as well. So it’s, this all has original art stock blocks, lore writing. Obviously’s gonna be different if it’s, gonna be a novel, you could serial see, realize novel you’re writing, send them a chapter a week or chapter a month, depending on how quickly you write, just keep feeding them something. Let them know you’re there.

[00:34:41] Joseph: Have you ever looked at the data and difference between the open rates and the engagement on the, like the magic item Monday versus it’s just Patty telling you. Some bullshit in his life.

[00:34:51] Paddy: Yeah. The difference is insane. , I actually did this. This was like a recent thing because I’ve always been a huge proponent of newsletters and mailing lists and email marketing.

And because it’s always seen me in good stead in the past, it’s always worked really well for me. And it is a direct relationship or connection to your audience, but I’ve always been a bit wishy-washy with it. I’ll send you, I’ve never been consistent. I would send in the email.

Like sometimes it would be once a week. Sometimes it would be once a month, there would never be a set day or date know where I’m a reason. It’s just yeah, here’s what I’m doing. It just, whenever the notion came along, it’s yeah, I’ll sound a newsletter, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And about three months ago, I decided right.

Patty time to get your act together stopping. And idiot and try and do this because people are telling you it works. Why you’ve known us for years. Why are you not doing it? So we that’s where magic Item Monday came from. I committed to doing something every Monday and then the monster of the month at the end of the month and the click through rate and the open rate just went through the roof.

Like it went from, some of my, before that some of my worst conversions would be maybe, 10 to 15% open, which you know, is probably in the lower end. And then sometimes it did hit above 20, but it was rare. And then whenever I started the imagine out on Monday, it’s above 30, 30 to 40, sometimes higher ever since

[00:36:06] Joseph: that’s double. Yeah. Yeah. And then that’s open rate and then clicks. Do you have any feel for that? Yeah. Yeah, I, it depends. So I’ve got, or even better do you do you get more people just giving you feedback on your emails? That’s real test of engagement.

[00:36:20] Paddy: You’ll guide. Sometimes it’s a bit controversial, when I say controversial, it’s probably a bit overpowered for the game or whatever, and I do that on purpose because then people wanna let you know, they’re like, oh, that’s really okay, but I love it. Or, that’s really okay. And here’s probably a better way to balance the mechanics of this smudgy item.

And I, I know that, but I’m standing it because I want you to tell me so there are things like that. And there’s just some, sometimes we, I get people reaching out and saying, yeah, I really like this item and I love your stuff. Keep creating it and whatnot. Yeah. Good feedback.

[00:36:49] Joseph: Yeah. I’m just thinking how while you’re doing that, because you’re actually in the game space.

If you’re a lit RPG author and you started thinking about how you could provide in your emails, more, stuff about the world mechanics and just to get that engagement and people talking about it. And J just more psychologically invested in this world that you’re trying to get them to read the books and is the reason why you couldn’t do that for any of that stuff.

[00:37:14] Paddy: You, you so easy, you can’t, I’m not even it doesn’t have to be content. It could even be you’re showing them a little look, a glimpse behind a curtain at your reviews. Let’s say you get a one star review, someone who just got the wrong end of the stick. They didn’t, it’s I dunno, Everyone knows that there’s some swearing in your novels, this person didn’t like swearing and they put a one star review.

That’s that? That’s a good thing, really? Cause it lets people who are looking at the reviews, know what in your books, but you could use that to your advantage and, say guys, this shows how important reviews are to authors. This one star review, I think is unfair because it doesn’t reflect the quality of the book.

It’s just pointing out one thing, this person doesn’t like, and you talk a little bit about the review and how you feel about it. And what you’ll find is without even give using a call to action, people will go look at the review and then they’ll like, I love this software in your books. I’m gonna leave review because I enjoyed the book and this is unfair.

Yeah. Don’t beg, don’t even ask. Yeah. And people, you need people to think that the decision to do things, it comes from them. That’s something I learned the hard way as well, but yeah.

[00:38:15] Joseph: Yeah. And some of the authors that I’m working with, like they’re of a different level. So it’s like the reviews, the number of reviews becomes a way of us understanding if a series is in as sentence or descend, right?

[00:38:27] Paddy: Like you’re not asking for reviews. It’s just there’s you just build an audience and care so much that they go, yeah. Couples, one of my box SETSS has thousands of reviews on it. And on that one product, I did not ask for a review once.

[00:38:42] Joseph: And then when you look in the context of reviews, I know it’s tough when you’re getting started and you wanna get some reviews and people tell you how important its, but in the reality of a place like Amazon.

When a Colleen Hoover book gets a hundred thousand reviews and you’re trying to get right. Like you just have to understand like where youre in your

career and what expect exactly got 10 reviews. Write another book. Yeah. But there was a point in time when she only got 10 reviews. Couldn’t right.

I turning the rockets now in the next year, I’d love if you could kind share not just like what you’re planning on doing, but kinda why this growth strategy and you said that it is, there’s a method to this madness that ends up going back. So if you could kind share as much as you’re comfortable with on that’d love to hear about.

[00:39:25] Paddy: Yeah. I don’t know how much you can share in the way of details, but yeah, I can give you a sort rough overview of where my head’s at and where I think things are going. Where do I start? So yeah, like I said, I need to calm myself down now getting carried away. Yeah, no, that’s I meant it peer calm, but inside my head, it’s just pointing everywhere.

So circling back on novels, right? So I’m a writer a novelist fiction writer at heart. It’s my first love, even though it’s my passion creating stuff is my passion, even though marketing is the hat that I have to wear most of the time. It’s not necessary. I am passionate about marketing here at this stage, but it’s not, it’s nowhere near as much as writing.

So coming back to novels has always been part of the, always been part of the plan because. I’ve always wanted to write fantasy. More so than I have in the past, I started out in science fiction thinking I’m not worthy of writing fantasy, so I’m gonna start writing science fiction instead. And then I started writing science fiction.

I was like, yeah, but this is just as hard as fantasy. What was I thinking? I learned a lot about that, but looking ahead, so we want to have our first million dollar Kickstarter in 2023, and we’ve already got a lot of the fires burning for that to happen. We have a huge marketing campaign.

That’s broken into several different sub campaigns and that’s looking like it’s gonna happen. And the reason we know it’s gonna happen. And it’s like I said, we have access to the data. We know how much it takes to get a 300,000 campaign. So you could extrapolate that and go, okay if those are the numbers for that, here’s what I need for a million dollar campaign.

So we’re, but we also have. Separate campaign where it’s gonna circle back to the novels and essentially it’s going to be similar to what Brandon Sanderson did and unique as well. And it is going to focus more not solely, but focused more on the hard cover print copies, that kind of thing.

Physical rewards, which is what does scare a lot of in these, because it’s always about the eBooks and the audiobooks and, the it’s like we don’t really make, there’s not that much of a margin on a print on the demand book, so why do I even bother about it? So what you don’t realize is there’s a huge opportunity when it comes to the print market, there are still a huge, there are a huge amount of people who will only read books that are printed and.

You are not accessing those people. And those people still have the same problem. Everyone else had 10, 15 years ago where people weren’t writing enough books for them. Now with the ebook that, because we create tons of content. Now there’s more content than you could consume. And a hundred lifetime lifetimes.

The problem is those people who only like physical books, they’re still stuck. They still have to wait three years for a new book or 10 years, depending on . If you’re a fantasy writer who I won’t do or not. So yeah, that hunger and desire is still there. And I see the indy publishing market or industry starting to make end roads into the physical side of things, which again is something a lot of people are afraid of, but that’s another reason you should do it.

If people are afraid of something, you should be among the first people to overcome that fear. Make those end roads and benefit from it because a lot of people are like, oh, I wanna see how Paddy does it first and see what happens, or I wanna see how X, Y, Z does it, before, and then if it works, then I’ll do it.

And it’s it’s too late. yeah. Yeah. They’ve already gotten to that point and you’re never gonna catch up with them. So there’s that also I realize something fairly early on, which is why I did branch into TT rpgs because I’m all about recycling or creating stuff for multiple audiences.

And the thing is most sense, fiction and fantasy readers don’t play Dungeons and dragons, but you’ll find that most Dungeons and dragons people do read science fiction. So I’ve built this fairly siz. Voracious audience who don’t mind spending. I think our current Kickstarter, the average pledge is 120

[00:43:04] Joseph: like the lifetime that’s to the lifetime value of whole back for some authors.

[00:43:10] Paddy: Exactly. It’s a different game, right? but also, there, there are more expenses incurred in that as well. So it’s not like I get all that 120, all that stuff, but the more people you get, the bigger the audience the physical game is a it’s an economy of scales game. The bigger, the orders you can print orders, you can run with the cheaper it is per.

So the more, the bigger your margin is when it comes to profit. So the idea is it’s scaling your audience as big as you possibly can. That’s why we’ve been so aggressive in this regard is scale. The audience build the audience. Like I’m still not a money making road. I might look like it. He’s making whatever $300,000 a Kickstarter.

That’s amazing. It’s actually I’m reinvesting nearly all of that after the costs are considered , to, into building my audience and having an even bigger Kickstarter next year. So it’s all about building the audience for me. And I don’t know when that’s gonna stop. Maybe it never will.

I don’t know. But yeah, those are no, those are a few things that I’m seeing. And I think that I don’t know if it’s gonna be something we do. I would like to hope that penny dragon games and star camp press will be involved in some way, but I can see two ways in which the industries are disrupted.

I’m not gonna say anything about the tabletop RPG thing, because I can’t without giving too much away. But when it comes to the Indy novel industry, , I think that physical products is going to be one of the things that disrupts that market and disrupts things for trad publishing even more in the next 10 years.

[00:44:41] Joseph: Yeah. I would say that, my observation on where I might disagree a bit is that might not be on the print side per se, because I think people are, that becomes one of those obstacle things you’re not looking at where I think the door is gonna open up faster is on the audiobook side. Just because when you see what’s happening with direct sales, What, how easy it is to deliver through book funnel.

And the experience from that customer is okay, I buy from Paddy’s store. I buy from Joe’s store, but all my audio books end up in my book app, it becomes a really pleasant experience. And that’s one of the we’re seeing.

So I, a hundred percent agree with you that the print thing is right for dis disruption and stuff’s happening.

That’s gonna do that. But I also think it’s, I agree with what you said earlier. A lot of people are like I don’t sell that many print books. Anyhow, why should I do it? It’s

[00:45:30] Paddy: yeah. Audio, people say, people often say to me, are you digital? No, because we’ve been traveling a lot this year and living on the road, which is why I’m in an RV type scenario right now.

People say, oh, you’re a digital nomad, yada, I’m like, I’m not really digital nomad. I’m I call myself a hybrid nomad because. Some of my income streams are digital, novels, audio books, . And I think those have, those are the, what’s the word, those have the greatest scope for growing, right?

You can expand on those so many ways. And the barriers to entry are so low. It is just a matter of clicking by boom. You’ve got what you need. That’s a hundred percent true. Fear. Barriers is always a good thing. But I think that some people don’t realize that just because there are more barriers, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.

And because a lot of people see the barriers, they do think it’s a bad thing and they turn away from it. So that leaves it up then to a handful of people who see that as an opportunity to go, okay there’s a barrier there, but I can still make that work and cause there’s so few people willing to try to make that work right now that could result in something pretty phenomenal.

I’m not saying it will, but I think it will. I think it will.

[00:46:38] Joseph: Oh, for sure. So this a little different take on that. A barrier to entry can become a barrier to exit as well. So certainly for authors there, the biggest thing for an author to overcome is a reader taking the risk of their time to read your book.

We all know we’ve maybe even done ourselves. We rather read a book we’ve already read or a we’ve already seen than try. something new.

Somebody does read that book, then they’re in your world right now. It’s oh, I know I can trust this. I’m gonna be more likely to do this than go to somebody else’s stuff. So I think there’s that it’s a slightly, it’s slightly derivative from what you’re talking about. You’re talking more about that first mover advantage, but I think that, understanding that obstacles.

If you’re prepared to go over ’em, there’s other people that just won’t right.

[00:47:24] Paddy: And yeah, and they will eventually, when the tools are developed, to make the process easier where you just click a button and all the distribution and printing and everything happens for you and you don’t have to worry about it.

But at that stage, you’re heading, you’re almost going into the late majority phase the, yeah, exactly. The curve where it’s gonna start dropping off soon, and it’s too late to reap the it’s not too late. You just need to find other ways to be competitive and to float to the top.

But it does become more difficult.

[00:47:49] Joseph: This gets the stuff that I wrote about in Advantage’s like your audience is build and you get this cumulative advantage over time. That is impossible to beat because it’s a, for so long. And now, know, in your case, your audience may only be growing at five.

But it’s 5% on a list of 50,000 people versus, yeah. Somebody that’s doubling a list that’s hundred people like, so you just have and again, going back to this whole idea what is the most valuable asset? The one thing that’s common in this whole thing, isn’t the content, it’s the attention, right?

It’s the you’re built that, that, that audience, now you can sell em games, you can sell books. God knows what’s gonna come out in our lifetime. You’ll be able to sell em based on your content. Some dudes coming up with something, his garage that’s gonna change, create a whole new media stream.

It’s inevitable.

[00:48:35] Paddy: And I that’s what, with all the big tech companies, they all came in the garage. They just scripted everything .

Yeah. And the trick is getting striking that balance, where you are getting the first move advantage, but you’re not too early. kinda, you try to overcome a bunch of things and it just kills your momentum and then someone else comes along and they put in half the effort and just explode.

[00:48:56] Joseph: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for doing all that hard work. Now I know what to do.

Cool. Why don’t the Kickstarter you’re running right now is that one and another one is three months or next month.

[00:49:05] Paddy: Oh, no. Okay. So we have way star, which is our biggest one so far, and that’ll end in two weeks. But then we’re gonna be doing one every month for a year.

Yeah, so we’re doing this wa Kickstarter for every month, for 12 months. And most of this is gonna be tiny little Kickstarters. They’re no one in the industry as quick starters. So generally speaking, they’re like a week to two long instead of the general three 30 days or a month long So it’s two weeks and we’re gonna do that for 12 months, but dotted in and around those, there are gonna be a few really big really big campaigns as well. So two, 1 million campaigns is the goal. We’ll see. Now the reason we’re doing that, And I don’t mind sharing this now, even though it like only occurred to me very recently.

And again I’m going to equate this to the, in the novel publishing sphere is you have something called Kindle countdown deals. You have, the opportunity to lower that barrier of entry for people. You can make the book free, you can make it make sense instead of whatever. And then that’s when you get that investment of attention.

And then once they’re invested, because they now know who you are, they’re more likely to go and read another book in your series. It’s I’ve already read a book in a series, actually kinda liked it. So it’s easier for me to go and read the next book than to go and find another author. Yeah.

So you’ve got that now I’ve discovered, or I suspect that I’ve discovered something very similar in Kickstarter that no one’s doing at the minute, and that is providing something of value, a piece of content. That you can get into someone’s hands like that, as soon as your Kickstarter finishes.

And we have we have a huge catalog of content at this stage and it’s just in a digital form. It doesn’t have to be physical at all. We’re doing PDFs people in the TT RPG industry love PDFs, right? So our PDFs are just the equivalent of an ebook essentially. So do that for a few dollars whatever you wanna do it at, and you’re not gonna make any money off this.

And if you do, it’s probably gonna be enough just to cover your costs. , but you’re going, you’re gonna build a huge audience off the back and that audience is gonna be there when you do launch that huge Kickstarter, six months done to line, and you’re gonna get it all, so for example, The way I came about this, I, like I said back a lot of Kickstarters a month and I generally don’t back Kickstarters where it’s PDF only because I do like to hold the physical book in my hand.

And a lot of Kickstarter, people are like that because when people are putting that amount of money into something, they wanna hold a physical product and they also it’s the mentality, the psychology behind a Kickstarter person, isn’t I buying a product it’s, I’m being part of something.

I I’m serving a greater purpose. It’s like the hierarchy of needs now there is one Kickstarter and it was doing just a PDF only. I, okay. Actually I’m gonna click in just to see what it’s like because doing PDF only, it’s cool because you don’t have to worry about the production side of things. When a, that comes to the physical printing and shipping and all that stuff.

What’s this guy doing? And he was just doing, I think it was like a second Kickstarter again, to get things up and running, keeping it small, which is great. But inadvertently, he I noticed he was getting a lot of backers, so he only earned $2,000, but he had 1,300 backers or something like that.

Now my first Kickstarter made twice what he earned, but I got 20% the number of backers he got. So again it’s looking at the value in your audience, investing in building that audience and not just getting them the content. So that’s where we’re at right now. We’ve planned out a year of those mini Kickstarters that are there solely for building the audience.

[00:52:32] Joseph: It’s a brilliant idea because it gets to the whole concept of along with a you’re building trust,

little bit of

that relationship stronger and be in a position so that maybe they don’t jump in at the next one, but when they’re ready, they’re going in with. The confidence that you’re gonna deliver what they want. You built that relationship. So I love, that’s one of the things that I really focus on a lot with the marketing that we do is that just Hey,

there’s Peter Jackson talk, not Peter Jackson. Dean Jackson talks about what’s it, 85% of your sales happen after 90 days. And if you think about it, how many author marketing systems are designed just for that? None maybe 10, 20%, but most of them are like, no, I’m gonna send you an ad.

And then I’m gonna send you to a sales page. That’s designed not to nurture you at all. It’s just, buy or go away. So you’re missing out on 85% of the potentiality, if, whereas in the, what the model you’re building, if somebody takes. Five years to finally decide to spend a hundred dollars with you.

What do you care?

[00:53:33] Paddy: Yeah. Yeah, because I know they’re probably gonna spend more than a hundred dollars the following year . Yeah. And that’s that’s the the outlier that’s gonna take that long. Most people be like, they’re either gonna, oh, I don’t, I’m not interested in this.

[00:53:44] Joseph: They’ll leave because it’s just not interesting that they never were gonna be a customer. They’re gonna see, oh, I like this. I like this, I’ve backed on Kickstarter games of different people. We haven’t even opened up the game.

It’s it looks cool. And I’m sure it’s great. And it’s but it’s oh yeah, it finally came. And like we’ll get around to it eventually.

[00:54:00] Paddy: Yeah. You got what you invested in it’s just the same as there’s so many similarities between the and the author.

Novel publishing set of things and the TT BG set of things like, you have the, to B red pile, which is bigger than you’ll ever be able to read. You have the same, the TT, which is you’ll,

I know. Sometimes you see people’s shelves, it’s like just Boeing under all these games and I’m like, yeah, people who love novels are just to same. They just got so many books on their shelves. They’re ready to you.

addy its been great having you on talking about all this.

[00:54:29] Joseph: You wanna just tell everybody where they can find you again and and then I guess I’ll seeing you in Las Vegas.

[00:54:33] Paddy: Oh yeah. I’ll be seeing you there looking forward to it. I’ve been meaning to get over there for since the beginning really, but just never. Never materialized because the first year it was like, I went full time and couldn’t afford it then for two years and then COVID happened and then whatever.

But yeah, so that’ll be good. You can find information at paddyfinn.com. That’s the best place to go. It’s can it’s it does need a bit of remodeling, but you can get in touch with me there. You can find out some information there. It’s not just about Kickstarter. It’s actually more business oriented trying to help people look at their business from a business point of view and, be creative, but you do need to work with some numbers.

You need to think about strategies and marketing and personal branding. And what does that all mean? So trying to help people figure that out too. So yeah.

[00:55:20] Joseph: It’s been great having you on we’ll have you on again later. So we can get a update on how this happens. See, delete that video. So I know you can see how miserably it all turned by. No, it’s just in a park. We had to sell the van. There’s no, I’m.

[00:55:34] Paddy: I’m going to preop this by saying there is no such thing as a failure there it’s only another step towards the door to success.

[00:55:41] Joseph: yep. It’s true..

Yeah. Cool. All right. Great talking to you, man. And we’ll see you in Las Vegas. Thanks for helping me. And I’ll see you there.