TLDR – Michelle is working to publish her first book. We went to kickstarter to help fund and promote.
Writing stuff
Before kids, before marriage, Michelle stopped working, setup a home office, and started writing. She quickly finished a book that was rejected by a few publishers. Then we had fours kids, moved into a fifth-wheel, built a house, and moved to another country; basically loads of life got in the way. Michelle has always stuck with writing but never had enough time to finish any of her ideas. While on holiday on Spain when Ireland asked us to leave a few years ago Michelle and the kids wrote the outline a story about elves.
Fast forward to 2020 as the kids have become more self sufficient with age, and life has settled a bit in Ireland she’s started to find more time and finished the elves story. in fact she has almost finished the second book in the same series. We went back and forth discussing what to do with her and eventually settled on self publishing. Gives us more freedom and control of the property with a better return on our efforts. It also means promotion and finishing is on us; loads of work. So far it feels like it’s taken more work to set things up ti publish then it took to write the book.
After Writing – Finishing the book
Illustration – The job after writing and rough edits was finding an illustrator. The book is a middle grade book which should have at least one picture per chapter plus cover art. I went to Twitter asking if knew anyone who knew anyone with mad art skills. Turns out I knew a few people. However the person we selected was a random contact. About 30 illustrators direct messaged me offering services. Ola had a style we liked that felt like a great fit for the book. We contacted her over twitter then email and worked out rates. For 15 black and white image plus coloured cover art we settled on 800€.
Michelle wrote a small blurb about her vision for each image and the cover, supplied some samples, and we provided a PDF of the book. Ola has been brilliant to work with. Her vision for the art has turned out to meet Michelle’s vision well. Any feedback and requests we have provided to her have been accepted without issue.
Audiobook – After illustration came Audio recording. Michelle and I both enjoy audio books and wanted an audio book version, and wanted to record it using the kids voices. For audio setup we bought a data recorder, microphone and some other bits to setup a sound booth – see other post on this. Total cost here was about 800$ for the hardware and software.
Copy edit – The last cost before publishing is copy editing. A few people have read the book looking for errors and provided feedback. Knowing grammer and spelling can ruin books for some people we wanted to have a professional make sure nothing was missed. I personally know a few editors making this an easy hire. For 10,000 words the cost was 250$
Setting up KickStarter
With all of the book publishing finishing work figured out now comes the selling part. The plan is to publish via Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. Simplest start to promotion is who you know, social media. But before we can do that we need to know what to promote. We don’t have cover art yet, don’t have a finished sample chapter, and only recently decided on a book title. My thinking was kickstarter. We can use it for promotional copy, as a sales platform for preorders, it has its own built in exposure, and we can help offset the published costs we’ve incurred.
When creating a kickstarter campaign one of the things you need to fill out is risks. For this project the risks were simple – the book will be published no matter what as we have already paid for everything, so no risk. I’ve backed a number of kickstarters but have never been on the seller side before. It took a few weeks to get everything in place. Top of the list, because it would take the most time, a video. From reading most successful kickstarters have videos, and it would be nice to be successful.
Michelle was not excited about the idea of a video. When I first brought it I could tell she was hesitant and nervous and did not want to do it. Knowing her well, I went with the approach of telling her the benefits and letting her think about it on her own time. A day or more later she let me know she had started on a script. A week or so later we setup lights, mics and cameras in her office and she started recording.
The first take edit said everything we wanted to say but was too long at 7 minutes. Felt like a dick asking Michelle to do it all over again. Thankfully she understood, put her makeup on and did two more takes. The finally edit is around 3 minutes long and posted to the kick starter. At about 60 funding over 50% of the people who started the video finished it. Finishing being one of the stats you have access to on the kick starter dashboard.
While Michelle was creating the video I setup the project. The process is well oiled wizard step by setup. First you wrote the main page and name things then you have to be verified. Kick starter verifies your email address, mailing address, and bank information must match the project owner name. All of this took a few days to process. More difficult then writing the sales copy was creating the rewards.
I copied from a number of other projects this start with our own twist on things. Had Wes and Michelle verify everything was good and provide input until we were satisfied. Once we’d finished the main page, rewards and verification. It’s time to submit the project for human review. Human review was completed the next day and the video was added a few days later.
All that’s left now is pressing publish and promoting the project. We pressed publish and posted to Facebook, and Twitter in less then a week we had made half the goal with friends and family and one backer we don’t know. Now comes the harder part. We are out of friends and family and need to find backers we don’t personally know to back the rest of the project. — see next post for update on how well that goes.
