Once in a while we get to know the team at a fellow start up that really impresses us and can add value to the Bublish community. We like their mission and we trust them. One such company is Pubslush, a crowdfunding platform for books and authors. We’ve just created a custom Bublish page on Pubslush where we can support our authors in their efforts to raise funds to undertake their next writing project. Here’s the link to join our team: http://pubslush.com/teams/id/46. If you have questions or are interested in crowdfunding your book, please feel free to contact us at: info [at] bublish [dot] com. Here’s more information about crowdfunding from our friends at Pubslush:
Crowdfunding Your Book 101
By Justine Schofield, communications coordinator at Pubslush
Crowdfunding is becoming an increasingly popular way for self-publishing authors to mitigate financial risk and gauge the initial market for their book. Crowdfunding is an extremely helpful tool for those who know how to use it, so here’s a brief introduction on what you’ll need to know before determining if crowdfunding is right for you.
The most important thing to realize is crowdfunding requires a lot of hard work, motivation, and determination. It’s unrealistic to think you can just throw your campaign up and people will flock to support you. Conducting a successful campaign can be very time-consuming and tedious, but if you’re willing to put in the time and effort, it’s also completely rewarding.
Another thing many people don’t realize is a lot of work is required pre-campaign. You’ll need to know the exact goals and expectations you have for crowdfunding your book. For example, do you want to conduct a full-scale publishing effort, just raise enough money to hire an amazing editor, or do you just want to publish your e-book?
Knowing the intended goal of your campaign will provide you with a starting point in researching publishing costs, which vary can vary greatly. (Light proofreading is much cheaper than extensive editing…you get the idea.) Research is imperative to determining the publishing costs, which will help you determine your funding goal as well as your reward levels.
Once you’ve finished research, formulated your funding goal and created reward levels, the next step is to devise a detailed marketing plan. Since crowdfunding campaigns are time sensitive (most last 30-60 days), developing a marketing plan pre-campaign will help you hit the ground running and keep up momentum throughout. Dividing your plan into weekly goals is a great way to manage your time and outreach efforts.
Once you’re ready to launch your campaign, it’s time to implement the marketing plan. A majority of support for your campaign will come from your own personal network. Sure, a few people may just happen to find your campaign and pledge their support, but this won’t accumulate to any substantial amount of funding. It’s up to you to generate support.
Particularly with people in your network, personalization is key. The most effective way to garner support is to send people in your network a personalized e-mail telling them about your campaign and asking them for support. Be sure to make it as easy as possible for them to support you and include a direct link to your campaign page.
Also, once someone supports your campaign, send a personalized thank you and ask for help to continue to spread the word. Providing a template letter that supporters can send to their own network makes it easy for them to comply with your request. Be sure to keep your supporters updated throughout the process and post-campaign, too. Since they’re financially contributing to your book, keeping them updated will help ensure they made a sound investment.
When reaching out to people outside of your network, a targeted outreach effort yields the best results. Obviously, every book has an audience, and you know where to find them—the Internet. Social media is great for finding and engaging with your audience. Search relevant hashtags on Twitter, find fan pages or groups that cater towards your audience on Facebook, and research blogs that also target your audience.
Here’s where it gets a bit tricky though. You don’t want to blatantly promote yourself to your audience. No one likes to feel like they’re being spammed. The most effective means of infiltrating your audience is to make connections and allow your campaign to organically come up in conversation. Again, the more personal the better.
These are just the basics of what you need to know about crowdfunding. Lucky for you, there’s much more information available about crowdfunding, the publishing process and so much more on Pubslush. Educating authors into making informed publishing decisions is our main goal, so be sure to peruse our resources and ask questions!
Related Posts
