Why You Should Crowdfund

Crowdfunding is something every independent artist should look into at some point. The concept is pretty simple: You put out your shingle on a crowdfunding site, market the heck out of it, and hopefully it will help you raise the money you need for your project. In most businesses you have investors; crowdfunding just makes that a little more transparent. In this case, you let everyone know that you have a project that needs to be financed and that there are different tiers for different investors; then those interested contribute as much as they feel the project is worth.

The comic book is the classic example: Someone comes up with an idea and then sets up different tiers:

• PDF copy for $1
• Real copy for $5
• Signed real copy and bookmark for $10
• Signed real copy, bookmark, and T-shirt for $25
• Signed real copy, bookmark, T-shirt, and baseball cap for $50

Investors then put in as much money as they want, expecting to get the products they put money on. If the project fails to meet its goals then either the money is returned or you need to deal with the investors. However, if the project succeeds, you have the money for the project. Of course, your reputation depends on not only your success but how well you give investors what they were expecting, and there is always the possibility that you didn’t allow for the cost of shipping and producing the merch, so there are some potential problems to keep an eye on

However, if you succeed and your math was on target, then you get to reap the rewards. With that in mind, crowdfunding can work really, really well for you.

Presales

For most products, you can divide the sales period into presales and regular sales, or products sold before release and products sold after release. Presales are sometimes considered better because they are more dependable; that is, they are sales to the good before you even start selling and that helps finance publication, This just means that the more presale orders you can get the better, and crowdfunding gives you the presales by how it works: By putting down money, the investor has essentially created a presale. For someone trying to make sure that they have the money for publication prior to publication, this works out well.

Can Create and Deal Easily with Increased Demand

If your book ends up being more popular than you thought it would be, you can just keep accepting the money and then just publish more books and other merch from the additional money generated. You can also create additional demand by offering “stretch goals”: Once a goal has been met, you sweeten the pot somewhat, such as by offering all investors a bookmark, more pages, and additional features (such as more information on the world, pin-ups, even posters). You can set these stretch goals ahead of time or as you feel they are needed, but they do usually work better if set up ahead of time.

Convention Preparation

You can use the funds generated to pay for conventions and the materials for those conventions. It’s actually typical to figure in the price of additional books or merch into the goal to allow for them to be published; for example, you could set a goal to sell 1000 books but set a goal for 1200 books while making sure that the price per book allows for that. This gives you books that you can sell at conventions or offer for prizes or other giveaways. However, make sure that you don’t charge too much per book to cover this additional printing or it could limit the potential investors.

Marketing

Crowdfunding acts as a form of marketing; if nothing else, by putting your book on a centralized hub, you do allow better access to those looking for your book, or at something similar to it, you give your project a better chance of being seen. However, by following the directions of the crowdfunding site you make the project even more visible and add to its value; if you’re looking for some great marketing tips and an incredible marketing platform, crowdfunding sites will definitely help sell your book.

Customer Feedback

Anything you can do to get good feedback should be sought out and taken advantage of whenever you can find it. Crowdfunding sites usually have some pretty good customer feedback systems, not only allowing for the basic rating system, but also providing potential investors access to the creators, allowing them to ask for clarifications, make suggestions, and even point out specific ways to make them more interesting to themselves as well as other investors. You can also set up polls and chat sessions.

In short, they offer some very thorough comment systems that make them a pollster’s favorite fantasy.

Cover Printing Costs

Obviously, the point but this can mean so much more. As noted, you can charge a little extra in order to print more copies than you need strictly for your investors. This means that you can not only deal with them, but also have enough copies left over for local comic shops, chain stores, conventions, and even selling on your site. You just need to figure out what to do with the extra copies.

Cover Creation Costs

You should also be looking at covering the cost for the artist, writer, layout artist, and anyone else who contributed to creating the book. When you’re determining the crowdfunding goal, these costs should be allowed for. DO NOT do the usual indie creator thing and don’t include yourself in this; you did the work, you deserve to get paid. Sure, you may be thinking that you’ll save money by paying yourself out of the profits, but it’s always better to allow for your needs first. More to the point, there are always unexpected costs, and that eats first out of the amount you were hoping to get. So count yourself as one of the crew or you may not get paid.

Cover Costs in General

So, you’ve paid for the printing and you’ve paid for the crew (including yourself); what’s left? Marketing is the biggest part; even with everything going your way, you should be paying for some advertising, as well as for the website. You should also be paying for convention tables from the profits; conventions are not just good, but for some, they are the best. Was there some sort of merch everyone liked and you would love to get your hands on some more for giveaways and selling on your site? That should come out of the profits as well.

See why you need to pay for yourself? There are a lot of additional costs that will kill your profits and you’ll be glad of it, but if you don’t take care of yourself then you may not be paying your bills.

Learning How to Market

With all of the information available to you, as well as the tips and tricks people will tell you about, this will be the best Marketing 101 class you’ll ever take. Not only will you learn how to present your book, but how to create some interesting merchandise and how to properly price your items. Combined with all of the feedback you have access to, you’re going to learn not only how to listen to create the best possible product but also who to ignore and even develop some thick skin. It may not be pleasant, but it will be educational.

Finding Good Merch

Not all merch works with all comics, and now you get to learn why. Not only that, but you also need to find the best and cheapest producers of whatever merch you decide to go with. You’re going to find that good merch can help a floundering book just as bad merch can kill a good one. You’re going to develop non-comic product lines for your books and other projects, as well merch that has nothing to do with anything you’ve got going on; here’s where you find out how much fun developing merch can be.

Developing Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is arguably one of the most important things you can develop: If you’re doing poorly, your supporters can buoy you, keeping your head just above water, while success is also best the more people know of it. Just look at Image Comics: Great books, but between the late shipments, low issue numbers, and factious organization, they took some pretty strong customer loyalty and nuked it from above, thus forcing them to scale down operations. Learn from them; the better you take care of your customers, the better they’ll take care of you.

Gives Potential Investors a Way to Track Your Progress

Let’s ignore the investors you’re getting directly from the crowdfunding site and look at the bigger picture for a sec. You need to understand that if you have a successful crowdfunder, you will have generated a lot of data and usable comments. You will have a record anyone can look at that shows how you dealt with customers and their suggestions and other input. You will have also created a lot of data about daily sales and how your tiers did, so you can determine which ones did well and which ones did poorly.

You will also have no doubt created a business plan to make that happen.

Now, instead of going after the hundreds or thousands of little fish, you decide to get an actual investor, a big fish. They want data, they want customer feedback reports, they want daily figures. And you have all of that. You’ll need to talk to a business advisor, but you should have the information they are looking for, even if you don’t think you do.

This means that you can take your small project and upgrade to the next level, all because of the information gathered through your crowdfunder.

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Crowdfunding can provide an excellent way to conduct your business, especially if you’re looking for a good non-traditional business model. While does require you to have more hustle than a regular artist, it can give you a way to put yourself on the same footing as some of the bigger players in the field. Remember to push your crowdfunder whenever you can, explore other ways of marketing your product, and have fun doing it, and you should do okay.