Reflections on my First Kickstarter – Part 2 of 3: The Campaign

In Part One I wrote about the nervous energy that inhabits you when you’re planning a crowdfunding campaign – but what about the campaign itself? That has to be worse, surely? Well, spoilers… it really wasn’t that bad at all. There are quite a few things I didn’t realise which came as a shock however, and that’s what I’m going to concentrate on here.

The Nuts and Bolts

The Kickstarter campaign interface shows you a lot of data, most of which I can see would be far more useful of you had multiple paid promotional channels or a complicated communications and engagement strategy. However, the most basic part of it which holds your attention is the funding progress graph. Here’s mine!

If you’re familiar with the progress of most Kickstarters, you will see that this is a non-standard graph. There was a spike in the final third of the project, rather than in the last few days, and in those latter parts of the project it flat-lined rather than spiked. Weird? Not really, more realistic. The Journals are a niche product for a pretty niche game and moreover, they’re unofficial content too. So it’s reasonable for people who are heavily into the game to go early, and then other people to discover the campaign slowly. But what caused that spike?

The Intervention of Dr Mitch

The mid-campaign spike was down to my good friend Dr Mitch, the author of Liminal, giving the project a shout out on the original Liminal kickstarter. That update, in the right place, probably added £1000 to the project total. It was very generous of Paul to do so and honestly, it should have been something I asked for, rather than hoping for, but remember in Part One where I said I hate personal marketing? That.

How much promo is too much?

Which leads me to the question of how often I was going to pimp the project? I’d already decided to keep the campaign relatively short, at 2 weeks, but even in that time I was reluctant to spend my every waking hour talking about it like some projects do. This is a personal choice, and not one that I regret. After all, there’s not a whole lot I could say about the project to add to the writing promo and I was always aware of not becoming a wall of noise in the Liminal online spaces, which are pretty mellow at the best of times! The other thing to remember is that I had kept the project super simple – no stretch goals and no special tiers.

Questions, and how the answer them

It’s inevitable that you’re going to get some questions from backers. I’d be a little worried if I didn’t! The questions fell into two distinct categories, one of which I was prepared for and the other that came out of left field.

In the first instance, I knew I was going to get some questions about my decision to not ship into Europe, due to the EU safety regulations. I was very grateful for the understanding that Liminal’s european fans showed me over this. Naturally, some were disappointed, but I didn’t receive any abuse or even snark. That was very nice, as I expected (probably a little unreasonably) to get some serious flak for that decision.

In the second instance, I got a lot of questions about the progress of the core Liminal game itself. These were more difficult to answer because, to be honest, it isn’t something I’m in control of even though I have written for the main line (and still have several texts in line for publication). I reached out to Paul to check that my understanding of the progress of the latest books was correct and then pitched an answer to the questions. It’s really important to me to respect that distinction, and make sure I’m not passing on speculation or just made up progress. That’s not helping anyone.

The little shocks

Finally, there are a couple of things within the campaign that you can see which might not be apparent when you’ve not seen the back-end before. Probably the most shocking is you see whenever someone cancels a pledge and you see WHO cancels the pledge. You very quickly have to get a thick skin when people you know cancel pledges on you – it’s nothing personal, after all.

The other thing I was a little shocked by was the transparency you have when it comes to who has paid and who hasn’t paid when the project finishes. I only had one person who paid on a dead card, so nothing to worry about, but I can only imagine the stress on these multi-million dollar projects seeing five or even six figure sums being delayed due to dead cards. The prompting phase from Kickstarter isn’t indefinite either – they remind people a few times and then kill the pledge.

Project End

The flip-side to the silly early morning start of the campaign was me being asleep when the project ended. No last minute promotional surge from me! The scores on the doors?

Which, for those curious about what exactly Kickstarter takes off you for their services, translates to £1994,42 – for which I am exceptionally grateful.

Now, however, I am entering the Danger Zone. Will I become mired in ‘real life issues’? Will sudden unforeseen international dramas derail the project? We shall see, as we move into the endgame – fulfilment!