What Happened?

I basically destroyed my shoulder during a bench press at the gym. I did a set at 240 and I felt great. No pain, no difficulty, and plenty of strength in reserve. I added 20 pounds, unracked the bar, dropped it fine, and then started lifting. About halfway up, my left arm kept going… and my right arm started slowly dropping. It wasn’t a strength issue, either. My shoulder totally gave out.

It took four weeks to get my insurance to approve an MRI. When I got into the doctor’s office a few days later for the results, I heard words you really never want to hear after an MRI. “There’s a lot going on in there!”

The MRI revealed that I had:

• A full supraspinatus tear.

• A full infraspinatus tear.

• A partial subscapularis tear.

• A posterior labrum tear.

I went in for surgery on September 10th. During surgery, it turned out that it was a bit worse even than the MRI made it look. Of course I had the full supraspinatus and full infraspinatus tears. But there are three prongs of the subscapularis. My “partial” subscapularis tear was actually three of those prongs fully torn.

Also, it turns out that the infraspinatus was retracted - indicating it was an old injury. I’m pretty sure that happened about two years ago. I thought it hadn’t been that bad because I’d mostly recovered, but clearly I turned out to be wrong.

Recovery

Recovery is going well, but super slowly. I’m six weeks post surgery now. I have to wear my sling full time for another two and a half weeks. Range of motion is still very limited, but is increasing with every physical therapy session. I’m not allowed to reach above my head until the sling comes off, and even then I have to take it slow and still not put weight on my shoulder for another month or two. But all of that is pretty normal. The recovery is proceeding well and on track, I just wish it were faster.

The Substack

I can type now in a somewhat limited fashion, so I’ll be returning to posting. But don’t expect three posts a week just yet. It’ll probably be one post a week at first, but I’ll be ramping it up as my shoulder improves. I hope to return to three posts a week by the end of the year.

The Kickstarter

Due to my shoulder injury, Morgon and I have postponed the Knights of Washington Kickstarter campaign. We plan to run it early in 2026. So if you tuned in here to follow the campaign in real time as I promised, fear not! You haven’t missed anything.

Thank You!

Above all, thank you for your patience with me. The last few months have been a bit rough. I’m glad to see so many of you are still here!

I will resume regular posting as soon as I’m able to after surgery.

In part one I outlined everything I was doing wrong with the sales presentation of this book. It was pretty bad. In part two I talked about how we fixed those problems, thanks to a consultation from Nick Cole and Jason Anspach. Today I want to talk about the actual book launch itself.

Nick and Jason had already helped me fix the book. Next, they helped me plan the book launch. It beat the pants off of any book launch we’d done to date - but it didn’t go quite as planned or hoped. Still, I learned a lot from it, and it helped shape up a basic book launch model that we would follow (or try to follow) for every book we launched afterward.

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Nobody is coming to save you.

The modern publishing industry is brutal on every level. If you’re self published, you know a huge part of the pain. Over a million new books per year are published on Amazon - and that’s before AI. Meanwhile, overall book sales have been stagnant or trending downward for at least two decades. And at the same time, new forms of entertainment like video games, streaming video, and social media are competing for the same leisure time that books once occupied.

But it’s not just the indies suffering. Big presses have been struggling as well, and have fundamentally altered their business models. Mid size presses are mostly non-existent now.

On top of that, the new era of online book sales and social media has fundamentally transformed the sales environment. Most advertising is now online, and is often too expensive to be worth it for low margin products like books. Putting books at a visible spot on the shelf still works, but only for the top 0.1% of books.

If you want a successful career as an author, you have to take charge of marketing your own books - even if you already have a publisher.

Big-pub is living off its aging superstars, and not making new ones.

Who’s the youngest big-pub blockbuster author you can think of? Go ahead and take a minute to think. I’ll wait. Or better yet, sound off in the comments, then come back.

The youngest big-pub blockbuster author I can think of is Brandon Sanderson, and he’s 49.

I can hear some nitpickers in the crowd saying that it takes a long time to truly become a blockbuster, and I get it. It usually does. But I think you could unambiguously call Sanderson a blockbuster author when he took over the Wheel of Time series from Robert Jordan - 16 years ago. And he achieved that blockbuster status in no small part from that exact takeover.

Who else has true blockbuster status at a younger age? What younger author could put a book out now and instantly sell a few hundred thousand copies based only on his name?

Big pub isn’t really taking new authors to start their careers anymore. There are a number of reasons for this. It’s always been hard to start a new author’s career from scratch, but it’s even harder . With profits declining, big pub has been cutting into the unprofitable activities. That means slashing up and coming authors. But also, the corporate restructuring of big pub has transformed them mostly into a vehicle for syphoning corporate funds toward payouts to favored individuals - politicians whose votes the corporate owners need and classes of individuals they want to promote for their own reasons.

Will they accept new authors? Sometimes, yes. If you fit into one of the protected classes, or if you’re a powerful politician they want to bribe - or if you already sell well enough that you don’t need them.

Mid tier presses aren’t engaged in the money laundering the same way, but they’re still really only taking authors who have already proven they can sell. If you can’t sell already, they’re not interested - and if you can sell already, you won’t really benefit from them.

You’re running a business, whether you want to be or not.

The average fiction novel sells about 150 copies.

I chose my words specifically there. That’s not the average self published novel, or the average small press novel. That’s the average novel, period. Realize that that average includes traditionally published novels. Authors like J.K. Rowling and R.L. Stine who have sold hundreds of millions of books are bringing those averages up.

In today’s market, you can’t even rely on a publisher to do that for you. It’s not that they’re not trying, either. Believe me, we tried. I’ll have future posts about exactly this topic and why publishers mostly can’t do it anymore. But trust me, it’s true. The world works differently now. Whether you have a publisher or not, you’re going to have to market your own book.

That average of 150 copies? It means that most authors run out of steam after they sell copies to all of their friends and family. If you want to sell beyond friends and family, you have to get serious about it.

And that means that you have to treat it like a serious business.

That doesn’t mean you have to spend thousands of dollars on it. It doesn’t mean you have to work 80 hour weeks. Do keep in mind, though, that if you want to be successful, you do have to put in either time or money. And if you want to be very successful, you’re probably going to have to put in both.

But mostly what I mean is that the time and money you do spend on it needs to be taken very seriously.

Because nobody is coming to save you.

Is this the best sales funnel you could possibly build? No. Frankly, there are people out there who are far better at marketing than I am. But this one is pretty good, and can serve as a solid example as you build your own.

One of the keys is to automate as much as you can. You’re an indie author, not a mega corporation. You don’t have huge amounts of time or money. If you try to do all of this manually, you won’t have time to write your books. In fact, even if you automate it, it’s going to take a ton of time. It’s super helpful if you have a spouse or partner to help you, the way I’m helping Morgon. But one way or another, if you want to sell, you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and do the work.

There are three key parts of your funnel. You have to have a way to get people into the funnel. You have to have a way to move people through the funnel. And you have to have a way to close the deal at the end.

So let’s dive into the KOW funnel and see how we’re doing these things.

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But true to their word, and what I’d paid for in my consultation, they also helped me fix it. The end result was a massive improvement over what we’d brought to them.

What we learned from that consultation would change the way we did everything at Silver Empire.

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But most of the time, it’s reason zero. You don’t actually understand your book.

“But wait,” I hear you saying across the internet. “I wrote the book. What do you mean I don’t understand it?”

The problem is that your book is your baby. You’re far too emotionally attached to it. As I said before, you are the biggest reason your book isn’t selling. If you want to sell your book, you have to get your ego out of the way and assess it honestly. Make no mistake about it - this is hard. But you can’t communicate your book to readers - you can’t even find the right readers - if you don’t understand it properly.

Somewhere out there is a reader who wants a book exactly like the book you’ve written. Actually, no matter how strange this is, I guarantee you there are at least a handful of them. But if you want to find those readers, you have to stop expecting them to speak your language. You have to learn to speak theirs.

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If you want a solid book launch, you have to prep the battlefield. You have to build an audience of people who want to buy your book. This takes time. You can make it go faster if you’re willing to spend money. But for a high volume, low margin product like books, you need to be really careful about how you spend your money. You can’t afford a high cost of acquiring customers.

On the other hand, if you’re not willing to spend money, it takes a really long time to build an audience. Morgon and I have been building our audience for years now. But we don’t have a specific audience for Knights of Washington built.

That matters, because you want to be as specific and targeted as you possibly can when marketing. We want to focus our efforts on people who are highly likely to buy the book, and not waste energy on those who won’t be interested.

We’re going to start with the audience we already have.

But what are we going to do with them?

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I think the key factor in why I finished first turned out to be that I was the one going to most of the conventions at that time and trying to sell the books we had. It was genuinely a bit embarrassing to both only have a very few books as a “publishing company” and for none of them to be my own. That motivated me to get to work on my novel.

It was a long time coming. I’d been working on it since 2012 - well before we’d launched Silver Empire. In the sprint of 2017, I finally finished the first draft. The second and third drafts came surprisingly fast, and by that summer I had what would prove to be essentially the final draft (minus some final copy editing) in hand. Before long, I had a title and a cover ready, and I was abou…

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Now, here’s the thing. A lot of gamers don’t like “playing the META.” Sometimes that can get pretty boring. It gets rote, for sure. You end up playing exactly the same way all the time, and exactly the same as how all of the other players are playing. Sure, it’s effective. But it’s dull.

The thing is, you don’t actually have to play the META all the time in order to do well at most games. You can often have quite a lot more fun if you don’t, in fact. But if you want to do really well at the game, it does help to know the META. If you’re going to break the rules, at least know them. Know how your approach will be weaker - and where it might actually be stronger. Sometimes it’s even better to not play the META - if your own strengths and weaknesses just aren’t suited to it.

But to really do that well, you need to know the META.

Following the META when you sell books can be pretty dull, too. It gets rote, and you’re doing exactly what everyone else is doing. You’ll often have quite a lot more fun if you don’t. In fact, you probably started writing because you wanted to do something different.

But if you’re going to break the META, at least know what they are. Know how your books are different. Know how to adapt your strengths and weaknesses to the realities of the current fiction markets. Play to your own strengths and weaknesses.

Here’s an overview of the current Most Effective Tactics Available in the fiction publishing market.

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But I have a few other tricks up my sleeve - tricks that can really amplify all the other legwork. The best part is that all of these things can be done far more cheaply and effectively than paid ads, giving you a much better ROI. And I’m pretty tech savvy, so I can do them even more inexpensively - many of them for close to free.

So let me walk you through the infrastructure that I’ve setup to help launch Morgon’s new series, Knights of Washington.

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We screwed up basically everything else about the book launch, though. And that’s today’s story.

In fairness to ourselves, we put a lot of effort into this. And we did actually do a lot better with this book than we’d done so far. We were learning - just not fast enough to help Susan. If you’re reading this, Susan - and I hope you are, because I sent you a link - I am so, so sorry.

If you already actually know how to sell books, you can probably already tell many ways we went wrong just from the cover. For those of you who can’t tell, read on!

It’s a Bad Title

I’m sorry again, Susan. I know you really loved the title. But it’s a bad one. I didn’t know why at the time, but now I can summarize it very, very simply.

Never, ever use a made up fantasy name in your book’s title or tagline. And keep the number that you use in your book’s blurb to an absolute minimum - no more than one or two, only if you absolutely have to, and keep them near the end.

I’m sorry, authors. I know you’re in love with your made up fantasy names - especially character names. Those characters are your babies. I’ve written a novel and novella of my own, and have two other novels more than half finished. I know. I get it.

A brand new reader who’s picking up your book for the first time? That reader has no idea what a “Dodrazeb” is - and he doesn’t care. By the time you explain it, he’s moved on to another book. And now you no longer even have a chance to make him care - which is the entire point of your blurb! He’s gone, checked out already, before he even looks at that blurb.

To be fair, we did improve this. I convinced Susan to change Treasures of Dodrazeb from the novel title to the series title. That’s definitely less bad - a lot less bad - than it would’ve been as the book title.

But that book title? The Origin Key? Ugh. It’s just as bad. If you know the book, it makes sense. But that’s exactly the problem - you have to know the book for it to make any sense. A good book title should make sense immediately to a reader, even if they know nothing whatsoever about your book. It should give them some kind of idea what they’re getting.

The title doesn’t have to do all the heavy lifting here. The cover is there to help with that. But that’s ok, because we screwed that up, too.

The Cover Is Worse

We could have actually recovered from the titling mistakes if we’d had a good cover. Alas… we did not.

It is actually an improvement from our previous covers. It looks like a pro made it, because we actually had a pro make it. Well, sort of. This one came from Octagon Labs again (as mentioned previously, a now defunct book cover site). It was custom made for this novel, and made to our specifications. It’s not the artist’s fault - he did a fine job of making the cover we asked for.

We just asked for entirely the wrong things.

Here’s an exercise for the reader: take a look at this cover. You tell me, in the comments, what kind of book you think this is. Do it before you read on - then come back. It’ll be a hilarious game, I promise. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

This book is fantasy adventure novel set in third century Persia. It’s very reminiscent of - and somewhat inspired by - Prince of Persia. Did you guess that? Don’t be absurd. I know you didn’t. This cover is a perfect example of how a cover can look good and still be an awful cover.

For the next exercise, go back to the comments. Tell me what should we have put on the cover?

There are a few right answers, but here’s the obvious and simplest. The cover for this book should have focused on a Persian prince in a general action pose, with a beautiful princess shown as a damsel in distress. And it should have had some sort of fantastical element to it - magic, or something similar.

Now, it is important that the layout and poses of these characters need to make it look like an adventure book, not a romance book. The same basic cover concept could end up looking like either one, and romance readers would have been very upset by this book (despite its romance). Most of this comes down to dressing and posing the characters appropriately.

And Susan would’ve been upset if we showed the princess as a damsel in distress. That never really happens in the book. She’s quite the character, actually. It doesn’t matter. The one thing your cover actually shouldn’t be is a recreation of a scene from your book. Just don’t do that.

And also, yes, this book needed to be labeled as fantasy, not sci-fi. Susan was pretty insistent that it was actually sci-fi. Having read it, I understand why. But this is where you need to get your ego out of the way. To a reader, this book was fantasy, not sci-fi. And when you’re trying to sell a book, the reader’s opinion is the only one that matters.

The cover I described would have made it pretty clear what the reader was actually getting from this book.

We paid about $90 for the cover to this book. And then Susan and I together actually did some modifications to it (which actually did improve it). A cover like I described probably would’ve cost us around $200, minimum. I think we would have struggled to find a cheap premade cover that would work for it. It’s too specific, and not in any of the microgenres that tend to get a lot of premades. But a $200 cover would’ve easily doubled the sales of this book, and maybe much more than that.

Our Blurb Actually Wasn’t Terrible

Our first blurb for the book actually wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t great, either, but it was an acceptable start for people who were learning.

After an assassination attempt on his royal father, Prince Rasteem vows to track down the dastardly Chudreev the Viper. After he and his brother lead the Persian army to victor in an invasion of the mythical Dodrazeb, Rasteem begins to suspect that they may not be on the right track. As he searches for Dodrazeb's fled King and his beautiful daughter, he learns that a powerful artifact has also gone missing.

With the help of new allies, he must track down his father's true assailant, and prevent him from recovering The Origin Key.

The astute reader will note that it has too many fantasy names in it. But otherwise? Not awful. It sets the scene. It builds a bit of excitement and anticipation, although not enough. That’s where it’s weak. It does a fairly decent job of conveying what kind of book it actually is. It’s not actually a summary, which is good. It doesn’t give too much away. It doesn’t do enough to make you actually care about the characters, though.

Morgon rewrote the blurb eventually to a much better one. She became our resident expert on blurbs. I’ll be writing an awful lot about blurbs over time, too. They’re the second most important part of selling your book. But this was OK for where we were - and a lot better than many indie authors do.

It Flopped, But It Was A Big Improvement

Initial sales for the book were unfortunately low - lower than either of our anthologies. This was mostly because we hadn’t built enough audience for Susan yet, as compared to the audience we’d built for myself and Morgon. This would be a problem that would plague us throughout the entirety of Silver Empire’s life. I’ll have a lot to say about it.

But it sold well for Susan in person at conventions - much better than our anthologies were selling. We went to several conventions together. On average, she sold more copies of The Origin Key than I sold of our two anthologies combined. We were starting to almost break even at the local conventions (entry was cheap and we didn’t have to pay for travel or hotels). It wasn’t great, but it was momentum.

And later on, as we learned some more tricks for promoting books, we applied them to The Origin Key. Over its lifetime, it sold about as well as both anthologies combined - mimicking online how it sold at conventions in person. If we’d applied our promotional tricks right at book launch, it would have done even better. We talked with Susan about getting a new cover for it when she put out the second book.

Alas, she never finished the second book. She had some life changes that made it hard for her to write. And I’m sure that the low sales probably demoralized her a bit. I can’t blame her for that. Once more, I’m sorry for that, Susan.

As usual, Elite Members can view the hard sales numbers here.

If you’re here reading this Substack, you probably think you’re terrible at sales. I have bad news for you. You’re right, you probably are terrible at sales. But then again, I also have some good news for you.

You’re almost certainly not as bad at sales as you think you are.

The truth is, nobody is as good at sales as you probably think they are. The absolute best salesmen in the world? The guy who can sell ice to Eskimos? Even he can’t do it for every block of ice and every Eskimo. That was a one-off occurrence and he’s been bragging about it the rest of his life.

The reality is that even the absolute best salesmen are only going to close the deal about 20-40% of the time - and even then, only with an audience that’s already extrem…

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Your logline has two purposes, and it needs to excel at both of them. First, it needs to tell your reader exactly what they’re getting from your book. And second, it needs to make them excited about your book. And it needs to be less than two sentences, preferably one sentence - and the shorter, the better.

Let me give an example. If you’re of a certain age (I’m looking at you, Gen X and Gen Y), then you remember that every single (OK, I exaggerate… but not by much) action move of the 1990s was a variation of “Die Hard on/in a ____.” The classic and most well known example is Speed - “Die Hard on a bus.” But we also had Speed 2 (Die Hard on a boat), Executive Decision (Die Hard in a plane), Die Hard 2 (Die Hard in an airport), Passenger 57 (Die Hard in a plane… again), Under Siege (Die Hard on a boat… again), Under Siege 2 (Die Hard on a train)… you get the point.

Some of these movies were pretty good, but eventually this got old and people started poking fun at it. But there are a few reasons this happened, and there’s actually a good reason. If you’re going to sell your book, you need to understand the reason.

In four words, you instantly understand all you really need to about the movie.

It’s an action movie. It’s one guy, or maybe one guy and his friend, against the baddies. They’re cut off from all other help. The stakes are high. There will be some major action set pieces. It’s funny. Most likely the hero will be some kind of everyman, but with one thing that gives him at least some of the right skills. There’s going to be some kind of romantic element, but it’ll be (very) secondary. And most of all, Die Hard was an amazing film - one of the best action movies of all time, frankly - and this one will be, too!

Or, at least, the movie claims to be all of these things.

The reason this particular formula eventually fell out of favor is that the movies didn’t deliver. Some of them did (or at least mostly did). Many people pan it, but Speed was quite successful at the box office and has plenty of fans even today. But so many of the others failed on at least one point. Speed 2 and Die Hard 2 lost a lot with the whole, “I’ve done this before” schtick. Executive Decision was ridiculous. And Under Siege 2 was just terrible.

But why did these movies get made, even though they turned out to be subpar? Because the logline sold it to the studio executives. And why did the logline work for the studio executives? They knew what they were getting - and they knew how to sell it to audiences - in no small part because they could use the same logline on the general public.

Take my novel War Demons. We did a lot of things suboptimally with that book, but I have a pretty decent logline: “When a soldier came home, his demons followed him home - literal demons.” A shorter version would be better, but it’s sufficient. You don’t have to be as snappy as “Die Hard on a ____.”

Comparing your book to a popular book or movie in your logline is good, actually. People will understand instantly what you’re saying. The more popular the book you’re comparing to the better - but only if the comparison is accurate. Your logline must be accurate, or it leave your readers angry.

Using two books as a mashup is even better. Another version from War Demons: it’s like The Dresden Files meets Monster Hunter International. A lot of people don’t know those books. But if you do, that tells you an awful lot about what my book is. And it’s an accurate description (although I leave it to my readers to decide if its anywhere near as good as either of those). My novel isn’t really quite like either of those - but it’s very much like the two mashed together. And that’s communicated very clearly in very few words.

The best example of any book I’ve ever published is from my wife’s upcoming novel, Knights of Washington: Muskets and Magic. “George Washington’s Spies but fighting the supernatural.” One fairly short sentence tells you all you need to know.

And so far, literally every person I’ve ever mentioned it to has been interested. That’s how you know when you have a hit on your hands. If you tell people the logline and they perk up and want to know more, you have a winner. You can sell that book.

If you tell people the logline and they’re not interested, you’re in trouble. The best case scenario is that you don’t understand your book, and you need to rework it. Go back to it again. Find everything you can that’s like your book. See what they say. Simplify. Shorten it. Try the new versions out. Don’t even try to sell your book until you have a good logline.

With our one book in hand, we started going to local conventions. It was more than a bit embarrassing to be a “publishing company” with exactly one book. But about the only thing going for us at the time was my total lack of fear. We did sell some. Across a handful of local conventions we actually sold a few hundred dollars worth (easier than it sounds like when you’re selling your book for $10-15 a piece). It wasn’t anywhere near enough to cover the costs of the conventions, but we actually had sales!

It was at one of these conventions, run by the local library, that I met Susan McPhail. If I recall correctly, I sat on a panel. Those who have seen me at cons in the past know that the one thing I can do is talk, and at least sound like I know what I’m talking about!

I must have sounded pretty good, because Susan submitted a novel asking us to publish it. The concept was a little niche (which is actually good, although I didn’t know it at the time), but it sounded pretty interesting to me. I gave the book a read, and found I really liked it. We did a bit of editing on it, but it was actually a pretty light pass. Susan had written a pretty good book.

But we didn’t release it immediately. We had a plan, you see.

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Well, let’s be fair. You don’t actually have to find readers. Maybe you really did write your novel just for the love of writing it, or for the artistic expression. If that’s true, great! Congratulations! I truly mean that.

But if you’re here reading this, it’s almost certainly because that’s not actually enough for you. Maybe you really don’t care about the money (but let’s be honest - you probably do). But you do care that people actually read your book. If you want people to actually read it, you’re going to have to get out there and sell it.

You don’t want to do all that marketing stuff, though. That’s icky. I get it. I really do. But if you’re not out there marketing your book, how are people going to even know about it in order to read it?

“But,” I hear you say, “I’ve been trying to! I’m just no good at it!”

You’re right. You are the reason your book isn’t selling. You probably really do suck at marketing.

But you can learn to do better. The first step is to get out of your own way.

Let’s dig in to the first steps - including some very simple tests you can use to figure out where the problems are in your sales and marketing process.

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Yes. As an indie author, you should Kickstart every single book you write.

I’ll be more specific than that: you should run a separate Kickstarter for every single book, even in the same series. Run them individually, and space them out - even if every book is already done. And unless you have a very good reason not to, you should use Kickstarter specifically, despite its numerous issues. If you’re doing it any other way, you’re leaving money on the table.

Let’s get into the reasons why.

Give your fans a chance to give you more money

As you grow your audience as an indie author, you’ll start encountering Superfans. Superfans come in multiple varieties, but one very important variety is the kind who has lots of money and wants to help you succeed. Most of the time this kind of fan is uncomfortable just giving you more money. That's completely understandable. To be honest, I’m not really comfortable with fans just giving me money, either - and I’m not alone.

So give them an excuse! Add higher tier rewards to your Kickstarter campaign. Give them a way to give you money without just giving you money! Here are some quick examples of tiers and addons you can use for your Kickstarter campaign to get more money from your fans.

• Hardcover books

• Previous books in your catalog

• Bookmarks, posters, t-shirts and the like

• Special editions of your book (leatherbound, etc)

• Dinner with the author

• Name a character after the reader

Use your imagination!

Pro tip - don’t discount your product on Kickstarter. In general, all products in your campaign should be full price. If you have any way at all to justify it, they should actually be priced higher than normal! You can easily get away with this for Kickstarter only editions or items, but you can also get away with it just for the simple promise of “Kickstarter backers get the book first!” Just don’t overdo it. You can get away with hiking a $15 paperback up to $20 for Kickstarter if the backers get it first. You’ll probably make backers mad if you charge $30 for it and that’s all they get.

Again, Kickstarter backers want to help you!

It will not cannibalize your Amazon sales!

There are a lot of people who hang out on Kickstarter looking for projects to back. It’s just what they do. As an indie author with limited reach, you’d be very unlikely to reach any of them without going through Kickstarter itself. Some of them won’t even read your book. They won’t care. They just want to help you get it made! On my Kickstarters, we’ve gotten about 30% of our funds through the Kickstarter network. This means people who found us because we were on Kickstarter!

This is why I recommend Kickstarter specifically, and not other crowdfunding sites like IndieGoGo. Kickstarter has the largest community by far, and you’ll get the most out of it by using Kickstarter.

You will have some existing fans who opt to buy the book through Kickstarter and not Amazon. But if you followed my advice above, they’ll actually be paying you more money - and Kickstarter takes less than Amazon does, so you’ll keep even more! But you’ll also gain some extra exposure and word of mouth that will help your book.

Kickstarter backers are much more likely than average readers to leave you Amazon reviews - and they’ll leave those reviews early. Remember, they want to help you succeed! Let them. Recruit them to review your novel on Amazon within the first week of release. Those early reviews will easily make up for the books they bought on Kickstarter instead of Amazon.

But the best part? A significant portion of your superfans will buy your books through the Kickstarter and then buy them again on Amazon! At Silver Empire, we even had one superfan who backed all of our Kickstarters, bought all of our books again on Amazon, and then bought them again directly through our web site. We love you, Xavier, and we will never forget!

Kickstart each book separately and grow your audience each time.

When you’ve finished your campaign, Kickstarter gives you contact info for every backer. Keep that info! That’s the core group for your next campaign! You have a lot of leeway in setting the duration of your campaign, but 30 days is the sweet spot.

But… why run one campaign for three books for 30 days when you can run three campaigns for 30 days each and get three times the publicity? Each campaign, you’ll grow your audience - both from your own social media and marketing efforts and from Kickstarter itself.

But, I hear you say, what about those people who want to buy the entire series at once? Great! Let them! When you run the campaign for book 2, let them buy book 1 also. When you run the campaign for book 3, let them buy the whole set.

All your highest tier rewards, like a private dinner with the author? Offer them again! Let your superfan buy three dinners with you instead of one! Most of them won’t do that. But if you have one who will, give him the chance!

When should I NOT Kickstart my book?

Kickstarter’s guidelines are pretty strict that your campaign needs to be for something new. But they’re pretty lax on what they consider “new.” I’ve Kickstarted unwritten books, of course. I don’t recommend it, actually; I recommend you have the book finished first if you can. Kickstarting an unwritten book can put an awful lot of pressure on the author - who is most likely you! I’m sorry, Richard! The book was awesome when we finally delivered it, though! And any delays in writing it can agitate your backers. I’m sorry to all of you, too! We did finally deliver the books!

But you can also get away with a ton of other scenarios. Kickstarting a written but as yet unreleased book is perfectly fine. I’ve seen friends Kickstart re-releases of a book before. I’ve seen friends Kickstart new covers. We ran a Kickstarter - our only unsuccessful Kickstarter - to fund an audiobook edition of an existing book. I’ve never seen Kickstarter have a problem with any of that.

But if you can’t spin your project into being new in some way, don’t try it. Don’t risk getting banned.

If your project is in some way likely to get you banned, don’t do it. Read their terms of service!

If you don’t think you can deliver your project in a timely manner, be very cautious about running the campaign. If your book is already written, you’re probably fine. But if it’s not, think hard about waiting.

And make sure you’re ready to put in the effort. Kickstarter won’t magically generate money for free. Like every other sales platform, you have to work for it - and learn the ins and outs of Kickstarter’s system. I’ll have a lot more to say about that in the coming months!

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