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Crowdfunding Exhibitionism P.1

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Kyle Jacobs [Root]
@rootdraws
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Alice Slays the Jabberwock is Live on Kickstarter - and I'm sharing behind the Curtains.

Good Evening Steemit -- We've all been busy here with the whole Hostile Takeover Situation, and I have been working on a conquest of my own. With the 64 page rough draft storyboard completed, and due to some factors that were beyond my control, I needed to launch the print run for the "Alice" project during the month of March. The project went live 10 days ago, and I've got some solid results to share with you thus far. [Kicktraq - A Third Party Campaign Tracker]

Background:

This is my 20th Kickstarter campaign. I've found that running Kickstarter campaigns in conjunction with Patreon makes for solid enough USD foundation for me to do make ends meet, figuring out how to make comics -- and now graphic novels.

So far, this campaign has outperformed ALL other campaigns that I've done, and there are a number of reasons I think this is the case. I'll break them down in terms of [Project Specific] v. [Outreach Specific].

Project Specific Reasons:

  1. Full Length Projects are commercially viable. Aim for 64-100 pages. [source]
  2. Public Domain Projects are commercially viable, and have a pre-existing audience of people that can relate to them. Public Domain works are essentially legal cultural fanart. [Project Gutenberg Top 100]
  3. Projects that already have a significant amount of the work completed require less convincing for people to back, because there is less risk. I have personally failed to complete several projects while attempting to fund large scale projects, and learning these guidelines which I am attempting to extrapolate in this blog post. -- I will likely go into those reasons and how I will address them moving forward in another post. For this post, please just note that I had already completed a 64 page rough draft prior to launching this print run.
  4. Physical Products are King. People want a graphic novel they can hold, and have on the shelf, and share and return to -- Digital products do not translate as well in the USD markets. Therefore, High Value, Significant Page Count, Limited Edition Print Runs. [Comic Project Success Estimate Calculator]

Outreach Specific Reasons:

  1. Previous campaigns I have simply assembled a list of potential locations, [Reddit, Twitter, Newgrounds, Art Galleries, etc.] - and then gone through and shared some art relevant to the campaign, and left a tracking link for the campaign. You might think this is thorough, you would be wrong. 95% of these links failed to convert. The only two areas that ever converted with this method were Mailchimp Newsletters [composed of previous backers], and content specific Sub-Reddits. -- Furthermore, the amounts of conversion here were 1/10th of the amounts seen in this campaign.
  2. In this campaign I have opted to do direct marketing, personalized email outreach with custom letters, and a flyer [both as attachment and embedded in the email.]

Results have been as follows:

  • "Pledged via custom referrers" means setting up tracking links using the Kickstarter Dashboard.
  • "Pledged via external referrers" means I was too lazy to use proper tracking links.

This is my "Previous High Score" on Kickstarter -- The Liber Vulva Print Run. My first successful Kickstarter campaign which took place for about 45 days I think, back in March / April '18, while I completed my first 48 page comic project, and printed a booklet.

Liber Vulva Financial Stats:

[Booklet and Book Printing Information Here.] [Previous Kickstarter Campaign Portfolio Here -- 20 created.]

Interestingly enough I think this one also had a lot of individual email outreach as well, though at the time, it was not focused on any sort of group that knew me as someone who had finished comic projects.

.:.

This series will be continued as I focus on other components of outreach for this project. A few ideas that I plan to explore:

  1. Paid Advertisement using multiple platforms worth of Ad Credit, and data tracking pixels.
  2. Qualitative Comparison Posts for previous projects compared to this project.
  3. A Summary Sheet of all previous projects -- aka, "the Back Catalog"
  4. Releasing the first chapter on a web-page, and using data tracking pixels to optimize Paid Advertisement Campaigns.
  5. Sending out Stickers and Artwork to high value previous backers.

.:.

Beyond this I will also be sharing a continuation of this blog series as I release this project on Steemit, and into the Ethereum Ecosystem.

If you'd like to back the USD Campaign, you can do so here -- there are reasons why you would want to do so, relating to including commissions in the project as "Art Director" and making sure that you get a print copy.

If you're interested in backing, but are more of a "Digital, Show me When It's Done" type person, then you ought to wait until I release it here on Steemit, and then hook me up with some STEEM for a PDF.

I am also reaching out to @fundition about figuring out how to use their platform, as well as @steem.leo about their shop for PDFs.