My friend and socio-political crush Tara Reed wrote an excellent and insightful blog post on the perils of crowdfunding. She has been using indiegogo to acquire funds for her book Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda: A Novel Approach to Dating. Her first experience with indiegogo…wasn’t the best. While some of the company’s practices are clearly stated, some of them are vague and a potential roadblock for creators trying to get funding for a book, game, project, etc. Tara’s story will help creators understand indiegogo’s system, help them understand how to game it, and hopefully help assist some crowdfunding successes.
I highly recommend reading Tara’s blog post. It’s an informative, interesting, and personal story about how crowdfunding can go wrong. I also recommend checking out Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure book with romantic comedy and dating advice elements. As a complete sucker for rom-coms, of course I’m going to dig it!
Thanks for the great write up, Ray!
I appreciate the support, as always.
Can’t you just publish through amazon or iBooks for little to no charge? Work during the day, write during the night type of thing?
That’s a fair question. Yes, I can physically publish at low cost, but it wouldn’t bode well for the quality of the novel.
Self publishing gets a lot of bad press/word of mouth because most self-pubbers write something up quick, have a friend who “reads a lot” edit it, puts together a junky cover in word and posts it up on Amazon for $0.99 – $3.99. People might buy it, but it’s probably not very good quality, and then it’ll be poorly reviewed, meaning low future sales, and permanent reputation to your name.
Many of these authors do this over and over, maybe for a series of novels, convinced that if they get a few titles up on Amazon quickly, they’ll be millionaires in no time, but they don’t realize it will hugely backfire on them. People aren’t stupid, and just because a book costs $4 doesn’t it should be of poor quality. You can have friends pad the page with 5 star praise (that even Steig Larsen wouldn’t get), but it won’t last long.
I’ve been working on the book for five years and I want nothing more than to release it with traditionally published quality. And that costs a lot. Especially with a multiple path/choice format book that has 300+ different choices the reader can make and 60+ endings resulting in countless possible paths (like a video game), all of which need to be professionally edited (substantive, line edit and copy edit). Then it has to be professionally formatted because the book is full of hyperlinks leading back and forth to the various choices in the book. Then there’s cover design, which is about as important as the editing. That’s the minimum.
I also see a great deal of potential in this project, and I plan to turn it a series and hopefully a video game. The only way any of that is going to happen is if the original product is the professional quality the reader deserves (and the concept, let’s be honest – it’s pretty frickin’ great!). I also want to be able to charge more than $2.99 for it, and I can’t do that if it doesn’t translate into quality.
Finally, the further I get into production, the more third-party help I’ll need with various production elements as my chronic health issues make for hefty physical limitations.
I hope I’m doing a good job of being transparent about all of that.
Thanks for reading and for the great question!