So my Kickstarter campaign flopped HARD.
But it’s okay. I’ve grieved it and accepted it.
For those of you who are brand new or who just subscribed recently, my name is Laura-Louise and I am an indie author, illustrator, and comic book artist from Ireland. Since 2023, I have been rewriting the first book in my Irish young adult superhero series, Lasair-Fhíona. This is a book series I’ve been writing on and off since I was twelve and it’s a story that is very important to me.
The book is just about ready for publication so I figured it would be fun to run a big Kickstarter pre-order campaign for it. Kickstarter seemed like a great way to generate new readers for the book as well as connecting with the audience. I had been gearing up to promote the Kickstarter weeks before it was even launched.
The funding goal was €1000 and the deadline was 14th November. And I know some of you are probably thinking: but, Laura, aren’t you cancelling this way too early? You still have 29 days left to go.
See that’s the thing. The campaign was launched a month ago and I only managed to get it 7% funded. I don’t really feel like wasting any more time and energy promoting a Kickstarter campaign that isn’t going to get funded on time. It feels pointless to me. So I’ve decided to cancel it.
Which is a shame because I was so excited and I had done an insane amount of research on Kickstarter campaigns and how to market them and such. Then I launched it…
The campaign has been active for about a month now and I was only able to accumulate four backers in total. (Shout-out to everyone who backed the project by the way! I really appreciate all of your support!) I’ve already sent out an update email to my Kickstarter backers explaining why I cancelled the campaign but this blog post is going to focus solely on what went wrong and the lessons I learned from it.
Unfortunately, despite all of the social media marketing, the campaign is very unlikely to meet its funding goal by the November deadline. And that’s okay.
I think the biggest problem with my Kickstarter project was that it didn’t do very well in the first two days. The first day I managed to get it 2% funded which I was really excited about but then the second day rolled around and…I got no new backers. The first week was like an emotional head wreck because I kept refreshing the page to see if I had gotten any new backers and it was just a literal ghost town. I kept thinking: is this going to work? Maybe next week will be better.
The thing about running a successful Kickstarter campaign is getting your project on the front page of Kickstarter. That’s pretty much how you can get your project funded quickly and effectively. More people on the platform are more likely to see it that way and back it because Kickstarter is basically recommending it to them.
So how do you get your project on the front page? Your campaign needs to be doing well within the first two days of launch. Unfortunately for me, I was only able to achieve 2% backing within the first two days of opening my campaign.
Most of my promotion was done through TikTok, Bluesky, and Facebook. And I did a little bit of marketing through Instagram. I think the biggest issue I faced with social media marketing was that I was marketing to the wrong people. Especially when it came to Facebook. I feel like a lot of the people I was marketing to didn’t even know what Kickstarter was or how it worked. And I understand that.
Kickstarter can be a very overwhelming platform to get a hang of. Not everyone wants to set up a Kickstarter account just to make a donation to a project on there. It’s a lot of hassle. There were a lot of people who left lovely comments on my TikTok videos, saying they loved the concept of my book but didn’t understand the delivery of it. So that was a problem.
Like I said before, I’ve accepted that this just didn’t work out and it’s okay. I think it’s important for creatives to allow things to go wrong. That’s how we learn from our mistakes and try again. I’m not too upset about it honestly because I’m still planning to publish the book next March anyway and I will still be doing a regular pre-order for it once the last round of edits are complete.
I’m currently in the process of illustrating the cover for the book so I will be sharing a cover reveal for it really soon!
I’d love to know if any of you have had any experiences running Kickstarter campaigns in the past and how they worked out for you. Feel free to share your experiences in the comments. And if you’re thinking about running your own Kickstarter campaign, I hope some of these insights were helpful.
Thank you so much for reading!
Love,
Laura-Louise xoxo