Friday, March 15, 2013

Recap of Launch Your Book Through Kickstarter Panel

One of the best experiences of my Kickstarter campaign, if not of my entire life, happened last night: I organized and participated in a panel to teach people how to use Kickstarter to launch their books.

Through the magic of Google Hangouts, I was able to broadcast and record the entire thing and push it directly to YouTube! Below is a recap, and you can scroll down to the bottom to see the whole video.

But before I get carried away, I want to thank the nerds of a feather, flock together blog for an incredibly kind mention of Mechalarum and my blog. You guys are the best :D And thanks to the Blood-Red Pencil blog for publishing my guest post: How Your Blog Network Will Help Your Kickstarter Succeed.

And now, back to the panel! I was honored to present with some amazing people, including: Colin Druce-McFadden, Brooke Borel, Michael J. Wyant Jr., and Amanda Barbara.

Me, Brooke, and Amanda before the panel!

The NY Publishing Innovators Meetup (organized by Ned Lomigora, who also runs the awesome Zeeen platform for author and publisher promotions), was kind enough to provide an awesome audience. Ned did a great job moderating, and audience members felt that he "kept the discussion going, gave all panelists a chance to speak, and left a good amount of time for Q&A." (Alex S.)

Here are a few of the interesting topics we covered.

Using Kickstarter as a traditionally published author: (at 8:26 in the video) "I did get an advance... I needed more money to help cover travel costs [to attend events in my industry]." - Brooke

Biggest cost? (at 10:32 in the video) "I would say illustration was. An illustrator of caliber." - Colin

The benefits of Pubslush for authors: (at 14:33 in the video) "We offer flex funding... for authors it's huge... It's really important for authors to have flex funding because all your costs are going to vary." - Amanda

Thoughts on rewards: (at 20:32 in the video) "I wanted everybody to get something." - Michael

The full video is here. It's long, but packed full of wonderful information about crowdfunding your book project. Hope you enjoy!

(Sorry the audio isn't great, we're going to work on getting a better solution for the next event. Thanks to Michael for fixing some of the issues!)



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