5 Ways Crowdfunding Has Changed for Authors in Recent Years

Once upon a time, authors had only one legitimate choice for publication: get picked up by a small press or big house. Starting near the turn of this century, self-publishing became a legitimate option for author success, and is now outperforming what we now call “traditional publishing” for the average writer. 

Crowdfunding hit the scene around 2010, and has introduced a third option. Traditional publishing offers a smaller piece of the profits, and places all financial risk on the publishing house. Self-publishing gives the author a larger cut, but the author also assumes all financial risk. 

Crowdfunding splits the difference. The author gets the larger profit percentage of self-publishing, but puts most of the financial risk on backers. 

You’re already familiar with crowdfunding, at least as a concept. You’ve probably either backed a campaign or run one of your own. It’s been around for 15 years. However, over the past few years five big changes have altered the crowdfunding landscape. 

If you try crowdfunding your next book, even if you’ve already experienced success, ignoring these changes can mean a serious drop in your backing. So here they are, for your considerations. 

1. Crowdfunding Is No Longer Fringe

It wasn’t that long ago when crowdfunding was the domain of the outcasts. Independent, inventive, early adopters went to the people to get their books, art, and projects out of their imaginations and into reality. It was for people who thought and moved too quickly for traditional publishing.

In the last half-decade, more and more established entities have realized crowdfunding lets them push some of the risk associated with trying new products and ideas out onto the public…because that’s what pre-selling is. If things go well, they’ve paid for R&D early. If things go poorly, they’ve made some sales and defrayed the costs. It’s a smart business move for them, but can make it harder on truly independent creators. 

This means crowdfunding authors are no longer competing for eyeballs and dollars with other scrappy amateurs. You’re going in against established operations with business-level budgets, social media staff, and more hours to throw at a project than you can compete with. 

That doesn’t mean success is impossible. It just means you need to show up ready to punch well above your weight class. 

2. The Rise of Professional Consultants

It’s worse than that, even. In addition to full-time businesses using crowdfunding to boost their operation, there’s a whole ecosystem of professional crowdfunding consultants. These professionals make their living off other peoples’ crowdfunding efforts and they represent two serious threats. 

First, the good ones are good at what they do. When you compete against them, you’ll experience what happens most of the time an amateur goes against a professional. They’re looking for the same dollars and page views you are, so you need to have a good plan and work it with massive commitment. 

Second, the market is also full of charlatans: people who claim to know a lot about crowdfunding, but really know just enough more than you do to be convincing until they get your credit card number. Some are simply there to rip you off. Others mean well, but don’t know half as much as they think they do. In both cases, they waste your money. 

It’s hard to tell the difference between those two, and it’s hard to know the things the good ones know — but it’s not impossible. Just like you did market research on your genre, or learned how to pitch an agent, take the time to learn how to crowdfund well. There’s no room there for just winging it. 

3. Patreon’s New Model

Patreon is a new take on crowdfunding. Where Kickstarter and IndieGoGo support one-shot campaigns for a large (or medium, or small) single payoff to get one project off the ground, Patreon is set up to allow creatives to receive a small amount of money each month from a community of people who just want to see them keep creating. 

The top writers on Patreon all make over $400,000 a year, so the model can work. The average Patreon writer makes between $4000 and $12,000 a year….and the corporate players haven’t moved into the space yet. 

If you think you can write consistently, and turn in new chapters in your series consistently enough to keep the promises inherent in a Patreon platform, it’s worth looking into. At least until the big players figure out how to bend it to their wills. 

4. Backerkit Has Entered the Chat

Backerkit started out as a company that simply helped successful crowdfunding campaigns track, manage, and deliver their products to their backers. They’d cover billing, tracking, late orders, and communication. If you payed them extra, they’d manage your fulfillment and shipping, too.  After a while, they started advertising new crowdfunding projects to their growing community of repeat backers. 

Two years ago, they stepped up and became a crowdfunding platform of their own, a direct competitor to Indiegogo and Kickstarter. They claim to have learned from those other platforms’ mistakes, and to be offering an improvement on what they offer. 

This is a developing situation still, with Kickstarter at the top and Backerkit slowly growing. That said, it’s an option when choosing your platform not all writers know about yet. It's also been used by Brandon Sanderson, who has run some of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time.

5. Market and Advertising Saturation

Not too long ago, you could tell somebody “I’m Kickstarting my next book”, and they’d say “What’s Kickstarting?” A little more recently, you could say that to somebody and they’d back you because they hadn’t already backed three projects that month. 

Fast forward to right now. How many crowdfunding ads did you see this week on Facebook? How many authors do you know personally who’ve put something on Kickstarter this year? The market is growing saturated, so the message “I’m crowdfunding my work!” has less impact than it used to. 

This doesn’t mean we should stop crowdfunding our books. It does mean we have to get more creative with how we differentiate ourselves from all the other campaigns going on right now. Better yet, it means we have to engage deeply with our fan base. There might be 100 crowdfunded books out in the world right now, but only one of them will be by your fan club’s favorite writer. 

Where to Start

What to do next depends on how much crowdfunding experience you have so far. 

If you have already run a successful crowdfunding campaign, review the information above and tweak your next project to take advantage of these new situations. 

If you haven’t, build your campaign from the ground up keeping these facts in mind. If you hire outside help, make certain your candidates know about these changes and have a plan for them. Too many consultants work a program they developed a decade ago, without making shifts to keep up with the times. 

I would also recommend, if you are going to crowdfund a creative work like a book, you should really have it complete and ready to publish before starting your campaign, especially if it is your first Kickstarter (or whatever platform you choose.)

There are a lot of unknowns for how long things will take, and having what you are already familiar with completed means that you can concentrate more of your attention on what's new; namely, setting up, running, and fulfilling your campaign.

No matter what, you have some work – and profits – in your future.

So go get ‘em.