CHOOSING THE RIGHT CROWDFUNDING PLATFORM FOR WRITERS ANDY MEYER, WRITER https:// Bayless of Human Scale Business spoke with Meyer about how to choose among a growing number of crowdfunding platforms to meet your specific needs as a writer. Throughout our conversation, we reference the following decision tree, which developed to inform his own choices (click to view larger image): In each of the following sections, and focus on key questions to ask yourself as you consider your crowdfunding options. Page 1 of 9
I'm an author and I'm interested in raising money through a crowdfunding vehicle to publish a book. What kind of questions should I be asking to help me figure out which crowdfunding platform is right for me? Well, you've already answered the very first question that comes with crowdfunding and that's, "What is your project?" So starting with the idea of a book, that's a one-time project that you're going to be putting out there. In this day and age, we want to know whether or not we want to self-publish this book. Now we, as individuals, are able to connect with printers and print on-demand services that will be able to print your book and distribute it to services like Amazon and the big booksellers just like other publishers and self-publishing is the act of doing that as a person. Now the difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing is that with a traditional publisher, they're going to have a lot more money and a lot more resources to do the marketing for your book. But you're going to have a lot less control over your book, and you're not going to be getting as much of the funds back, the royalties from your book. Page 2 of 9
Let's assume that I do want to self-publish. What's the next question I should be asking myself as it relates to crowdfunding platforms? In the crowdfunding world, there's a couple big Goliath platforms: Kickstarter and Indiegogo. One of the main differences between Kickstarter and Indiegogo is that with Indiegogo, if you run a crowdfunding campaign and you don't meet the crowdfunding goal that you set, then you can choose to keep those funds. So with Kickstarter, you have the disadvantage of not being able to take money if you don't meet your stated objective. However, because with Kickstarter that goal line is firm, it gives people confidence that if you take their money, you will have the resources necessary to complete your project. Yeah. And with Indiegogo, if you don't reach that goal, but you are keeping the money, that puts a lot of pressure on you as the creator to actually put out that project, regardless of how much funding you're getting. So both of them kind of have their advantages and disadvantages. And it's up to you to figure out whether or not you can complete this project whether or not you've met this funding goal. Page 3 of 9
You've made the decision that you want to be able to keep the funds that you raise, even if you fall short of your stated goal. What's the next question? Well, the next thing you want to consider is how you want to be interacting with your user base and how you want to connect with your user base. A larger platform like Indiegogo, or even Kickstarter, is going to have a very large user base. With one of the smaller platforms, like Rockethub, that platform is going to have a little bit more nichededicated audience. And these people are hoping to interact with the creator on a more personable level. And Rockethub and some of these platforms do offer a little bit more customization over their campaigns. And they allow for ways for the author or the creator to communicate with their fans in a little bit more complex and interesting ways. Page 4 of 9
Let's back up and assume that I don't really want to self-publish. What should I be thinking about then? There's still some options to kind of combine crowdfunding with working with a traditional publisher. And there's a few different platforms that have gone about it in some interesting and different ways. Publishizer is one platform that actually does use the traditional publishing method. They act as an agent would, where you are submitting your project to this website, to this platform. If the author receives 250 pre-orders, then Publishizer acts as the agent and submits your manuscript to a certain amount of actual traditional publishers. And that submission to the publishers comes with the information and the knowledge that at least 250 people have already pre-ordered the book. So it's not so much funding the project but using a crowd platform to do pre-sales, to really validate that there might be a market for your market for your publication? Absolutely. Page 5 of 9
Let's go down the other path. You don't want to publish through a traditional publisher, some sort of alternative publisher that isn't self-published. What do you mean by that? For example, Inkshares uses the similar goal of 250 book pre-orders. And if the author gets those 250 pre-orders, then Inkshares is the one to publish your book. They are, essentially, a publishing company with a website front end that faces these users: an active market of people who are interested in pre-ordering books. Somebody like Publishizer is essentially a book agent. Whereas, Inkshares is a publisher in its own right. When you look at Unbound versus Inkshares, the distinction that you're suggesting here is the ability to distribute to corporate locations. Tell me more about that. Well Inkshares, as I said, acted sort of like a traditional publisher with the website front end. And what Inkshares promotes, the specialty that they kind of focus on, is that once your book does get published, they have a lot of options for authors and for creators to have their book distributed to these bigger corporate locations like Barnes and Noble. And with Unbound, they're basically in a similar boat, but their focus is more on letting the author really communicate with their fans and share their process. Page 6 of 9
Let's turn our attention to an author who has some kind of ongoing production, a blog for example. What kind of questions should she be asking in order to help determine which crowdfunding platform is right for her continuous project? Well, the very, very first thing, especially with these continuous publications like blogs or video series or social media like an Instagram poetry account or something like that, the very first thing you have to get comfortable with is putting your work out for free and visible to the public without them being responsible for paying you any money, or anybody paying you any money for that work. If you do want to get paid from your work straight off the bat, then your best option is probably to go to a traditional, serialized publication, like a magazine or poetry journal or something like that. The impression I'm getting is that in the world of continuous publication, you make a fundamental decision about where you're going to get your funding. If you need to get paid per project, you need to go down the more traditional publishing path, not unlike how a pay per view television producer might raise funding. If you want to crowdfund your work, on the other hand, you need to consider a model that is more closely akin to something like public television. Yeah, absolutely. The important part for a lot of authors is just wanting to be heard, and I know that's something that I believe in as a writer. Being heard by people, first and foremost, is the kind of thing that's going to maybe encourage somebody to make the donation down the road, and that will be sort of a delayed payment for that artwork. Page 7 of 9
If I've made the decision that I'm willing to publish my blog to make it freely available to the public, you suggest a question about whether you want to make money through tipping or subscription. Tell me more about the nature of that choice. So this is kind of the distinction that I've been able to make, because there's not a lot of platforms out there. The largest ones that do stand out are Patreon, Flattr and ChangeTip. Patreon is unique because it uses an optional subscription method. And the way Patreon works is it uses this optional subscription. But the people who are consuming the content, they are not required to pay for that content. This work is being put out for free, and then the people who support this artist, and want to see them continue to create work, can sign up on Patreon. And they can subscribe by pledging a monthly amount of dollars that they're willing to contribute to this artist. That really builds up; and that becomes a basic income for the artist; and it allows them to continue to create their work. On the other hand, the tipping platforms, Flattr and ChangeTip, can you make a distinction about the nature of the distribution? What does that mean? Well Flattr has been going through a lot of changes in the past couple years. They have decided to sort of take a focus on eliminating advertising in websites. So say you have a news outlet or something like that. What Flattr does is they take a payment from the user who's voluntarily choosing to pay in order to eliminate these ads. On the social end, ChangeTip has a lot of integration with Facebook and Reddit and Tumblr and all of these social media accounts where people are publishing their creative Page 8 of 9
work. And ChangeTip offers very good integration with all of these social media account. So if someone likes that specific video that you posted to Facebook or to YouTube, then that person can choose to tip you $1, $3, buy you a cup of coffee, essentially, for the day. Like Patreon and Flattr, all of that eventually builds up, and that's what crowdfunding is all about. Page 9 of 9