The Traveler’s Guide to the Darkwood crowdfunded from May 1st to May 16th. It got a total of 347 backers and raised $6,007. This is a 20% contraction from the average 437.2 backers I got for Harlequin, Kessler, Caspar, Ozaka, and Cora, the five books of the previous series where I’d hit a plateau and was getting fairly consistent results. We’re in a new series now, so it’s not clear how much data from the old series applies, which means we’re back in speculation mode.
It’s possible that the series is totally unsustainable, kept as high as it is only by the momentum of the previous series. If this is the case, my backer count will steadily decline until it falls below the 300 backers (ish) needed to justify the ongoing existence of the series and it shuts down halfway through.
It’s possible that I’ve immediately hit the plateau for this series, and 300-400 is the new normal. This is going to be extremely punishing on my budget, because that is enough to justify the series, but barely.
It’s possible that the new series just needs to build up momentum and get exposure effect working for it just like the old one. If this is the case, we should see at least 10% growth from each project until a plateau is reached, most likely in the same 400-500 range that the last series plateau’d. A backer count of at least 380 (roughly 10% growth) in the next project would indicate this is the case.
There’s also another variable, which is that I’ve started experimenting with buying advertising services. The idea is to buy some ad services’ fairly affordable packages and see if they’re profitable, and if so buy a more expensive package and see if it scales. Today’s candidates are Olivia and William, the “duo expert crowd funders” who send lots of Kickstarter messages to everyone who tries to crowdfund anything. That certainly suggests they’re not the most effective crowdfunding marketing that exists (when you’re the best, clients usually come to you), but I probably can’t afford whoever that is anyway, and they don’t have to be literally the best ever to be worth it. If sending a DM to every crowdfunding project on the platform works, then that means they have successfully advertised themselves and can probably do the same for me.
But the results are looking pretty grim for them. It’s impossible to say for sure how much worse the project would’ve gone without their support, and from the analytics they sent me, they did successfully get three thousand people to click through to my project. If we assume that 1% of those clicks actually pledged and the vast majority of them are being hidden in the “direct traffic no referrer information” category, then they might be responsible for as much as 30 of my backers, for an average of $520. Considering I paid $200 for a 10-day advertisement package, this most optimistic estimate suggests that they were worth it, albeit barely, and that there’s little room to scale for a project that only lasts 15 days anyway.
But that’s blindly assuming that 1% of all clicks turn into pledges. More careful examination paints a more pessimistic picture. A little over 400 of the clicks came from Twitter. Only one backer came via Twitter (backing at a fairly standard $17). If we assume a standard rate of 1 backer per 400 clicks backing at an average of $17, that’s about $127.50, which means they aren’t even making me back the money I paid them for the campaign.
This assumes both that the rate for other pledge sources (which are too vague in Bitly’s dashboard for me to draw firm conclusions about) had an identical hit rate to Twitter, masked by Kickstarter’s “direct traffic no referrer information” category, and that the one Twitter backer actually came from this advertising campaign and not from my own tweet. My Twitter presence is really bad so this is a reasonable assumption, but as a counterbalance to the very optimistic $520 scenario, there is also the very pessimistic $0 scenario where that one Twitter backer was a lucky pick-up from my own tweet and the entire advertising campaign accomplished nothing. Certainly the only tweet that ever mentioned me (and it came from an account I’ve never seen before that does nothing but tweet about crowdfunding, so I assume it’s part of Olivia and William’s campaign) got a grand total of four likes, one of which was from me, so while I put my money on the $127.50 scenario being closest to the truth, I think the $0 scenario is more likely than the $520 scenario. In fairness, I was biased that way from the beginning – my thought here was always “I should at least check if these things work” rather than “surely this is the missing ingredient to push me over 600 backers!”
So long as the budget permits, I still intend to try other advertising services to see if some are more effective. I’m worried that effective advertising has a floor cost of several thousand dollars, which my campaigns just don’t make enough to justify, but it’s possible that effective advertising that works at small scale does exist, even if it’s lost in a sea of mediocrity. For that matter, if this second series does pick up momentum over time, I might give Olivia and William a second chance. It’s possible that this first campaign was let down by a weak product rather than a weak advertising campaign.
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