By Lee Constantine, Head of Growth at Publishizer
Kickstarter and Amazon and all your hopes and dreams.
I wish that when you launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter or Indiegogo their community of backers would automatically buy your book and you’d obtain thousands of dollars in funds to publish your book, and all would be excellent.
I wish it with all my heart.
I wish everyone could be like Eric Ries and John Lee Dumas and Rafael Araujo(< that book is amazing).
But not everyone has the business connections like Eric Ries. Not everyone commands an audience like John Lee Dumas. And not everyone has an experienced marketing team like Rafael Araujo.
Accumulating at least 7k backers is out of this world, especially when done in only 30 days. And $400k in funds is better than any paid advance I’ve heard about in a very long time (besides the Obama’s).
If you could obtain less than 10% of that; about 500 backers or so. You’d still have about $10k in funds, new readers to share reviews later on and probably an interested publisher.
I wish even that^ was an easy feat.
**Average book crowdfunded on Kickstarter earns less than $5k.
I wish that when you self-published your book on Amazon you’d get instant access to their millions of readers who would be happy to buy your book the instant they read your hook or synopsis, and life would be amazing as could be.
I wish that because Hugh Howey, E.L James, James Altucher and a few other authors self-published and sold some thousands of copies meant that you could do the same thing.
But it’s gotten even more difficult to gain exposure on Amazon, especially when every book ever is also up there.
I also wish that all of those authors hadn’t also taken big traditional book deals either. Because why would they if they were so happy as a self-published author?
**Average book self-published on Amazon sells about 50 copies in it’s lifetime.
I wish that when you started sharing your chapters and stories on Wattpad their community of readers would come back time and time again to like and share your content, and that they’d buy your book once you decided to publish it, and all your hopes and dreams came true all the time.
But it takes a lot of work and time to get a few thousand eyes on your stories, even when you are writing ‘free’ fiction. It takes a million eyes to start making money on the platform or get interest from a publisher.
And forget about getting your reader’s emails.
**Wattpad killed it’s crowdfunding product for lack of book sales.
I wish.
I wish it was that easy to sell your book. And I wish these online platforms could make authors happy in all the ways you could ever expect.
That’d make me happy.
But, that’s not real.
And that’s why traditional and independent publishers still dominate the bestsellers out there.
Bestseller lists also require at least 3k in book sales within a week (unless you’re Amazon), which is not possible to hit unless you’re actively pushing your book and have a strategy to sell.
No one has sold 3k copies, or even close to that amount, without trying very hard. (Except for J.K. Rawlings once Harry Potter became popular).
But forget about that bestseller sticker. You just want your book to get read! Right? Heck, you want people to know you. And probably make some money while you’re at it.
Well you know what they say. Anything worth doing is worth letting someone else do for you. Oh wait…
Cheers,
Read how to get 16,871 book subscribers in 10 minutes.