Running a Kickstarter: Lessons Learned

I have run two Kickstarters. One was completed, done-and-dusted from launch to distribution, successfully. One is approaching that stage after many delays. I thought then it might be useful to put in one place some advice for people who are thinking about running one - consider it as a display of scars and old war wounds from somebody who has been under fire to those who are about to embark to the front lines.

I am going to divide this advice into practical tips and - to my eye in a way more important - emotional ones. Some will sound obvious. But a lot of it wasn't intuitively obvious to me before having had the experience.

Practical Tips

• The biggest and most important practical advice to be given is: get your ducks in order with respect to every stage of the process before launch. On the first Kickstarter I ran, In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard, I factored in print costs and the costs of paying other contributors, as well as Kickstarter fees and taxes. But I, naively, didn't really think about the costs of packing and storage; my original plan was to do all the storage and packing in my cellar, but as it turned out there wasn't space to do this, so I had to spend a lot of money storing the books in a self-storage facility. This, once you factor in the cost of packing materials, in itself ended up eating up almost 10% of the total revenue from the Kickstarter itself. 
• This also includes the cost of your own time. If you are doing distribution yourself (as I did on In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard), be prepared for lengthy ballache-inducing hassle that will eat into the time you have to spend on your day job, family commitments, and so on.
• It also includes distribution, if you are using a third party for that. On Yoon-Suin 2nd edition I made the foolish mistake of thinking that this would be easy to sort out once the print file was ready to be sent to the printer. I had no idea that the back-and-forth of choosing a distributor, figuring out costs, getting everything set up, etc., would take six months. In retrospect I would have got all that arranged in advance - something that now seems obvious, but which isn't actually obvious if nobody tells you. 
• When it comes to marketing and advertising, perhaps the most important aspect of a Kickstater launch is a beautiful, eye-catching cover or image. This appears to drive a huge proportion of interest and backing. 
• But it is also important to have a good pre-launch page and widely advertise it in advance. Kickstarter campaigns need momentum. If they fund rapidly, they will undergo explosive growth. If they don't, there is a danger of stagnation. This is presumably something to do with the algorithms that recommend and promote projects. So get lots of people signed up in advance of launching.
• Creative people are flaky. Without wishing to go full Jordan Peterson, people who are creative ('high in trait openness') don't appear to be very conscientious and are often neurotic. This will include basically everybody you work with on a project, and it will also almost certainly include you. I will come back to this point when discussing emotional issues, below, but it comes with a practical consideration: expect delays at every single step of the way. Sometime the delays will be long. There is no finger-pointing or blame associated with ackowledging this basic, apparently immutable feature of human creativity. 
• Tax is boring and irritating but you need to bone up on it, because it can end up making what looks like a profitable venture turn into a loss. This will, again, probably strike you as obvious, but it is important to be aware of it - it is easy to look at Kickstarter figures and congratulate yourself on how vastly wealthy you are, and put tax out of your mind.
• I strongly recommend against doing what I did on both of my Kickstarters, which was to have backers fund just the product and pay for shipping later. This adds an extra hurdle into the process where things can go wrong or become unpredictable. Better to just do an all inclusive price which factors in worldwide shipping. I will never not do that again.

In summary, then, the message is to frontload everything that you can possible think of: writing, art, layout, printing/manufacture, distribution. The less you frontload things, the more pain you will experience trying to complete the project. 

And this observation naturally flows through into the emotional tips that I would also give:

Emotional Tips

• Running a Kickstarter looks straightforward from the outside but it really is not. Especially if you have a busy day job (which I have) and a young family (which I also have), your time gets badly squeezed - and even the most concientious and determined person will find it hard to motivate themselves to open up an Excel spreadsheet and spend the evening figuring out the rates of VAT they need to add to products for each member state of the EU after the kids have gone to bed. Sacrificing time to do fun things you enjoy (like writing wonderful RPG materials) is fine; sacrificing it to do boring and difficult, soul-destroying things is a grind. Gird your loins for this!
• It follows from my comments about creative people being flaky (above) that this will also apply to you. Self-discipline can't really be taught - it has to be learned - but it is important nonetheless to learn it. I don't have an easy message in this respect: be strict with yourself, as strict as you can be.
• It is right and good that you feel a sense of pressure and duty to fufil your obligations to backers. Embrace this as an incentive to get done what needs to be done. 
• Excitement is your enemy. Getting excited about how many backers you have and how much money is rolling in gets in the way of making hardheaded decisions about what needs to be done and when. Don't get carried away. Numbers are just numbers. It's fulfilment that matters.
• Finally, remember that the world doesn't revolve around you. While you may feel yourself to be under intense pressure and while you may feel as though your backers are sitting at their computers relentlessly hitting 'refresh' on the Kickstarter page at all hours of the day and night, the fact of the matter is that 95% of backers understand things take time, largely put the fact that they have backed product X, Y or Z out of their minds, and only engage when they get the happy announcement that distribution is about to take place. This does not mean that backers never have legitimate complaints about delays and so on, but it does mean that you shouldn't beat yourself up too much about events that are beyond your control if you are genuinely trying your best.

I hope this is useful to readers who may be thinking about running Kickstarters of their own. It is not something to be done lightly, especially if you are not somebody who finds it easy to work with numbers or to organise themselves. To a degree, any creative person launching one will definitionally find that the logistical elements of the thing do not come naturally. But given that they are the most important stage of the process, it is vital that one goes in with one's eyes open.