Crowdfunding is Coming: Eldric the Wizard
Well, we certainly aren’t far off now!
Our plan, as it stands, is that our first crowdfunding campaign will be live before the end of this month. Before the end of the week, we will be submitting our page to Kickstarter for review and – hopefully – approval. Once approved, assuming thing stay on schedule, our pre-launch campaign will arrive shortly after.
Pre-launch is where you’ll have the opportunity to register for notifications when the campaign goes live. The pre-launch period is helpful to us as we get a little bit of information about initial interest. Typically, people who sign up during pre-launch are very likely to support the campaign. This is also a great time to do some marketing, and we plan to dabble with some sponsored ads on social media. We’ll likely run our pre-launch campaign for 10 to 14 days.
Finally, the campaign will launch. Once live, supporters will have a chance to actually purchase Eldric the Wizard and the Helpful New Neighbour. There will be special pricing for bulk purchases, options to buy autographed copies, and digital only versions. We’ll also have stretch goals – which are financial milestones we hope to hit, where we will offer additional rewards or improve upon our existing purchasing options once certain thresholds are hit.
We’re excited to launch our campaign, and if you’ve never backed a crowdfunding campaign before we hope this will be an interesting experience for you!
The Work Behind the Scenes
Launching a campaign isn’t just something that we pulled together in a few days. We’ve been thinking about how to crowdfund for a children’s book since the beginning of this project, and have been working on the actual material for the better part of the year.
While still working on the manuscript and the art, we were already reviewing the crowdfunding campaigns of successful creators who came before us. We tried to review campaign structures and pricing from some of the most funded children’s book campaigns of the past, such as Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and A Little More Beautiful: The Story of a Garden.
We pulled a lot from the campaigns we reviewed, successful and unsuccessful projects alike. We looked at typical backer numbers, project tier price points, and structure of stretch goals. We looked at what sorts of reward tiers saw the most activity. We also drew inspiration on visuals – videos, images and campaign graphics.
All of this, we hope, will help us tell our story. We want our page to be engaging. We want it to clearly explain not just the story of Eldric, but the larger Village at the Crossroads project. We hope that interest in our first campaign leads to future fans and buyers as we expand the world of the Village.
Running on Optimism
With the work we’ve put into prepare, we’re hopeful… even optimistic… about our prospects. We aren’t setting ourselves massively unprecedented goals. Nor are we trying to reinvent the wheel. We have some ideas that we think may be interesting, and some stretch goals that people really interested in the prospect of the project can get excited about.
The foundation though, is tried and true. For a first crowdfunding campaign, we feel like that’s the best way to reach our result. We’re optimistic that with your help we’re going to get there!
We can’t wait to launch later this month. Stay tuned!