Kickstarter For Authors With Oriana Leckert

How can you use Kickstarter to help bring your creative vision into reality? What are some of the biggest mistakes authors make? What are some tips to ensure your campaign is a success? Oriana Leckert shares her expertise.

In the intro, AI-narrated audiobooks from ElevenLabs will now be accepted on Spotify through FindawayVoices; A Midwinter Sacrifice by J.F. Penn with my voice clone for the Author's Note on Spotify; BookVault introduce boxsets and slipcases; Managing your finances [Becca Syme]; How to write non-fiction [EOLU Podcast]; Thoughts on the Berlin film market; Death Valley – A Thriller.

Today's show is sponsored by my patrons! Join my community and get access to extra videos on writing craft, author business, AI and behind the scenes info, plus an extra Q&A show a month where I answer Patron questions. It's about the same as a black coffee a month! Join the community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Oriana Leckert is the head of publishing at Kickstarter, as well as an author, freelance writer, editor, and consultant.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Types of Kickstarter campaigns for authors
• Unique rewards to offer your backers
• Biggest mistakes authors make for a campaign that doesn't fund
• Bringing your own backers vs. discovery from Kickstarter
• Tips for creating a visually pleasing page
• The importance of a pre-launch page
• Making sure your Kickstarter gets approved
• Creating a detailed budget for your rewards

You can find Oriana and more about Kickstarter at Kickstarter.com/creators/publishing and Kickstarter.com/publishing.

Transcript of Interview with Oriana Leckert

Joanna: Oriana Leckert is the head of publishing at Kickstarter, as well as an author, freelance writer, editor, and consultant. So welcome to the show, Oriana.

Oriana: Jo, I'm so excited to be here talking with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Joanna: It's great to have you on the show. So first up, just in case—

What is Kickstarter, for anyone who doesn't know? What is your role there?

How did you become involved in the publishing side of things?

Oriana: Absolutely. So Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform. We are unique in the crowdfunding landscape for a few reasons. We are only for creative projects, so you can't use Kickstarter for medical bills, investment funding, charitable donations.

Every Kickstarter project has to create something new to share with the world.

Kickstarter is also a public benefit corporation, which is a sort of legal and business charter that turns us basically into a mission-driven for-profit organization. So our mission is to bring creative projects to life. Everything we do comes back to bringing more creativity into the world through that structure.

We are also quite a progressive company. We do 5% after-tax profit donations every year to organizations fighting systemic inequality and doing music and arts education. We are very transparent about our tax contributions, the salary difference between our CEO and the median staff salary.

So we do all sorts of things that make us, what I believe, a really ethical place to be and a force for hopefully good in the world.

My role is head of publishing. So I've been a Kickstarter six years, which is the longest I've been at any company, actually. I came here to grow our journalism category at the very end of 2018. I have done journalism, I've done comics, I've done publishing.

It, sort of unexpected to me, is the best job I've ever had. Which is slightly corny, but worth saying. I can't believe I get to do this work all the time. My background is about half and half digital media and traditional publishing, so I've spent most of my career fully focused on books and the written word in one way or another.

I generally describe my job here as one part literary industry expert, one part crowdfunding consultant, one part life coach, and one part cheerleader. So those are the various roles I get to play for my creators.

I also get to be out in the world all the time doing wonderful things like this, just kind of talking about Kickstarter and helping people get a better understanding of what it's for, how you can use it, the benefit for authors and creative people of all stripes.

Joanna: Oh, that's great. You are a cheerleader. I love your energy. You bring such a great energy.

I do feel like Kickstarter, obviously, is a company, but it does have that very creative feel. So I really appreciate that.

I've also met you a couple of times in Vegas over the last few years, and so I thought we'd start there. What have you seen in terms of the changes in the author community over the last few years?

What are the types of Kickstarter campaigns that authors do?

Obviously, we're not all Brandon Sanderson (whose campaign made over $41 million!).

Oriana: That's a great question. It's been pretty exciting. So I was hired by Margot Atwell, who held this role, also, for five or six years. I really see a pretty strong through line from her work to mine.

The amount of change in perception from authors, publishers, illustrators, toward Kickstarter, the shift has been absolutely massive.

I mean, certainly when Margot started, and even when I started, there was a lot of sort of bewilderment, hedging toward distrust, and people thought Kickstarter was just for desperate people who couldn't get a book deal through the traditional systems.

The change has been so dramatic of people understanding that —

Kickstarter can be transformative for an author's career —

and that it can work for traditional publishing, indie publishing, hybrid publishing, all kinds of authors. 

I mean, obviously I'm in the bag for Kickstarter, but there are so many ways that it can be tremendously helpful. Kickstarter is really about collapsing the boundaries between a writer and their readers, a publisher and their fan base, any creative person and their audience.

There's so many benefits to doing that. You get to thrill your backers with new and exciting rewards. You get to turn what can be a sort of, not boring, but like just a standard book release, into a moment.

You get to build your brand, your profile, get press.

You get to test out ambitious projects. You get to understand so much more about your audience — 

and what they want and how you can give it to them.

So, yes, going to shows like Author Nation, formerly 20Books, was a real revelation for me. Margot's work was mostly concentrated on the traditional publishing industry and getting to know the people who are really driving forward indie publishing and self-publishing and owning their own author careers.

It's been really marvelous getting to make a lot of inroads into that world and seeing the great success that people can have on our platform and outside of it.

Joanna: You mentioned there that you can thrill backers with new and exciting rewards, but I feel like many people listening might not even know what kind of rewards they would do. The word “reward”, it's quite a different word if people haven't been involved with Kickstarter.

For an author, what are the kind of rewards that people are doing?

Oriana: I love that question because, to me, the rewards are really like at the heart of the Kickstarter proposition and what makes this kind of fundraising so interesting and kind of thrilling.

Basically, Kickstarter, your process is that you're inviting people on a creative journey. You're saying, I'm going to make this cool thing. I want your support, and in exchange, you're going to get stuff. You're going to get to be part of my process.

Your main reward is going to be your book, or your series —

or, if you're a publishing company, your season. Whatever it is, that's your main tier, and then you're going to build everything else out above and below that.

Then a lot of people think the rewards means swag or merch, which is fine, but merch can really add a lot to your production costs. It's causing you to learn how to produce all kinds of things that maybe you've never done before.

So that's not the only way to do it. If you're going to do some merch, I think it's nice to come up with some custom items that feel really related to the work that you're doing.

If you've got a romance novel with a pivotal scene on the beach, maybe you make some candles that smell like the ocean. Maybe you do some kind of handkerchief that's printed with the pattern of the dress that your heroine is wearing.

You can really think beyond merch, into digital rewards, experiential rewards. There's a lot of parts of the writing process that can be sort of like pulled out and packaged as rewards. Things like notes from the field, outtakes, deleted scenes.

I've had people write bloopers, as if it were like a comedy movie, like added new scenes or novellas, other pieces from different works that you've done. Certainly, your back list and other books that you've written, those can all be included. We've seen people do tours of the writer’s studio, things like that.

Also think about what skills you have in addition to your writing. Perhaps you are excellent at marketing, or social media, or poetry. You can offer webinars on those sorts of things, other kinds of ways that people can experience the creative practice that you have.

Then you can get into like high-end exclusive one-off, crazy rewards. One whole section of rewards I love is naming rights. We've seen all kinds of “We'll name the dragon after your dog. We'll name the illness after your mother in law. We'll name the hero after your son.”

There's a LitRPG novelist named Matt Dinniman, who did this really well. He writes these big cast, you know, there's dungeons, and you're in an intergalactic reality TV show with hundreds of characters. So in his last campaign, for $666 he will kill you off in his next book, and for $777 he'd let you live. He'll write a whole scene around you personally and that sort of thing.

So those are just some. I mean, you can do book release parties. You can do book clubs. If you're writing children's books, you can do coloring pages or supplemental material for teachers or other educators.

The sky is really the limit, and it is based on your creativity —

and the things that both you can make and that your audience wants. So this is another opportunity to talk to them.

Ask them, if I'm going to do a piece of swag, would you rather have an enamel pin or makeup bag? If I'm going to do alternate covers, would you like the blue cover or the red cover? See what your people are interested in, and then figure out whether it's possible for you to deliver it to them?

Joanna: Wow, so many ideas there. I feel like this is part of the game, is that if someone's listening and they're like, “oh, that sounds great,” well—

You need to get on Kickstarter and start backing things and understanding how it works.

It's quite different. People think, oh, it's just like an Amazon or whatever, it's just not.

Oriana: My number one piece of advice for anyone who's even a little bit Kickstarter curious, get on the site and back some projects, even just for a buck or two. Follow the creators out in the world, watch what people are doing.

I often say this, but I am an expert in Kickstarter because I stare at Kickstarter all day long. You too can stare at Kickstarter all day long. You can follow everybody. You can look at what people have done and what's worked and what hasn't.

Find all the best tricks, steal them for your own.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery and all that. It is absolutely the best way to get good at Kickstarter, just like immerse yourself in this strange and lovely world and see how everybody else is doing it, and do it better.

Joanna: I mean, I now buy a lot of just ebooks.

I mean, I buy a lot of beautiful print with foil and all this, but I also just buy ebooks. They're kind of a similar price as you might get on some of the other platforms. So people can do that.

I think you mentioned the book being the main offering, and people might think, well, that's the paperback. But you can do ebook, you can do audiobook, you can do bundles, you can do series, as you said. So there's so many options.

So obviously things have changed over the last few years, but—

Have you got any numbers on how big the Kickstarter industry is now with publishing?

Or anything you can share around that?

Oriana: I would love to tell you. So first I'll tell you, Kickstarter overall, by the numbers since our inception, there have been 273,000 projects funded, eight and a half billion dollars pledged, from more than 24 million backers.

In publishing specifically, we've had 69,000 projects launched, 3.2 million unique backers, and over $380 million pledged to campaigns. I have lots of other stats, but a few things I'll share here.

The publishing category has grown year over year, every year since 2017, in terms of number of projects launched, number of projects successful, and the overall percent of success rate. There has never been a dip since 2017, so for over a decade.

Another stat that I really love about the publishing category, if you look at campaigns that have at least 25 backers, the overall success rate is 84%. I think that's really telling because 25 backers, that's like a little bit more than your mom, your best friend, the folks who are essentially obligated to support anything that you do.

So if you can get a little bit beyond that sort of inner circle, your chances of succeeding on the platform are tremendously high. Another thing that I wanted to call out, I just got some new numbers around this, the average backing amount per backer across the whole category has nearly doubled since 2020.

So we used to see an average backing around $40, and it's currently at $72 per backer. I think this is clearly around the trend of special and deluxe editions, but it's a great indication that —

The backer behavior on Kickstarter is just very different than your general book buying public.

People don't come here looking for 99 cent ebooks, the lowest bargain basement prices.

Folks are really willing to pay more because they understand that this is a different kind. It's not exactly a purchase, it really is supporting bringing a strange and wonderful new thing into the world that wouldn't exist before.

People are also much more forgiving about timeline. If you buy something from most online booksellers, you're expecting to have it in your hands within a couple of days. People wait months, and sometimes years, to get their Kickstarter rewards, and they don't mind if the creator is clear and transparent.

You're also doing the work of demystifying the publishing process. Why does it take so long? Where are books printed? How long does it take them to ship via freight over the ocean? What do all these things really look like?

So it's really interesting just figuring out what your backers want and will bear, versus the general book buying public out in the world.

Joanna: Absolutely, and that's why we have fewer backers than we might sell total books on other platforms. As you said, they do spend more money and we can do higher quality and more interesting products. Obviously there, you mentioned that not every campaign actually funds.

What are some of the top mistakes you see that mean the campaign doesn't fund or there are other issues?

Oriana: The biggest mistake I think authors make, or any creator, is overestimating their abilities to reach their crowd. I think making sure that your ambition matches your reach is the number one most important thing to like come close to guaranteeing that you will be successful.

If you are an emerging writer, and you're still building your audience, and you don't have that many followers or subscribers out in the world, you should not try to fund a multi-volume, leather bound omnibus.

Do a real, honest assessment of who's in your crowd, how to find them, what percentage of them are likely to support what you're doing —

and then find a project that feels realistic based on those numbers. That's really the biggest thing, sort of conceptually.

As far as tips for a project page, again, back campaigns, look at what other people are doing.

A project page can be either as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. You definitely want, obviously, to talk about the book, what is in it. Do a trope card, if you want. We're seeing those all over the site.

Just what kind of book it is, and like specs. Also, page count, trim size, cover design. Obviously, if you're doing a special edition, exactly what sorts of bells and whistles, with a prototype, if you can.

Then you can be really expansive from there. What are your inspirations? Who are your collaborators? What brought you to this work? What are some of the things that make you excited about your writing practice? Your timeline, your budget. What made you choose these rewards and how are you going to produce them?

All those sorts of things will make backers feel both more trusting that you will do the things that you're promising, and just more excited to be part of your journey.

Joanna: So just to be clear with what you said at the beginning. So somebody, they're a new writer—and I've seen several authors fail this way—they want to do some gorgeous book, and they put a level of $25,000 is what they want, but they don't necessarily have an email list or anything.

When I saw this particular person I'm thinking of, I saw that and was like, there's no way that's going to fund. So what is the problem with people that are kind of expecting Kickstarter to bring people? So maybe just talk about—

What's the split between what Kickstarter does with discovery and then what the author has to bring?

Oriana: Yes, absolutely. So we track backer behavior, obviously, all across the site and category by category.

In your Creator dashboard, if you run a campaign, you will see a breakdown of what percentage of backers are coming through your efforts and who are coming through the Kickstarter ecosystem.

In publishing, an average is about 30% are coming through Kickstarter. That can be like 20% to maybe 40%, depending on how much exposure your project winds up getting. So that's not nothing.

Being on Kickstarter will help you grow your audience, but it's definitely not everything. You really do need to bring your people first.

Our algorithm works on attention.

So any project that's getting clicks, getting backings, getting comments, our algorithm says, “Oh, people want to look at this. We will expose it to more and more people.” That means raising it up in search results, slotting it into various of the macros and carousels around the site.

Our recommendation engine powers recommended projects on the top of campaigns, at the bottom of emails. We are doing a lot to make sure that projects are being surfaced to folks who want to see them.

We actually are doing some significant backer-focused work this year on improving our search results, improving our recommendation engine. We're really working to make sure that people are finding the projects that they are going to be excited by.

Joanna: So, I mean, and this is something I think is quite different, it is very visual. The story page, the sales page. There's a main visual.

There's kind of two fields, the header field, and then a very small description field and then the image. That's what's really surfaced around Kickstarter, isn't it?

Any tips for the image and those text boxes for SEO purposes?

Oriana: Yes, totally. So SEO is important, but it is not as crucial. We can always tell when people are coming to us from KU because rather than the title of the book, their project subject says, “Reverse harem, lesbians on Mars, with an enemies to lover subplot.” You know, you don't have to do that on Kickstarter.

Keywords are important, but it's not the same. It's much more about, what is this project? Who is it for? So I would, of course, absolutely maximize your title and your subtitle to get as much information as possible.

Then exactly as you said, I mean, imagine somebody looking at your project on their phone. They're going to see the title, subtitle, the project image, maybe one sentence. That's also what they're going to see in a tweet, in a search result, in a newsletter thumbnail.

So those elements are really, really important, and you want with just those four items to sort of bring everybody in and get them excited to click through.

For the project image, we recommend one full bleed image. Maybe it's your cover, your cover image, or like one gorgeous illustration from the book.

Or if you've got a series, maybe a stack of books.

We don't recommend larding up that image with a whole lot of text. Remember it's going to show up next to your title, the title of your project.

So if the title of your project is the title of your book, and the title of your book is also written on the book cover, you don't also need a text bubble that says the book title on top of that project image.

Sometimes people try to cram a whole lot of very salesy text onto that image. It not only like makes the image pop less and makes it less interesting, it also is very difficult to read when that shows up thumbnail sized on a search page or a social post.

So concentrate on making like a bright, exciting image that isn't too overloaded with many tiny elements.

Joanna: And then the video. I wanted to ask about this because on Kickstarter it says you really should do a video. So why is that?

Any tips on the sales video?

Oriana: We definitely do see a preference for videos. It's, again, probably the tiktokization and the pivot to video all around the internet. Kickstarter is on the internet. It's a visual medium. People like videos these days.

That said, if the video is the main stumbling block keeping you off the platform, I am here to tell you that you don't have to do one. Plenty of projects fund extremely well without having a video. So if that's the calculation that you're making, just have beautiful imagery and you'll be fine.

That said, if you are going to do a video, it needs to be short, bright and compelling. Especially on the publishing side, we see about 50% of potential backers stop watching after one minute, and everybody else is gone after the second minute.

So you don't need to undertake some massive Hollywood production style situation that's going to cost you tons of time and money. Much better to do just kind of like a direct to camera. It is nice to show your face if you feel comfortable doing so.

Just a teaser. Talk a little bit about who you are, what you're doing, ask for people's support, and say that you hope they click in and read through the whole rest of your story.

Joanna: So, and this is a tough one, because I've done different kinds of videos, now coming up for my fifth campaign.

For the fiction, I did do one for Blood Vintage which is like a book trailer. So it goes straight into the sort of thriller book trailer, and then I put on my face afterwards, and I'm telling them about the book.

On my nonfiction ones, I've really just done, sort of as you said, a face to camera.

Is there any data on what kind of video people prefer? For fiction, is a book trailer better than a direct to camera, or vice versa?

Oriana: That's not the kind of data that we do or possibly even could collect. I think it's more a question of knowing your audience, knowing what they want, and what is going to fit the best. I mean, I think that's really smart that you've done it slightly differently for your fiction versus nonfiction.

Whatever you think is going to be the best representation of this particular work, that's what you should go with.

Joanna: I guess I think about it from my perspective as a backer. With fiction—and it's terrible to say, but it's true—I often don't care so much about the author, I want the story.

I've bought a ton of fiction off Kickstarter without knowing the author, whereas I feel like the nonfiction I've bought, I've actually known the author, so I'm more interested in the author. So that's just, I guess, my personal behavior.

Oriana: Sure, but your personal behavior is probably fairly telling about a broader book buying population. So I think that makes a lot of sense.

Joanna: It's good to know though. I mean, for people listening, look, there's no structure for it. In fact, the very first video I did, I went to Russell Nohelty's bestselling page and I deconstructed his video. I literally wrote it down, and then I followed his script with my stuff.

Oriana: That's a great way to do it.

Joanna: I think to find someone who's successful and model them, I think that's always a good trick.

Oriana: Yes, absolutely.

Joanna: Okay, so let's just talk about some of the other aspects. So the pre-launch page, this is something that seems to be very important.

Talk about the pre-launch page.

Oriana: Absolutely. It's a new feature. We've released it—gosh, what is time—last year or the year before. It has really changed the way that people are doing the kind of period before they launch.

[Check out my pre-launch page at JFPenn.com/deathvalley — which will become the main sales page on launch.]

So a pre-launch page, it's a cover page. It lives at the same URL where your campaign will ultimately go. It's simplified, and it is designed to generate followers.

So anybody who follows the pre-launch page is going to get a system email from Kickstarter as soon as you launch. We see a very high conversion over the life of the project, from pre-launch followers to project backers, sometimes 40 or 50%. Most of them tend to do it right away.

The work that you do to promote that pre-launch page and get your follower count up is going to pay off very handsomely once you launch.

It really helps you have a strong first day, which is excellent for morale, excellent for messaging, good for the overall percentage chance of success on the project.

So, as I said, this is still new-ish. We don't have a huge amount of data about it, but I recommend a pre-launch period of at least two weeks. We've seen some people do it for weeks, months, even in a few cases, over a year.

I think in the best case, that pre-launch period is sort of a crescendo into the burst of launch. So if you urge someone to get excited and follow this page, which they do, and then six months later they get an email that the campaign is live now, I think you've really diluted the excitement that they had when they first came on board.

Everyone should do what works for them and their timeline and their project, but definitely don't skip that as a step.

Spend some time promoting that pre-launch page, getting up your follower count. It will really, really, really help once you go live.

Joanna: For people listening, my pre-launch page is at JFPenn.com/DeathValley. Depending on when people are listening, it might well be live, or it might be in the future.

So when I did my first campaign, obviously you don't know when you first start all the things you kind of have to do. There's obviously KYC, know your customer, that Kickstarter has to do. So if people are going to set up their pre-launch page, how long will it take and—

What do people need to set up so that Kickstarter knows they can be approved?

Oriana: So there's two different approvals.

The KYC stuff is done by Stripe, our payment processor. I would give yourself lots of extra time for these approvals. It usually only takes a day or two. Sometimes you get an automatic approval, but don't leave that to the very end.

Make sure you get your bank details, your ID, all of that information up and sent over to Stripe well before you need to, well before it comes to crunch time.

As far as the Kickstarter approval process, that too can be automatic or it can take up to a few days. We do want, especially for first time authors or first time creators, the trust and safety team who reviews the projects wants to see pretty much a final draft when they're approving it.

You can't put up your pre-launch page until the project is approved. For serial creators in good standing, we are making some allowances where people can get that pre-launch page up before the approval process.

Especially when you're starting out on the platform, it's good practice to like have your campaign more or less finalized, so that the reviewers can see everything that you'll be doing. Then you can get that pre-launch page up at that point.

Joanna: Yes, because — 

When you put up the rewards and things, you have to have costed it all out.

You have to say, like, how much people need to pledge, and you need to know things like your shipping details. So let's get a bit more into those finances.

Earlier, you mentioned that adding merch can add a lot of money and lot of cost to a campaign. Of course, if you don't know how much it's going to cost even just to print your book, say, with foil or sprayed edges, or whatever, you can't cost it out either.

What are some of the issues that people find with finances around Kickstarter?

Oriana: I cannot stress enough the importance of doing a full, real, detailed budget. That doesn't mean vaguely guessing how much you think it might cost to print a book. Really, actually get samples, figure out all of your processes.

Budget, not just for print production, but for bubble wrap and tape, for pens and stickers. For all of the things that you are going to be producing in your rewards and also budget contingency plans.

Think about all the things that might go wrong.

Make sure you're doing a really, really detailed job of understanding all of your costs. It's good that you mentioned Russell before. There's a publishing creator tips page, that's kickstarter.com/creators/publishing.

There's a whole lot of resources there for all kinds of different projects and different elements of the crowdfunding process. One piece is a budgeting article by Russell. It's got a worksheet in it and details all of these things that we're talking about. So I absolutely recommend using that as a guide when you're setting out your budget.

One thing about it that I love is that he also says, “Include a little bit of money to do a nice thing for yourself.” For him, he gets a tattoo of one of his characters after every successful campaign.

So maybe for you, that's getting a manicure or a massage or a nice dinner or a new book, but do do something sweet for yourself. That's a nice way to give yourself a reward at the end of what can be a pretty intense process.

Joanna: Yes, it is intense. It's funny because I was scared about it before I pressed that button on the first time, but I feel like what I love about the Kickstarter thing is that it's a real launch period.

I feel like one of the most tiring things for authors is the constant need to do marketing, whereas with Kickstarter campaign, you can be like, okay, I'm going to really push hard for this couple of weeks, or a few weeks before that. Push hard, do all my marketing, and then I can go into fulfillment, and I can ease off a bit.

I feel like this is more surge marketing, isn't it?

Oriana: Yes. I think that's an excellent way to describe it, for sure.

That's definitely the Kickstarter proposition. You know, look, I will be screaming from the rooftops about this project for 30 days, and then I will stop talking about it.

Joanna: Yes, and you can't have it. Well, there won't be a thing anymore.

Oriana: Exactly, exactly.

Joanna: Well, then on that, I guess once we have finished, the campaign closes, and Kickstarter collects the money, and we get the money in a couple of weeks’ time.

We also have to fulfill the stuff, which is, all the shipping and all of that. One thing that I've seen people be confused about is around taxes.

So any clarification on who pays the tax?

Oriana: So I am actually not allowed to give tax advice, as I am absolutely not an accountant. I would say you should certainly talk to your accountant about what you're doing on Kickstarter and how you should report that and what that's all going to mean.

This is a reasonable point to note that, as we are recording this on February 13th, yesterday, Kickstarter announced a whole bunch of new features that we have been working on for a long time, and we are in the process of rolling out. Including a lot of post campaign tools that we've never had before.

We're doing an internal pledge management system. That is something that people have been asking us for probably over a decade. There are many elements to that, but one thing that we are going to be doing in the future is we're going to be helping everybody with tax and VAT collection.

So that's something that's coming soon, and we're going to do our best to help demystify a massively complicated process.

Joanna: It is. Well, then I'll say, from my perspective, I know what taxes I have to pay, and I make sure I pay them after I get the money from Kickstarter. So as far as I'm concerned —

Paying tax is my responsibility as the creator.

What else then is coming? Or things that perhaps authors aren't using enough yet?

Oriana: Well, so last year, we released late pledges. This means, as like it says on the tin, once the campaign is closed, you can still collect additional backing. There's some caveats with that. We don't want to undermine that sort of now or never, all or nothing, do or die situation.

So our recommendations for late pledges, they're most effective in two to seven days after the campaign has closed. The final 48 hours of a campaign are really strong. You know, that's when all of that FOMO really kicks in. So a lot of marketing happens, a lot of outreach, a lot of just like traffic.

So inevitably, no matter how hard you have been pushing this project, the day after your campaign closes, three people are going to email you and say, “Well, I didn't know you had a live campaign.” So late pledges are really for them to still be able to get on board, even though they missed all of the main part of the activity.

We also recommend you do not have all of your rewards available in late pledges, and those that you do, cost more. So again, you want to make sure that all of that talk you've been doing during the campaign of like, “This is your only chance to get this book, at this price, at this specificity,” has not been made into a lie by late pledges.

Then also with late pledges, they don't get to stay up forever. At some point you do say, now I am going to press, so I'm going to turn them off. So that's how late pledges are designed to work.

Some other really cool features that we've just announced, and again, as I said, we announced this yesterday. So I don't have a ton more information, although I should tell you where to go to find it. I mean, we've got pop ups and things all over the site about it.

Well, it's a slightly cumbersome URL, updates.kickstarter.com/kickstarters-2025-product-roadmap with some hyphens. I don't know if you have show notes.

Joanna: I'll put a link in the show notes.

Oriana: Excellent. That would be great. That's where we lay out the sort of overview of all of the stuff that we're working on this year.

Some things that I will just call out, we are in beta currently for a payment plan. It's called Pledge Over Time. That allows backers for rewards above a certain dollar amount, I think it's $125, to make their pledge in four payments, rather than all at once.

We are working on secret rewards, which, this is also still in beta. Creators can get a direct link to a reward that's not listed in the campaign and send that to specific groups of backers.

So we have a lot more features planned for this year. We're trying to make things that people have been asking for. This also means, if there's a feature that you want Kickstarter to have that we currently don't, write into our support team and tell them.

A lot of the things that we have developed over the years have come directly from so many people asking for it that we realized we just had to do it. So please tell us what you want, and maybe it'll come to life.

Joanna: Brilliant.

Where can people find Kickstarter for Publishing and any other help online?

Oriana: Yes, kickstarter.com/publishing is where all of the publishing projects are. I mentioned that creator tips page, kickstarter.com/creators/publishing. We are all over the socials. We are everywhere that you can find us.

Oh, another thing we also just rolled out is a whole new learning lab curriculum, which is a video series of every element of your Kickstarter project.

It is probably geared a bit more toward like larger sort of design and tech and gadget and games creators, but I'm sure that there are really, really relevant tips for publishers and publishing folks in there as well.

We're trying to give as much help as possible. We want everybody to succeed. Of course, a rising tide lifts all boats, which is foundational to the Kickstarter ethos.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Oriana. That was great.

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