Thursday, June 14, 2012

Kickstarter Projects: Good or Bad Idea?

I saw today in my newsfeed an article saying that a whopping 40% of Kickstarter projects don't meet their funding goals. And I thought...actually, that's pretty fantastic. So, you're telling me that 60% of projects on Kickstarter do get funded?

Well, not quite, as you can see in this infographic from AppsBlogger:


BUT DO YOU SEE ALL THAT BLUE???

For those of you who don't know (scorn redacted), Kickstarter is a crowdsourcing network where ingenious people like Chuck Wendig post ideas for projects and propose a funding goal and dictate levels of monetary giving with perks attached. And it works a lot of the time. 

Is this a new chapter to the self-publishing story? Even traditional publishing story, a la Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, which was Kickstarter funded? It's pretty cool, in any event.

Posted by Meredith Barnes at 11:16 AM

7 comments:

  1. Greg MarcusJune 14, 2012 at 11:45 AM

    I love Kickstarter, and was really disappointed that they said my project did not meet their criteria. I asked them to tell me why, and they wouldn't say. I'm writing a non-fiction book as a serial on my blog, and have a small project to raise money for graphics and other stuff to help convert to an e-book.

    Greg Marcus, author of "Busting Your Corporate Idol: How To Reconnect With Values & Regain Control Of Your Life" Http://idolbuster.com/book

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    1. Meredith BarnesJune 14, 2012 at 12:09 PM

      It may be because, once you serialize something on your blog, it's technically already published. And the ancillaries (graphics, etc.) are considered components of the published book and therefore a "fund my life" idea, which they prohibit, just as they would for a photographer who was trying to fund a new camera.

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  2. UnknownJune 14, 2012 at 11:46 AM

    I am a HUGE fan of kickstarter. So much so that I had to still my hand at blogging/tweeting all of the awesome. As for books, I can see how this would be an amazing opportunity for nonfiction research and documentaries, maybe even some graphic novels, but I can't get my head around the potential for self-pubbed fiction in print or ebook.

    If you have some thoughts, I think there's a lot of potential for awesome here. I'd even fund a kickstarter project of a book on publishing books through kickstarter!

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    1. Meredith BarnesJune 14, 2012 at 12:13 PM

      There is a lot of opportunity for awesome! But just be sure that you're funding a complete project, not components. That's the tricky part. For instance, I'm not sure they'd fund research as much as they'd fund the finished product of that research (and the costs of research are built into the goal #). It's subtle!

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  3. UnknownJune 14, 2012 at 2:53 PM

    Hey Meredith, have you heard of Pubslush? It's the Kickstarter for authors. Mashable wrote about them here. http://mashable.com/2012/05/31/pubslush-video/

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  4. AnonymousJune 14, 2012 at 3:18 PM

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