Episode 056 - Crowdfunding for Authors with Joshua Essoe
December 8, 2020
Joshua Essoe discusses CROWDFUNDING FOR AUTHORS. He shares what led him to choose crowdfunding—and specifically Kickstarter—as his approach for funding his book, ESSOE’S GUIDES TO WRITING ACTION SEQUENCES AND SEX SCENES, what went according to plan, and what was a surprise. He also describes what he gained from the experience, including confirmation that being a writer doesn’t have to be the solo sport it sometimes feels like.
Joshua Essoe is a full-time freelance editor who has edited for New York Times and USA Today bestsellers, and many top-notch independents and award-winners. He was lead editor at URBAN FANTASY MAGAZINE from 2014-2015. From 2012-2015 he recorded the weekly writing podcast HIDE AND CREATE. You can find Joshua teaching about editing, pitches, and back-cover copy every year at the Superstars Writing Seminar in Colorado. Joshua is a writer himself and was a 2014 finalist in the Writers of the Future contest. He just completed his Kickstarter release for the first in a five-book series, each covering two subjects of the most-common issues he sees in fiction writing.
"Why did I decide to do Kickstarter? I wanted to create buzz about my book. I wanted to spread the word about my book." --Joshua Essoe
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast, today my guest is Joshua Essoe. Hey, Joshua, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Joshua: Hey, Matty. I'm doing pretty well. Thanks for asking.
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
Joshua Essoe is a full-time freelance editor who has edited for New York Times and USA Today bestsellers, and many top-notch independents and award-winners. He was lead editor at URBAN FANTASY MAGAZINE from 2014-2015. From 2012-2015 he recorded the weekly writing podcast HIDE AND CREATE. You can find Joshua teaching about editing, pitches, and back-cover copy every year at the Superstars Writing Seminar in Colorado.
Joshua is a writer himself and was a 2014 finalist in the Writers of the Future contest. He just completed his Kickstarter release for the first in a five-book series, each covering two subjects of the most-common issues he sees in fiction writing. And I have my copy of it right here. ESSOE’S GUIDES TO WRITING ACTION SEQUENCES AND SEX SCENES.
[00:01:09] Joshua: One book, flip it around.
[00:01:11] Matty: Yeah. We're going to be talking about that.
[00:01:14] So the Kickstarter campaign that Joshua used for that book is what we're going to be talking about today. The topic is crowdfunding for authors. But before we dive into that, Joshua, just tell us a little bit about ESSOE'S GUIDES TO WRITING SEX SCENES AND ACTION SEQUENCES. ...
[00:00:06] Joshua: Hey, Matty. I'm doing pretty well. Thanks for asking.
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
Joshua Essoe is a full-time freelance editor who has edited for New York Times and USA Today bestsellers, and many top-notch independents and award-winners. He was lead editor at URBAN FANTASY MAGAZINE from 2014-2015. From 2012-2015 he recorded the weekly writing podcast HIDE AND CREATE. You can find Joshua teaching about editing, pitches, and back-cover copy every year at the Superstars Writing Seminar in Colorado.
Joshua is a writer himself and was a 2014 finalist in the Writers of the Future contest. He just completed his Kickstarter release for the first in a five-book series, each covering two subjects of the most-common issues he sees in fiction writing. And I have my copy of it right here. ESSOE’S GUIDES TO WRITING ACTION SEQUENCES AND SEX SCENES.
[00:01:09] Joshua: One book, flip it around.
[00:01:11] Matty: Yeah. We're going to be talking about that.
[00:01:14] So the Kickstarter campaign that Joshua used for that book is what we're going to be talking about today. The topic is crowdfunding for authors. But before we dive into that, Joshua, just tell us a little bit about ESSOE'S GUIDES TO WRITING SEX SCENES AND ACTION SEQUENCES. ...
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[00:01:32] Joshua: Well, actually, it's a project that has been on my mind for a really long time. I started thinking about it, I think in 2013, the second year I lived down in Los Angeles, my wife and I relocated there from the greater Bay Area when she went to grad school. And it was something that started brewing because I wanted to start addressing a lot of the stuff that I saw in the manuscripts that I was editing. I wanted to give people sort of a jumpstart when they start looking for an editor so that they could look through these things and find the big content issues that they might be able to fix themselves before it comes to me.
[00:02:09] It literally started out of this series that I do on Facebook called Pro Tips. So I'll just every so often, unscheduled, just put out a pro tip. And sometimes there'll be really long. Sometimes they're just a sentence or two. And I thought maybe I could just pull those together and put them in a book and throw it out there.
[00:02:26] It's really evolved well past that, that sort of makeshift idea, into a series of books that dealt with all of the big things that I saw, the most pressing issues, the most difficult issues that I saw writers struggling with.
[00:02:40] And the main one has always been action scenes. Action scenes are very difficult for writers to pull off because you have to balance this weird conglomeration of what's interesting to the reader, not just interesting to you. What's actually compelling about an action scene is how drawn you are to the characters and how much you care about what they're doing, what their goals are and what they lose if they fail. And I saw a lot of overwriting in action sequences, and a lot of underwriting in action sequences, mostly having to do with blocking and setting.
[00:03:18] Like I ran through action scenes where I had no idea where the characters were at any given point. If suddenly they're attacking somebody who I thought was on the other side of the battlefield. I was like, Wait a minute, how did they get there? Or they have items disappearing from their body or appearing where they'd left them on the table that morning or something like that. A lot of little inconsistencies in that realm.
[00:03:41] But yeah, the action sequences in manuscripts is guaranteed going to be the place I'm going to spend my most time editing. They usually need a lot of individual line by line stuff. And like I said before, it's all about character. And if that character is not there yet, that's why you don't want to start a book or a new character with an action scene is because we don't care yet, but most people will skip over that stuff. So weird.
[00:04:09] I have been tempted at times to skip over action scenes, but I've found that a lot of readers, my wife included, will get to an action scene, read the first couple of paragraphs -- blah, blah, blah -- flip pages, get past it. Okay, good. What happened? Got it. Okay. Continue.
[00:04:26] Matty: So you're fixing it so that she'll read through it all, right? That's the goal. She'll stick with it.
[00:04:32] Joshua: I want her to read my action scenes when I write my own stories. So I got to do it well.
[00:04:37] Matty: So when you had this glimmer in your eye about you were just going to take your pro tips and you were going to put them into a book, and then you ended up with the first of a series, at what point in that process did the idea of crowdfunding occur to you and why?
[00:04:52] Joshua: I think it occurred to me really early on in the process after I started to take the project seriously, once I started to view it as an actual serious series of books, where I had important things to say, I started thinking very seriously about how I was going to let people know that it was a thing. And I've long enjoyed Kickstarter. I've been a backer of dozens and dozens of projects on Kickstarter, including a whole bunch of books. Some of my clients have launched their books on Kickstarter to success. So I was very interested in pursuing that.
[00:05:30] I wanted to have a Kickstarter. I wanted to experience what that was like, and I thought that it would be a great way to raise the money for the book. Obviously, you spend a year, writing your book. And none of that is paid unless you're under contract. If you're an indy, then it's like, I hope this does something when I release it. So this was a way not only to try and get a little bit of money for the time that I spent writing the book, but mostly to get the money to actually make physical copies of the book and to pay designers and to pay the ebook designers and cover, all of those really important things that your book has to have in order to be successful.
[00:06:14] And it worked. I managed to pull it off. I'm not getting paid very much for my time, but the book itself got paid for, all of the services, all of the stuff that I had to hire out for, all was successfully paid for.
[00:06:28] I think that both my accidental genius and my mistake was that I offered so many service rewards in the Kickstarter. So that ended up eating into a lot of what might have been pay for the actual writing. Why that was a good idea was because I was then able to be exposed to a whole bunch of people that I never would have been exposed to otherwise. So I got to work with them. I got to see their ideas. I got to chat with them. I mean, over the course of the Kickstarter month, of fulfillment anyways, which I set aside October in my schedule to do all the Kickstarter reward fulfillment -- I started a little early in September, but don't tell anyone -- I was able to talk to, I think, 55 people in different consultation calls. So I did 55 consultation calls in the span of a little bit over a month.
[00:07:16] And that was amazing talking to all of these writers about what they're passionate about, what they're writing right now, how we can work it out so that the story comes together, or get past what they're stuck on, or how they can find writing time, all kinds of different writing-related subjects.
[00:07:31] But back to your question about my goals. Why did I decide to Kickstarter? I wanted to create buzz about my book. I wanted to spread the word about my book, and because I'd been an editor for over a decade already, I had a platform already that I could speak to. I had a presence on Facebook -- still trying to figure it out that -- but I'm able to bring a lot of the people that I know from workshops and from teaching at seminars and stuff like that and say, Hey, if you thought that what I had to say was valuable, I've got this book coming out.
[00:08:02] And I'd say about 40% up to 50% of the people who backed the Kickstarter were people that I had contact with that I knew from some way -- workshop, seminar client, through Facebook. And then the whole other 60 to 50% were all people that I had never met. And that was the demographic I was hoping to reach, people who were looking for books on writing on Kickstarter or who were looking for how do I write action and Googled and found it or were pulled by their friends: This is a really cool book, a good editor. You need to look at what he's done. Those were the people that I was hoping to reach. And luckily, I had success with that and I was able to create the buzz and spread the word.
[00:08:45] Matty: It sounds like you went into it knowing right away that you wanted to do Kickstarter. It's not like you added up all the numbers, you realized that wasn't in the bank account, and you were casting about for other funding options. Am I understanding that correctly?
[00:08:59] Joshua: That is correct. No, I knew Kickstarter was probably going to be the best one. I could have gone to my family and be like, Hey family, how do you feel about funding my book? I could have just dipped into our savings or whatever. I'm glad I didn't have to do that -- you know, pull out investments that we're supposed to be saving for our retirement. But, yeah, I thought Kickstarter was a brilliant way to go. IndieGoGo was another good idea, but I primarily have an affinity for Kickstarter. I just like the platform a little bit better. I have backed, I don't know, 80 things or so on Kickstarter, so obviously I like what I find on Kickstarter and I wanted to be a part of that.
[00:09:39] Matty: You had mentioned something that I wanted to delve into sort of for selfish reasons, and that is that with the Kickstarter campaign, the few that I've been involved in myself, you're purchasing a product ahead of time, let's say -- I'm going to ask you to give a better description of it than this -- but then normally the person who's running the Kickstarter is offering incentives for you to do that. And that you're having to balance the value of the attraction you're going to have with the incentives against the time it takes to fulfill them. So can you talk a little bit more about what you were thinking when you originally decided on those incentives and then how it turned out?
[00:10:18] Joshua: Sure. First, I had to figure out what did I have to offer, besides the book. Like if I was going to add extra incentives and add extra tiers that backers could support, I had to figure out a way that I would be able to give them some sort of quality product in exchange for a higher dollar ask.
[00:10:35] And for me, I thought of like little postcards with my cats on them because one of my cats, a lot of people know him as Super Helpful Editing Cat because I've been posting about him for years. He likes to come and sit on me or on my keyboard or climb my arm as I'm trying to work. And so I have created a little following for him. He's even spawned fan art.
[00:10:59] Matty: That's cool.
[00:11:00] Joshua: Yeah. So I thought about, I can make some really cool, cartoony, stylized postcards with Super Helpful Editing Cat on it. And I thought about that for a little bit. And the idea was somewhat attractive. I would have to get into yet another production level and I didn't want to go there. So I thought, what do I have that I could offer? Well, I have skills, I have my editing and I'm good at that. What can I do in those terms? Phone calls, I love consultation calls. They're super fun. I pretty much enjoy every single consultation that I'm on. If I could do 70% consultation and then 30% editing, I probably would jump at that. It's just really great to be in real time, talking to an author about their work and the problems and how to make it better or how to get past a stumbling block, all those things. It's just, it's so much fun.
[00:11:52] And the other tiers had varying degrees of editing services. Like I would edit their first five pages, or I would edit back cover copy for them, or work on a pitch with them. Some people want to do customize a little bit. So if they backed something that was equivalent, like their back-cover copy, and they wanted me to work on their query letter instead, I'd be like, sure.
[00:12:13] And then there was the big one, which was three hours of editing, included in the tier. So yeah, I solved that problem by offering myself and my time.
[00:12:23] Matty: And did you have any control over how many people, for example, took advantage of the three-hour consult, or if thousands of people had taken advantage of it, would you just be fulfilling premium incentives for the rest of your career?
[00:12:38] Joshua: I started running into that problem. A couple of days into the Kickstarter -- I was blessed enough that the Kickstarter funded completely in under six hours -- and I started seeing the larger tiers with the service rewards start going up and up and up. And I was like, Uh oh, wait a minute. I didn't think this through. So I started limiting those awards. Kickstarter allows you to do that. You can even reword or rephrase or change completely the reward levels as long as nobody's back to it yet. After somebody backs it, it becomes locked, you can't change it anymore.
[00:13:12] That's why, out of my, I think I had six reward tiers, three of them were formatted perfectly, and three of them got a little wonky because after it launched, I looked at it. I saw, wait a minute, why did it do that? I tried to go back in, but somebody had already pledged on the level so I can't fix it.
[00:13:26] But I started seeing the reward tiers with three hours of editing and first five pages start going up and up and up. And I was like, Wait a minute, how much of these can I actually do? Do I have time to do all of these things? So Kickstarter allows you to go in and limit the amount of reward available, and you can do that throughout the entire campaign. You can change it if you want. If you go in at 10 and you go, oh, I was wrong about that, let's do 20, you can still do that, too.
[00:13:50] So I went in and I made sure that they all started getting limited. I should have caught it a little bit earlier. I had a good friend, Martin Shoemaker, who was looking out for me and he instant messaged me on Facebook one night and he said, You're giving away a lot of time here, you might want to think about that. Can you afford all that? And I was like, Oh man, that's a good question. So that night I limited things to 10, 15. I think one of them is up at 25 because that one was just really popular. Yeah, it's really important to be able to limit rewards that it would kill you to have to do 300 of them. If I had 50 people sign up for the three hours, I would be doing that for the next couple of months. I wouldn't be able to do my regular scheduled work.
[00:14:33] Matty: I think that the other question, and this is more applicable to me, this is the selfish part because I'm thinking about how this applies to Patreon, which I use for the podcast, and with Patreon, as I think with Kickstarter, you're encouraged to create different tiers of membership and the rewards get more special the more people pledge. And I ended up just having one basic tier for The Indy Author Podcast patronage, because the idea of trying to administer all the tiers was scary sounding to me. And it's also, I guess, a little different, because this would be an ongoing thing as opposed to a Kickstarter which is one event that you're planning these for.
[00:15:17] But that the question I keep coming back to is I feel as if with Patreon, and maybe also with Kickstarter, a lot of people pledge not because they're really intent on getting the book, they pledge because they want to support a creator. And so you're weighing who do you have to incent to participate with a thing or a time or a service or whatever it is, and how many people are just going to pledge because they like your work. They know you. They've heard of you. They want to support this creative endeavor.
[00:15:47] And I would imagine that's tied into those percentages you were giving about how many people you knew and how many people you didn't know. Did you experience surprises in terms of that, and how much you felt that the incentives were actually the deciding factor for people throwing their money behind the Kickstarter?
[00:16:07] Joshua: Yeah, that's a great question. I was very pleasantly surprised that so many people I had never heard of, never met, actually came to the Kickstarter, and back then, that was awesome. I was hoping for that. And there's really no way to know how getting the word out there, asking people to spread it, how that is going to pan out. Luckily for mine, it panned out great. And it was doing so well that for most of the campaign, it was ranked between, if I remember correctly, first or second and ninth best-selling non-fiction book on Kickstarter for almost the duration of the campaign.
[00:16:46] So because of that, people looking for nonfiction books, when they scroll to that category in Kickstarter, they would see my book there. And I think that's how a lot of people found it that I didn't know about, that I hadn't met previously.
[00:17:00] Also Kickstarter sends out emails, it's like Amazon Also Boughts. So at the bottom of your Kickstarter updates of any campaign that you have backed, you'll see a number of campaigns that are also promoted by Kickstarter that are like the one that you backed in case you might want to back that one too. So I saw in my statistics that I got a bunch of backers that way, too.
[00:17:21] Matty: I'm struggling with how much do I have to offer to incent people to patronize the podcast in the same way that I imagine you were thinking through how much do I have to offer to incent people to support the Kickstarter? And if you learned anything in the course of it, that made you think, Oh, if I did this again, I would offer more or I would offer less or make changes to your strategy …
[00:17:42] Joshua: I found that most of the people that I didn't know, bought in at the tiers that didn't offer a service award. Almost all of them. There was a very small percent percentage who went into the service rewards. People who knew me, who knew my work or had attended a workshop or something that I'd taught, they were the ones who, for the most part, I'd say like 90, 95%, were the ones who'd backed all the reward tiers.
[00:18:10] Matty: Oh, interesting. That's opposite of what I would have expected.
[00:18:14] Joshua: I had no expectations on that. I was very curious to see how it was going to pan out. I didn't know. I think it's because a lot of people, they saw this book they could get for I think it was $3 or $4 if you just want the basic digital copy and that's it. Why did they want to pay $180 for what they probably just viewed as a single book?
[00:18:36] People who are a little bit more serious about their writing careers and are in the midst of their writing careers or at the beginning of the writing careers probably understood the value of the three hours of editing and the book and a consultation call and a drawing from James Owen who's the illustrator and the designer of the book for $180. That was such a good deal. I had so many people go, Are you sure that you're putting the right prices on these things? I was like, Yes, let's do it.
[00:19:05] But, yeah, it was mostly people who understood my work in the first place who wanted to get the higher amounts, but I needed those higher amounts -- well, actually, it would've funded regardless of them -- but it funded so well, around 300% funded, because I had those people who knew who I was, and they were willing to take the gamble that I could also write a good book on writing.
[00:19:32] Matty: So I would have thought before I heard how those percentages worked out that it sounded as if your goal was that you wanted to get a book out there and you wanted to fund it, but you could also equally, and perhaps this evolved over time, say, I really want to expand my editing business and so I'm going to offer something that is going to have as an incentive, a sample edit, on the theory that let's say a hundred people fund it and get the sample edit and some percentage of those are really going to like the experience and go to want to continue. Did that ever become an actual explicit goal for you as you went through this -- your book as a business card?
[00:20:14] Joshua: Yeah, no, it didn't. And perhaps I was naive about that, but honestly, I really wanted to create a book that would help people. And that was pretty much the only thing that I was thinking about. The fact that it also ended up exposing me to people that I had never met before and therefore potentially bringing in new business was a happy byproduct.
[00:20:37] I didn't even realize it until I was actually in the Kickstarter. And I was like, Oh, this is could actually help business. Business was going and has been going very well, so it wasn't the purpose of the book. It was just like I said, happenstance, and then I suddenly realized, Oh, duh, I'll probably get new clients out of this. That's really cool. And it did happen that way. but no, that wasn't, it wasn't a goal of the book at all. Probably should have been. But, no, it was simply because I have a passion for instructing. I love it. I wanted to write this book. I wanted to help writers deal with and tackle subjects that I see them struggling with so much so that, when they come to me and they had their manuscript and were ready to start editing. It's easier on me. My job is easier now.
[00:21:28] Matty: The episode before yours is going to be Michael La Ronn talking about how much it costs to independently publish a book. So if someone gets to the end of Michael's episode and here's what the number is going to be and says, Oh man, I don't have that much money in the bank, I wonder how I could come up with it, and they happen to be saying that within your hearing, and if this person had no experience with Kickstarter before, is Kickstarter something you'd recommend in that scenario?
[00:21:57] Joshua: Potentially. Here's the thing. The reason that my book was able to overfund by around 300% was because I had a platform going in. If that writer has a platform already, regardless of what it is, and they can translate that platform over to Kickstarter and over to that book, then yes, absolutely, I would wholeheartedly recommend Kickstarter or other social funding site.
[00:22:23] If they don't, then they need to work on that first. I felt so bad for a lot of the books that I was doing research on when I was devising my campaign and figuring out how to order it and actually physically present it on a platform. I saw so many books that were just falling flat and I could tell that the person really put their heart and soul into it. I saw a lot of self-help and a lot of spirituality books, and only a very, very few were doing well. Most of them were just falling on their faces.
[00:22:58] And I looked at those as examples of what I was not going to do. And I don't want that to happen to anybody else who's watching this or listening to this because it is a gamble and it's just like everything else in publishing. There are a lot of nos. After you spent a tremendous amount of time, not only creating a product, but by creating the campaign -- just creating the campaign is an enormous time sink.
[00:23:25] Matty: How much time do you think you spent on the campaign?
[00:23:29] Joshua: I thought it would be a lot easier. So because this is my first one, despite being around other people who've been doing it successfully, I thought that you throw up the campaign page, no problem, you write it out, done, throw it in, cool. That took me three hours, something like that. No, no, no. I had spent a number of hours sporadically over like a month and a half. And it got down to a couple of weeks before I was going to launch. I was like, okay, let's get real serious about this campaign stuff. Let's get it all written down. I had to work straight a whole week, going until five, six o'clock in the morning, every single day to get that thing completed before I was ready to launch, because I had a launch date and I needed to hit the launch date because I'd had interviews that said, this is when it's launching.
[00:24:12] There's not room for smudging it. So yeah, creating the actual campaign -- Kickstarter is a platform, the tools they give you are a lot more limited than you might think. In fact, that was some of my feedback to them when they sent me the survey is I really wish that there were a lot more tools for me to format, for me to create upon. Because if you want to have images, are you looking at Kickstarter and you see all these campaigns with beautiful images, they've created all of those themselves. They had to create JPEGs or other image files and upload them. And the image file is what has all of the information about what the campaign is, the pictures and the words saying, If you pledge this month, you get these extra 10 soldiers, whatever it is. Kickstarter has no real way to implement that right now.
[00:24:58] And I was shocked by this, like all the little banners for the headings of different sections in my Kickstarter campaign, I had to create all of those at the drop of the hat, spur of the moment because I didn't realize that I couldn't just create them in the Kickstarter platform.
[00:25:12] So that's something to keep in mind when you actually starting the creation of the physical page, I guess the digital page, it's going to take a lot of time to write all your copy, then figure out how it's all divided up, create the visuals for it. There's just a lot of work. Figure out where are you going to create your visuals? Are you going to have somebody to do it for you, or are you going to buy a program? Are you going to learn the program first? There's a lot of things to consider there.
[00:25:39] Matty: When you factor in the time that you could have been editing, let's say, if you took all those hours that you were putting into the Kickstarter and could you have funded the book if you had instead spent that time editing? I guess you didn't expect that going in, you figured three hours, and you figured out your, how much you make per hour, times three, and that's the amount, but it sounds like you liked it enough that you're going to continue. So all the time you put into it is paying you back beyond just I got to publish my book, right? What are those incentives that you're getting out of it to keep you coming back to it?
[00:26:18] Joshua: That's a good question, too. One of the things is that I knew that this book potentially wouldn't make money in the Kickstarter, and I was okay with that. There were two reasons for that. One of the reasons was I wanted to have a book I wanted to help writers. So I didn't really care if I ended up making profits. Second reason was because it's a first book in the series. If I lose money on the first book in the series, it doesn't matter because the first book basically is a billboard for the rest of the series.
[00:26:42] So basically, I'm investing in myself, I'm gambling on the fact that the whole series will pay off well, that the whole series will do really well. And that this first book is like, your first taste is free. And it isn't -- people have to pay for the book, obviously. It's just my cost going into it.
[00:27:00] So with all the reward tiers and things like that, would I have been able to purchase all of the services that I had to hire out for and create the book without doing Kickstarter? Well, I would have lost the production of the book, first of all. I've got a whole stack of books here in the house now that I'll be able to sell eventually. I don't know when or how fast, but I will be able to sell them eventually. And all of that will be profit. Like that eventual payment will be the payment that I get for all the time that I spent writing and researching and all that jazz, putting together the Kickstarter. Not only did I get the printed books from doing Kickstarter, but like I said earlier, I got exposure to all these authors and writers and hopefuls that I never would have been exposed to otherwise. I got a great launch platform for it. People see it, it's still linked around, people share it. So that allows me to get a lot more free ad space that I never would've had before now.
[00:28:00] Granted all the editing services, the last I calculated it out, I was making between $30 and $35 an hour, I have to check my notes, whereas I make $50 an hour, so it's obviously a pretty big discount off of my hourly rate. I have to do the new numbers now that the Kickstarter is actually over because that was projected, the $30 to $35. So I've been wanting to do that.
[00:28:23] But now I'm like, Oh, thank God the Kickstarter is over, I can go back to my regular editing schedule again. So since I stopped, I guess it's been 11 days here in November, I've been back on my normal schedule and I've just been like, all right, Kickstarter can chill for a little bit and I'll tabulate more numbers later. But, yeah, I'd be very interested to see where the final numbers land on how much I made per hour were I to do that in my normal schedule, now that everything is said and done. So yeah, you could potentially come even or lose money with the caveat that hopefully in addition to breaking even, you now have a stack of books that you can sell.
[00:29:04] Matty: Yup. And you took a very interesting approach, and this will only make sense to people who are watching on YouTube. I don't want to call it a flip book and that's not right, but if you turn it this way, is that what you're calling it? A flip book?
[00:29:16] Joshua: Yeah, call it a flip book. I mean, there's a flip book where you flip and you see the picture, right? It gives you basically a movie, because you're flipping pages so fast. But there's also that kind of flip book, which is, I don't know which one's older honestly, but yeah, the flip book where you turn it around and you have a whole new thing. That wasn't my idea. That was James Owen's idea. And I thought that was super cool because I've never seen that out there before. It was a new way to present this information.
[00:29:42] That was a couple of things that I had to consider. If I'm going to write a series about writing books, a series of writing books, how many of those are out there? There are thousands of these things out there. Why do I want to throw another thing onto that pile? Do I have anything interesting to say? I eventually came to the conclusion that, yes, I have something interesting to say. I haven't personally read a series of books that were written from the perspective of an editor who just edits all day every day and has been doing so for many, many years, and finding out what they saw most commonly going wrong with the work they were seeing. So that was one thing.
[00:30:20] And the second thing was, I hadn't seen a group of books put together where they just basically delved into two subjects or one subject at a time, where the whole thing is just this one thing, is one thing about this one aspect about writing. It wasn't like, this is how you first come up with your idea. Then this is how you outline it. And then how to structure your plot. Here's how you want to start your first pages. I've seen those kinds of things that take you step by step or deals with the overall, like how do you write a blockbuster novel, which is a super good book. So I wanted to delve very much into these very particular subjects.
[00:30:55] The next book coming out is going to be WORLD BUILDING and MOOD AND ATMOSPHERE. I've never seen a book specifically geared toward mood and atmosphere, and I'm pretty excited about it because that is going to be so cool. Creating mood and atmosphere in your world building, in your settings, elevates it. It makes it so much greater than it could have been without these things. It's like you take setting and you imbue it with emotion, you have atmosphere. So I'm really looking forward to writing that. I've started taking notes and that book of course will be the next one to hit Kickstarter. We'll see when that happens. I hope it's going to be within the next six months or so.
[00:31:33] Matty: What other changes are you going to do as you go forward with other Kickstarters based on your experience with the first one?
[00:31:39] Joshua: I'm not going to offer as many service rewards, that's for sure. October killed me, but I got it done, but I'm not going to do that again. I will offer some rewards, I would definitely offer consultations because, like I said, not only are those fun, but I get to be introduced to a lot of writers. And so that's definitely going to go up in the next Kickstarter. I'll probably do first pages as well. I'm not sure if I'm going to do the three-hour editing thing again.
[00:32:05] First pages is pretty fun, too. I can usually knock out five first pages in an hour and a half to two hours. And that's because I don't just edit the first five pages and call it quits because I want them to be able to take that work and get something out of it that they can bring forth into all their work following it. So it takes me a little bit extra. I write a little critique to go with it and everything. So I'll bring those back, probably 10 or 15 of them. Maybe I'll do five three-hours, if I do them at all. Consultation calls I'll probably cap somewhere more along the lines of 30, something like that.
[00:32:40] But the cool thing is that the next Kickstarter to add more tier levels is that I can add in the first book. So I'll have a second book and people who didn't get the first book will have the option to get the first book. So it relieves me of offering more service reward tiers, because they'll have more options.
[00:32:56] There is a debate on whether or not lots of options are good. And I think there is a threshold there. I think that between like two, three and six tiers of options is probably ideal. You don't want to go any more than that. Sometimes I back these Kickstarters where it's confusing to figure out what you're getting and what the difference between the tiers are.
[00:33:20] So if you're creating your own Kickstarter, make sure that your two levels are very easy to understand, and they're very easy to tell apart. Make sure that each one has a distinct purpose. And if it doesn't, kill it, get rid of it, not useful. It will only serve to confuse people. And then you'll wind up with the person who's been looking at your campaign page for 15 minutes and finally goes, It's too much. I can't figure it out. And they leave, or they hit the Remind Me button. And then two days before your campaign is going to close, they get an email from Kickstarter. They go, Oh yeah. No, that was too confusing. You've lost the momentum there. So keep your backer tiers succinct and keep them very clear and only have two or three.
[00:34:05] If that's all you need, don't struggle to come up with more stuff that you can add in, like a plushy or a poster. No one needs more posters, no one needs more post-it notes or pens. Everybody's got these things. So while it might be satisfying for you to have your stuff emblazoned on a jacket, like a rain jacket or something like that, no one's going to care.
[00:34:28] Matty: You risk alienating people, because I know that sometimes I get physical thank you's from organizations that I've contributed money to, and I want to say, I don't want part of the money I just gave you to be spent on a shopping bag. Just stop it.
[00:34:45] Or a mug. Of course, a plushy of the Super Helpful Editing Cat would be completely different.
[00:34:53] Joshua: I agree. I agree with you there. In fact, one of my authors, Jess Owen, she has a really awesome series, animal fantasy, and it's called SONG OF THE SUMMER KING, and one of her most popular -- well, maybe it wasn't the most popular -- reward tiers was the one with the stuffed animal of her main character. People went bananas for that. So if you have the right product, like here's this animal fantasy so it's perfect. One of those things that she ran out, she had to say we're on back order. it was crazy. My wife really wanted one. You know how long it took me? I'm her editor!
[00:35:28] Matty: She should have definitely bumped you to the top of the plushy list.
[00:35:31] Joshua: It was years!
[00:35:33] There is a place, there is a place for stuff like that. I was like, Nah, I'm not doing any of that. I like your word alienation because I do feel like it can start to feel a bit corporate, a bit markety, you know? And I don't want to feel that way. I want people to be as honestly enthusiastic about it as I am.
[00:35:50] Matty: That's a great entree to the last question that I wanted to ask you, which is how did your follower pool change and how did your interactions with your follower pool change before and after the Kickstarter?
[00:36:03] Joshua: You know, that's interesting and I'm still figuring that out. I wanted to have a lot more participation in the Kickstarter campaign itself than I did. So I haven't quite figured it out, how to get people to really participate. I back a lot of board games on Kickstarter and these big box games, especially from a company that's pretty well-known, they have a lot of participation, like their comments -- I don't even know how they get to all of their comments, that's how much participation they get. I wasn't hoping for that much because that's untenable. I wouldn't be able to deal with it. But I was hoping for like three, four times the amount that I got.
[00:36:42] And I think that one of the reasons why I didn't get the participation was there wasn't a lot for the people that were backing my book to participate in. It was a book, they were buying it, what else is there? That's a very simple process. I tried to stay in contact with my backers throughout the campaign. So I typically put out two updates every single week, one on Monday, one on Friday. And in order to keep doing that, I started putting my Pro Tips in the backer updates.
[00:37:10] Matty: I became a fan of the pro tips emails.
[00:37:12] Joshua: I appreciate that. Thank you very much. I was very happy to hear back. When I did, it was rare when I heard back from people, usually on a consultation call, and be like, Yeah, and thanks for sending those pro tips. I love them. They're really helpful. I'm like, Oh, they are? Awesome. Like I said, I wasn't getting that interaction, but I don't think I had the right product for that kind of interaction that I was looking for.
[00:37:34] What I have seen is that after the fact, I have been getting more participation with my posts on social media. So obviously some of the people from Kickstarter have followed me out into the rest of the internet and either on Twitter, but mostly on Facebook, and they have been participating there, or some of them have actually sent me emails -- you know, I got your book. I'm starting to read it. Thanks so much. -- which are super cool, love that, that's so much fun.
[00:38:05] It's interesting because as a writer, it feels like a solo sport, but it isn't. It feels like you're doing it all by yourself and you're just creating and then throwing it out into a vacuum, so you don't have any idea how other people are viewing it. Once you have something up on Amazon and people start reviewing, then you start getting an idea. But up to a point like that, when people are regularly reviewing your work on Amazon or on Goodreads or something, then you have no idea what the reception is. So I've been very pleased. The reception that I've been getting so far has been A pluses all the way across the board. I hope that translates when I get it up on Amazon. I hope that translates to the five stars -- you know, I hope I'm getting the five stars over there and we'll see what happens.
[00:38:50] Matty: Let me just ask quickly, what is the process from transitioning a book from Kickstarter to Amazon?
[00:38:56] Joshua: Basically just like any other indy release that you do. There's no difference in the process there. They're separate things. So Kickstarter is its own thing, and then releasing it on Amazon or wherever else you're going to do it as a different thing.
[00:39:08] Matty: And did you have to specify to your Kickstarter followers that it would not be available on Amazon until a certain date or was there any timing issue or really two completely different things?
[00:39:21] Joshua: There's a little bit of crossover in the respect that Kickstarter backers expect that they will be the only ones who have access to the product until the product is shipped to them. And after all the backers have the product, then you can start selling it elsewhere. And I believe in that, and it's kind of an unwritten rule, but the culture understands that you don't start selling your product in a store before your backers have it. They're the ones who funded you. It's not a store. Kickstarter's not a store. It's not like you're going into Barnes and Noble and giving them, you know, $10 in cash and taking away your soft cover.
[00:39:58] They're the people who are loaning you the money to create your work. So you're beholden to them. They're giving you money, the auspices of the product that you told them that you're going to make is going to be really cool. So it's like you said, at the beginning of this call, they're your supporters, they're your backers. They're the ones who are making it happen. They're not people that you're selling to. There's a little bit of a difference in the mindset.
[00:40:27] Matty: I would also think, getting back to the question I had asked you originally about the engagement and how you were engaging with your followers, I would think that the interaction would be much easier after the first one, because I would think that if you have a platform where followers can be talking with you and talking with each other, then there's going to be more of, Oh, I love the section in the ACTION SEQUENCES book about such and such. Like they'll all have a common experience -- well, many of them have the common experience -- of the first book as the basis of a discussion with you and with each other.
[00:41:00] Joshua: I hope so. I hope that happens. That would be great. Or some people who back the first book coming back as veterans to the second campaign, talking to all the newbies. Yeah. It's cool that you're here, but you haven't read the first book yet.
[00:41:10] Matty: Exactly.
[00:41:11] Joshua: I think that'd be great. The more enthusiasm, the more people are going to tell their friends, basically. And that's how I based my entire business, which was around word of mouth. I figure that if I do a good enough job and people not only like the job, but like interacting with me, that they'll go away from that experience and anytime they hear their writer friends say, Oh geez, I need an editor. And they'll be like, Oh, let me tell you about this guy. That's how I based my entire business. And that's basically how I'm going to be basing my business with this series of books, too.
[00:41:45] Matty: I think that is a great wrap up for the discussion. And please just tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about you, your books, and your Kickstarter campaigns online.
[00:41:55] Joshua: So right now it will be up on Amazon at some point in the nearish future, hopefully by the end of the year. That's what I'm telling myself. So for right now you can get the book through me--you can go to my website, which is, Joshuaessoe.com. Very easy.
[00:42:13] That's how you can get the book. To reach me, it's super easy. I'm on Facebook. My profile is public. Just search out my name and there I am.
[00:42:22] Matty: Sounds great. Well, thank you so much, Joshua. This has been so interesting.
[00:42:25] Joshua: Thanks a lot, Matty. I enjoyed talking with you.
[00:02:09] It literally started out of this series that I do on Facebook called Pro Tips. So I'll just every so often, unscheduled, just put out a pro tip. And sometimes there'll be really long. Sometimes they're just a sentence or two. And I thought maybe I could just pull those together and put them in a book and throw it out there.
[00:02:26] It's really evolved well past that, that sort of makeshift idea, into a series of books that dealt with all of the big things that I saw, the most pressing issues, the most difficult issues that I saw writers struggling with.
[00:02:40] And the main one has always been action scenes. Action scenes are very difficult for writers to pull off because you have to balance this weird conglomeration of what's interesting to the reader, not just interesting to you. What's actually compelling about an action scene is how drawn you are to the characters and how much you care about what they're doing, what their goals are and what they lose if they fail. And I saw a lot of overwriting in action sequences, and a lot of underwriting in action sequences, mostly having to do with blocking and setting.
[00:03:18] Like I ran through action scenes where I had no idea where the characters were at any given point. If suddenly they're attacking somebody who I thought was on the other side of the battlefield. I was like, Wait a minute, how did they get there? Or they have items disappearing from their body or appearing where they'd left them on the table that morning or something like that. A lot of little inconsistencies in that realm.
[00:03:41] But yeah, the action sequences in manuscripts is guaranteed going to be the place I'm going to spend my most time editing. They usually need a lot of individual line by line stuff. And like I said before, it's all about character. And if that character is not there yet, that's why you don't want to start a book or a new character with an action scene is because we don't care yet, but most people will skip over that stuff. So weird.
[00:04:09] I have been tempted at times to skip over action scenes, but I've found that a lot of readers, my wife included, will get to an action scene, read the first couple of paragraphs -- blah, blah, blah -- flip pages, get past it. Okay, good. What happened? Got it. Okay. Continue.
[00:04:26] Matty: So you're fixing it so that she'll read through it all, right? That's the goal. She'll stick with it.
[00:04:32] Joshua: I want her to read my action scenes when I write my own stories. So I got to do it well.
[00:04:37] Matty: So when you had this glimmer in your eye about you were just going to take your pro tips and you were going to put them into a book, and then you ended up with the first of a series, at what point in that process did the idea of crowdfunding occur to you and why?
[00:04:52] Joshua: I think it occurred to me really early on in the process after I started to take the project seriously, once I started to view it as an actual serious series of books, where I had important things to say, I started thinking very seriously about how I was going to let people know that it was a thing. And I've long enjoyed Kickstarter. I've been a backer of dozens and dozens of projects on Kickstarter, including a whole bunch of books. Some of my clients have launched their books on Kickstarter to success. So I was very interested in pursuing that.
[00:05:30] I wanted to have a Kickstarter. I wanted to experience what that was like, and I thought that it would be a great way to raise the money for the book. Obviously, you spend a year, writing your book. And none of that is paid unless you're under contract. If you're an indy, then it's like, I hope this does something when I release it. So this was a way not only to try and get a little bit of money for the time that I spent writing the book, but mostly to get the money to actually make physical copies of the book and to pay designers and to pay the ebook designers and cover, all of those really important things that your book has to have in order to be successful.
[00:06:14] And it worked. I managed to pull it off. I'm not getting paid very much for my time, but the book itself got paid for, all of the services, all of the stuff that I had to hire out for, all was successfully paid for.
[00:06:28] I think that both my accidental genius and my mistake was that I offered so many service rewards in the Kickstarter. So that ended up eating into a lot of what might have been pay for the actual writing. Why that was a good idea was because I was then able to be exposed to a whole bunch of people that I never would have been exposed to otherwise. So I got to work with them. I got to see their ideas. I got to chat with them. I mean, over the course of the Kickstarter month, of fulfillment anyways, which I set aside October in my schedule to do all the Kickstarter reward fulfillment -- I started a little early in September, but don't tell anyone -- I was able to talk to, I think, 55 people in different consultation calls. So I did 55 consultation calls in the span of a little bit over a month.
[00:07:16] And that was amazing talking to all of these writers about what they're passionate about, what they're writing right now, how we can work it out so that the story comes together, or get past what they're stuck on, or how they can find writing time, all kinds of different writing-related subjects.
[00:07:31] But back to your question about my goals. Why did I decide to Kickstarter? I wanted to create buzz about my book. I wanted to spread the word about my book, and because I'd been an editor for over a decade already, I had a platform already that I could speak to. I had a presence on Facebook -- still trying to figure it out that -- but I'm able to bring a lot of the people that I know from workshops and from teaching at seminars and stuff like that and say, Hey, if you thought that what I had to say was valuable, I've got this book coming out.
[00:08:02] And I'd say about 40% up to 50% of the people who backed the Kickstarter were people that I had contact with that I knew from some way -- workshop, seminar client, through Facebook. And then the whole other 60 to 50% were all people that I had never met. And that was the demographic I was hoping to reach, people who were looking for books on writing on Kickstarter or who were looking for how do I write action and Googled and found it or were pulled by their friends: This is a really cool book, a good editor. You need to look at what he's done. Those were the people that I was hoping to reach. And luckily, I had success with that and I was able to create the buzz and spread the word.
[00:08:45] Matty: It sounds like you went into it knowing right away that you wanted to do Kickstarter. It's not like you added up all the numbers, you realized that wasn't in the bank account, and you were casting about for other funding options. Am I understanding that correctly?
[00:08:59] Joshua: That is correct. No, I knew Kickstarter was probably going to be the best one. I could have gone to my family and be like, Hey family, how do you feel about funding my book? I could have just dipped into our savings or whatever. I'm glad I didn't have to do that -- you know, pull out investments that we're supposed to be saving for our retirement. But, yeah, I thought Kickstarter was a brilliant way to go. IndieGoGo was another good idea, but I primarily have an affinity for Kickstarter. I just like the platform a little bit better. I have backed, I don't know, 80 things or so on Kickstarter, so obviously I like what I find on Kickstarter and I wanted to be a part of that.
[00:09:39] Matty: You had mentioned something that I wanted to delve into sort of for selfish reasons, and that is that with the Kickstarter campaign, the few that I've been involved in myself, you're purchasing a product ahead of time, let's say -- I'm going to ask you to give a better description of it than this -- but then normally the person who's running the Kickstarter is offering incentives for you to do that. And that you're having to balance the value of the attraction you're going to have with the incentives against the time it takes to fulfill them. So can you talk a little bit more about what you were thinking when you originally decided on those incentives and then how it turned out?
[00:10:18] Joshua: Sure. First, I had to figure out what did I have to offer, besides the book. Like if I was going to add extra incentives and add extra tiers that backers could support, I had to figure out a way that I would be able to give them some sort of quality product in exchange for a higher dollar ask.
[00:10:35] And for me, I thought of like little postcards with my cats on them because one of my cats, a lot of people know him as Super Helpful Editing Cat because I've been posting about him for years. He likes to come and sit on me or on my keyboard or climb my arm as I'm trying to work. And so I have created a little following for him. He's even spawned fan art.
[00:10:59] Matty: That's cool.
[00:11:00] Joshua: Yeah. So I thought about, I can make some really cool, cartoony, stylized postcards with Super Helpful Editing Cat on it. And I thought about that for a little bit. And the idea was somewhat attractive. I would have to get into yet another production level and I didn't want to go there. So I thought, what do I have that I could offer? Well, I have skills, I have my editing and I'm good at that. What can I do in those terms? Phone calls, I love consultation calls. They're super fun. I pretty much enjoy every single consultation that I'm on. If I could do 70% consultation and then 30% editing, I probably would jump at that. It's just really great to be in real time, talking to an author about their work and the problems and how to make it better or how to get past a stumbling block, all those things. It's just, it's so much fun.
[00:11:52] And the other tiers had varying degrees of editing services. Like I would edit their first five pages, or I would edit back cover copy for them, or work on a pitch with them. Some people want to do customize a little bit. So if they backed something that was equivalent, like their back-cover copy, and they wanted me to work on their query letter instead, I'd be like, sure.
[00:12:13] And then there was the big one, which was three hours of editing, included in the tier. So yeah, I solved that problem by offering myself and my time.
[00:12:23] Matty: And did you have any control over how many people, for example, took advantage of the three-hour consult, or if thousands of people had taken advantage of it, would you just be fulfilling premium incentives for the rest of your career?
[00:12:38] Joshua: I started running into that problem. A couple of days into the Kickstarter -- I was blessed enough that the Kickstarter funded completely in under six hours -- and I started seeing the larger tiers with the service rewards start going up and up and up. And I was like, Uh oh, wait a minute. I didn't think this through. So I started limiting those awards. Kickstarter allows you to do that. You can even reword or rephrase or change completely the reward levels as long as nobody's back to it yet. After somebody backs it, it becomes locked, you can't change it anymore.
[00:13:12] That's why, out of my, I think I had six reward tiers, three of them were formatted perfectly, and three of them got a little wonky because after it launched, I looked at it. I saw, wait a minute, why did it do that? I tried to go back in, but somebody had already pledged on the level so I can't fix it.
[00:13:26] But I started seeing the reward tiers with three hours of editing and first five pages start going up and up and up. And I was like, Wait a minute, how much of these can I actually do? Do I have time to do all of these things? So Kickstarter allows you to go in and limit the amount of reward available, and you can do that throughout the entire campaign. You can change it if you want. If you go in at 10 and you go, oh, I was wrong about that, let's do 20, you can still do that, too.
[00:13:50] So I went in and I made sure that they all started getting limited. I should have caught it a little bit earlier. I had a good friend, Martin Shoemaker, who was looking out for me and he instant messaged me on Facebook one night and he said, You're giving away a lot of time here, you might want to think about that. Can you afford all that? And I was like, Oh man, that's a good question. So that night I limited things to 10, 15. I think one of them is up at 25 because that one was just really popular. Yeah, it's really important to be able to limit rewards that it would kill you to have to do 300 of them. If I had 50 people sign up for the three hours, I would be doing that for the next couple of months. I wouldn't be able to do my regular scheduled work.
[00:14:33] Matty: I think that the other question, and this is more applicable to me, this is the selfish part because I'm thinking about how this applies to Patreon, which I use for the podcast, and with Patreon, as I think with Kickstarter, you're encouraged to create different tiers of membership and the rewards get more special the more people pledge. And I ended up just having one basic tier for The Indy Author Podcast patronage, because the idea of trying to administer all the tiers was scary sounding to me. And it's also, I guess, a little different, because this would be an ongoing thing as opposed to a Kickstarter which is one event that you're planning these for.
[00:15:17] But that the question I keep coming back to is I feel as if with Patreon, and maybe also with Kickstarter, a lot of people pledge not because they're really intent on getting the book, they pledge because they want to support a creator. And so you're weighing who do you have to incent to participate with a thing or a time or a service or whatever it is, and how many people are just going to pledge because they like your work. They know you. They've heard of you. They want to support this creative endeavor.
[00:15:47] And I would imagine that's tied into those percentages you were giving about how many people you knew and how many people you didn't know. Did you experience surprises in terms of that, and how much you felt that the incentives were actually the deciding factor for people throwing their money behind the Kickstarter?
[00:16:07] Joshua: Yeah, that's a great question. I was very pleasantly surprised that so many people I had never heard of, never met, actually came to the Kickstarter, and back then, that was awesome. I was hoping for that. And there's really no way to know how getting the word out there, asking people to spread it, how that is going to pan out. Luckily for mine, it panned out great. And it was doing so well that for most of the campaign, it was ranked between, if I remember correctly, first or second and ninth best-selling non-fiction book on Kickstarter for almost the duration of the campaign.
[00:16:46] So because of that, people looking for nonfiction books, when they scroll to that category in Kickstarter, they would see my book there. And I think that's how a lot of people found it that I didn't know about, that I hadn't met previously.
[00:17:00] Also Kickstarter sends out emails, it's like Amazon Also Boughts. So at the bottom of your Kickstarter updates of any campaign that you have backed, you'll see a number of campaigns that are also promoted by Kickstarter that are like the one that you backed in case you might want to back that one too. So I saw in my statistics that I got a bunch of backers that way, too.
[00:17:21] Matty: I'm struggling with how much do I have to offer to incent people to patronize the podcast in the same way that I imagine you were thinking through how much do I have to offer to incent people to support the Kickstarter? And if you learned anything in the course of it, that made you think, Oh, if I did this again, I would offer more or I would offer less or make changes to your strategy …
[00:17:42] Joshua: I found that most of the people that I didn't know, bought in at the tiers that didn't offer a service award. Almost all of them. There was a very small percent percentage who went into the service rewards. People who knew me, who knew my work or had attended a workshop or something that I'd taught, they were the ones who, for the most part, I'd say like 90, 95%, were the ones who'd backed all the reward tiers.
[00:18:10] Matty: Oh, interesting. That's opposite of what I would have expected.
[00:18:14] Joshua: I had no expectations on that. I was very curious to see how it was going to pan out. I didn't know. I think it's because a lot of people, they saw this book they could get for I think it was $3 or $4 if you just want the basic digital copy and that's it. Why did they want to pay $180 for what they probably just viewed as a single book?
[00:18:36] People who are a little bit more serious about their writing careers and are in the midst of their writing careers or at the beginning of the writing careers probably understood the value of the three hours of editing and the book and a consultation call and a drawing from James Owen who's the illustrator and the designer of the book for $180. That was such a good deal. I had so many people go, Are you sure that you're putting the right prices on these things? I was like, Yes, let's do it.
[00:19:05] But, yeah, it was mostly people who understood my work in the first place who wanted to get the higher amounts, but I needed those higher amounts -- well, actually, it would've funded regardless of them -- but it funded so well, around 300% funded, because I had those people who knew who I was, and they were willing to take the gamble that I could also write a good book on writing.
[00:19:32] Matty: So I would have thought before I heard how those percentages worked out that it sounded as if your goal was that you wanted to get a book out there and you wanted to fund it, but you could also equally, and perhaps this evolved over time, say, I really want to expand my editing business and so I'm going to offer something that is going to have as an incentive, a sample edit, on the theory that let's say a hundred people fund it and get the sample edit and some percentage of those are really going to like the experience and go to want to continue. Did that ever become an actual explicit goal for you as you went through this -- your book as a business card?
[00:20:14] Joshua: Yeah, no, it didn't. And perhaps I was naive about that, but honestly, I really wanted to create a book that would help people. And that was pretty much the only thing that I was thinking about. The fact that it also ended up exposing me to people that I had never met before and therefore potentially bringing in new business was a happy byproduct.
[00:20:37] I didn't even realize it until I was actually in the Kickstarter. And I was like, Oh, this is could actually help business. Business was going and has been going very well, so it wasn't the purpose of the book. It was just like I said, happenstance, and then I suddenly realized, Oh, duh, I'll probably get new clients out of this. That's really cool. And it did happen that way. but no, that wasn't, it wasn't a goal of the book at all. Probably should have been. But, no, it was simply because I have a passion for instructing. I love it. I wanted to write this book. I wanted to help writers deal with and tackle subjects that I see them struggling with so much so that, when they come to me and they had their manuscript and were ready to start editing. It's easier on me. My job is easier now.
[00:21:28] Matty: The episode before yours is going to be Michael La Ronn talking about how much it costs to independently publish a book. So if someone gets to the end of Michael's episode and here's what the number is going to be and says, Oh man, I don't have that much money in the bank, I wonder how I could come up with it, and they happen to be saying that within your hearing, and if this person had no experience with Kickstarter before, is Kickstarter something you'd recommend in that scenario?
[00:21:57] Joshua: Potentially. Here's the thing. The reason that my book was able to overfund by around 300% was because I had a platform going in. If that writer has a platform already, regardless of what it is, and they can translate that platform over to Kickstarter and over to that book, then yes, absolutely, I would wholeheartedly recommend Kickstarter or other social funding site.
[00:22:23] If they don't, then they need to work on that first. I felt so bad for a lot of the books that I was doing research on when I was devising my campaign and figuring out how to order it and actually physically present it on a platform. I saw so many books that were just falling flat and I could tell that the person really put their heart and soul into it. I saw a lot of self-help and a lot of spirituality books, and only a very, very few were doing well. Most of them were just falling on their faces.
[00:22:58] And I looked at those as examples of what I was not going to do. And I don't want that to happen to anybody else who's watching this or listening to this because it is a gamble and it's just like everything else in publishing. There are a lot of nos. After you spent a tremendous amount of time, not only creating a product, but by creating the campaign -- just creating the campaign is an enormous time sink.
[00:23:25] Matty: How much time do you think you spent on the campaign?
[00:23:29] Joshua: I thought it would be a lot easier. So because this is my first one, despite being around other people who've been doing it successfully, I thought that you throw up the campaign page, no problem, you write it out, done, throw it in, cool. That took me three hours, something like that. No, no, no. I had spent a number of hours sporadically over like a month and a half. And it got down to a couple of weeks before I was going to launch. I was like, okay, let's get real serious about this campaign stuff. Let's get it all written down. I had to work straight a whole week, going until five, six o'clock in the morning, every single day to get that thing completed before I was ready to launch, because I had a launch date and I needed to hit the launch date because I'd had interviews that said, this is when it's launching.
[00:24:12] There's not room for smudging it. So yeah, creating the actual campaign -- Kickstarter is a platform, the tools they give you are a lot more limited than you might think. In fact, that was some of my feedback to them when they sent me the survey is I really wish that there were a lot more tools for me to format, for me to create upon. Because if you want to have images, are you looking at Kickstarter and you see all these campaigns with beautiful images, they've created all of those themselves. They had to create JPEGs or other image files and upload them. And the image file is what has all of the information about what the campaign is, the pictures and the words saying, If you pledge this month, you get these extra 10 soldiers, whatever it is. Kickstarter has no real way to implement that right now.
[00:24:58] And I was shocked by this, like all the little banners for the headings of different sections in my Kickstarter campaign, I had to create all of those at the drop of the hat, spur of the moment because I didn't realize that I couldn't just create them in the Kickstarter platform.
[00:25:12] So that's something to keep in mind when you actually starting the creation of the physical page, I guess the digital page, it's going to take a lot of time to write all your copy, then figure out how it's all divided up, create the visuals for it. There's just a lot of work. Figure out where are you going to create your visuals? Are you going to have somebody to do it for you, or are you going to buy a program? Are you going to learn the program first? There's a lot of things to consider there.
[00:25:39] Matty: When you factor in the time that you could have been editing, let's say, if you took all those hours that you were putting into the Kickstarter and could you have funded the book if you had instead spent that time editing? I guess you didn't expect that going in, you figured three hours, and you figured out your, how much you make per hour, times three, and that's the amount, but it sounds like you liked it enough that you're going to continue. So all the time you put into it is paying you back beyond just I got to publish my book, right? What are those incentives that you're getting out of it to keep you coming back to it?
[00:26:18] Joshua: That's a good question, too. One of the things is that I knew that this book potentially wouldn't make money in the Kickstarter, and I was okay with that. There were two reasons for that. One of the reasons was I wanted to have a book I wanted to help writers. So I didn't really care if I ended up making profits. Second reason was because it's a first book in the series. If I lose money on the first book in the series, it doesn't matter because the first book basically is a billboard for the rest of the series.
[00:26:42] So basically, I'm investing in myself, I'm gambling on the fact that the whole series will pay off well, that the whole series will do really well. And that this first book is like, your first taste is free. And it isn't -- people have to pay for the book, obviously. It's just my cost going into it.
[00:27:00] So with all the reward tiers and things like that, would I have been able to purchase all of the services that I had to hire out for and create the book without doing Kickstarter? Well, I would have lost the production of the book, first of all. I've got a whole stack of books here in the house now that I'll be able to sell eventually. I don't know when or how fast, but I will be able to sell them eventually. And all of that will be profit. Like that eventual payment will be the payment that I get for all the time that I spent writing and researching and all that jazz, putting together the Kickstarter. Not only did I get the printed books from doing Kickstarter, but like I said earlier, I got exposure to all these authors and writers and hopefuls that I never would have been exposed to otherwise. I got a great launch platform for it. People see it, it's still linked around, people share it. So that allows me to get a lot more free ad space that I never would've had before now.
[00:28:00] Granted all the editing services, the last I calculated it out, I was making between $30 and $35 an hour, I have to check my notes, whereas I make $50 an hour, so it's obviously a pretty big discount off of my hourly rate. I have to do the new numbers now that the Kickstarter is actually over because that was projected, the $30 to $35. So I've been wanting to do that.
[00:28:23] But now I'm like, Oh, thank God the Kickstarter is over, I can go back to my regular editing schedule again. So since I stopped, I guess it's been 11 days here in November, I've been back on my normal schedule and I've just been like, all right, Kickstarter can chill for a little bit and I'll tabulate more numbers later. But, yeah, I'd be very interested to see where the final numbers land on how much I made per hour were I to do that in my normal schedule, now that everything is said and done. So yeah, you could potentially come even or lose money with the caveat that hopefully in addition to breaking even, you now have a stack of books that you can sell.
[00:29:04] Matty: Yup. And you took a very interesting approach, and this will only make sense to people who are watching on YouTube. I don't want to call it a flip book and that's not right, but if you turn it this way, is that what you're calling it? A flip book?
[00:29:16] Joshua: Yeah, call it a flip book. I mean, there's a flip book where you flip and you see the picture, right? It gives you basically a movie, because you're flipping pages so fast. But there's also that kind of flip book, which is, I don't know which one's older honestly, but yeah, the flip book where you turn it around and you have a whole new thing. That wasn't my idea. That was James Owen's idea. And I thought that was super cool because I've never seen that out there before. It was a new way to present this information.
[00:29:42] That was a couple of things that I had to consider. If I'm going to write a series about writing books, a series of writing books, how many of those are out there? There are thousands of these things out there. Why do I want to throw another thing onto that pile? Do I have anything interesting to say? I eventually came to the conclusion that, yes, I have something interesting to say. I haven't personally read a series of books that were written from the perspective of an editor who just edits all day every day and has been doing so for many, many years, and finding out what they saw most commonly going wrong with the work they were seeing. So that was one thing.
[00:30:20] And the second thing was, I hadn't seen a group of books put together where they just basically delved into two subjects or one subject at a time, where the whole thing is just this one thing, is one thing about this one aspect about writing. It wasn't like, this is how you first come up with your idea. Then this is how you outline it. And then how to structure your plot. Here's how you want to start your first pages. I've seen those kinds of things that take you step by step or deals with the overall, like how do you write a blockbuster novel, which is a super good book. So I wanted to delve very much into these very particular subjects.
[00:30:55] The next book coming out is going to be WORLD BUILDING and MOOD AND ATMOSPHERE. I've never seen a book specifically geared toward mood and atmosphere, and I'm pretty excited about it because that is going to be so cool. Creating mood and atmosphere in your world building, in your settings, elevates it. It makes it so much greater than it could have been without these things. It's like you take setting and you imbue it with emotion, you have atmosphere. So I'm really looking forward to writing that. I've started taking notes and that book of course will be the next one to hit Kickstarter. We'll see when that happens. I hope it's going to be within the next six months or so.
[00:31:33] Matty: What other changes are you going to do as you go forward with other Kickstarters based on your experience with the first one?
[00:31:39] Joshua: I'm not going to offer as many service rewards, that's for sure. October killed me, but I got it done, but I'm not going to do that again. I will offer some rewards, I would definitely offer consultations because, like I said, not only are those fun, but I get to be introduced to a lot of writers. And so that's definitely going to go up in the next Kickstarter. I'll probably do first pages as well. I'm not sure if I'm going to do the three-hour editing thing again.
[00:32:05] First pages is pretty fun, too. I can usually knock out five first pages in an hour and a half to two hours. And that's because I don't just edit the first five pages and call it quits because I want them to be able to take that work and get something out of it that they can bring forth into all their work following it. So it takes me a little bit extra. I write a little critique to go with it and everything. So I'll bring those back, probably 10 or 15 of them. Maybe I'll do five three-hours, if I do them at all. Consultation calls I'll probably cap somewhere more along the lines of 30, something like that.
[00:32:40] But the cool thing is that the next Kickstarter to add more tier levels is that I can add in the first book. So I'll have a second book and people who didn't get the first book will have the option to get the first book. So it relieves me of offering more service reward tiers, because they'll have more options.
[00:32:56] There is a debate on whether or not lots of options are good. And I think there is a threshold there. I think that between like two, three and six tiers of options is probably ideal. You don't want to go any more than that. Sometimes I back these Kickstarters where it's confusing to figure out what you're getting and what the difference between the tiers are.
[00:33:20] So if you're creating your own Kickstarter, make sure that your two levels are very easy to understand, and they're very easy to tell apart. Make sure that each one has a distinct purpose. And if it doesn't, kill it, get rid of it, not useful. It will only serve to confuse people. And then you'll wind up with the person who's been looking at your campaign page for 15 minutes and finally goes, It's too much. I can't figure it out. And they leave, or they hit the Remind Me button. And then two days before your campaign is going to close, they get an email from Kickstarter. They go, Oh yeah. No, that was too confusing. You've lost the momentum there. So keep your backer tiers succinct and keep them very clear and only have two or three.
[00:34:05] If that's all you need, don't struggle to come up with more stuff that you can add in, like a plushy or a poster. No one needs more posters, no one needs more post-it notes or pens. Everybody's got these things. So while it might be satisfying for you to have your stuff emblazoned on a jacket, like a rain jacket or something like that, no one's going to care.
[00:34:28] Matty: You risk alienating people, because I know that sometimes I get physical thank you's from organizations that I've contributed money to, and I want to say, I don't want part of the money I just gave you to be spent on a shopping bag. Just stop it.
[00:34:45] Or a mug. Of course, a plushy of the Super Helpful Editing Cat would be completely different.
[00:34:53] Joshua: I agree. I agree with you there. In fact, one of my authors, Jess Owen, she has a really awesome series, animal fantasy, and it's called SONG OF THE SUMMER KING, and one of her most popular -- well, maybe it wasn't the most popular -- reward tiers was the one with the stuffed animal of her main character. People went bananas for that. So if you have the right product, like here's this animal fantasy so it's perfect. One of those things that she ran out, she had to say we're on back order. it was crazy. My wife really wanted one. You know how long it took me? I'm her editor!
[00:35:28] Matty: She should have definitely bumped you to the top of the plushy list.
[00:35:31] Joshua: It was years!
[00:35:33] There is a place, there is a place for stuff like that. I was like, Nah, I'm not doing any of that. I like your word alienation because I do feel like it can start to feel a bit corporate, a bit markety, you know? And I don't want to feel that way. I want people to be as honestly enthusiastic about it as I am.
[00:35:50] Matty: That's a great entree to the last question that I wanted to ask you, which is how did your follower pool change and how did your interactions with your follower pool change before and after the Kickstarter?
[00:36:03] Joshua: You know, that's interesting and I'm still figuring that out. I wanted to have a lot more participation in the Kickstarter campaign itself than I did. So I haven't quite figured it out, how to get people to really participate. I back a lot of board games on Kickstarter and these big box games, especially from a company that's pretty well-known, they have a lot of participation, like their comments -- I don't even know how they get to all of their comments, that's how much participation they get. I wasn't hoping for that much because that's untenable. I wouldn't be able to deal with it. But I was hoping for like three, four times the amount that I got.
[00:36:42] And I think that one of the reasons why I didn't get the participation was there wasn't a lot for the people that were backing my book to participate in. It was a book, they were buying it, what else is there? That's a very simple process. I tried to stay in contact with my backers throughout the campaign. So I typically put out two updates every single week, one on Monday, one on Friday. And in order to keep doing that, I started putting my Pro Tips in the backer updates.
[00:37:10] Matty: I became a fan of the pro tips emails.
[00:37:12] Joshua: I appreciate that. Thank you very much. I was very happy to hear back. When I did, it was rare when I heard back from people, usually on a consultation call, and be like, Yeah, and thanks for sending those pro tips. I love them. They're really helpful. I'm like, Oh, they are? Awesome. Like I said, I wasn't getting that interaction, but I don't think I had the right product for that kind of interaction that I was looking for.
[00:37:34] What I have seen is that after the fact, I have been getting more participation with my posts on social media. So obviously some of the people from Kickstarter have followed me out into the rest of the internet and either on Twitter, but mostly on Facebook, and they have been participating there, or some of them have actually sent me emails -- you know, I got your book. I'm starting to read it. Thanks so much. -- which are super cool, love that, that's so much fun.
[00:38:05] It's interesting because as a writer, it feels like a solo sport, but it isn't. It feels like you're doing it all by yourself and you're just creating and then throwing it out into a vacuum, so you don't have any idea how other people are viewing it. Once you have something up on Amazon and people start reviewing, then you start getting an idea. But up to a point like that, when people are regularly reviewing your work on Amazon or on Goodreads or something, then you have no idea what the reception is. So I've been very pleased. The reception that I've been getting so far has been A pluses all the way across the board. I hope that translates when I get it up on Amazon. I hope that translates to the five stars -- you know, I hope I'm getting the five stars over there and we'll see what happens.
[00:38:50] Matty: Let me just ask quickly, what is the process from transitioning a book from Kickstarter to Amazon?
[00:38:56] Joshua: Basically just like any other indy release that you do. There's no difference in the process there. They're separate things. So Kickstarter is its own thing, and then releasing it on Amazon or wherever else you're going to do it as a different thing.
[00:39:08] Matty: And did you have to specify to your Kickstarter followers that it would not be available on Amazon until a certain date or was there any timing issue or really two completely different things?
[00:39:21] Joshua: There's a little bit of crossover in the respect that Kickstarter backers expect that they will be the only ones who have access to the product until the product is shipped to them. And after all the backers have the product, then you can start selling it elsewhere. And I believe in that, and it's kind of an unwritten rule, but the culture understands that you don't start selling your product in a store before your backers have it. They're the ones who funded you. It's not a store. Kickstarter's not a store. It's not like you're going into Barnes and Noble and giving them, you know, $10 in cash and taking away your soft cover.
[00:39:58] They're the people who are loaning you the money to create your work. So you're beholden to them. They're giving you money, the auspices of the product that you told them that you're going to make is going to be really cool. So it's like you said, at the beginning of this call, they're your supporters, they're your backers. They're the ones who are making it happen. They're not people that you're selling to. There's a little bit of a difference in the mindset.
[00:40:27] Matty: I would also think, getting back to the question I had asked you originally about the engagement and how you were engaging with your followers, I would think that the interaction would be much easier after the first one, because I would think that if you have a platform where followers can be talking with you and talking with each other, then there's going to be more of, Oh, I love the section in the ACTION SEQUENCES book about such and such. Like they'll all have a common experience -- well, many of them have the common experience -- of the first book as the basis of a discussion with you and with each other.
[00:41:00] Joshua: I hope so. I hope that happens. That would be great. Or some people who back the first book coming back as veterans to the second campaign, talking to all the newbies. Yeah. It's cool that you're here, but you haven't read the first book yet.
[00:41:10] Matty: Exactly.
[00:41:11] Joshua: I think that'd be great. The more enthusiasm, the more people are going to tell their friends, basically. And that's how I based my entire business, which was around word of mouth. I figure that if I do a good enough job and people not only like the job, but like interacting with me, that they'll go away from that experience and anytime they hear their writer friends say, Oh geez, I need an editor. And they'll be like, Oh, let me tell you about this guy. That's how I based my entire business. And that's basically how I'm going to be basing my business with this series of books, too.
[00:41:45] Matty: I think that is a great wrap up for the discussion. And please just tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about you, your books, and your Kickstarter campaigns online.
[00:41:55] Joshua: So right now it will be up on Amazon at some point in the nearish future, hopefully by the end of the year. That's what I'm telling myself. So for right now you can get the book through me--you can go to my website, which is, Joshuaessoe.com. Very easy.
[00:42:13] That's how you can get the book. To reach me, it's super easy. I'm on Facebook. My profile is public. Just search out my name and there I am.
[00:42:22] Matty: Sounds great. Well, thank you so much, Joshua. This has been so interesting.
[00:42:25] Joshua: Thanks a lot, Matty. I enjoyed talking with you.
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