Tips and tricks on kickstarting your creative ideas are okay, but finding a home for your concepts is even better. Bestselling author Russell Nohelty believes that art and creative expression are essential to society. Russell joins Ella Barnard in this episode to present a new, innovative, safe space for artists to showcase their work. Kickstarter is a platform that aims to bring people together and bring their creative ideas to life. Listen in and learn more as Russell talks about how this platform provides an opportunity for creators to connect directly with their communities, putting power where it belongs.
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Kickstarter: Bringing Creative Projects To Life With Russell Nohelty
I am here with my good friend, Russell Nohelty. He is a USA Today bestselling fantasy author, publisher and consultant. He runs a small press, Wannabe Press, which makes weird books and comics for weird people. He has run 19 successful crowdfunding campaigns, raising over $275,000, including 6 campaigns that raised over $20,000 each, and 2 that raised over $30,000. He has also written several graphic novels and children’s books which can all be found on his site, RussellNohelty.com. Thank you so much for being here, Russell.
I’m so excited to be back.
I love our conversations. Even though they only happen every year or two, I still enjoy them. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your author’s journey for the people who are getting to know you for the first time?
I started writing in 2006 when I decided to write my first movie. I was a camera operator and production person. I had a bunch of gear. I was like, “I want to make a movie.” I wrote a movie as an afterthought to directing the movie. I had to write it. I got into a car accident in 2008. That led to me not being able to do anything for a long time. I sold all of my gear and all I could do was write. I started writing movies and TV shows. That led to comics, books and me starting a publishing company. There are 40 or something books that I’ve been involved in. I counted close to 100 writing projects that I’ve done across all media in my life. It’s a lot but I focus on novels.
We have known each other for years. It’s fun seeing the different transitions that we’re all going through like, “I’m going to write twelve books,” and then now we’re here. What are you working on? You do this Kickstarter thing, which was part of your bio. What is going on with that? It’s big. It’s all over my Facebook every day.
Monica Leonelle is one of the foremost publishing experts in the world. I did nonfiction for a long time. I have a couple of books out. I had a blog and a whole bunch of other stuff. I have a bunch of courses and such but I burned out on it. Monica took over the rights to all of that stuff. She is writing a series of 16 to 17 books. It has expanded to 18 books. It’s the Book Sales Supercharged series. I am co-writing a very small portion of those books. I believe it’s 6 or 7 books. It grows and shrinks over time. The most part that I had was in our Kickstarter book, Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter, which raised over $21,000 in our campaign.
We have been fulfilling it. We have a Facebook group for people that are going to be doing our Sprint with us. We have courses, consulting and such. I’ve been recording videos and talking with people in the group. I’ve been talking with Monica about different assignments and what we do in the future. It’s this huge series. Monica has not talked about it very much. We’re going to have it all out. It’s going to be this huge explosion. Monica is known as a process consultant. She had a series called The Productive Novelist.
I’ve read that. When I first started doing this, I owned some of her first books. She had a bundle of three of them. I was like, “I’ll buy that.” I bought it and read them. I’ve known Monica for a while.
What I’ve always been known for is selling books. This new series is about selling books, not making books. She has already done the making books. She has books on Get Your Book Selling on Amazon, Get Your Book Selling on Apple Books, Get Your Book Selling on Kobo, Get Your Book Selling on Barnes & Noble, Get Your Book Selling in Print, which is one that I helped with, and Get Your Book Selling with Cross-Promotion.
This series is comprehensive.
There’s a website. There are so many of these books all across the thing. While I prefer to write one book that encapsulates everything, she is great at breaking it down like, “You have a pain point on Kobo. Here’s my Kobo book. It’s specific to Kobo. It’s only about Kobo.” She’s got one on Barnes & Noble. She has one in print, Kickstarter and a bunch of other ones. We have been talking about the Kickstarter book. Kickstarter is the most niche of all of the books that we’re doing because there’s also one on Facebook and all sorts of places that authors use more than Kickstarter.
My particular area of specialty is kickstarting books. I’ve run nineteen campaigns and all of them have been book publishing. Either it has been comics, anthologies, kids’ books, novels or nonfiction, even though I’m not the publisher of this book. I’ve run all of the campaigns that I’ve been involved with. I have been on some level books. I know book publishing on the Kickstarter platform. What we’re trying to do with this specific book and the group that we have is to build out the novel, board game, film and comics community. A couple of other communities have been built out so that it has a robust network and a way for people to start selling direct.
You need to be passionate about your work unabashedly, build that passion, and explain why people should buy into your work and you as a person.
What I believe in very strongly is that the future of authorship is direct selling, which is selling direct-to-customer. It’s not that you’re not selling on Amazon. It’s to focus on what you’re doing on your website, Kickstarter, Patreon and the ways that you control the data of who is buying from you instead of Amazon controlling the data. It’s not that there’s no value there but you make so much more when you’re getting direct. You have access to your clientele without having to rely on algorithm shifting or something like that.
Why do you think that that’s where it’s going?
Fewer people can make a living on Amazon because more books are coming out. The pie is being divided in more ways. It’s a lot harder to get 10,000 people to consistently buy your book or even read your book. It’s a lot easier to find 500 people who are rabidly devoted to your book. I believe that no matter what your niche, any author can find 500 people that are fully committed to their books and are willing to spend $5 to $25 and even $40 for a hardcover on that book. I also believe that once you have a bundle of books, let’s say a series or even books that are interconnected, it’s a lot easier to run advertising to a bundle that is $40 than it is to run for a $0.99 book and hope that there’s read-through.
You’re talking to me who releases $0.99 books. I get $0.30 if they buy it and $0.20 if they do KDP because I’m in KU for mine. I might change that. Running ads is very difficult.
It’s really hard. There’s so much hope that you put in it like, “I sold 1,000 books at $0.99. If my read-through is what they say, then I should be able to be profitable doing this.” You’re relying on these factors outside of your control. One thing that we don’t talk about is you write in a hot genre. It’s underserved and people rabidly read in it. People are after those books. Most authors do not write in hot genres. Most authors write in some weird fiction hybrid. It’s genre-spanning. When I say authors, I’m like that.
I’ve gotten a lot better over time but it took 25 or 28 books or something like that for me to nail down, “This is how I write more popular books and still be true to myself.” I have horror, dark fantasy, sci-fi and dystopian books. I have books all over the map and people who will buy all of those books. It’s not common for someone to genre-hop on Amazon, Kobo or any of these places. It’s not that they are not loyal to an author but when someone goes to Amazon, they’re mostly saying, “I’m interested in this thing. I’m going to search for this thing. I’ll read twenty books about this thing.”
It’s this story specifically. That’s where you have the writing to market. Authors are like, “Let me title my book The Billionaire’s Secret Baby,” and then write that book.
There’s nothing wrong with that. My feeling from knowing a lot of authors is that most of them do not have Steven Spielberg’s taste. What I mean by that is Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Michael Bay make the movies that they love. They happen to have a very commercial taste. I have a lot of friends who have commercial tastes. There are a lot of authors who do not have commercial tastes. My favorite Piers Anthony series is Incarnations of Immortality, which is a niche book that did not sell nearly as well as his Xanth books did.
I know a lot of authors who write Weird Westerns, horror and these genres. You’re never going to have success with those books in KU in the way that a thriller or romance author will because there are so many more romance readers on KU or even doing eBooks. That doesn’t mean that there are not a lot of readers who don’t go to Amazon to read their books, or follow authors and subscribe to their newsletter or whatever that thing is. It’s a lot easier to find those people and get a small devoted group of 200, 500 or 1,000 people than it is to satisfy the changing whims of whatever the KU reader wants this month.
One of the things I like about self-publishing is that if you can find your audience, then that’s it. I love how many different kinds of genres have come up. You can find LGBT stories and the main characters. You can find all of that because people can write it and there’s a demand. I was interviewing a woman who loves sci-fi and romance. She is trying to write sci-fi romance but wants to put sci-fi in there.
It’s a hard thing because sci-fi romance is like a romance with alien parts. Sci-fi generally has a slim to no amount of romance in it. She’s the exact author that you’re talking about because she wants to do both. That’s not a big genre but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who would want to read it. How would you have people who are in that space to use Kickstarter or direct-to-customer?
There are a couple of things. Many authors are introverted and want to write their book and never talk to another human. That is ideal for the KU writing to market strategy. I know many successful authors whose books I love and who I love who can find a trend or a thing. They will write to it and make good money doing whatever that trend is. They don’t have to go on podcasts and conventions and do these things.
Unfortunately, while you can run ads to these people, they are a lot harder to find. You must go to many more places. That does not mean physically walking to them. You must go to specific places that cater to those kinds of readers and spend more time with them. They will want to know you and what you are about, learn about your history and befriend you. That may be a thing that freaks you out. It’s going to be a lot harder for you to do that if you don’t want to have people in your corner knowing about you and feeling things about you.
That does not mean you cannot make a living doing this. It means you should be focused on how old-school pulp is the new-school KU. It’s based around trends, writing hooks, and making books that all feel the same. They have similar tropes, trends, and all of these things. There’s nothing wrong with that. Since the dawn of writing, the people that made the most money were generally pulp writers because they were writing hot mass-market books that were sexy, fun, and all felt the same thing.
What do you think I’m reading? I’m a reader.
When I say things like that, they think that I’m talking down to those kinds of writers. It is so much more challenging for me to look at how a book is written and write a book that feels tonally like that. That is an enormous skill that authors have. I do not have that. I have a Neil Gaiman skill of speaking in a way, cultivating a personality, and writing books that have very specific aesthetics that are like Neil Gaiman’s books or Goth fantasy but they’re also Gaiman-esque. My books are Russell-esque. They all feel like I wrote them. People will read a book that is off-genre for them because they are like, “I like your writing. I don’t love science fiction but I’ll try this book because I like you and your writing style.”
We’re talking about those writers who are getting lost in the genre. It’s a lot harder for them to get someone to switch genre to another thing because what they love is the genre. It’s not that they don’t have fans of their writing but those people are more fans of the genre. What I am proposing is for these writers who write off-genre and any author can use this. Just because you’re writing in a genre does not mean you can have a specific tone. My friend RJ Blain writes paranormal romance. Her biggest series is Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count).
Her writing is very Blain-esque. She’s in a hot genre and also has a distinctive style inside of that genre that she cultivates. You can do both things. If you are an author who writes an off-genre, you’re going to have a lot more success cultivating a fandom around your work, going out and finding the little niche people and places that are excited about your work. For instance, my friend writes Weird Westerns like Lovecraft meets Western.
I would be like, “You need to go to places that Lovecraft fans hang out and pull off some people who like Westerns from there. Go to places that Westerns hang out and pull people who like Lovecraft from that.” It’s not going to be all of them or most of them. It may be a few, which is why you have to find these pockets all over the place like conventions, being on podcasts, speaking, and being in places. You’re looking for 1, 2, 5 or 10 people at a time every time you speak to come and become part of your world. That is not easy. You could also never care if anyone buys your books and write them for fun.
That’s what I say. You can write whatever you want. If you want to make a living, here are your options.
The problem is you have people like Mark Dawson. I love Mark. He’s great. People like Mark Dawson make it seem like all you got to do is put a book in KU and then run ads to it. Mark Dawson is James Cameron-esque. He writes books that are very popular in a popular genre and puts his hook on them that people like. My friend Jonas Saul similarly has a 30-book series in a similar genre. The character is very unique in the space. I’m thinking of books that I love but are not going to be as popular.
If you did a bisexual science fiction romance book that’s a hard science, you’re going to have a problem because most people in KU want het couples, not all but most. Most people want romance and not the hard sci-fi part. If you lean into sci-fi, you’re going to have a problem. If you lean into the romance, you’re going to have a problem with the hard sci-fi people. Almost all of my main characters are somewhere on the LGBTQIA spectrum. I get it but that doesn’t change the fact that if you want to succeed in KU for the most part, not everyone, you need to start with a het couple.
I want to get back to the Kickstarter direct-to-customer thing because I’m curious. I’ve seen Kickstarter coming up a little bit, not just you. Authors are using it in different ways. You mentioned something about the board game. I don’t spend a lot of time on Kickstarters so I’m assuming from the way you said it that there are already communities of people who are checking on Kickstarter to see what games, comics and things they might be able to support or something like that. Let’s talk about that a little bit.
When you take responsibility for communicating with people who support you, it allows you to have this moment of creation with those who make your career possible.
Both comics and board games were dead in the water as far as categories went before Kickstarter. It was very hard to service these things, making the money and margins you did on board games. It only allowed a few cool and weird board games to come out because the field was dominated by a couple of places. A similar thing happened before the invention of Kickstarter. People were doing PayPal and other stuff. There was a Renaissance because it allowed people to bring new ideas into the space.
It was a breath of fresh air because suddenly, board game people could spend millions of dollars on board games that they thought were cool that never would have come out commercially. Not only did it become a destination to go for. It became the destination for cool things and projects that you might not find otherwise, similarly with comics. What I would love to do is to create a space in the Kickstarter realm where cool people who have cool projects start their projects on Kickstarter, then bring them to Amazon and all of the other places. It’s like how board games started on Kickstarter and get distributed into the mass market.
Comics started on Kickstarter to get distributed into the mass market as well. The last time I heard, 3,000 to 3,500 books launch on Amazon a day as opposed to 300 or so projects launched at any one time in the publishing category on Kickstarter. I looked and there were ten fiction books on Kickstarter. There’s almost nothing in the fiction space at any one time. Part of that is because people don’t want to do the work of doing Kickstarter. It’s work. You got to print books, do the campaign, sign things and ship them. It’s not no-work. It’s not throwing a book on KU and turning on ads.
I’m in your group where you’re showing people how to do a mini Kickstarter. You’re like, “I just made $200.” The setup is like, “Once I know what I’m doing, it is still work but I’ll know what I’m doing.”
The biggest thing is it’s a complete change in the perspective of authorship because Amazon puts a natural barrier between you and your customer. When things go wrong, it is Amazon’s job to solve them. If there is something wrong, you only have so much control. You’re the author. Kickstarter pulls that and you are the one responsible for communicating with your people and fulfilling their stuff, with all the good and the bad that comes with it.
Sometimes I have people that have bad experiences. I have to ship them new books and do customer service and all of that stuff. In return, I get to have a world where I have people who are spending a premium on my books so that I will sign them because they love what I do so much. They seek me out to do it again and make weirder things or continue the pursuit. It allows you to have this moment of creation with the people that make your career possible.
That’s a lovely thing. I always tell people on a campaign, “Many people will read this book. Few of them forever will help me create. The difference between this and buying on Amazon is you were helping this book come into the world and allowing for new books to come out. No one else has that experience.” It’s a very special relationship you have at that moment because they trust you to deliver this thing sight unseen.
Most readers here will be novelists. Can you talk a little bit about how you present an idea for a novel on Kickstarter? How do you get people invested in it?
It’s a lot more complicated.
You don’t have to go detailed like, “Here are the things that you offer.”
You have to bring passion to it. What Kickstarter allows that Amazon does not is for you to be passionate about your work unabashedly. It is not just a sales channel. It is a way to get people excited about the thing that you are doing, to build that passion in, and to explain to people why they should buy into this series, your work and you as a person, and be front and center. That might be scary to people but to me, it’s a great feeling to be able to be front and center in front of your work, telling people why they should care about it.
That is the most important aspect that you have to switch when you are between Amazon and Kickstarter, or direct sales and Amazon. The way that you succeed on Amazon is very mechanical. You write a 250-word blurb that gives a teaser. You have a cover that is on-brand. You have a look inside that looks nice. You have the right keywords and the right thing, then you throw ads behind it. I’m not saying anyone could do it because it is hard to do that well and distill a book into different words. There are a lot of pieces. The book or the product speaks for itself.
The advantage of Kickstarter is you get to speak. You get to join that conversation and say, “Here is why I love this book or series, here is why it’s important, here is why it’s not the same thing you’re reading on Amazon every day, and here’s why I care about this thing.” That is the key difference between both mediums. People who do it well transfer their excitement onto the audience and Silly Putty or whatever that thing was with the newspaper print. It helps with all your launches because all launches should be a transfer of excitement from you to the person that is buying the book.
For most authors, not us who write a new book every two weeks, they haven’t read a new book in that series for several months or maybe a whole year. Part of the reason that authors fail at launching is that they don’t transfer that excitement back and remind people why they love a series or a book in the first place. Every launch on Kickstarter is a chance to get people re-excited about the series and the thing, but also build assets that you can use later.
For instance, I have my fantasy series, The Obsidian Spindle Saga. It’s a twelve-book series. It deals with several things that I have to explain to the audience. What is an Obsidian Spindle? They’re in a place called The Dream Realm. What is The Dream Realm? There are characters that they won’t recognize that all map onto fairytale characters. There’s The Red Rider, The Wicked Witch and all of these. I have to map those characters for them. I do that during the campaign. I pretty much take that exact copy, and copy it into an autoresponder sequence to explain the series.
Once I know it works, it works to get people excited about the series as well. It is a lot of work but there are a lot of assets that you build that you can then use otherwise. You do a video. I have a thing for the video. The middle part of the video is a product demonstration. You can pull that middle out, put that part forever, and use it on any number of places as your book trailer. There are things at the beginning and the end of that but the middle part is a demonstration of why this book is cool and what it’s about.
I’ve been writing these short romances for a couple of years. Let’s say I was tired of writing short romances because they’re the same. It’s seven chapters. The meet-cute happens at the end of the first or the beginning of the second. It’s so formulaic. I enjoy it but I wouldn’t mind branching out into something a little more interesting and exciting for me as a writer.
I have this audience of people who like my stories, which is not just the formulaic part. I also have strong women. They’re not waiting for their prince to rescue them. There is a prince. I have a certain style of my own. If I had a project where I was like, “I have an idea for something,” could I take it to my audience or my newsletter and be like, “Hey?” You don’t have to give me a step-by-step because that’s why you have a book called Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. Is that the kind of space?
There are a couple of things that you can do with it. What you’re talking about is an audience buy-in campaign. You’re trying to find if there’s enough interest for this new series. For something like that, you would position the book against what you’re writing, then you would go to your audience a month before the campaign and try to convince them that this is something that they should pay attention to. The campaign itself becomes like, “I’m only going to do this book though if we get to $2,000 or whatever.” That has happened to me before for our book Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter. People had asked me for years to do more of the book. I told them that I would do multiple new volumes if we hit almost $16,000.
We hit it with one issue. I delivered three more books after that because I knew there was momentum. I did a campaign for each book. We did an Issue 5 campaign and a reprint of the first volume. I did 2 and 3. They both made enough money to get me to Volume 4, which we finished production. We will do a campaign for that. All of that stuff is important because you don’t know. A big example of this is audiobooks. I don’t recommend running just an audiobook campaign because Kickstarter is not great for audio-only projects. My friend did run an $11,000 audio drama campaign. There’s some interest there that you can do. She had a lot of success on Kickstarter before.
Doing a campaign for a board game, film, short film or something that you wouldn’t normally do that people have asked for is another way that you can use a campaign to say, “I want to do something else. It’s a good idea but I need you to tell me if it’s a good idea. The only way I can know if it’s a good idea is if I do this campaign. I’ll do some pre-orders and if I hit this number, then we will do it. If you don’t think it’s cool, don’t buy it because I’m telling you to buy it.” You do a sequence of like in one a month, you’re trying to build excitement. I provide a prelaunch page. I generally use that a month before the campaign and I start promoting it.
I signed up for your prelaunch. I was like, “Notify me when it’s up for your Kickstarter book.” It’s cool that you’re talking about it. I watched you do it and I’m watching you fulfill your Kickstarter. It’s very meta.
It’s a weird thing. One reason we wanted to do it that way is so that people saw the whole process. When they read the book, they could say, “I remember that process.”
You need to own the relationship with your customers.
I’m watching it. You had these stretch goals that add a crap ton more work. I was like, “I’m going to be very selective on my stretch goals.”
I told Monica not to do a lot of the things that she did but she ended up doing it anyway. I always say, “If you have a new stretch goal, make the product better.” Each stretch goal and weekly goal made the product better. It added over 100 pages to the book at the end. It’s easily the longest book that Monica has ever done in the nonfiction space. It’s the longest book I’ve ever done in the nonfiction space and I’ve made longer nonfiction books when I make nonfiction books. Other things you could do though is get the edges spraypainted, do matte or spot UV, and add an epilogue or little things like that.
It doesn’t have to be like, “Here are so many other chapters.”
I didn’t help with those chapters. I told her I wasn’t helping with those chapters. It was a lot of work. When she decided to do whole recorded webinars every week, I was like, “Good luck with that. That’s so much.”
I’m watching this and I’m like, “I’m not doing it. It’s already a lot of work.”
I don’t think it’s a lot of work. I spend a couple of days building the page. Once I do another book in the same series, I copy generally the page and make the next one. It takes me 4 or 5 hours to make a page from beginning to end, including imagery and everything, and another hour to make the video because I have a process and system. I spend a couple of hours before the launch making emails for the launch. Once I have one and I’ll do the next one. I’ll just copy it and do roughly the same sequence.
It’s like, “This is a different title. This one is for Ichabod 2.”
That is what I do. That’s what I’m going to do for the Cthulhu book because these things have already been proven out. It’s a lot of work. I just don’t understand how much work it is because it’s the only thing I know. I want to own the relationship with my customers. That takes a lot more effort than having someone else own the relationship because if they ever go bye-bye, your Amazon account is suspended forever. You’ve lost the whole kit and caboodle or gravy train. Even if you’re not Amazon exclusive, you’re making most or half of your money in Amazon. I don’t but even if you’re wide, at least 50% of most people’s business is coming from Amazon.
I know that it’s going to take more work. I dread it every time. The thing is it takes me a day to pack the books. I drive them off and go and get an acai bowl, a shake or something to celebrate the end. I do it again. It only takes a couple of days to do the fulfillment part of this for me because I know what I’m doing and I’ve done it. I find it meditative because what I do is usually so intangible. It is words being typed into the ether. Getting the books, printing them, packing them and bringing them is an actual rewarding experience that shows I have done something for this series and that there’s a breakpoint of like, “This book is now pre-launched.”
The part that is intimidating for me is showing up with that passion over and over again extrovertedly. You have to get people to Silly Putty that passion from me to them consistently before the launch, up to the end of the Kickstarter. Where do you find those people?
The first thing that you have to show is, “This is not Russell that you’re seeing here. This is an amalgamation of Writer Russell to bring the right people here.” I put on a mask on this thing or this act for the people who are listening. They see that I’m a fun and interesting human so I can get people into my work or to like me. Around the house, I’m generally much more low-energy. It’s an act that you’re putting on. When people reject me, they’re not rejecting me. They’re rejecting the amalgamation of things that I have put on to be Writer Russell.
People don’t do a good job of understanding that the outwardly facing thing when you’re doing marketing is different. I am not like this. This is very tough for me to keep on for a whole day. I can put it on for an hour but I can’t keep it on for a whole day. I’m going to get off this thing. I had caffeine and I’m going to drop and zone out for 30 minutes to 1 hour after. I don’t show up on video a lot of times during my campaign. I will do a video and 1 or 2 livestreams, and be on some podcasts that I already recorded before the thing started.
I’m mostly typing. I know that people want to do 100 lives and say they like live videos. My literal business is writing words that people react to. If I can’t do it with words, then how are they going to feel anything when they’re reading my work? These are the people that react to my work while they’re reading it enough to support me. I have to be able to talk to them in a way that they will respond, which is in words. Most people like videos and audio but we’re talking to readers who read words.
I felt my shoulders released on behalf of the readers and myself a little bit. I’m like, “I just have to make my words count and express myself in words, which is what writers do.”
Do you have to bring passion to the words you write? Yes. You also have to bring passion to every word that you write when you’re writing a book. Granted, I slack off sometimes. I can’t bring passion to every chapter but my books are more than seven chapters long.
Surprisingly, the books that I bring not as much passion to or I’m not as excited about sometimes do the best. I’m like, “What? Why?”
It’s the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon where Arthur Conan Doyle loathes Sherlock Holmes. Maybe the most ironic thing in all of literature is that a Sherlock Holmes statue stands outside of his house. The only reason Arthur Conan Doyle got rich is that he kept raising his rates so absurdly high. People kept paying them. I get it. If you’re doing a campaign, it should be for something. It’s not just a book you’re going to launch on Amazon. It should be for something that you care about more deeply. At least there’s an element. I’ll give you Dragon Strife.
It’s a series that only took me 5 or 6 months to write. I wrote every other month of it. It’s not a book I’ve written for a long period of time. It’s not something that is a formative writing experience for me. It’s not The Obsidian Spindle Saga, which I still think is the thing that I’m going to be known for hopefully forever. To me, it’s the best piece of writing I’ve ever done. It’s cohesive and ties together. I love everything about that series. It’s not that I don’t like Dragon Strife but it is not that book. It’s a trilogy that I wrote across six months. It was a big part of my life.
Sometimes you have to come and say, “What is important about this book?” It’s a book about dragons. It’s going to do pretty well anyway. The thing that makes it different is that I care a lot about sacrifice overall and the idea of how communities interact with each other. I wanted to tell a story that dealt with that. The lead character is someone who the town is going to sacrifice to a dragon in a volcano. The story is about how they interact with her, what happens after she meets this dragon and comes back to the town, and how they interact with each other after.
She knows all of them were willing to have her die. What does it mean when a character who was supposed to die is so important that the fate of the entire world changes because of them? Those are the things that attracted me to tell this story and why I could never tell the story in The Godsverse or The Obsidian Spindle Saga. It’s not how those books operate. I needed another space to talk about this specific thing that I care very deeply about. While there has been sacrifice and people sacrifices in my books, there has never been somebody that was going to be a sacrifice to a dragon and ended up changing the entire world.
You have to think of what is important about your books. My books also focus on strong women but most importantly, generally underpowered women who are going against the fate that somebody has said they were destined to and changing the world or the universe. That’s the through-line of this. This is character is so undervalued that people are going to kill her to appease a dragon. She ends up changing the whole world and showing how one butterfly wing flapping can change everything.
I read one of your short stories but I haven’t read one of your books. One of the topics that I’m passionate about is writing about people’s core fantasies. It’s like the one that came out, the universal fantasies thing. What’s that core story fantasy that wide people are reading? Even though I haven’t read your books, I want to read that one because that appealed to the core story.
My books are about empowering yourself and overcoming the adversity of the world. My readers have commented over and over that the thing they like about my work is the characters have agency in a world where generally they have none. That is the universal fantasy that goes through most of my work and the thread. Some of my books are much smaller but most of them, especially the big ones, are about people who have been left off by the world and end up changing it for the better. All of my books are noblebright.
You have to bring passion to the words you write.
It’s the good guys in almost all of them, except for one book that I wrote. They’re all noblebright. The good guy wins in the end. They may not be the best people but they’re always doing the right things. They always end up being either talked into like Han Solo or objectively doing the right thing like Luke. Those are the things you can always expect from my books. Once you have that tenet, then it becomes about what is the thing that resonates.
One of the things I love about Kickstarter is I can spend the next month testing out different messages and seeing what resonates. When I’m ready to launch on Amazon, suddenly I’m like, “Here are the four things that resonated about this launch or series.” I can put them in the copy of the books. They will sell better because of that or at least find their target better. On top of that, I get all of the emails about who bought my books. I can use those to make custom audiences and lookalike audiences on Facebook to start targeting the books to other people.
I won’t lie to you. You probably missed out on some people from your mailing list that will then boost your book one day. People are going to buy your book on Kickstarter. They’re not going to then go and buy it on Amazon. What you gained from that is the data of who bought the book. You can then feed that into whatever your ad system is and have them make a much more accurate lookalike audience of people who will then buy your book on Amazon, dropping your costs. I know this is on Facebook and not on Amazon. It’s mostly Facebook ads. It will drop your costs down of what you end up getting charged to sell on all these other platforms.
If you’re wide, then you would be advertising on Facebook to get to all the other places most likely. If you are like, “I want to write a new novel that I’m passionate about, and I’m excited about this new project,” what amount would people like? Is it $2,000 or $5,000? What would you say?
Here’s the minimum for me that I look for. $250 to $500 a book is the goal. My goal is to break even on all the production costs on Kickstarter because you can’t expect much more than that, honestly. You’re probably not going to be Brandon Sanderson and make $7 million on your book launch or do any of this stuff. What would be a good goal is, “Can I go into my book launch free and clear with a couple of hundred dollars of advertising budget after that?” I’ve done nineteen of these. I’ll make maybe $2,000 or $3,000 at the end of the day. In one campaign, I made $7,000 or $8,000 at the end of it. It was awesome. What I’m always attempting is to break even before I put the book on Amazon. Everything else is gravy after that. That includes production costs, printing costs, shipping costs and all of the costs.
To me, that is ideal because publishing is a war of attrition. If most authors on most days could say, “I got out of this launch free and clear,” they would be so unbelievably happy. Most authors go into a launch $2,000 down. They make $1,000 back of it and are happy to have only lost $1,000. For any person, the goal should be kickstarting. It’s not make-a-living on Kickstarter. It’s kickstarting your ability to make this series or book. I’m happy if I can break even and have some advertising money afterward. That’s gravy on top of gravy. That would be my goal. I would caution though. The higher your goal, the more stressful it is to do the campaign. You might make a $1,000 goal and your campaign is at $500 after two weeks. You’re like, “Am I ever going to get there?”
I saw your post in the Facebook group where you’re like, “People, $250 or $200. This is your first Kickstarter. You can do another one later with a different project.”
Don’t do your dream project. If you were counseling a writer who has never written a book before and had this ten-book epic that spanned galaxies and realms, and that is what The Godsverse Chronicles and Obsidian Spindle both do, you would never tell them to take on that project first. You would say, “Start small. Learn what kind of writer you are and what kind of writing you like doing, then grow over time into the person who can tackle that series.”
I know plenty of people who did the epic fantasy book first. It worked out for them but I would never counsel someone to take on this massive project. In the same way, I would say that Kickstarter is a renewable resource. You have no idea what your benchmark is. You might go and make $10,000. I have no idea. The odds of 25% of all projects on Kickstarter generally making over $10,000 is not likely. You are not going to do this project unless you make the money. That is my caveat.
I have a book. It’s going to be a $30,000 goal. I’m not going to do the book in anywhere near the way that I would if we do not hit $30,000. I need that much money to break even on everything. I cannot do it if we don’t hit that number. If you don’t have that, then go lower or what you think you can hit in a day. How much do you hit in a day? Go to your Amazon dashboard and see the best day you’ve ever had on Amazon unless you’re Mark Dawson who hit $40,000 in a day.
We had this one crazy spike for one day. We’re like, “It’s not that day. What happened?”
Look at your average day and say, “Somewhere in this range is what I can make in one day.” I know people who generally their first day on Kickstarter is the biggest day they have ever had in their whole career. My caveat to that is to make the minimum $250 because if you go with less than $250, then Kickstarter is like, “Is this real?” Don’t do $1 because they will always flag you. I’ve learned that from the publishing person who overruns the publishing category on Kickstarter. She told that to my face. I tried to do a $1 campaign. She said, “Why are you doing this? Kickstarter hates when you do this.” I’ve done $250, $500 or something like that. Can you make $250 from ten of your friends? Probably.
If worst came to worst and you’d be like, “I need this. I’ve only got one day left.“
It’s something. Is $1,000 something that you could lean on some friends for? Probably not, but if all things go terribly, you can come up with $250 and be like, “I’m never doing that again.” You might hate it but you might love it. Many people are so stuck on this like, “This is the way that we launch. These are the things that we do and this is what makes an author.” An author has all sorts of things. I never thought I would like to negotiate contracts when I started doing this. I like putting together contracts, negotiating contracts, and all of the things that go into that thing.
It taps into the writerly analytical part of my brain. That is why I like writing nonfiction as well. There are things out there that you might love. You might think that ordering 50 books, signing them, and shipping them sounds like a lot of work. It’s very rewarding to have a stack of books and be like, “All these people paid for this book.” It’s 50 or 10 of these people or whatever it is. It’s rewarding to have this many people to support this book. Three boxes of people support this book. To feel them in your hands is a good feeling.
We don’t get a chance as writers to have a good feeling often enough. We’re looking at dashboards and usually saying, “This is what the graph looks like.” They never graph the people. Kickstarter takes that off. You graph your support to actual humans who support you. We’re communal animals. We need that idea of people being around and people supporting you. Amazon is very cold. That affects authors a lot because all they see is the graph. They’re like, “I only sold ten widgets. Next, I sold 15 widgets and then 8 widgets.”
In our first interview a long time ago, you were like, “There’s a human on the other side.” That has stuck with me forever. You can look at your graph or dashboard and be like, “It’s this much money.” I’m getting $0.33 per book. That’s if they purchased it. It’s even more than that. If you take $100, then that’s 3,300 downloads in a day of people who put their money into me and their time. If it is page reads, it’s just their time. Looking at $85 or $100, you’re like, “It’s $100.” If you’re looking at 3,300 downloads or hours of people’s lives, that’s a big deal. That’s something to celebrate every day. I’ve never forgotten that. I love that so much.
I appreciate that. Kickstarter is a way to make that real also. It’s going to be painful because you’re going to find out that friends who said they bought your books don’t buy your books. You’re also going to find old high school acquaintances or college acquaintances that buy your book. You’re like, “Why that one?” I have a friend who has never read anything that I’ve written or given me $1. She’s one of my best friends. She never shows up in that dashboard but it’s fine.
You might find that it is painful. I don’t because I don’t put a price tag on friendship. I’m not saying you do. If they do or don’t, it doesn’t bother me. A lot of people are like, “My friends and family are not supporting me.” As long as you can get over that, you realize the people that are supporting you financially are a gift. They support you and people can support you in all sorts of ways that aren’t monetary. It’s very interesting to look and be like, “That girl that I knew when I was sixteen still buys my books,” or “That friend that I had in college still buys my books.”
I can’t say that this is not a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. Good data is so valuable. That’s the thing that Kickstarter gives you. That’s the thing that I didn’t understand until I stopped doing Kickstarter, and when to try and launch books outside of Kickstarter. I was like, “This is very alienating. I have no data.” What kind of data do I get from, “There are these three spikes. There are no spikes there. I put $20 in Amazon ads and it worked. I put $20 on Amazon ads the next month and it did nothing. I don’t understand.”
I believe in good data. I spent a large part of my career trying to put phases to data and make data something that authors can like. Kickstarter is a way that you can be like, “I don’t like this data but it is data. This is good data.” Every time I do a post-analysis with someone, I say, “What did we learn?” I always want them to hear, “This worked. This didn’t work.” At the end of it, even if they got no backers, they have data.
All of this is in the Kickstarter book that you’re writing with Monica Leonelle.
I didn’t say every word. I read this book. It was 433 pages. I wrote the thing and it broke my brain. It is a very different way of selling. It goes all into buyer tactics and things that I pulled from my whole system in a way that I’ve never even had broken down before. Monica was looking at it from an outside perspective and putting all of the things along with putting her own spin on things. It’s my system from beginning to end. That also includes buyer psychology pieces and all sorts of other stuff that’s in there. I love the whole series. We have four books out. We have cross-promotion, bundling, Facebook and print. Monica has a bunch that I didn’t co-write with her.
People can support you in all sorts of ways that aren’t monetary.
When are they coming out?
They are going to come out in June. Even if you’re like, “I don’t care about Kickstarter,” I promise you, you will care about Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Facebook, cross-promotion, bundling or print. There are a whole plethora of books you can get. You can get the whole bundle at TheWorldNeedsYourBook.com. You can find them on any retailer except for the Kickstarter book, I believe. We’re holding that one back until we fully deliver that one.
The other place to find you is Russell Nohelty.
You can get a free book of mine, Mystery Spot, by going to my website. Mystery Spot is one of my favorite stories set in The Godsverse. It’s about a Black teacher in ’70s Colorado who learns she’s a pixie and has to stop a bloodthirsty cult from using her blood to open a portal to hell and release a dragon onto the world. It’s also about the socio-economic situation in 1970s rural America. At the same time, what it means to be a Black teacher in a White school, and all these other things. Mostly, it’s a fun story with magic, dragons, cults and stuff.
I’m going to go check out your dragon book ones. Are they out?
They’re coming to Kickstarter on January 4th. You can go to my website. Everyone can go into my email. They will be able to get that starting January 4th. It will be out everywhere.
Thank you so much. There are topics that I wanted to touch on that we didn’t touch on. Go look at some of Monica’s and Russell’s posts. They have them on Facebook and other places. It’s about pricing books because that’s also an exciting thing that you are doing. They’re like, “It’s worth this, so we’re pricing it this.” That is happening in the industry. A lot of authors are doing that. We didn’t even talk about that but it’s something I’m excited about.
I listened to The Self Publishing Show. They said the average price for eBooks in romance is approaching $5.
Years ago, it was $2.99. It’s going up.
I agree, especially in print books. I guarantee you whatever you’re pricing your books, you should be pricing it higher unless you’re pricing it at $20, then you’re just about right.
I had a conversation with somebody else because all of mine is $0.99. She’s like, “The short story romance authors are making a move to go to $0.99. If most of us do it, then it will become the new norm.”
They also get those books on Kindle Unlimited generally if you’re on Kindle. If you’re wide, you have to price higher because the ads cost more and you’re not getting to Kindle Unlimited pages. That goes from $0.33 to $2.8. That is an almost 10X increase.
It’s a huge increase for me to go from $0.33 to $2 per sale.
Even if you get half of the sales, you will still be making five times more almost.
I’m down for that, especially because if you think about it if you bought it for $2.99. You get to keep it, reference it, read it, reread it, or do whatever you want to with it. Whereas if you buy a cup of coffee, you drink it and it’s gone. I bet you spent more on that coffee than you did on my $2.99 book.
There was a book on Kickstarter. Its premise was like, “I’m going to try and get you to spend the least amount of money possible.” It’s called Crowdfunding Your Fiction. They raised $4,000 from 470-something backers. That’s a lot. Our book raised $21,000. His book was priced at $2. Ours was priced at $10. Our book raised $21,000 from over 500 backers. We made over four times more from roughly the same backers. We had 520 or something like that. We had more money from more backers than this book. The difference was we priced our books at roughly 5 times more and delivered 10 times the value.
That’s the part where I’m like, “Wow.” I’ve said this in the group. You and Monica are overdelivering on what I expected. Another thing we could say when you’re doing your Kickstarter is don’t be afraid. I haven’t done it but I know when you overdeliver, people want to come back because they’re like, “We know what it’s going to be.”
I do think it takes you to be like, “I’m overdelivering at $5. My books are overdelivering at $5.” Maybe not every book is like that. I don’t know if you’re getting $5 of value from every book. I have two proofreaders, a beta reader, a content editor plus myself. I put a lot of money into the books. I believe in them and that I should price them high enough so that I can find other people who love them as much as I love them. That means pricing them at a time.
I’m excited about it because when eBooks first came out, everything went way low. If you were to go to Barnes & Noble and buy a book, you can’t buy a book for less than $9.99.
You’re still pricing your eBooks by half. The problem with pricing is eBooks can be priced much lower because there’s no delivery in them. Print books need to be priced a lot higher because you are printing them POD and not printing them in large runs. A big publisher is getting 10,000, 20,000 or 50,000 copies of a book at $35 or whatever the census of the book so they can price it lower. You have a much higher cost. You need to price your book much higher so that you can get the same advantage that a person has. Some people are making $1 per print book. My heart goes out to them because that is so little money to sell a print book.
I’m certain that readers don’t know that this book is priced at $12.99 and I’m making $0.75.
That’s the problem. I price my books at $20 minimum because then I make roughly what I make selling a $5 eBook.
That was a slightly different topic that I took us on. Go check out this book, the whole series with the two of them and Russell. He has got a ton of great stuff out there. He’s one of my favorite people in the community. You’re so straightforward but also generous. I appreciate that about you. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me. You’re one of my favorite people in the community too.
Thanks. Thank you, everybody. I appreciate you for spending this time with us. Hugs and happy authoring.
Important Links:
- Wannabe Press
- RussellNohelty.com
- Monica Leonelle
- Book Sales Supercharged
- Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter
- Facebook – The World Needs Your Book
- The Productive Novelist
- 50,000 Words in One Month
- Get Your Book Selling on Amazon
- Get Your Book Selling on Apple Books
- Get Your Book Selling on Barnes & Noble
- Get Your Book Selling in Print
- Get Your Book Selling with Cross-Promotion
- Incarnations of Immortality
- Xanth
- Neil Gaiman
- Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count)
- Mark Dawson
- Jonas Saul
- The Obsidian Spindle Saga
- Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter
- Cthulhu
- Dragon Strife
- The Godsverse
- How to Build a Community and Sell to Them Without Feeling Gross with Russell Nohelty – Previous episode
- TheWorldNeedsYourBook.com
- Mystery Spot
- Russel@WannabePress.com
- Facebook – Russell Nohelty, USA Today bestselling author
- The Self Publishing Show
- Crowdfunding Your Fiction
About Russell Nohelty
Russell Nohelty is a USA Today bestselling fantasy author, publisher, and consultant. He runs the small press Wannabe Press, which makes weird books and comics for weird people.