FULL BLEED: IT’S THE WAY THAT YOU DON’T PAY, THAT’S OKAY

Deep breath. The campaign for My Gifts Are Hungry is done and dusted. All those desperate Bluesky posts and blog posts and photo threads and attempts at outreach that just got blown off (even to some folks I know directly and that’s not a great feeling), all the surprise pickups and all of it. It’s over. Even after that despair post from last Thursday, when the campaign seemed moribund and belly up at the surface of that fishbowl and don’t let Timmy see, he’s too young to understand death. Even after that, it’s over.

250% funded. Bunch of folks wanting to buy all the books, not just the new one. Some folks brave enough to take me up on my offers of editorial feedback or writing them into a story or even original fiction written just for them. None of those have ever happened before, though I’m pretty sure I offered them on the last two Hazeland book campaigns. One day someone’s going to bite on the Insane Grill Tier reward and I’m going to be in trouble then.

Let’s do a little breakdown of things. Okay, no, wait. Let’s do the good, the bad and the ugly of things.

The good. Final outcome was great. Big improvement over the campaign for Fake Believe, both in numbers and dollars pledged. 77 backers this time around over 61 for Fake Believe. $2524 this time versus just under $2100. I doubled the main campaign goal and made that in a day. That’s amazing. All this without any real outside advertisement. Biggest referrer was actually my own Bluesky account. Me and all the folks who reposted into their own feeds. No Twitter, no Meta anything, no TikTok. Not even USEnet. Kickstarter’s own reminder emails was the other big driver, even a surprise showing from the “fund before it closes” email reminder they sent out sometime on the weekend, I think.

But let’s be real. I have to work on marketing and outreach. But as I discussed last time, that’s really an expensive proposition. Or time consuming in finding the folks who might actually want to talk with me, but they’re hard to find themselves because they’re not on big platforms or are destination websites/podcasts. All those folks already have more guests than they can handle (and largely only want the guests that are going to get them more attention.) I still don’t have much idea how to do that, even this far into things.

Okay, the bad. The totally weird curve of activity. Huge initial spike, then a little bit more. Then really only occasional pledges, no matter how much I posted or folks reposted. Less than $400 between the first week and the last three days. It’s not nothing, particularly given the size of the campaigns I run. Then a huge wave of activity in really the last 48 hours, nearly as big as the initial spike.

This was very very strange compared to the other two campaigns I ran previously for Hazeland books. Those both took a couple days to fund at a much lower level, but they also showed a pretty even growth slash activity curve. Just a constant stream of backers, not a flood, but enough to keep things looking good and healthy. Now, in reality, this isn’t bad. It’s a lot like most Kickstarter campaigns by my understanding. Just that none of the ones I’d run in the past worked like that. Maybe that means my projects have hit some kind of threshold where they operate more “normally.” I dunno.

The ugly. Me despairing and flipping out about the campaign before that last burst of activity. I was wrong and said as much. That said, everything I wrote about it last week was exactly how I was feeling about things. To have a campaign (that I pressed much harder than last time around, as best I could) come out with a smaller threshold of success? A dwindling readership? Yeah, none of that was good. But a mid-list-death-spiral career isn’t good either. People still have those, right? Or are they part of the old world and people just keep writing now? I can’t keep track.

But hey, despair is never pretty. Won’t be the last time, either. I apologize in advance. But I’ll mean it then as well. What can I say, I’m not used to good outcomes, where it comes to my career. Get an advance, lose a bunch to taxes, hire an outside editor and there goes a chunk, things fall apart with the publisher and I pay for a cover that is never going to get used and pay the editor of the manuscript for their time on it because I don’t want to be the guy that killed a publishing house. Whoops, no advance. Start at less than square one again.

Which I did, two years ago. Little more, really. On Kickstarter. Where I turned a pre-sale (and let’s be real, much of what happens on Kickstarter is a pre-sale with bells and whistles) into a small readership. Then it expanded some. And it expanded more. Next time around, I’m shooting for 100 backers. That’s likely unrealistic, but I’ve got some time to build up that audience. Somehow. I’ll figure it out.

In the meantime, it’s get the final pieces of the stuff promised for this campaign together. That means another edit pass and the page layout. Maybe look at that cover again, something more unified with the colors. Then work on the next book, currently with the title You’ll Never Have Time. That’ll likely change. Gotta decide if it’s going to be one long book or two short/medium sized ones. My Gifts Are Hungry slipped way past its enclosure to become something else, the longest book I’ve written so far. Maybe this will do the same?

Again, thank you to everyone who pledged their money or reposted or sent words of encouragement. It means a lot, even if I freak out once in a while about it. It’s a stressful world out there, and I’m not just talking about trying to make things work as an indie writer who’s actively antagonistic to the world of publishing. (Not without reason, really.) The world keeps on burning. Proud Mary etc etc.

Until next time.