How I Ran a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign for My Book

Publishing 7 min read

This post comes courtesy of Joe Casabona, podcast coach, solopreneur, and web developer. Learn more about Joe at casabona.org.

There’s a reason I’ve never been skydiving. And why people get homes inspected before they buy. Why there’s travel insurance, and why betting websites offer to give your first bet back if you lose it.

People, by and large, are risk averse, and these things (not doing something, getting things inspected and insured) help lower or mitigate risk.

Writing a book can also feel pretty risky. You’re either:

Creating and putting a proposal out to publishers, in hopes one decides to publish your book (therefore shifting the risk to the publisher)
Hiring a book agent to help you sell your book (therefore shifting at least some of the risk to the agent)
Writing the entire book, then trying to sell it to a publisher, or sell it yourself, assuming all of the time risk, and perhaps the entire risk, if you decide to self-publish

But what if you could mitigate the risk a bit? What if you could leverage crowdfunding to mitigate the risk, help you realize the time investment is worth it, and build a following by building in public?

That’s exactly what I did with my self-published book, and it worked… like gangbusters.

Here’s how I did it.

Getting an Advance From Crowdfunding

You probably already know that writing a book can come with significant risk. If you do it right, you’re spending hours spread out over weeks or months crafting a great, helpful story, revising it, and getting it to a place where you’re ready to send it out to test readers.

That’s part of the benefit of going with a traditional publisher. Most publishers will pay you a pretty good advance against any future royalties, so you’re immediately recouping some of that cost.

In this instance, the publisher (who’s done their own risk assessment) also essentially has a fixed cost to make their investment back on the book, before paying out royalties to the author.

But when you self-publish, there’s no publisher to give you an advance. You have to build the time and effort into the cost of your other work if you’re self-employed, or use your free time if you have an employer.

This was the predicament I was in when I wrote my last self-published book, WordPress: A Year in Review, in 2020. I wanted to write a book to fill the void of in-person and community events in the WordPress space (at the time, I was fully in the WordPress space as a developer and educator), but I wasn’t sure if there was a want or need for it.

So I decided to take a page out of a relatively new, but popular playbook for indie movies: get it crowdfunded.

I set a modest goal of $3,000, which I felt was enough for me to write the book. I ended up making about $15,000—which is better than any publisher advance I’ve gotten as well!

But before we get into how I structured it, I want to touch on the fact that crowdfunding is another way of shifting risk: this time to the project’s backers.

So, how do we mitigate risk enough for them to want to back the project?

Mitigating Risk for Project Backers

I just want to start off here by saying that I was pretty well-known in the WordPress community in 2020—I wasn’t some newcomer trying to take a community’s money.

In other words, I had already spent years building trust through involvement. And that’s the first way to mitigate risk: build trust in a community—and bring that community with you when you’re ready to launch the campaign.

I was blown away by the generosity of the WordPress Community to help me bring this project to life. And part of the reason many folks were willing to back it was that they were essentially paying me back for my generosity.

Before then, I spent a lot of time sharing my knowledge and offering my analysis of what was happening in the community for free. I was sharing everything I did, and as a result, building trust.

The people who backed my project knew I had the receipts to back up what I was promising because I:

Was spending a lot of time in the space and knew what was going on
Offered my opinions and guidance through podcasts and video
Was already writing about WordPress… a lot

My backers knew I would deliver because I was already delivering. But I also wanted to make sure the perks were good.

Continuous Building

One thing I wanted to make sure I didn’t do was take a bunch of people’s money and then disappear for 6 months, making my backers wonder if they were just bamboozled.

So as part of the perks, I also offered early access to all of the work—drafts, cover art, notes, etc.—as well as videos and a brand new podcasts so backers could follow along.

That means that even if they got the printed book, they’d have an electronic copy well before the book was on, and off, the presses.

They’d also get weekly emails of my progress, no matter how small the update.

And while the videos and podcast were also public, their support meant that content could happen—making it an extra perk for their pledge.

But it also offered another avenue of funding for the project.

Getting Sponsors (or Corporate Backers)

Unless you have a massive following, pledge levels of $2-19 likely aren’t going to get you all the way there. And while I deeply, deeply appreciate pledges of all sizes, there were two other levels that made the project a screaming success.

The first was a “Small Business Supporter” level for $100. On top of the normal perks (which we’ll get to in a minute), The business’ logo would be published on the project’s website (which housed the podcast, public updates, and long form articles), as well as in the book.

I knew a lot of freelancers, small businesses, and agencies in the space, and figured that would be a good option for them. It turned out to be even more popular than I expected; lots of businesses took advantage of this perk. In fact, it alone helped me reach my initial goal of $3,000.

The other was two presenting sponsor spots for $5,000 each. These companies would have their logos in the front of the book, on the homepage, in the sidebar of every page of the site, and on the YouTube thumbnails. They’d also get mentioned in the podcast episodes and videos.

I also knew that there were hosting companies and other large organizations that had the budget to sponsor events for tens of thousands of dollars—not to mention send staff and swag to those events. Since those events weren’t happening, that money had to be reallocated.

I was able to fill up both spots very quickly.

I think the biggest takeaway here is I knew the audience, and the space. I was able to tailor pledge levels to specific audiences—and those levels accounted for about 85% of my funding.

Structuring the Crowdfunding Campaign

OK—let’s get to it. How did I structure this campaign?

I’m sure you’ve been able to infer some amount of information, but here are the pledge levels I came up with:

Supporter – $2. Name printed in the ebook, progress updates, behind the scenes content.
Early Access – $5. Everything at the Support level, early draft of the book, early access to interviews/videos, ebook of podcast transcripts, plus a kindle/books/pdf version of the book.
IRL! – $19. Everything at Early Access level + a printed copy of the book.
Small Business Supporter – $100. Everything in the IRL! pledge, plus your logo in the book and a link on the site.
Presenting Sponsor – $5,000. Limited 2 spots available, everything in Small Business Supporter level + logos in the front of the book, on the homepage, in the sidebar of every page of the site, and on the YouTube thumbnails. They’d also get mentioned in the podcast episodes and videos.

The way this is structured, people can support at basically any price they’re comfortable with, while making the Early Access tier very appealing. And if people want a copy of the book too, there’s a level that covers the cost.

We’ve already covered the higher sponsorship levels, which as I mentioned, did the lion’s share of the work regarding funding.

With the structure, there’s one more thing I want to cover: spreading the word.

What Really Makes the Campaign a Success

Once I decided to launch this, I reached out to everyone I knew in the WordPress space—podcasts, news sites, YouTubers, and businesses—to spread the word.

This wasn’t an, “I built it, so they will come,” situation. I wanted to make sure everyone in the space knew it was happening. And thanks to the connections I had made over the years from those news outlets and businesses alike, I was able to get great coverage in the media, and secure funding pretty quickly.

It’s come up a few times at this point, but it bears repeating: the reason this project was so successful was my involvement in the community.

It’s what gave me the credentials the community needed to trust me, as well as the connections I was able to tap—connections that were happy to promote my work because they appreciated what I did for the community.

If you’re thinking of crowdfunding your book, the best up-front time investment you can make (besides actually writing the book) is being active in the community your book is written for.

Share generously, make connections, and show them you’re the real deal.

If you do that, you’ll be able to mitigate the risk of writing a book with no backing—if you’re like me, get a great “advance” on your work!