Authors & Crowdfunding: How Does it Work?
Would you build a campaign around your next novel?
Unless they’ve been living under a rock, most fantasy genre fans have heard about Brandon Sanderson’s wildly successful 2023 Kickstarter for four novels he wrote on the sly.
Originally setting his goal to $1 million, Sanderson’s goal was to fund an exclusive box set and swag box for dedicated fans. This would create a series of self-published and printed books that would never be seen again once Sanderson moved on to a traditional publisher, who would print the books as they saw fit. Quite miraculously, the Kickstarter campaign earned over $41 million dollars with over 180,000 backers within 30 days in March of 2023. That’s right, the Kickstarter earned over 40x the amount of money Sanderson initially set as his goal.
It is currently the highest-grossing Kickstarter campaign of all time.
Of course, Brandon Sanderson is a prolific long-time author with a dedicated fanbase of hundreds of thousands of readers. His Kickstarter is an outlier, a legend to be told and aspired to. But for those little guys out there like us, looking to fund our self-published novel, there is a level of curiosity that comes out of a story like this.
