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So, you’re in the middle of your #zinequest3 Kickstarter but you haven’t hit your goal. What can you do?
Zine Quest really capitalized on FOMO. Fear Of Missing Out. But this works on both the creator side and consumer side. You see 6 projects fund in a day, or hours, or minutes. And you feel like you did something wrong. Or worse, you DESERVE to fund. What do you do?
First: breathe and focus on what you can control. You can’t control fads or trends or someone else’s marketing efforts. Also you don’t know their profit margins. Maybe that $40k KS that blew up is way overextended. You just don’t know. Forget everyone else and focus on you.
First things first, take a look at your ad copy. You need to sell yourself. A lot of people hate this because it makes them feel icky. You’ll need to get over that. Just make a list of the cool things you made. Be as detailed as possible. Don’t leave anything to the imagination.
You don’t need to inflate your worth or lie to sell someone on your game. Just write about what you loved enough to make this in the first place. “I wanted to make a dungeon explicitly about pyramids! So I did that. I made 10 cool pyramids to explore!”
Quantifiable qualities are great. 10 classes. 6 locations. Give us a sense of what we’re buying. A lot of kickstarters don’t want to spoil the surprise. This is bad. Spoil everything. Tell us your absolute favorite thing about this.
It’s also a chance to add new images. If you have preview art or mock-ups share them. If you have a lot, share one per day. Either on your front page or in an update.
A lot of people feel like you need to fund to make an update. You don’t. Post an update every 48 hours with new content. Your works in progress. Other things you’ve worked on.
Casey G is doing a Great War game called “Space Weirdos” he’s doing daily updates with a turn by turn battle report. This is genius! Show me how the game plays.
If you haven’t already, reach out to other creators in your wake genre or system for cross promotion. See if you can support each other through updates. Mothership 3pp’s are kicking ass this ZQ and it’s because they coordinated and supported each other.
Give free preview PDFs to anyone who will blog about you or do a video. Contact @FROTHSOF to see if you can get on their show. Get out there. Promote.
Don’t stop updating. You’ll get a bump 48 hours before your KS closes due to people hitting “save”. If they see a lot of new content they’ll back. If they don’t they won’t. Don’t let your KS go fallow.
Stop looking at other people’s success. Mute the Zinequest hashtag on Twitter and watch a movie. Take a break and regroup. Come back with a plan of attack. Can you add new content? Can you talk about old content?
9/10 people don’t have enough info to make an informed decision. Two Rooms and a Boom was FREE to print and play DURING our Kickstarter and for months before. We made $100k.
In short. Don’t give up hope. And if this isn’t your year, so be it. But the great thing about a failing campaign is it frees you up to experiment in a way you wouldn’t with a sure thing. MAKE YOUR FAILURES COUNT. You need to milk this opportunity for everything you can.
