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| Melissa Brown |
Melissa Brown is an author based in Norwich who published her novel ‘Becoming Death’ with
funds raised from the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Melissa gave a great
talk last Friday at the Norfolk And Norwich Millennium Library on this web-based
method of raising money for business and personal projects. Here’s a little of
what Words And Women learned from the talk:
Crowdfunding is a funding method
based on donations. People help to fund projects by paying a donation and in
return for the donation the supporter receives a reward or a perk, eg a
postcard, a copy of a book, a T-shirt or a poster. Donations can be as small as
£1. The reward or perk is determined by the size of the donation. The aim is to
attract as many people to donate to your project as possible. Melissa needed
£1297 to publish her novel: this sum covered an editor’s input, a cover design
as well as publishing costs. She achieved this by attracting 51 donations; most
backers donated the smallest sum of £1 but one backer bid a magnificent £140 (the reward here was to be
a character in Melissa’s book, in fact to be one of the victims and to suggest
how they might die!).
Crowdfunding is done through
web-based platforms. The most common is Kickstarter, the one which Melissa used for her project. Melissa says the process is quite straight forward. All the info needed is on the Kickstarter site.You just sign up
for a Kickstarter account, fill in your project details and load up a short promotional video. It
should be noted though that if you don’t attract enough donations and don’t
meet your target amount/your monetary goal for your project then the bids won't be collected and you will
receive nothing. If you reach your funding goal then Kickstarter like all the
other crowdfunding platforms will take a percentage. Kickstarter takes 5%, so you
are encouraged to build this amount into your funding goal.
It is hard to raise
funds for book projects. The more popular projects tend to be inventions and
computer games. However, Melissa says it’s worth doing because even if you
don’t meet your funding goal you will have generated lots of publicity and made
many new contacts.
In our next post we will look
at the other crowdfunding platforms out there.
An Interview with RosieSherwood posted on this blog 22/11/14 is worth look at too because this has more info on
crowdfunding.
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