Why use Kickstarter for your anthology project? By Adrian Collins

Kickstarter can be a small publisher’s best mate. The crowd funding platform is a brilliant way to market, fund, and produce large anthology projects. There are a few reasons you might choose to use Kickstarter as a funding platform for your anthology as opposed to, say, paying for it yourself, taking out a business loan, or using another funding platform. For the Grimdark Magazine team, that decision came down to the successful use of the platform by other publishers for similar projects, viral marketing possibilities, and the need for more money than we were able to access anywhere else.

One of the primary reasons we chose Kickstarter was because I’d seen other publishers achieve huge success with the platform. When Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists first came into being over a late night chat with GdM team member Tom Smith, I immediately thought of Ragnarok Publications’ Blackguards anthology. It was an awesome project and a beautifully packaged product full of great authors and stories. But, what really made me think of Blackguards was the marketing campaign they’d run on Kickstarter, which led to their success. It was beautifully written and presented: cheeky, fun content paired with fantastic design that made great use of the cover art and the author assets. That was the starting point for my research. I swept through social media and the Kickstarter site history in search of similar projects to see where they succeeded and to make sure the market wasn’t saturated with similar anthology themes. Those that stuck out were Evil Girlfriend Media’s Women in Practical Armor and Michael J. Sullivan’s Death of Dulgath. I began my project work by studying their success and seeing how I could emulate it. Kickstarter was beginning to look like a viable option.

In my research I found that one of the great aspects of the Kickstarter platform is its use of stretch goals, providing some of the best bang-for-buck marketing available to small publishers. Stretch goals encourage backers to leverage their own social media reach to achieve additional rewards from the project they have backed without requiring additional investment. Word-of-mouth marketing is the best way to build trust with people not familiar with your brand, and Kickstarter encourages this in spades. Some of the stretch goal incentives for the successful projects I researched were magnificently done, while other aspects I planned to do differently. I pulled each one apart to its bare bones and built my own product and marketing plan based on what I found. When compared, dollar-for-dollar, against what that reach would have cost through paid marketing, Kickstarter provided a far better option and became the platform around which we structured our business and project plan.

And, of course, there’s money. Anthologies with exclusive short stories and artwork done by some of the brightest talents in the industry are damned expensive. Try as we might, there was just no way to find $27,100AUD in the Grimdark Magazine coffers, or my own. Nor was a bank likely to lend me that sort of cash. As anyone in publishing will tell you, publishing is risky, so the chances of being able to repay a business loan on time were slim, especially when I looked at the additional money needed for marketing that Kickstarter removed the requirement for. I also looked at other cost reduction methods, such as print-on-demand and other funding platforms to lower expenses and make a loan more affordable. Print-on-demand didn’t shave nearly enough off the total production costs, and the other platforms didn’t have the legitimacy or excitement about them to generate the marketing push that I thought Kickstarter would give us with its stretch goals feature. Having done all this research, it became clear that Kickstarter was the correct choice for our project.

When you combine the three factors—successful precedent without saturation, ability to go viral through word-of-mouth marketing, and the financial requirement of publication—Kickstarter was the best option for Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists. Currently at 112% funded with 14 days to go, I believe we’ve made the right choice.

Bio: Adrian Collins is the Sydney based founder of Grimdark Magazine. He loves reading about anti-heroes and seeing a story from the perspective of the villain across all genres, especially SFF. GdM’s Kickstarter, Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists, is currently live on Kickstarter. Say g’day over on @AdrianGdMag and facebook.com/grimdarkmagazine.

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