Why I'm Launching Digital Threads on Kickstarter Before Amazon
Jul 08, 2024Episode 370
Neal Schaffer
On today's episode, I'm excited to announce my bold new venture: the release of my 5th book, "Digital Threads." Inspired by Albert Einstein’s famous quote about insanity, I'm breaking the mold by launching this book on Kickstarter before bringing it to Amazon.
Learn how to leverage Kickstarter to create buzz and drive engagement for your next big project. I'll share my personal journey through self-publishing and crowdfunding, highlighting the strategies and decisions that led to this launch. Discover the importance of exclusive access, special discounts, and unique services for your business.
Gain insights into the benefits and drawbacks of self-publishing versus traditional publishing, and get a sneak peek into my Kickstarter campaign's exclusive early bird specials and unique offerings. Embrace the power of experimentation in your marketing efforts and stay ahead of emerging trends.
Whether you're an entrepreneur, marketer, or simply curious about digital marketing, this episode is packed with valuable insights. Let’s get into it!
On today's episode, I'm excited to announce my bold new venture: the release of my 5th book, "Digital Threads." Inspired by Albert Einstein’s famous quote about insanity, I'm breaking the mold by launching this book on Kickstarter before bringing it to Amazon.
Learn how to leverage Kickstarter to create buzz and drive engagement for your next big project. I'll share my personal journey through self-publishing and crowdfunding, highlighting the strategies and decisions that led to this launch. Discover the importance of exclusive access, special discounts, and unique services for your business.
Gain insights into the benefits and drawbacks of self-publishing versus traditional publishing, and get a sneak peek into my Kickstarter campaign's exclusive early bird specials and unique offerings. Embrace the power of experimentation in your marketing efforts and stay ahead of emerging trends.
Whether you're an entrepreneur, marketer, or simply curious about digital marketing, this episode is packed with valuable insights. Let’s get into it!
There's a famous quote by Albert Einstein that goes insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That's one of the reasons not the only, but one of the reasons why I decided to launch my next book, digital Threads, on Kickstarter. But I also want to teach you how you can leverage Kickstarter or other marketing channels to create buzz and drive engagement for your next big project. Discover the marketing decisions behind my decision to launch digital threads and Kickstarter, and how offering exclusive access, special discounts and unique services can benefit your business. On this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
Speaker 2:
Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktok, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital-first marketing, one episode at a time.
Speaker 1:
This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schafer. Hey everybody, this is your digital marketing coach, neil Schafer, and welcome to episode number 370 of this podcast. You'll have to excuse me. I am recovering from a cold that I recently caught from doing a little bit of travel, so if I sound a little different, you know the reason why. But I am on the road to recovery and hopefully by next episode my voice will be back to normal. But hey, this is all about the authentic podcasting experience and really keeping this real and not batch recording months and months in advance, but really trying to record these as much in real time as possible, but really trying to record these as much in real time as possible.
Speaker 1:
So, before we get to today's topic, some industry news that I wanted to share with you. That I do on a weekly basis. If you want to receive this via email, I do provide this information as part of my weekly newsletter. You can go to neilschafercom slash newsletter. Make sure you're signed up for that. But things I'm looking at this week. So Threads recently announced its one year anniversary and they also announced they have more than 175 million monthly active users.
Speaker 1:
Now, as a social network, threads is not bigger than TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or Pinterest, probably, but you know what, compared to Twitter or X, however you like to call it, it just might be on par, twitter has obviously suffered a loss of active users for a variety of reasons, and if you feel like Twitter doesn't give you any love anymore and you haven't tried out threads, I really urge you to do so, because it is, from my perspective, the closest experience to Twitter that's currently out there among all the social networks and there is a growing and engaging community there. There's often this tie-in with Instagram, where sometimes your threads posts will come up on the Instagram feeds of your followers. So if you haven't experimented and, as you know, I like to say that not just social media, but marketing as a whole, it's all about experimentation you really owe it to yourself to do that. Let's see what the folks over at Meta have in plan for threads, but obviously they're invested in it and I do not see it going away, whereas X, I don't know. I'd say that X's future is more in doubt than threads at this point, but I digress.
Speaker 1:
Also, there was some new data that came out that showed that YouTube is the leading platform influencing kids' purchasing decisions. I thought this was really interesting because we all know that TikTok and TikTok commerce, tiktok shop, social commerce is really big there, but YouTube creators also play a huge impact. But YouTube creators also play a huge impact. So you know, if we are not focusing on the future consumer, the future market, we have no future, and that's why, even though you may not be targeting Gen Z, it's important to understand what social networks they're on, what are their trends in terms of the content they're consuming, what have you? So? Another reason why YouTube, despite the fact that TikTok continues to be all the rage, is still an important platform, especially for social commerce, and I know that YouTube does plan to add more social commerce features like live video shopping, et cetera, in the distant future. They talked about this at the last VidSummit that I attended.
Speaker 1:
We also have an interesting post that talks about how Cloudflare and if you don't know who Cloudflare is, they are a provider of CDN services or content delivery network. They basically cache websites around the world so that when you access a website like neilschafercom, you will be accessing a server closer to you that has a cached version of what you want to see and basically they're able to deliver content faster, and Cloudflare, by far, is the largest of these networks. My website, as I suggested, uses them as well, and they are now offering a free tool that allows you to say hey, ai, do not scrape my content. In fact, it can help prevent them from scraping your content. So this really leads to a really, really big philosophical question Do you want AI to scrape your website? Because if you remain anonymous to AI, you are not going to be able to impact the results that AI give you. So there's no right or wrong answer here. I am still very open and I accept the fact that LLMs are going to take my content. I am hoping at some point that will have benefits to me, and actually there are some people who already talk about the potential positive SEO benefits of doing that as we move further along this generative AI search that Google and others have been rolling out.
Speaker 1:
So Should you continue to allow AI to scrape your website? Man, that's something you're gonna have to think about. You know, if you're a major publisher and the content is your IP, then that's another decision than if you are a product or service company, where that content isn't necessarily your IP. And I think. Right there you can see two diversion views where, if you're a publisher and your life is the content, you might have a different perspective. But, hey, something that I am thinking about this week that I use this time at the beginning of my podcast to help you think about how you want to approach that as well.
Speaker 1:
On to my personal news well, as you can imagine by the title of this podcast and the teaser, that I am getting very close to finally launching my Kickstarter, which is how I plan to launch my book, and I'm going to go into some details about that because I think they'll be revealing not just about what I'm thinking, but hopefully they provide you some insight on how you may want to consider, when you launch a new product or service, what is the best mechanism to do that. But I finally got my final cover images for the cover and back cover of not just the paperback version, but also I do plan to do a hardback version of this book, and I finally got those literally less than 72 hours ago been traveling fell six, a little bit further behind. But the next step in the process is actually to upload that book and to order what are called author proofs to see what the book will look like, make sure there's no mistakes or errors or last minute edits that need to be made, and that's really the final check before man. It's ready to go Now. I still have an audio book to record and let's see how much progress I make on that next week, and obviously there are still a lot of details about the Kickstarter that I'm working on, but I am hoping over the next two weeks, to actually launch it, and therefore I think it's time to finally let you in more on this new book and how I plan to launch and why you might be interested in that launch, not just because of my book, but also what you can learn from what I'm doing. So let's get into it, and I think, before I talk about this Kickstarter, I should first talk about the fact that I am self-publishing digital threads.
Speaker 1:
Now, I don't know if you remember the early days of this podcast, when I launched back in 2013, but it was then when I was promoting a book called Maximize your Social. So my fourth book, age of Influence, came out with HarperCollins Leadership, the same publisher that publishes, you know, gary Vaynerchuk and John Lee Dumas. It was really an honor to work with them. Age of Influence came out in 2020. Before that I worked with Wiley, who did the For Dummies books. That was Maximize your Social back in 2013. But before that I actually self-published my first two books Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing back in 2011. And then Windmill Networking Understanding understanding, leveraging and maximizing LinkedIn back in 2009.
Speaker 1:
So I have seen both ends of the spectrum and I think over the last 15 years since I published that first book, it's safe to say that there is not as much a stigma on self-publishing as there used to be. I think it's also safe to say that, obviously, over 15 years we've seen this incredible growth of e-books and of audio books for that matter, but over the past few years we've seen a little bit of wane of control that major publishers have on market share. We've seen a lot more indie authors especially those that do TikTok really well in the fiction realm, you know become bestsellers literally, even though they are indies In the business book world. We've seen that as well. Pat Flynn is an example of someone who's become a bestseller as an indie. Mark Schaefer's books are all independently published as well.
Speaker 1:
So it's something that I've always thought about, but I've always enjoyed working with a publisher and when you work with a traditional publisher, you have a team behind you, so you don't have to deal with all the little things. You can focus on your content and, obviously, the promotion. So don't get me wrong, there are major benefits to doing that. But at this juncture in my career I wanted to have basically more control. I wanted to have more control as to when I wanted to publish the book, if I wanted to include chapters that maybe the publisher disagreed with me on. And I did talk to a few publishers before deciding to self-publish this book and immediately like well, you know, we want this to be a certain word count, which is over what I wanted. Or I wanted to focus on the small business and entrepreneur market. They wanted to focus more on larger brands, et cetera, et cetera. And you know this is really my book, which is defining my market, which is, I like to say, this is sort of a reset book for me to renew interest in what I do and who I am and to redefine that. So that requires me to really maintain full creative control and that is something that, if you want that, you really do have to self-publish.
Speaker 1:
Speed to market is another critical item here. Now it has taken me a little bit longer than I would have liked. I will say the manuscript was done on January 31st and I'm finally pulling the plug on the Kickstarter in July. So it's been six months, and with a publisher after submitting the manuscript it might be well. It's usually not as quick as six months. You know when they are quick it might be six months, but normally you're taking nine, 12, 15, even 18 months, depending on the publisher. I'd give it a year as the average, so I'm still doing it faster than if I work with a traditional publisher.
Speaker 1:
But, more importantly, I am in full control of that and obviously there are financial benefits right that you get to keep 100% of the royalties, depending on where those royalties come from. Obviously, if they're coming from Amazon, there's printing costs that you have to pay for if it is a paper book. But obviously you are not sharing those earnings with a publisher. Now, a book does not make you a millionaire unless you're the top 0.001%. But just as I talk about when I do my annual review of my income, if I can build a book, royalty revenue stream from three figures to four figures to five figures to six figures over the course of publishing several books, which is my intention. Then you begin to see the financial benefits and obviously speed to market means the quicker that others can read it and hopefully reach out to me for speaking and for fractional CMO opportunities. Those are the real financial benefits of publishing a book, right?
Speaker 1:
I'd also like to say you know, this other benefit is really you know my learning right, my own personal growth that, as I mentioned in that teaser of Albert Einstein's famous quote, that sometimes you need to do things differently, sometimes you need to shake up the status quo and understand that there are different ways of doing things. And maybe this will be a failure. Maybe for the next book I'll go back to working with a publisher, but until I do it, I won't know. And in fact, I'm even challenging myself further by doing something I've never done, not just self-publishing, which I've done before, but this concept of a Kickstarter, and I want to talk about this because I think a lot of people might misunderstand when I say the word Kickstarter. So I want you to understand the strategy behind this, because for me, and what I've learned, once again, how the book publishing industry has really changed over the last 15 years, as you can imagine the growth of the indie, the growth of digital, the growth of direct to consumer, and a lot more authors are actually doing Kickstarters.
Speaker 1:
It is a crowdfunding platform, don't get me wrong, but authors are using it more as a strategic launch tool to be able to offer things that they can't do working through a major publisher or just putting it up on Amazon. Right, it allows me. Now, if I had a Shopify store which I do plan to create as well, but that might have to wait a little bit longer I could be doing the same thing. So, in lieu of a Shopify store, I can leverage the Kickstarter platform, which will take a little bit of my income. Not that much, right, they will take a little bit of my income. Not that much, right, they do take a little bit, but I get to launch on a platform that was built for these sorts of creative projects. So, even if the Kickstarter fails and I'm going to set it at a low enough amount that hopefully it doesn't fail even if it fails, that's fine. I'll just launch it the way I used to.
Speaker 1:
I learn from my experiment and move on, right, but launching on Kickstarter allows me to directly engage with you and better understand you, the person who actually purchases my book, and that is a critical thing. This is something that Joe Polizzi, who we've had on this podcast many times, the content entrepreneur, the godfather of content marketing, and he now, working with Lulu Publishing, created their own imprint for the Tilt talks a lot about this how we need to have direct ownership of our consumers. We need to know who are the people that are reading our books, and we don't get that information from Amazon. The only way we can do it is if we do it directly and leverage the benefits of knowing who they are and developing a deeper relationship with them. So, for those that remember, the Age of Influence was originally called the Business of Influence and I did a similar crowdfunding campaign on a platform called Publishizer. Maybe you don't remember that, so I've actually done something similar before, but I'm really leaning into Kickstarter this time as a major consumer crowdfunding platform, really studying how other authors have been successful and, most importantly, how I can offer something special for my audience.
Speaker 1:
So the benefits for me launching on Kickstarter allow me to provide you the following. Number one is exclusive access Before you can get it on Amazon or in a bookstore or online, wherever you buy books or Audible, I don't care where it is. Before all of that, you will get early access only if you purchase the book through this Kickstarter, because I am not going to offer anywhere else until I actually fulfill the book and it is sent to you. So time is money. Information is money. I'm hoping that that gives my readers the leg up on the competition by being able to get access to the information earlier rather than later. I can also offer unique discounts and bundles, so the discounts are going to be rolled into what is called an early bird campaign.
Speaker 1:
I've decided that for the first 48 hours, the Kickstarter normally is like a three to four week campaign, but for the first 48 hours, the Kickstarter normally is like a three to four week campaign, but for the first 48 hours, I'm going to have a limited quantity amount of discounted prices for most of the major formats of the book. You know audio ebook. Well, actually, audiobook is part of a bundle, but anyway, ebook, audiobook bundle, paperback, hardback, even signed editions. And before I forget, if you're not part of my newsletter, you might not know this, but there is a way to sign up so that you will get notified when this launches and it'll be a great reminder to go in and check out those early bird specials. Go to neilschafercom slash Kickstarter and when the kickstarter launches, that will forward to the actual campaign, but that will give you a chance to sign up for early access. And I am also building a street team, or a launch team, where I'm going to spend some time with you over the course of a few weeks going through this companion workbook that I've created for this book and I will be providing more information to those that sign up for early access. So make sure you do that. Go to neilschafercom slash Kickstarter and I'll be contacting you about that. But you know the exclusive access to provide to you early special discounts and bundles, especially for the early bird special, and then exclusive services.
Speaker 1:
I hinted at the signed copy. You cannot offer signed copies through Amazon. At least, I don't know a way, unless I digitally sign all of them, in which case it really has no meaning, right? I will be offering 30-minute and 60-minute private coaching add-ons. This is something that you cannot go to my site and ask for 30-minute coaching, I just don't provide it, so it'll give me the chance to provide it. I'm going to have an Ask Me Anything. Special podcast episode only for those people that buy that tier as well, as you know. Vip four-day workshop going through all those exercises in the companion workbook. So a lot of exclusive services that I cannot provide through a major retailer. Right, it has to be with this book launch and obviously the early bird specials for the first 48 hours are going to give you the best deals.
Speaker 1:
Another really cool thing about launching on Kickstarter and even if you're not on Kickstarter, obviously when you do a launch is this notion of building buzz and anticipation. Right, I'm going to have an Amazon launch. It's going to come in a few months, but before that Amazon launch, I can already be building buzz, I can already get my book into the hands of readers. That hopefully, when I launch on Amazon, I am already going to be ahead of the game with reviews, with people already talking about it, building that buzz right by providing this early access to my most passionate followers and fans and podcast listeners. It also helps me involve you, my community, early on and hopefully this creates a sense of anticipation and excitement. Well, you'll have to tell me if you're excited or not. I'm incredibly excited because I cannot wait to talk about this with you. And the other thing is it also shows an early success and that can translate into momentum on other platforms. Right, it begins the conversation and the social proof.
Speaker 1:
Like I said, once it launches, everywhere there will already be people talking about the book, versus doing a very, very steep. You know, launch tomorrow, launch tomorrow and the book is already out. And the book is already out for a few weeks before people have a chance to read it, before people have a chance to talk about it. This way, it'll be able to launch that process before the actual official launch. Now there are other additional benefits. Right, there is a feedback loop that I can get from those people that get early access to the book. So far, I have sent it out for endorsements from a number of influencers.
Speaker 1:
I've gotten really positive feedback. There's been some interesting feedback that I've gotten from some other authors that might have different opinions on my advice, which I love, and I think there's no one right or wrong. There's no one single source of truth. That's why you should be reading multiple books for multiple authors. But the feedback is critical because it helps me understand how to best market the book, what are the things that people really resonate with, et cetera. Obviously, there are marketing benefits. I get additional marketing exposure because now I will have Kickstarter, potentially introducing this book to other people because of the way that the Kickstarter algorithm works. And the other advantage for you is I do plan to have stretch goals, so the amount that I plan to ask for is a very, very small amount, but should I succeed in getting that amount, I'm going to say, hey, if we reach this amount together, then everybody is going to receive these additional benefits, and that is something that is a really, really cool feature of a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter that I just could not do anywhere else.
Speaker 1:
So I hope this gives you better understanding as to why Kickstarter for this launch. In fact, you might think, well, what would it look like if I didn't use Kickstarter for the launch? It would just be buy my book on Amazon. Buy my book on Amazon, where I'm gonna get reduced royalties and we are feeding. Not to say that Amazon is not a critical part of a book marketing strategy, but it doesn't allow me to do anything special for you, my listener right. It doesn't allow me to use the book as a way to get feedback, build momentum, build community, and those are all things I can do with the help of leveraging Kickstarter, not as a crowdfunding mechanism, but as a strategic book marketing mechanism that allows me to get to know you better, and vice versa.
Speaker 1:
So I hope that clears up any potential confusion that you might have as to my decision here, and I just want to once again humbly ask if you are anywhere interested in potentially supporting this campaign, potentially getting your hands on my book before everyone else and getting it at a discounted price, should you come for the early bird pricing. Once again, go to kickstartercom slash Neil Schaefer and you'll be signed up and, like I said, I do plan to be launching somewhere in the middle of July. Kickstarter is really interesting because you cannot schedule a launch. You literally have to manually press a launch my campaign button, meaning that I'm probably going to have to be up at midnight on one night in order to launch it. But regardless, I'm really excited about the potential. I'm excited, obviously, to get this book into your hands and I would be honored by your support.
Speaker 1:
So, once again, that is neilschafercom slash Kickstarter, and thank you again for listening to this episode, for your subscriptions, for your reviews. Every one of them means a lot to me and I look forward to serving you next week, where I am interviewing Bob Moore, who is the CEO of a very, very interesting company called Crossbeam and we talk about. He's also the author of a book on the subject. We're gonna talk about the topic of ecosystem-led growth. I think that's gonna be a really, really fascinating topic for you, if you haven't heard about that before. More relevant for B2B, but B2C can leverage it as well, so make sure you hit that subscribe button if you haven't, and I will talk to you again next week. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schafer, with a slightly nasal voice, but hope to be back at you with a normal voice next week.
Speaker 2:
Signing out. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcastneilschafercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.
