Lessons on Game of Thrones Crowdfunding: The Re-Blegging

For the last three weeks, I’ve been running a Kickstarter to try to raise funds to let me spend some time writing exclusively about A Song of Ice and Fire, and to help me publish some books.

In that same time period, I’ve published a bunch of essays:

• I’ve written chapter analyses for Catelyn VI (the Battle of the Fords), Bran VI (Theon’s capture of Winterfell), Arya IX (the fall of Harrenhal),  and now Dany IV (the House of the Undying!).
• I got some people angry about a spoiler that might or might not be a spoiler, and interestingly, people got angry both ways. Won’t link it to avoid further anger, but you can find it if you want.
• I caused something of a controversy when I argued that the ice demons known as the White Walkers might, in fact, be the baddies.

I’ve also been learning some things about crowdfunding, although there’s a lot more I need to learn. So I thought I’d throw up this post as a way of starting a conversation for anyone interested in trying something like this.

And once again, if you like my Game of Thrones stuff and would like to see more of it more often, please contribute. We’re halfway to our goal with just over a week to go!

Some lessons I have learned:

1. It really helps having an established audience. If I’d tried this with my first book, back when I had far fewer followers and visitors, I wouldn’t be anywhere close to halfway.
2. Frequent content updates help, but not as much as you might think. While my output over the last three weeks has been very fast by the standards of someone working in long-form essays, there isn’t a 1:1 correlation between updates and donations.
3. Similarly, traffic helps but not as much as you might think. My best day ever for the blog, which unsurprisingly was the day when my essay about the White Walkers posted and blew up on Twitter and Reddit, garnered me one donation. A much more modest blog post that just updated my regular readers about the Kickstarter’s progress garnered ten donations.
4. Sweat equity helps a lot. This project wouldn’t have gotten anywhere close to where it has been if I hadn’t spent the last couple years doing guest-stints on various podcasts, doing AMAs on r/asoiaf, and generally garnering good will among the community. This puts appeals like this in the context of “here’s a way to get more of that stuff you already like.”

At the same time, one halfway completed Kickstarter does not an expert make. So if anyone has any suggestions about ways to improve, I’d be all ears.