Friends Don’t Let Friends Kickstarter Alone
Author Nation Cohort Proves Crowdfunding Campaigns Thrive on, Succeed with Community
Many authors may have missed the surge of interest in Kickstarter and other crowdfunding options amid the independent publishing industry in recent years. For those who’ve watched publishing through Kickstarter, though, there’s a lot of excitement.
It wasn’t just Brandon Sanderson’s breakout multimillion-dollar campaigns that put this option on the map. By the time he’d announced his four secret novels, indie authors and small publishers had already started to pay attention to the platforms and explore how they could use them.
Over the past five years, many best practices in running Kickstarter campaigns for publishing projects have risen to the surface. Perhaps the most notable has been the emphasis on the community and collaboration during a campaign’s lifespan. From active Facebook groups offering advice and support to others running Kickstarter campaigns to multi-author collections and short story anthologies funded on the platform, accountability teams to campaign swaps shared in backer update messages, authors at all levels are working together to bring greater success to their campaigns.
This year, I joined about fifty other authors from the Author Nation community in regular bimonthly cohort Zoom calls. We analyzed best practices, reviewed campaign pages, and promoted each other’s projects.
Here’s what we learned.
What Is Crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding is a process where businesses and individuals reach out, usually through various online platforms and communities, to raise money for a specific project or cause. Authors commonly use crowdfunding to raise money for special editions, to cover launch and production costs, to turn books into graphic novels, or to support audiobook production.
Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform focused on supporting creative projects. The platform doesn’t allow charitable or generic fundraising projects, focusing instead on connecting creators with people who are interested in supporting creative projects. Although it isn’t the only crowdfunding platform available to authors, it is one of the most popular and easily recognized within the author community and beyond.
Kickstarter also stands out from most platforms in that campaigns only collect funds from backers if their creators meet or exceed the minimum funding goal they set at the start of a campaign. This helps ensure, though doesn’t guarantee, that creators will provide the promised products and services to backers at the various funding levels for their campaigns.
The Author Nation/Kickstarter Cohort
The Author Nation conference team, headed up by managing director Joe Solari, connected this year with Kickstarter’s Head of Publishing, Oriana Leckert, to form the Author Nation Kickstarter Cohort. This first annual collection of authors, open to anyone in the Author Nation community, was set up to provide best practices in constructing campaigns and to help overcome the learning curve for setting up a campaign, especially for those creating and managing campaigns for the first time.
The cohort held bimonthly webinars starting in April 2025 and question-and-answer sessions for cohort members to walk through their campaigns and talk through strategies for ensuring their campaigns funded successfully. The calls were also recorded for all who couldn’t attend live.
Over the course of the cohort, more than thirty members of the group also published a Romance short story anthology via Kickstarter. The Love Me in Vegas: A Collection of Romance project raised over $23,000 on the platform. Backers were given the option to pick up their physical copies at the Author Nation reader event, Reader Nation, later this month. Several of the anthology’s authors plan to be in attendance to sign copies of the book.
Overall, of the campaigns run by cohort members, over 90 percent successfully funded their projects. When compared to a 56 percent funding rate for publishing projects on Kickstarter, the Author Nation Cohort programs were a huge success and demonstrated the value of this kind of community collaboration.
In addition to the anthology, several smaller groups popped up from within the cohort over the course of the sessions. Small mastermind and accountability groups for people at various stages of campaign development and completion set up regular meetings with one another to encourage one another, set accountable weekly goals, and answer one another’s Kickstarter questions.
These small groups ran weekly Zoom calls that resulted in experienced Kickstarter authors working alongside authors who had never run campaigns before. This dynamic offered opportunities for education and support beyond what the larger cohort meetings could offer. It also encouraged authors without previous campaigns to move forward, setting up their pages under the watchful eyes of the more experienced members of each group.
Kickstarter Groups on Facebook
The Author Nation cohort grew into a community-focused, collaborative experience, but it’s far from the only one available to authors wanting to learn crowdfunding strategies. As the platforms have become more popular, several Facebook groups have sprung up to support authors running Kickstarter campaigns, including the Kickstarter for Authors group, founded by author Anthea Sharp.
Sharp created her group in 2022 after looking for support for her own initial campaign but struggling to find advice that wasn’t attached to a paywall. The Kickstarter for Authors Facebook group now has more than eight thousand members and offers a multitude of free resources and guides in its posts. Sharp has also collected her expertise from studying several successful publishing campaigns on the platform over the years into a second edition of her Kickstarter guidebook, Kickstarter for Authors 2025.
Although self-promotion is forbidden in Sharp’s Facebook group, authors with pending campaigns may post a preview link in the group and ask for advice and suggestions for improvement. The advice given is both candid and on point, and the expectation is that the author has done their homework and utilized the best practices found in the group’s suggested posts as a starting point when constructing their Kickstarter pages.
After projects are completed, authors in the group are encouraged to post an after-action report about their campaign’s success or failure so that others may learn from what worked and didn’t work for these projects.
Kickstarter Project Collaborations
Collaboration and community—both among authors and among authors and their readers—are key aspects of any successful campaign. However, some authors have taken that collaboration to the next level. The Love Me in Vegas anthology created by the Author Nation cohort showcased one of the more advanced partnerships authors have created on crowdfunding sites.
Anthologies
Kickstarter anthology projects are short story collections organized around a central theme or genre. A project leader typically collects and reviews short stories to be included in the project, as well as organizes the layout and special edition details related to the book’s production. Other contributors are expected, at a minimum, to share the campaign in various ways during the process and encourage their readers to back the project while the campaign is live.
Book Collections
In Kickstarter book collections, a group of authors each contribute a single book to a collection presented in one campaign. This variety of books is often arranged around a central theme or genre. For example, these can be first-in-series for each author’s primary series, where backers can get multiple books from different authors, all focused around their favorite types of books. Once again, the organizer typically takes on the lion’s share of the project, assigning tasks such as graphic design, campaign copy writing, and scheduling group promotions as needed. All contributing authors are expected to promote the campaign while it is active to their readers. The better the coordination of promotion, the more successful the campaign.
Shared Backer Promotion Pages
Kickstarter shared backer promotion pages work best for authors who will be running separate campaigns around a central theme or genre focus concurrently. The group creates a centralized landing page for all their campaigns, where interested backers can find the links to each. Each author then promotes the central landing page to both their backers and readers at large.
These landing pages are not hosted through Kickstarter, but they might be created on the lead author’s website or using another site, such as BookFunnel.com’s sales landing pages.
Backer Swaps
Backer swaps—both parties mentioning each other’s campaigns either in their update messages to backers or via their author newsletters—are usually what creators think of most often when considering collaboration on a crowdfunding project. It’s considered by both Sharp and Leckert to be one of the most successful options for promoting one’s campaign.
Newsletter campaign mentions may present opportunities to reach the most reader eyeballs in raw numbers, though authors’ general experience shows they are often the least successful in converting viewers to backers. Email subscribers are often not familiar with Kickstarter and are reluctant to enter a new platform. They are also retail buyers and not specifically people interested in supporting creators for creativity’s sake. Although newsletter mentions are worth doing to nab the occasional Kickstarter backer lurking in an author’s list, conversion will not be the same as it would be for a conventional newsletter promotional sale swap.
According to Sharp, trading mentions in a Kickstarter campaign’s regular updates has proven to be the more successful tactic. The Kickstarter for Authors group has created a separate, dedicated group page just for coordinating backer swaps in campaign updates. During a Kickstarter campaign, creators have the opportunity to put out updates regularly over the course of the project to announce new perks, stretch goals, and funding levels. After the campaign successfully funds, these updates are used to announce delivery and fulfillment progress.
There can be many of these backer updates during a twenty- to thirty-day campaign and even more to follow after the campaign ends. In these updates, the creator includes their message to backers and mentions related or similar campaigns that might be of interest. People receiving these messages will already be familiar with Kickstarter and predisposed to supporting creatives in their endeavors since they’ve already backed at least one campaign.
Authors can arrange backer swaps in several ways. During your campaign, search the Kickstarter publishing project pages for campaigns with books or projects similar to yours. As you find campaigns that are running at the same time as yours or overlapping your campaign’s time frame, reach out to the creator and offer to share their campaign with your backers, and ask if they’ll share yours with their backers, too.
As mentioned earlier, Sharp also created an “(Experienced) Kickstarter for Authors Cross-Promotion” group. In this group, members link to a spreadsheet where others can search for campaigns running concurrently to their own.
Pro Tip: If you use groups like this to do swaps, make sure you follow the rules that have been set up. This ensures maximum opportunity for sharing and swaps with many campaigns.
Don’t Kickstarter Alone
The Author Nation/Kickstarter Cohort will continue into the next year, and at least one new genre anthology is already in the planning stages. Community members should watch for information about the cohort's new season early next year in the Author Nation community online and on the Author Nation Facebook group. Announcements will also be emailed to Author Nation community members.
Starting and running a Kickstarter campaign doesn’t have to be a lonely endeavor. Whether you join a Facebook group or community cohort, create or jump into an accountability mastermind group, or organize or join an anthology project, working as a team can make the process much less daunting. Beyond that, sharing the load can often result in greater success for your campaign in the end.
Check out the links below to some of the resources mentioned in the article.
- Kickstarter for Authors Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/429764288910415
- (Experienced) Kickstarter for Authors Cross-Promotion: https://www.facebook.com/groups/408680631087020
- Author Nation Kickstarter Cohort Page: https://www.authornation.live/kickstart-together
- Kickstarter’s Publishing Category Page: https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/publishing
Jamie Davis
