The Business: Post-Mortem on the Star Knight Campaign

This post is a follow-on from a post I did at the main blog as the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign approached its conclusion. Where that post is about what I'd expected to be my post-campaign timeline, this is me looking back over what went down.

• Constraints: I had nothing in terms of monetary capital. The campaign's purpose was to raise some. That I not only hit my initial goal, but--at the very end--managed to double it, is a fantastic success. In addition to having no money, I also came into this with little exposure to other campaigns and no experience of my own; I took what advice I found beforehand and followed it as well as I could. I attribute my success in large part to heeding that advice.
  
• Media: I made four podcast appearances over the course of the campaign, and on a few more I got the word out via chatroom participation, but of the four appearance the first--my Killstream appearance--had the strongest immediate impact. It was also my worst media appearance of the four. I had a similar impact just by participating in every World Class Bullshitters livestream I could, and both are equal to the support I got from the Twitch streamers I solicited for support.
  
• Personality vs. Product Appeal: Nick Cole is consistent in saying that readers are loyal first and foremost to genre, and I tried to emphasize in word and image whom I'm appealing to. The problem? A lot of the groups I'm friendly with were far more on board with "#StarWarsNotStarWars" than anything else. It didn't help that I hadn't bothered to break it down to something most folks could grok in a second. "Star Wars + Voltron + Robotech" (+ Deus Vult, for some segments) worked. My personality worked more to my benefit in the later podcast appearances, and that will become an asset going forward, but only if properly employed.
  
• Salesmanship: I suck at sales. I should not be surprised, as I have no experience as such. Advice proffered, publicly and privately, I've archived for later re-reading. Watching Nick Cole's recent video series shows that this writing business really is a business, and nothing was more obvious than how clear it was that Nick scripted and rehearsed each video he's done. I have to suck less at sales going forward until I get good at it, or I'll die of old age before I can buy my own mountain.
  

TLDR: I succeeded, despite the revelation of a significant lack of experience and gap in my skillset.

If I am to build on this success going forward, I must pay the price required to fill those gaps and learn as much as I can from my experiences here. I have things yet to learn about this entire scene, which means trying to learn from others' mistakes on a whole new set of things I need to do.

Some of this stuff I need to delegate to another, and at this stage that's purely due to time issues; I'm getting a good sense of what will require my focused attention and what won't (and when) now, so I'm getting an idea of what needs to be delegated and when- and what I can just rotate to the backburner while I put my energy on something else instead.

Which leads to a book/writing related thing: I'm a pantser by nature, heavily visual in my imagination (which is why my lack of drawing skill frustrates me at times; I'm think that this too is a skill I should just suck up and build up) with outlining usually me laying down waypoints to hit instead of a road to pave, and that worked this time. For Book Two forward, that needs to tighten up; I need to clearly mark out that plot before I fire up Scrivener to write that beast, especially if I hope to attain Pulp Speed and write as fast as the creator of The Shadow- Walter B. Gibson.

Right now, I'm aiming at manuscript sizes of 60K words; that's easily done in two weeks if I can reach Pulp Speed (about 6K words a day) (After listening to Nick's video on Audible and audiobooks, I'm wondering if I should bundle three of them together for the audiobook offerings if I stay at that manuscript size.)

Anyway, the money's making it's way to me now. Soon I'll cut Brian a check and give him the manuscript. At that time, I'll bring up two things: merchandise and a logo. The former I want to set up so I have additional revenue streams going. The latter I know I need for branding purposes, and I think that's where I can signal that--like Legend of the Galactic Heroes--this is a property with old-school sensibility (much like how Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark did 40ish years ago).