Promoting Your Kickstarter Campaign

Image copyright Amy Huang Photography

In July 2023, I used the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform to raise over $17,000 in pre-orders to finance the printing of my book, Maggie the Military Rat. It was a huge undertaking, and I did a ton of research beforehand to prepare. In this blog post series, I’d like to share what I learned along the way. In Part 2, I am discussing how to promote your Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.

So you have a great idea for a children’s book (or something else), and you’ve decided you want to run a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in order to finance it. Great! Now you need to figure out a way to promote your campaign. Because if no one knows about it, how can you expect them to support it? Here are my best tips: 

Begin Early

It might sound weird to think about promoting your Kickstarter before you even have your book completed, but trust me - you want to start early. The earlier you can build a following who is excited about getting your project off the ground, the better. For reference, I ran my Kickstarter from July-August 2023 and started building my following on Instagram and Facebook in early 2023. Even if you don’t have a completed book yet, you can share behind-the-scenes and progress posts to get your followers engaged.

Use a Social Media Platform You Are Comfortable With

When it comes to social media, it’s better to use a platform you are comfortable with–one that you already use personally–than to try to jump onto every bandwagon and overwhelm yourself. For me, that meant saying yes to Instagram (and pushing those posts automatically to Facebook) and saying no to TikTok and Twitter/X. When I was starting out, I heard that TikTok was the place to be for authors trying to promote their books, but it is not a platform I use so I decided not to hop onto that trend just because I felt like I “should.” I am very comfortable with Instagram and I enjoy being on it (for the most part), so that’s where I have chosen to focus my efforts. 

No matter which platform you use, I highly recommend using Canva to create graphics. I found it worthwhile to pay for CanvaPro, but even the free Canva has tons of features and enables you to create professional-looking graphics using its templates. I remember how intimidating it felt to use Canva in the beginning, and now I feel really comfortable with it.

Consistency is Key

When it comes to promotion, consistency is key. People are busy, and the algorithm isn’t always the best at getting your posts in front of people. That’s why it’s important to post frequently - I find aiming for at least 3x a week to be a good starting point, and ramped it up to daily when I was actually running my Kickstarter campaign. 

If posting 3x a week seems overwhelming or doesn’t come naturally, I suggest creating a themed schedule for yourself. For example, I used the following MWF schedule: Motivation Monday, Workspace Wednesday, and Fun Friday. This helped give me ideas AND kept me posting consistently. By the time my Kickstarter kicked off, I was posting daily and felt comfortable doing so. Be authentic and let people know you and care about you and your project. 

Build a Mailing List

While using social media is a helpful promotion tool, those companies ultimately control your followers and if something happens to your account or the platform, your followers can be gone in an instant. That’s why it’s so important to build a mailing list. You can do this easily for free using a service like MailerLite. I think it’s helpful to offer an incentive for people to join, such as a free coloring page or digital copy of your book. I found that my newsletter subscribers were among the first and most supportive backers for my Kickstarter. In fact, my very first backer was a friend who isn’t even on social media, and only follows my newsletter. So even though it’s more work, it’s definitely worth it to build this list, because these are going to be your most loyal and supportive followers and no matter what happens to your social media, you will have a way to get to their inbox.

I hope you found these tips helpful! In Part 3, I will discuss how to build your actual campaign. Stay tuned!