This is from Becky Flansburg, author of Sissy Goes Tiny:
“You can buy one (or 10) ISBNs from Bowkers (www.myidentifiers.org) and they are 100% yours. Buying 10 enables you to have 10 in a sequential series (helpful if you intend to be a publisher or write more books). BUT, there is another option too: when you upload your book to Amazon, you can choose to get a free ISBN through them. The downside is that Amazon owns your ISBN number, not you. If you use Amazon KDP’s free ISBN, they will be listed as your “publisher.” So, if you have a business set up and want your business to be noted as your “publisher,” then buy an ISBN from Bowker.
I printed Changing the Game with Kindle Direct Printing (KDP) because I didn’t research my options. That was a mistake!
I will write a separate post on ISBN numbers and how that affects selling your book on Amazon, but I made the mistake of thinking that printing through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Printing would at least allow me to run ads on Amazon to sell my book. Nothing could be further from the truth! Continue reading Kindle Direct Printing vs IngramSpark?
I met William Xue through my LinkedIn network. He says that his company, Win Choi, specializes in high-quality printing jobs since 2008, especially in children’s books and pop-up books. His company offers competitive pricing and a high-quality product. Continue reading Another Printer for Children’s Books including Pop Up Books
Ninja Tip: If you’ve successfully funded your campaign there may be a tax advantage to spending your campaign funds within the calendar year. See what Kickstarter has to say about it here. You can spend your campaign dollars with PrintNinja even if your artwork won’t be ready until the following year!
Hi Mia,
My name’s Justin — I work for a custom book/game printer called PrintNinja. We’ve printed lots of Kickstarter-funded projects like Brightmare Art Book, Wanderlust, The Cremation of Sam McGee, PokeNatomy, Dream On, High Fidelity, and No Small Plans. Continue reading Another printer for book projects: PrintNinja
I wanted to share this email from a printing company based in Hong Kong. I don’t have any experience using them, but their pop up book example looks amazing!
Continue reading Possible Printer for Kickstarter Board Books or Die Cut Picture Books
I learned the hard way about using Gmail for my Kickstarter marketing campaign.
First of all, Gmail only allows you to send out your email to 500 recipients. It doesn’t really state that; it just won’t send out the email if you have more than 500 email addresses. This means that if you want to send out your email to 2000 people, you will have to do it in at least 4 batches.
And that was my strategy for my Kickstarter launch. I set up my email with 500 email addresses and sent it out four times.
A few bad things happened:
The upshot is that a Gmail email campaign will work best for your Kickstarter campaign if you are planning to send out emails to less than 500 people. If not, definitely use an email marketing service, many of which are free.
Once you’ve decided on where you are putting your email database (spreadsheet, email marketing company), it’s time to start building your list. You want to avoid spamming people but you do want to cast your net as wide as possible. Where can you pull your email list?
Continue reading Building Your Email List for Your Kickstarter Campaign
I don’t have a ton of experience using different email database companies, but I have used Mailchimp, MailerLite, and Constant Contact. They all have their pros and cons.
I find Mailchimp hard to use but I have been using the free version for my blog for a long time. Continue reading Email Marketing Companies
The largest crowdfunding pledge management company, BackerKit, ran some numbers based on the thousands of campaigns they’ve worked with. According to their research, a Kickstarter project with a pre-launch page set up was 4 times more likely to successfully fund than a project that didn’t.
from Coolbacker
Personally, I was a little late to the pre-launch game. I’d recommend at least two months to begin promoting your Kickstarter campaign. I announced my Kickstarter project to coincide with International Women and Girls in Sports Day, Feb 3, 2021. My campaign launched Feb 14, 2021. That gave me less than two weeks. I don’t recommend my timeframe!
You are going to want to set up your project’s pre-launch page with the goal of getting people to sign up to be notified when your project has launched. Be sure to have a clear Call To Action on all your communication.
How to do this? Consider this to be the dry run of your Kickstarter marketing campaign.
You will want to use:
If you are giving yourself two months or more for your pre-launch campaign, I’d suggest using different aspects of your book to keep your messaging fresh.
Things to feature include:
Hi, I’m Mia Wenjen. Nice to meet you!
I blog about diverse children’s books (picture books through middle grade). I am also the co-founder of Read Your World Celebrates Multicultural Children’s Book Day on Jan 25, 2024, our 11th year!
I’d love to chat with you. Let’s connect! PragmaticMomBlog (at) gmail (dot) com or on social media:
