Thoughts on the Last Day of my Pre-order Campaign

Today is the last day of my pre-order campaign on Publishizer. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. It motivated me to pick a WIP, stick with it, and focus on that one project for most of the summer. If I hadn’t adopted a puppy, I would’ve a finished draft, but I am a week or two behind schedule now thanks to a complicated adoption process and an infinite amount of cuteness.

Still, I will have time to finish, let it rest for a week, read it out loud and some edits to get it ready for a round with critique partners and beta readers. And while I’m waiting for feedback, I’ll back to community magic, and hopefully have that done before November so I can NaNoWriMo the YA space opera I got 10K words into this spring.

Anyways, my progress and delays on the WIP are not what gave me mixed feelings. It’s the campaign itself and the concept of crowd funding a book.

When the support staff checked in to see how I was doing, I was honest and told them my efforts to generate interest were not working. They told me to Facebook message all my family and friends and ask them to pre-order.

I thought about doing this. My pre-oders had been a mix of friends and acquaintances. My mother was the only family member who pre-ordered.  Perhaps I could’ve gotten my cousins to pre-order if I had messaged, emailed, called or even asked in person, but to be honest, I felt GUILTY doing that. I didn’t want to pressure people into ordering.

Plus, the goals were set high – five hundred pre-orders to have my project queried to traditional publishers that were really small or indie presses. I’d have to get 100 to even reach hybrid publishers. Even though the people at publishizer said to push family to order, I really thought Twitter, and my 668 followers would be how I got higher numbers.

I was foolish to think I knew better than them. My pre-orders came through Facebook friends, friends of friends, and coworkers. I should’ve tried harder to get my family to buy it and share it to their friends, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do that.

In order for something like this to work, people need to shameless beg and bribe their friends and family to pre-order and share. They are the ones who are going back a project in progress. The rest of my network doesn’t know me, not really. Why would they give me money for a book that isn’t even done, one that won’t be released for a year or more?

Crowd funding, at least when it involves one newish author trying to get support to try self-publishing a novel, is about selling your project to the people closest to you and the people closest to them. That method doesn’t work really work for an introvert like me.

However, I do not regret the campaign. It taught me a lot about benefits of actually planning and plotting before I start writing.

If you were thinking about pre-ordering, today is the last day to do it until I have a publisher or have committed to self-publishing, and a scheduled release date. Here is the link: https://publishizer.com/earth-reclaimed/

If not, that is okay. Thank you for reading for my blog. I hope you keep reading as I share my thoughts on writing, teaching, food, animals and fiction.

Here is some cuteness so say thank you and hopefully brighten your day!