How authors are earning $50k+ on Kickstarter

By charging $100+ per book.

There are two ways a book can earn $100,000: An author can sell 10,000 copies for $10 or 1,000 copies for $100. The former is what big publishing is trying to make happen, the latter is what’s happening on Kickstarter.

When I was deciding how to publish my utopian novel Oblivion, I knew I would be more likely to reach a 1,000-person market than I would be to reach a 10,000-person market. I also knew I wanted to do more than write a book. So I was enticed when I learned that, on Kickstarter, 663 publishing projects have earned more than $50,000 from only a few thousand backers. 

When I asked, the company even sent me a spreadsheet of every single project that earned more than $50,000, which I then spent way too much time filling with links and backer counts, calculating the earnings per backer for each project, and ranking the whole sheet by dollars earned so I could analyze exactly what made each of those authors so successful (linked at the bottom of this post). 

As I started poring over that spreadsheet, I realized there were a few authors with repeat successes, like Joshua O’Neill, founder of Beehive Books, who has earned $2.5 million across 14 Kickstarter campaigns. I reached out to him to learn more about how authors are finding backers, developing collectible books, and earning $50,000+ on Kickstarter. 

Here’s what I learned.  

Finding 1,000+ backers

The first thing I noticed about that spreadsheet is that, despite the fact that all of the campaigns on it earned more than $50,000, most of them achieved that with only a couple thousand backers. Only 10 projects had more than 10,000 backers, 24 had between 5,000 and 10,000 backers, 99 had between 2,000 and 5,000 backers. The other 530 projects had less than 2,000 backers. Altogether, these campaigns averaged 1,626 backers at $109 earned per backer—can you imagine earning $177,236 from only 1,626 people??

There are definitely outliers: Six publishing campaigns earned more than $1 million on Kickstarter, and two of them are by Brandon Sanderson. The fantasy author’s record-breaking campaign earned more than any other Kickstarter campaign with 185,341 backers and $41,754,153. The second-highest publishing campaign was the leatherbound edition of his The Way of Kings with 29,778 backers and $6,788,517. These were definitely the anomalies.

“Authors with any size audience can find success on Kickstarter, so long as their expectations match their reach,” Oriana Leckert, the director of publishing and comics outreach at Kickstarter, told me. “To raise, say, six figures and beyond, an author would likely need to have a large existing fanbase to leverage; however an emerging writer with a small but dedicated community can handily fund a campaign in the thousands or even tens of thousands.”

The fantasy author Michael J. Sullivan is a great example of this.