Blood and Bloom in Las Vegas is Out!

Blood and Bloom has successfully been Kickstarted and is printed and will be available on Amazon shortly, as well as on this website. The Kickstarter was a success, though nowhere near the success that Worldbuilding Blueprints was, which makes sense. My audience is of course primarily world builders, and so most of them are interested in my world building writing, not in my fiction writing.

The process of creating a Kickstarter for a fiction book is somewhat different from the process of creating a Kickstarter for a non-fiction book. I think the biggest difference between the two is in how you market the fiction book.

Non-fiction marketing was particularly easy. I could simply take a page from the layout of Worldbuilding Blueprints, which I had created, and use that as the base of an advert showing the value of the book, as per the above image.

But with a non-fiction book, you don't have that same option. You can't just take a cool image because you don't necessarily have a cool image. I did try and use some images, and I did make some videos about the lore of the Blood and Bloom world and they were moderately successful. Examples:

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At any rate, I am happy enough with the Kickstarter as it allowed me to make enough money to pay for a BookBub a test run, which will be my next marketing experiment. So I will let you know, dear blog reader, how that experiment turns out with BookBub when we get there.

I would say that the biggest takeaway that I have taken from the Blood and Bloom Kickstarter is this: A fiction book needs a more clearly defined marketing strategy than what I went in with. I think you also potentially need to engage with a professional around marketing if you really want to push your Kickstarter.

For the next fiction book release, I'll probably run a pre-sale campaign, both on Amazon and on my own website, rather than a Kickstarter. For Worldbuilding Blueprints, Kickstarter was more than just a pre-sale campaign. The app itself brought in new readers who were people who learned about me from Kickstarter itself. This was not the case with Blood and Bloom, where the audience was largely just people from my own pre-existing audience. As such, it would be more economical to cut out the middleman of Kickstarter, and just run a pre-sales campaign on my website.

All that being said... Keep your eyes open, the Kickstarter for Worldbuilding Blueprints Volume II is coming!