Michael Botur shares his experience with running a Boosted campaign to publish his sci-fi novel.
This is the story of how I went about trying to crowdfund my latest novel.
If I get enough donations, I’ll shortly wrap up a crowdfunding campaign to self-publish a kickass young adult novel. Moneyland is a YA dystopian sci-fi novel about having the food supply interrupted and having to live off the land in suburbia. I’m hoping my Boosted campaign will cross the line. There’s less than a week to go.
In early 2017, Moneyland sat unread or rejected in the slush piles of publishers around the world. From January to July I despaired over their rejections. Then I started thinking about Hinemoana Baker’s Boosted campaign, and Dominic Hoey’s, and James Mahoney’s. I applied to run my own campaign. Boosted rang me up to talk it over. I interpreted the phone call as dare, like, “Mike, do you really believe in yourself?”
I supposed so. Maybe? Sorta. I took a deep breath, and a Lorazepam, and on August 15 we rolled out a 45-day campaign to raise $3000 to print some demos of the book and create a buzz around it.
Boosted suggested Dominic Hoey be my mentor for Moneyland. It was a great match – I’ve looked up to Dom for 10 years, and his Boosted campaign led to the publication of Iceland, regarded by many as one of the best New Zealand novels of 2017.
And so Moneyland launched… then crashed immediately. Two weeks into the project, I took a holiday on remote Great Barrier Island and switched off my cellphone for seven days. Before I left, I sent a Mailchimp letter to 70 people. It took hours to compose that letter. I’d shaken the tree 70 times – surely some donations were going to fall out?
A week later, I switched my phone on, convinced a tumult of donation emails would be waiting for me.
There was not a single new donation.
I was 33 percent of the way into the campaign and I’d raised just 5 percent of what I needed. I got stress migraines. I kept waking up at 3am. I went to work exhausted. I looked for a way out. I asked if I could lessen the amount I was seeking to raise. The answer was no. The whole thing was going to fail. I’d failed myself. Legendary NZ author Alan Duff responded after I’d sent out my Mailchimp letter with four words of wisdom: “Resend with smaller font.”
I begged a friend in public relations to help me find a corporate sponsor. A local millionaire with an interest in sustainability said he had nothing to spare. I pitied myself for a couple of days, got over it then resolved to do everything Matua Dom advised. He shared his own experience crowdfunding to get Iceland written. Dom told me 70 wasn’t enough people to ask. “In general 3-6 percent of people give so you need to really pull out all the stops,” he said.
Thanks, Tourettes, I thought. You could’ve told me that at the start, then I could have stayed in my shell, resenting the writing world.
I parked my self-pity and went back to Dom’s advice. You have to approach people two-three times and keep creating fresh content and news to keep going back to them with, he told me, so I spent four hours messaging people on Facebook I hadn’t spoken to in years, asking for their email addresses, buttering them up before the cringe-inducing spammy email demand for money.
I swallowed my pride. I did interviews in paper and radio. I stayed up late designing shitty handouts. I spoke to poetry crowds who didn’t care. I performed at Whangarei Library to a crowd of five. Forty percent of people in the library audience were my children; 20 percent were my wife. I did a second mailout. My best friends each put in a hundred bucks. The despair dried up. On a Thursday (payday? dole day?) the heavens aligned and my phone kept beeping with fresh donation messages as I drove home. I pulled over and emailed each donor my heartfelt thanks immediately. A petrol station owner from Maungatapere slipped me a hundy and wrote, “I can’t wait to see it published.”
Mike’s Boosted campaign could still use your help. Donations close on September 30; let’s get his manuscript published.
The Spinoff review of books is brought to you by Unity Books.