Crowdfunding a book
Strip the language away and a crowdfunding campaign is three things bolted together: a pre-order, a marketing campaign that runs for a fixed number of days, and a promise to put physical objects in the mail afterward.
The first two are what people plan. The third is what goes wrong.
The money is smaller than the number on the page
The total raised is not your budget. These come out of it first, and every one is real.
The platform's cut and payment processing. The platform takes a percentage, and the card processor takes a separate percentage plus a flat amount per pledge on top. Rates differ by platform and country and they change, so read the current schedule where you are launching and put the real figures in your sheet.
Failed pledges. A share of cards do not go through when the campaign closes, so the total shrinks between the last day and the money arriving.
Printing. If you are printing a run rather than using print on demand, this is your largest line and it is spent before any book ships — see Print on demand or a print run?.
Packaging. Boxes or mailers, padding, tape, labels, and spare copies for the ones that arrive crushed.
Postage. See below. This is the one.
Every reward you promised. Bookmarks, signed prints, pins, a tote. Each has a unit cost and a shipping weight, and the weight is the expensive half.
Tax. How money raised is treated — as income, as pre-sales, with or without sales tax or VAT on rewards — varies by country and by how the platform classifies the campaign. Ask an accountant in your own country before you launch, not after the money lands.
Shipping is what kills first campaigns
Domestic postage on a paperback is manageable. International postage on a hardcover, boxed and tracked, routinely costs more than the book — and one flat shipping fee for everyone means overseas backers are subsidized by a margin you do not have.
Do it before you launch: weigh a packed copy on a kitchen scale, then price that weight to three or four destination zones on your postal service's own calculator. The number is usually a shock, and far better to have in week zero than after a thousand people have paid you.
Then decide in the open: charge shipping by zone, cap the countries you ship to, or offer a file-only tier to everyone else. All three are normal. Absorbing the difference silently is the one that ends badly.
Fulfillment is a physical job
Nobody warns first-timers, so: after the campaign ends you will spend evenings assembling boxes, matching addresses to tiers, signing books, standing in line at a post office and answering messages.
Some backers will have moved house. Some parcels arrive damaged and need replacing at your cost. Some addresses are wrong and some parcels vanish. Plan for replacements and for the hours, and if the campaign is large, price a fulfillment service against your own time first.
A campaign converts an audience; it does not create one
This is the uncomfortable rule, and it holds almost without exception. Campaigns that fund arrive with people already waiting: a mailing list, a following built over years, a previous book whose readers want the next one, a community the book belongs to.
If you have none of that, spend the next several months building it and run the campaign after — see The newsletter, and what to give people for joining and Social media, for authors who would rather be writing. A campaign page has no discovery engine of its own worth relying on.
Launch with the finished book, not a plan for one
Backers are buying confidence. They are paying now for an object that does not exist, from someone who has never mailed them anything, so every piece of evidence that the book is real is doing work.
That means the final cover, not a sketch. Typeset sample pages, not a Word screenshot. The trim size, page count and binding, stated. And an image of the book as a physical object, because a flat cover file reads as a design while a book on a table reads as a thing you will receive.
In the tools. Mockups render your real print wrap as a physical book — the same file that goes to the printer, shown as an object — and the Social Pack turns the same cover into a short vertical video for the campaign page and your updates. Previews are free and unlimited, so all of it exists before you launch. Start a book → · about the tools
Tiers, and what crowdfunding is actually good at
Price each tier from the bottom up: unit cost, plus packaging, plus postage to the farthest zone you ship to, plus the platform's cut, plus a margin. A tier that looks generous and clears nothing is worse than no tier, because you owe the work either way.
Keep the number of tiers small. Every distinct physical reward is another item to order, store, count and pack.
What crowdfunding does well is the edition a store cannot justify: a hardcover, a dust jacket, a signed and numbered copy, a backer's name in the back matter. These let you charge well above retail without anyone feeling overcharged. A case laminate hardcover and a dust jacket come from the same design as your paperback, so the special edition is a binding decision rather than a second project — see Paperback, hardcover, dust jacket: what changes.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Mockups: showing a book that does not exist yet · More: Selling books directly to readers · Pre-orders: what they buy you, and what they cost · Pricing a self-published book