The team behind the BleedBack comic book series has seen some awesome success on Kickstarter. They met their $3,500 fundraising goal with 10 days to spare for their first book in series, Bleedback: The End is Nigh.
The story follows Andrei Mueller, brilliant enough to captain any robotics lab, but whose criminal record has barred him from wielding his gift again. Andrei is forced to work underground as a Breaker, a specialized hacker, able to crack the most sophisticated government mandated robot restraints.
A bike mechanic by day, Andrei moonlights at The Beast, New York’s hottest nightclub. The Beast is a place where every desire can be fulfilled … for a price. One night, in the heart of this pleasure dome, Andrei’s life is turned upside down when a lovebot he cracks goes haywire and explodes in violence at the club. Andrei takes desperate flight, but that same night a shadowy group abducts his teenage daughter, Angela.
On the run, Andrei must put aside his grief and hunger for revenge to forgo a contract with the very people who have stolen Angela. After fighting so hard to remake his life, Andrei is now hurled back into the dark recesses of the global Robo slave trade. This time he fights not only to save his daughter, but a planet that is increasingly at war with itself.
You can check out their Kickstarter campaign here, which still has three days to go from the time of writing! The team was nice enough to answer some questions and yield some insight into their Kickstarter success. Check out the results below.
Marketing strategy
When the Kickstarter campaign first launched the comic book team reached out to family members through e-mail, then friends and finally industry members. We figured it would be easier to get people close to us to pledge early on and strangers would feel more confident backing us if the campaign was off to a good start. MailChimp is a useful and free tool to send out mass emails. Also, an important note is to organize all your contacts in a spreadsheet way before you launch your campaign, you want to utilize your time wisely especially if your campaign has a time limit.
Twitter was a very important tool for our marketing strategy. Try to build up a following before your Kickstarter campaign by following people who would be interested in your project. For example, our campaign was for an indie sci-fi comic book, so our social media marketer would search big Twitter accounts, like Marvel and DC comics, and follow some of their followers everyday. A month later, our Twitter account has reached 1000 followers and many of our Twitter friends have been very helpful towards our campaign. For more information on how to use twitter, check out the article Marketing Your Campaign Using Twitter.
Frequency of project and social media updates.
Twitter: 2-3 times a day. A really handy Twitter tool to use is ManageFlitter. You can find out when your audience is most active on Twitter and schedule your tweets to send out at peak times.
Facebook: Once a day – You can get away with more posts on Twitter, but you don’t want to overload your audience on Facebook. One useful post a day is all you need. Also, I find when you attach an image to a post it reaches a wider audience.
Campaign: Once per week. It’s important to stay in touch with your backers, but not to spam their inbox.
What kind of conversions can you expect with a crowdfunding campaign?
Backers directed to our page from Twitter and Facebook accounted for 15 of our 109 pledges. Four of our ~1,000 Twitter followers and 11 of our ~250 Facebook followers backed our project, so we had significantly more success from Facebook.
What kind of time commitment does it take to run a Kickstarter campaign?
It definitely feels like a full-time job when you are invested in a campaign. If you have the resources, I suggest hiring somebody to assist with social media marketing so you can help distribute the workload.
How can you get bloggers and news organizations to notice your Kickstarter campaign?
One thing we learned during the campaign is to put together relevant industry contacts in a spreadsheet before the Kickstarter campaign, not after. We lost a bit of time searching for bloggers to send out our press release within the second week of our campaign. Again, have a marketing strategy before your Kickstarter campaign with relevant contacts already researched and available and press releases ready to go.
When we wanted to send out our press release, we researched bloggers/news organizations and put them all in an organized spreadsheet. You have to do a bit of an investigation to find their e-mails. If you get stuck with a contact form there is no harm in posting your message in there. If you are lucky enough to find their phone number, it is always helpful to do a follow up call after sending off your press release.
We found that a successful method to get bloggers to notice you is by building a connection with them through social media, before you have launched your campaign. It is important to go through your Twitter followers to see who is following you. We direct messaged all the bloggers/blog twitter accounts following us, and almost everyone we contacted responded positively, leading to publicity.
About Embreate Publishing
Launched in September 2012 and based in Toronto ON, Embreate is a creators’ collective that produces cross platform narrative content. The narrative content is distributed through graphic novels, comics, films and games. Embreate brings together a diverse talent pool who share an impulse for pushing boundaries through experimentation of technology and content. BLEEDBACK is Embreate’s breakout project, a five part comic book series written and illustrated by an international indie team.
The Comic Book Team
Scott Nihill (Producer/Writer) has worked in film, TV and gaming for ten years, he has a background as a fine art illustrator, made a popular series of documentaries on artists and an interactive documentary he directed was nominated for a Webby Award. Learn more via scottnihill.com.
Riley Adams (Editor) is a TV, film & game writer who has helped construct the character-centric journey in Bleedback. He’s worked on the CBS/CTV hit Flashpoint, and Warner Bros’ next big budget console game, Mad Max.
Jeremy Mohler (Color/Letters) has worked for Marvel and most currently, the Mortal Instruments: City of Bones comic adaptation for The Th3rd World Studios. Learn more via jeremymohler.com.
Giovanni Valletta (Pencil/Ink) is a rising talent to watch, who has already done fabulous work for Darkhorse Presents, and some of the biggest names in comics including Joe Kubert. Learn more at gvalletta.blogspot.com.
