TALK: Marcus Gipps

#kickstarter #swcfw

In a follow-up to out crowdfunding week, I thought it would be interesting to find out how a successful campaign works. Marcus Gipps ran a successful Kickstarter Campaign to get the UNCLE books by JP Martin and Quentin Blake back in print. He spoke to us about the project.

Tell me about your project.

I fell in love with the UNCLE books by JP Martin and Quentin Blake when I was a kid, but sadly my copies went to a charity shop. When I was reminded of them and wanted to read them again, I discovered that they were largely out of print – and second-hand copies were shockingly expensive. After a long period of occasionally nagging the publishers to reprint (I was a bookseller, and knew who to nag), I decided that no-one else was going to do it, so I better had! By that time I had been an editor at Gollancz for two years – although this project was in no way affiliated with them – so I believed I knew enough about publishing to make it work. 

The campaign went well. How did you get the word out there?

Two main things – I found an old and largely defunct yahoo group dedicated to UNCLE, which only had around 160 users – many of whom, I suspect, had closed their associated email addresses. But a message on that was enough to get me a handful of hugely supportive and very vocal supporters, who were poised ready and waiting when the campaign launched. I was also lucky enough to have new material from people such as Neil Gaiman and Garth Nix (among others), who were fans of the book, and their online presence and supportive tweeting etc was hugely useful. It sort of snowballed from there! 

Why did you choose to use crowdfunding?

As a personal project, I knew that I couldn’t afford to produce a book which would do the contents justice on my own money. I basically saw kickstarter as a way of judging interest, and also getting pre-orders – so I could use that money to produce the book! 

Did you come across any problems in the campaign, or the execution of the project?

I underestimated how long everything would take, of course, as everyone seems to – although I had done quite a lot of work on my own before the project started, I couldn’t afford to pay the professionals I needed until the funds cleared. I also didn’t factor in enough time for complications – introductions being delayed, CDs being lost in the post, that sort of thing.

What one tip would you give to anyone considering using kickstarter to fund their book?

Try and have it almost ready to be published before you launch – I know that means doing a lot of work with the possibility of not succeeding in your campaign, but the pressure of running a campaign at the same time as working on the project is immense, and I’d have been much happier if I knew that I’d done most of the work beforehand. It also reduces the chance of nasty surprises!

Thanks Marcus. Check out the Kickstarter page here.