Author and Anti-Hero

Some Observations on Crowdfunding and Social Media

As of this morning, the Kickstarter for THE NAUGHTY LIST — a short film based on my story “The Siqqusim Who Stole Christmas” — is 66% funded. Click here to contribute. We announced it yesterday morning, and promoted it throughout the day via social media. Here are my observations on what worked and what didn’t work. None of this is scientific, of course, but after twenty years in this business, I think my record for divining successful self-promotion is pretty solid.

Twitter worked wonderfully. I have over 11,000 followers on Twitter. Every time I Tweeted a link to the Kickstarter page yesterday, I saw an immediate and demonstrable bump in pledges.

Facebook worked terribly. I have over 9,000 followers on my public Facebook page. Every time I posted a link to the Kickstarter page on Facebook yesterday, approximately 39 people out of those 9,000 followers saw each post. That’s because Facebook’s algorithms detected the link embedded in the post, and buried it — because they wanted to charge me advertising. The one post where I DIDN’T include the link, and instead told people to get the info at, quote “Brian Keene dot com”, was seen by a much larger percentage of users. This further solidifies what many of my peers have been saying in private — and what Warren Ellis has been saying out loud. Facebook is fine for staying in touch with childhood friends, but as a marketing and promotional tool — it sucks. Unless you want to spend money.

The forum worked pretty well. Not nearly as well as Twitter, but if we parse the numbers — the forum has 540 users, 80 of which were online at some point yesterday. Of those 80, approximately 60 visited the thread for THE NAUGHTY LIST. Those are MUCH BETTER numbers than Facebook’s.

I didn’t bother promoting on Instagram or Tumblr. In the case of the former, most Instagram users are not going to click through. That’s not how they use the service. And in the case of Tumblr — the vast majority of the users are either too young to participate in a Kickstarter, or would find something problematic and socially wrong with the project itself.