After thinking about writing a book for a while I finally pulled the trigger and launched a kickstarter campaign. I wrote a description, created the ugly book cover shown below using Gimp, and uploaded a video created using a notebook and a black permanent marker. I spent a lot of hours researching what a kickstarter campaign should look like. Read multiple blogs describing how to successfully launch a campaign, how to get featured on kickstarter, and even examined some of the successful kickstarter campaigns to learn how they did it.

The second thing I did after clicking on the button to launch the campaign was to post an update on all my social networks. I don’t have a large audience but I really thougt I was going to get more people to at least click on the links or ask me questions about the campaign. The response was pretty bad. Family and friends liked my updates about the campaign on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, Twitter and other social networks. However, only one friend and my wife actually submitted a pledge.

The second thing I did was to reach out to people directly, via email. Some replied and some didn’t. The ones who replied told me that the book idea was very interesting and that they looked forward for the book. There were no pledges from any of the many emails I sent either.

I guess the tribe who is interested in my book is not big enough. As a contrast, Seth Godin (I am sure you know him) met his goal of $40,000 within 3 hours of launching his own kickstarter campaign. The man has a very big tribe, and they are interested in whatever he makes – me included.

Kickstarter campaigns fail when the tribe of people who believe in the idea is too small. — Seth Godin

The one thing I am very happy about is the learning experience about kickstarter, reciprocity and human tribes.

Keep an eye on this blog as I will be posting more updates about my kickstarter campaign for The Undocumented Engineer book and perhaps you can learn from my mistakes.