Kickstarteronomy #1

So first first first, me in as few words as possible. Journalist, dad, music addict, reluctant exerciser, fiction lover, nonsense talker, good at cheese on toast. Went part-time from the day job a few months ago. Spare-time project number one: write a book.

Books could well also be projects two to ten, it should be said. Desired common theme: turning received wisdoms on their head. But which wisdom to mess with first?

I’m often struck that when you say synth pop to most people, they basically think of The Human League. Reformed punks with suits and keyboards deadpanning on Top of the Pops, kinda thing. Why? Because a million TV programmes and books have been making only that connection for as long as I can remember.

Yet these were just one of the tribes that went synth crazy at the turn of the 1980s. Far less is said about the R&B crowd, even though they made a ton of classic records. For some insane reason nobody has written a book about this, so I talked myself into doing it. You can get a flavour here, with full details coming shortly.

But what I wanted to talk about today is Kickstarter, my chosen publishing route. This may be the first of a number of articles about the journey, but let's not over-promise on a rainy afternoon.

Why am I doing a Kickstarter? Well I've always fancied a crowdfunding experiment, plus there's a good hook for the book coming up next autumn, which is too soon for commercial publishers. Combined with having a pal who recently did a successful fundraise on Kickstarter, I decided fuck it let's do this if only to tick it off on life's bingo ticket as something that I will never do ever again.

I figured I would have everything ready in a week max, but that was more than a month ago. It's one of these weirdly deceptive things where you add most of the info in a couple of hours and think you'll wrap up after checking a few details, but then each thing takes a load of research and you push back your launch date again and again.

The business plan is a case in point. You have to set a funding target. If you make target by the end of the campaign, you get all the money. If you're a penny short, it's zero.

So you have to chew all your numbers very slowly, making lots of decisions months earlier than otherwise necessary, like paper thickness or shipping preferences or how many copies to run off. Then choices start appearing behind these choices, like parcel dimensions and customer localities, and it starts to feel like trying to play whackamole with a piano tuner.

Another task is deciding what pledging tiers to offer funders. You have to offer cool rewards to encourage larger pledges, but they actually have to be things that people might pay for. And you think, I'm a writer not a market trader, what in the hell could I offer that people might...

Obvious answer: read a hundred other Kickstarter campaigns for inspiration. This led me to a few ideas which all needed costed, plus they affected other things like parcel sizes, so now I was down another rabbithole. How much for badges? Does anybody want a badge or would they prefer a sticker? Oooh maybe I could offer art prints. Who do I know that could design something? What if I hosted a publication event? Could that count as a reward? You need a spare brain for all this, I tells ya.

I finally finished draft one of the plan and wrote to a bunch of Kickstarter alumni to ask very nicely for feedback. I got about three very helpful replies, and they raised some awks questions. You'll need a marketing roll-out, said one. I could imagine how you might roll out the marketing for a new bar of chocolate, but had no idea how it might apply to a Kickstarter campaign.

Another said: you don't have enough details about your offering in the blurb. And you absolutely need a campaign video. Well, I wasn't completely surprised by this last one. Kickstarter says 80% of successful projects have videos. I had been thinking I might swerve it anyway, but now decided it was a must. So one morning I had a bash at a script and smiled into my phone about a hundred times until I had something that seemed okay. Then I realised the camera was wobbly and made a makeshift stand and did the whole thing again.

Luckily iMovie turns out to be pretty wonderful for editing, so long as you don't get hung up on its weird shortcomings (like no lower-case letters in screen titles, are you kidding me Apple?). This was one of very few stages where I actually over-estimated how long it would take, even if I still wasted loads of time trying to add subtitles and probably being too fussy about lighting and sound quality.

Throughout all this, my happy place has been to go and mess around with my main story. It's where I actually get to write words like Prince and Chaka Khan and scour YouTube for the best pop videos to upload – all to remind me why I'm doing this in the first place.

Anyway, I eventually put my project in “pre-launch”. Here, the main image and project title go live on Kickstarter and you go into "marketing roll-out" mode – aka emailing everyone who might be interested and joining every Facebook group devoted to funk and disco. It can be a lonely furrow, but at least some stalwarts have been loving the idea and saying they’ll definitely get onboard.

If this makes me cautiously optimistic, my pre-launch follower numbers are a bit shit. Is this because the follower thing on Kickstarter seems a bit buggy and not everyone can make it work? Is it because everyone is waiting for the real launch? Is it because everyone is not waiting for the real launch? My wife Anne says I need to chill, so I’m like tepid about this.

It’s now a couple of days before actual launch. I'm waiting until the new week begins, which is apparently the best time to go live. Your first and last 24 hours are supposedly the busiest, so maybe things will go ballistic on Monday. Maybe my phone will be attached to my ear all day as I try and find space for more than ten interviews before lunchtime and figure out what to wear on The One Show. (Lol. Wouldn't go on even if you asked me. Nope.)

One of the Kickstarter alumni started his original response to me by saying he had been "that soldier", which is feeling more and more appropriate. I'm sitting here lacing up my boots, shaking the old hip flask to see if there's a drop of rum in the bottom. I can hear the mortar shells and gunfire in my eardrums but maybe if I run like crazy and lob a grenade or two I’ll make it back alive.

So wish me luck, people. Give me a share. Better still, back the damn project. It'll be brilliant and no messing. What else would you expect after a month of thinking about nothing by parcel dimensions?

In the words of the outrageously forgotten Dazz Band, Let it Whip!