The Complete Creative

With our campaign coming to a close, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit one of the most popular episodes from our past to help you crush your next Kickstarter campaign goal. 

These are the best tips to help you plan and execute your next Kickstarter campaign. I hope you enjoy them. There is a bumper between each one where you will hear our theme music, just FYI. 

Tip #1: Start early.

You should be building your audience for at least three months before you launch a campaign. You can’t be successful in crowdfunding without a crowd.

That means showing off your project, starting a Facebook group, beefing up your social media presence, making press contacts, and building a newsletter.

The more time you have to build your network and prep them for a Kickstarter project that’s coming, the more likely they will be to back your campaign when it’s time.

Tip #2: Send individual thank you notes to backers.

When somebody gives you their hard earned money it is only polite to say thank you. It’s easy for us to treat our backers as money, but they are humans and adding the human touch will improve your connection.

On top of being the right thing to do, it will also stem the loss of backers toward the middle of your campaign because you are making a connection.

Tip #3: Stretch goals should always make your core product better.

Most people have terrible trouble with stretch goals. Once a project funds the backers fall off because there’s nothing more to keep their interest.

You can change that by making sure your stretch goals always improve the quality of your project. For instance, if you have a book that is a 100-page soft cover comic, you can add extra pages at the end as a stretch goal, you can add an extra story, you can make your soft cover a hardcover, you could make your book a bigger size.

Meanwhile, the original backer is still paying the same amount for their pledge, and they are getting a better product. Nobody cares about the bookmarks and prints. They just want the coolest project they can get.

Tip #4: Keep your rewards simple.

There is no need to add multiple options for similar items. Each reward should be targeting a specific buyer, and have enough space in between to clearly delineate the right buyer for that product.

I recommend you start with a $1, $10, $25, $50, and $250 for a standard book. Certain products will not fall into this range, but for a publishing product like a book or CD these five categories should be your base. You can always add more later.

Tip #5: make deposits into the good will bank.

Good will is a finite resource, and you will use it up when you run a campaign. In order to make running a Kickstarter palatable to your audience, you need to add value to people’s lives for months and months before you ask them to pledge to your campaign.

This could be from a webcomic, or free pages from your book, or a podcast helping them fix their biggest problems, or anything you can do to help add value to your audience’s lives. The more value you add, the more trust you will have with your audience and the fuller your good will bank will become.

You can’t be a take with Kickstarter, you have to give 10x more than you ask. You should be delivering 10x value to your audience so they will gladly give you money. In fact, they will consider it the least they can do after all the help you have given them.

Tip #6: Don’t overextend yourself on merchandise.

Especially once a project is funded, creators generally go crazy offering all sorts of merchandise like t-shirts, mugs, and other very high priced items. The problem is that they are eating into their own profit margins and eventually end up in the red.

Merchandise is unnecessary in almost all instances until you have a well-known product. Just focus on making a great single product (unless your product is incredibly high priced like many tech products are). If you must make merchandise, don’t make anything with multiple sizes. Also note that if you offer merchandise you can no longer ship your product media mail.

Tip #7: Keep your video under three minutes.

Your video is a commercial, and nobody can stand a commercial for more than a couple minutes, no matter how amazing the commercial. You can say everything you need to say in under three minutes.

Yes, you will have to edit yourself down. There are plenty of free programs like iMovie which can take out all the ums and ah. You need to make your case clearly and succinctly so people don’t tune out.

Tip #8: Add lots of images.

The average successful Kickstarter has 11 images in it. Even if you have something with a novel, there are plenty of images you can add besides your cover. You can add a photo of yourself. You can add some quotes from your book overlaid on top of a royalty free image. You can add silly memes. You can have somebody draw some illustrations of your book.

In whatever the case, your book needs images. Humans are visual creatures and picture help improve the quality of your page and make your project look more professional.

Tip #9: Keep your text concise.

People on Kickstarter love to use huge blocks of text, but that is ugly to the eye. They also love to muddle their paragraphs. Remember in school where we learned how to write a paragraph?

You have a main sentence, 2–3 sentences that support the main sentence, and finally a concluding sentence that ties together everything you said. The same thing is true with paragraphs. You have a thesis paragraph with your main point, then 3–5 supporting paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph.

You don’t need much in order to get somebody to back, but it does have to make a compelling, clear, and concise case.

Tip #10: Send updates often.

Throughout the campaign you need to update your backers at least once every 3 days. The average successful projects have given more than 10 updates. These can be raffle giveaways, or stretch goal announcements, or just a great day that you had. I like to offer weekly challenges on my campaigns, so every week I upload a new video for backers.

The point is that the backers need to be involved in your campaign throughout.

Tip #11: You don’t have to do your dream project first.

If you’ve never raised money on Kickstarter before, then don’t expect to raise several thousand dollars, especially if you have no network. You are much better served doing a project you can complete and fund, even if it’s only $500 or less. Then you will have a baseline of your audience and be able to build from there.

Your goal is to get your feet wet and learn the ropes. It’s not to stress yourself out chasing an impossible goal. You have an entire career to build up to your dream project.

Tip #12: Pledge to other projects.

Kickstarter is a community, and people want to see that you are an active backer before you launch a project. Additionally, if you do back a lot of projects you can then email them during your campaign and ask them to introduce you to their audience. It might not work, but you are almost buying their time to consider your offer.

Tip #13: Consider your category carefully.

Some categories have a much more active community than others. Tech, design, and comics have very active communities. Publishing does not. You want to make sure you get a sense of the community

Tip #14: Start on a Tuesday. End on a Thursday.

Studies show that Tuesday is the best day to begin a campaign. However, Wednesday and Thursday are very close to Thursday. So much so to be within the study’s margin of error. However, Thursday is far and away the best day to end a campaign. Thursday blew all other days of the week away by a statistically significant margin.

Tip #15: Post more to social than you think necessary by a factor of 10.

Only about 3% of people see your Facebook posts. Twitter has a shelf life of 15 minutes. So the people you think you are going to annoy probably haven’t even seen your post. You need to post all the time in order to get word out about your project.

Post when people back your campaign. Post when you’ve hit a milestone. Post everything, but make sure to keep changing your imagery so it doesn’t get stale. It’s the same reason McDonald’s has 1,000 different billboards. The same image drowns into the background. People need new stimuli in order to keep engaged.

Tip #16: You need to raise 30% of your funding in the first 48 hours.

If you think you can raise $1,000, that means at least $300 needs to be raises in the first 48 in order to guarantee success. If you raise under 20% then your project will have a tough uphill battle. If you raise more than 50% it means your target was too low. 30% means you hit the nail on the head.

Tip #17: Convey the why.

Most campaigns are pretty good about describe what their product it. Some can even clearly discuss how they are going to bring it to market. Almost none convey why people should back their project or why they are uniquely qualified to bring the product to market.

The why is what makes people back, though. People are much more likely to back an unfinished product with a compelling why than a finished product that has none. The why is different for every product, but if there is no why you will suffer much fewer backers and risk your campaign not funding.

Tip #18: Bring the passion.

If you can’t show passion for your product, then nobody else will show passion either. You need to show extreme passion for your product to motivate others to get passionate about the product as well. Your passion is contagious, as is your lack of it. It needs to come through in your word, your social strategy, and definitely in your video.

Tip #19: Make sure to calculate shipping carefully.

Almost 10% of successfully funded products fail to deliver. The number one culprit in that failure is shipping. Sometimes rates go up, but sometimes it’s because stretch goals change the weight and size of the box. Still other times it’s because a product that was once media mail can no longer be shipped that way because certain incentives prevent it from being shipped in that way. Other times it can be because they didn’t properly check shipping rates to all countries, and international shipping ate into all their costs.

You need to be very careful with shipping. It can add an undue burden on the unprepared creator. However, with some planning you can make sure it doesn’t destroy your campaign and send you into debt fulfilling rewards.

Tip #20: Kickstarter takes 10% off the top.

Kickstarter takes 5% for their fees and 3–5% for all processing fees through their credit card vendor. Take this into account. Add a 10% buffer to your campaign to prevent failing to raise enough money.

Tip #21: Transparency is key.

If something is going wrong, or right, tell your backers. If you have something to say, say it. Don’t hide anything. People are very forgiving if you are honest.

Tip #22: Schedule posts before your campaign begins.

Buffer, Hootsuite, meet Edgar, Tweet Jukebox, and many others allow you to schedule a base line of social media posts before your campaign begins. You will have other things to post as well, but you want to make sure you get the bulk of your updates out of the way early so that you aren’t fretting about them when your campaign is live.

Tip #23: Double check your rewards.

You can’t change your rewards when your campaign is live. If you accidentally charge the wrong shipping price, or you need to change the tiers in any way once even one person backs, you can’t. This often leads creators to creating new tiers to try to fix what they screwed up. An ounce of preparation is priceless.

Tip #24: Give an early bird perk to your first-day backers.

The first 48 hours is critical to the success of the campaign, so reward those people who back early. It doesn’t have to be much. Maybe the first day backers get a free wallpaper, or maybe they get the digital rewards before anybody else. It doesn’t have to be much, but that little gesture will help push people over the edge to back early.

Tip #25: Make your Kickstarter campaign a spectacle.

Kickstarter is the closest thing to an online comic-con that I’ve ever seen. You should be treating it as such by offering super cool, exclusive perks, doing live chats, engaging with your fans, and giving people something they can’t get anywhere else. You could offer daily giveaways through raffles, or weekly videos.

You can do a google hangout or an AMA, but the simple fact is that Kickstarter is an event and the more you can treat it as such the more success you will have.

Tip #26: Set up a launch and close event for your campaign.

You can do this at your house, at a local comic book store, at a park, or a restaurant. The key is not to spend a bunch of money on the event, it’s to get people excited about your project. If you are an artist, you can hold a show at a local gallery.

If you are a filmmaker you can hold a trailer screening at a local theater. You should hold these events the first and last day of your campaign to help drum up the most fervent enthusiasm possible during the most crucial times of your campaign.

Tip #27: Build press relationships early.

Emailing press contacts the day your campaign launches is too late. The press may have up to a six-month lead time on getting articles into their pipeline. However, if you aren’t building your contacts well before then the press won’t even write a story about you.

You need to be fostering these contacts for months or years before you launch. Offer to do articles for them, meet them at cons, find them on social media, and treat them like humans just like you would for anybody else. The real question you need to ask is “how can I provide value in their lives?” When it’s time to email about your project, then you need to make it easy for them to publish.

Tip #28: Your backers will be mostly people you know.

No matter how many emails you send to the press or how many cold contacts you make during your campaign, most people that back your project will be people you know for months or years before the campaign launches. That means you need the biggest network of energetic friends and fans before you ever hit the launch button. Remember, you can’t be successfully on crowdfunding without a crowd.

Tip #29: Pledge levels should include rewards from all previous tiers.

You don’t want people hesitating about backing a higher tier because they don’t want to miss out on something they really wanted from a previous tier. You want it to be very easy for them to increase their pledge level.

Increasing existing pledges is a crucial part of the middle campaign lull, and any hesitation will prevent you from getting that extra pledge money.

Tip #30: Model success.

Hundreds of other campaigns have done Kickstarter better than you in the past. They’ve succeeded and failed thousands of times. Use that to your advantage. Look through them all and find the points of commonality between them. Make sure to take note of the words they use, the imagery, and the reward levels that are consistent among the highest performers. Then, you can model that in your own campaign for the highest chance of success.

Tip #31: The right title is critical for success.

With hundreds of projects to choose from, you only have a second to catch a backer’s eye. With the way that Kickstarter is set up, you basically get an image and a title to make a backer click on your link.

So you want to make sure your title is catchy AND that is uses all 60 characters to fully explain the reason somebody should click on your project. Almost all hyper successful projects use a colon after the name of their project to state what the project is about. Make sure to utilize all 60 characters in order to give yourself the best chance for success.

That’s it for our mini-season. If you liked this, please subscribe, rate, and review it wherever you download your podcasts, whether it’s Itunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or any of the other wonderful podcast aggregators out there.

It’s the best way for us to find new people to help and to make sure you don’t miss any future episodes. We have some crazy stuff coming up that you won’t want to miss, so subscribe now.

This week I'm so excited to bring my good friends Kris Simon and Marcus Perry to the show. I've known Kris, well forever, and she is my all time favorite convention programmer I've ever met. I LOVE doing programming at her shows because it is always well thought out and amazing. I feel like I've been doing her shows forever, but it's been at least five years. 

What I didn't know was that she was also an amazing editor who had worked with everybody in the industry back when she was at Shadowline. Before I decided to do our latest book, Cthulhu is Hard to Spell: The Terrible Twos, I sat down with her and asked if she would please please please help me edit it. The first two books nearly killed me, and I couldn't do it a third time without serious help. 

She agreed, and I think we made an AMAZING book, which you can find on Kickstarter by going to www.cthulhuishardtospell.com, or typing Cthulhu is Hard to Spell into the search bar.

One of the great finds she brought into the book was her significant other, Marcus Perry, a filmmaker who has worked with just about everybody, and who used to be head of marketing at Paramount. Together, they make an amazing team, and an interesting interview. It's way more common for a couple to have one creative person or entrepreneur and the other has a stable job, which is the situation I have with my wife. 

I was really enthusiastic to have them on to discuss what it's like to both be in highly creative and unstable fields at the same time. Listen to this episode if you want to know about: 

succeeding as a creator

How to keep going in the face of overwhelming odds

how to pitch and market your project like a Hollywood studio

How to overcome imposter syndrome

And much more. 

If you liked this episode, find Kris on Twitter @kris_simon or https://www.geekchicpromotions.com, and find Marcus at https://vimeo.com/marcusperry. 

If you love this show, please rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite podcast app. You can also connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Today on the podcast I am going back to the archives to my interview with Paul Jenkins. Paul is one of the writers behind my anthology, Cthulhu is Hard to Spell: The Terrible Twos, and my first really big "get" for the show.

Kickstarter link

Paul is writer of all the things. Paul was the third employee on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, right when Eastman and Laird were about to explode into an empire. He’s worked with almost every known writer as an editor, and every artist as a writer. He’s written for Hellblazer, Spider-man, Batman, Inhumans (which won him an Eisner), and so much more…and that’s just on the comics side.

Paul is really a transmedia kind of guy. He works in every medium. Aside from writing movies, he’s written several video games including the Legacy of Kain, Twisted Metal Black and God of War series.Most recently, Paul is credited as writer on Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, created with RadicalEntertainment and The Darkness, created by StarbreezeStudios (source: Wikipedia).

On top of that he runs Meta Studios, and does his own creator owned comics Fairy Quest,which went on to raise $95,100 from 1,642 backers on Kickstarter, and is one of the prettiest books you’ve ever seen.

So long story short…Paul has some creds. And because of that we were able to go allover the map. He started by talking about his passion, which I found interesting…because he said he can find passion in anything. I love that idea,because it’s one that I use all the time. I hates marketing and sales before Istarted doing it, and by doing it I found something to love in it.

Paul’s big thing in that segment was in coming to work and doing it full force, and the idea that If you come full force at something, you’re going to be able to find something you love about it. Paul could choose anything to work on, and I’m sure he has people throwing projects at him, at least sometimes. He could phone it in, yet he still comes with the same work ethic that made his career.

Over and over it seems that these successful guys, talented as they are, come from a place of work ethic, and incredible work ethic. We saw this all the way back in the Les Garner episode and echoed in other episodes like Erik Lervold when he talked about every day being a fist fight.

These are incredibly talented guys, but there are thousands of talented guys. What separates the talent from the success is work ethic. It’s so much more important than talent. The world is littered with talented, lazy guys. If you can just outlast and out hustle, you will be a success.

Then we talked about Pixar’s 22 rules ofstorytelling, and how important they are. We touched on a lot, but mostly talked about endings, and how without an ending you have nothing. Lots of times people think they’ll figure out the ending as the go, but without an ending,Paul said, you are lost.

We also touched on some structure stuff. I talked about my way of designing a story and writing it sort of ends into the middle, where I take each issue and work from page 1 and page 20, toward page 10, and end on page 10-11.

What we really talked about though was whether writing comics gave him structure when he was writing his new novel, Curioddity,which I’ll plug now. Here’s the synopsis, pulled from Amazon.

Will Morgan is a low-budget detective after quitting his job and hardly ever has any work. When one day a mysterious man named Mr. Disndale, curator of an even more mysterious Curioddity Museum (a museum that houses legendary relics of history), visits him and asks him to find a wooden box made of teak, with a mother of pearl inlay that contains the world’s largest sample of levity, Wil thinks it is all a joke. He accepts the task and before long finds a worthy substitute to meet Mr. Dinsdale’s specifications.What Wil soon learns, however, is that there is a whole other world out there,a world he can only see by learning to un-see things, and in this world thereare people who want to close the Curioddity museum down. With the help of his new girlfriend Lucy, Wil will do everything he can to deliver on his promise to help Mr. Dinsdale keep the Curioddity Museum in business.

Curioddity is Paul Jenkin’s debut novel…exciting, fast-paced, and uncanny. A must-read.

Honestly, when I asked we sort of skirted around the question, because I was much more interested in his answer. He told me that most novelists and screenwriters have a hard time in graphic novels because so much is unseen and unread. I’m fascinated by that, because I found that comics made complete sense to me.

That’s when Paul dropped another truth bomb; he said it’s probably because I’m adaptable and not afraid to fail, so when I went into comics I was ready to figure out how to make it work.

And that made me think, because I always think that people are like me, but most people aren’t like me. They aren’t proactive, and in this business you have to be proactive. You have to be adaptable too. And when I went from movies to television to comic books, there was a comfort in that structure for me. I knew that every issue needed a cliffhanger, and every page and two page spread needed a cliffhanger, so I understood it all immediately, in fact I welcomed it.

Funny story,Paul blew me away when he told me writing for Marvel and DC is totally different, in that you can’t end every page on a cliffhanger. Why? Ads. You never know where ads are going to come, so you can’t rely on having every two-page spread end on a beat. That’s something unique to creator-owned books these days. The only way to guarantee you will get that beat you want is by doing a two-page spread, because then you have to run the pages back to back.

I always wondered, with digital, why people still did so many two-pages spreads, and now I think I have an answer. So when you write mainstream, you don’t have that freedom.

We also talked about Teenage Mutant Ninjas Turtles, and the phenomenon that accompanied it.TMNT is a violent book made for adults, and how it became a household name associated with children is fascinating. I’ll let you listen to the story Paul tells for yourself.

We ended on Paul talking about his creator-owned books, like Fairy Quest, and indie vs.mainstream. I still don’t think it’s possible right now to break in the wayPaul did, basically by asking an editor for a shot, but I love that idea.

And it’s in that idea that I want to end: asking. Paul was an editor who wanted to be a writer. So what did he do? Asked an editor for a shot…and he made the most out of it. But even if he didn’t get the job, the worst that would have happened was a no from that editor.

I love asking. I love Amanda Palmer’s TheArt of Asking, and I’ve pretty much built my career on asking for things. It’s the only way I had Paul on the show. It’s the only reason I had successful projects. It’s the only reason we’ve had success at all, and the more I do these shows, the more through lines I see. One of them being that asking is one key to success. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know. 

Hope you enjoy the show. Go follow Paul on twitter @mypauljenkins if you do, and make sure to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app, too.

Welcome back to The Complete Creative, the podcast that helps you build and sustain a better creative business. 

This week we continue with our unofficial mini-season devoted to my new anthology Cthulhu is Hard to Spell: The Terrible Twos, which is live on Kickstarter now. 

Kickstarter link

This month I'll be highlighting some of the creators that helped create the book by dropping three interviews from them this month. 

First up is my friend Ray-Anthony Height. Ray is a wonderful artist who has his own very popular indie book, Midnight Tiger, which is also live on Kickstarter now. You can scoop it up by heading here.

Ray-Anthony Height is freelance comic book penciler, creator, character designer and Co-Founder of Write Height Media. He's done work for Marvel Comics, Image Comics, Alias Comics, Viz Media, Mirage Studios, Hasbro and various other companies.

I really enjoyed this interview. When I looked up to clock the time, I was shocked an hour went by, and I could have talked to Ray for another hour without even realizing it. 

Listen to this episode if you want to learn: 

How to push your own limits as a creator

Why you should stop switching between projects constantly

How to get over the fear holding you back

How to grab opportunity when it comes knocking

and much more. 

If you liked this episode, head on over to Ray's Kickstarter and check it out, or find him on Instagram.

And if you are enjoying the show please rate, review, and subscribe on iTunes by clicking here, or find us wherever you download your episodes.

Today on the show I’m talking to USA Today bestselling author Ann Gimpel.

Ann Gimpel is a USA Today bestselling author. She’s also a mountaineer and vagabond at heart. She’s stood on top of some really gnarly peaks, and discovered that Zen mindfulness comes in very useful when the only other option is screaming your lungs out or curling into a fetal position because you’re too scared to do anything else.

I met Ann at Loscon last November when we sat on a panel together, and I was just so impressed by everything she had to say about writing and building a career. I later found out that she’s written over 75 novels, and attained a level of success in publishing that most authors can only dream to achieve.

After the show, we became friends, and recently she put together an anthology of stories to support the victims, both animal and human, of the horrendous fires in Australia. I gave a story to that anthology, and since it’s now live on all platforms, we wanted to do an episode of the show to support it and raise funds for the project.

All proceeds go straight to relief efforts on the ground in Australia.

Rising from the ashes book link

 It just so happens that I have my own anthology launching next week, so anthologies have been on my brain, which makes this perfect timing.

Listen to this episode if you want to learn:

Why Ann will never go into Kindle Unlimited

How to self edit more effectively

How to maintain the stamina to write 75 books

How to research better

And much more. If you love this one, make sure to head over to https://anngimpel.com and tell Ann how much you appreciated her stopping by for a chat.

And if you are enjoying the show please rate, review, and subscribe on iTunes by clicking here, or find us wherever you download your episodes.

Welcome back Wannabes and Creators to another episode of The Complete Creative. I'm changing up the show notes this week. I've been having my editor write these notes for the past few weeks, but this week I'm back at the helm. In two weeks my biggest project of the year launches, the second volume of my epic anthology series, Cthulhu is Hard to Spell. 

Because of that, I've got anthologies on the brain, and I'm going to be talking about them a lot in the next month. This week, I'm talking to Terry Cronin, editor of The Healing, which is live on Kickstarter right now. 

The Healing link

Terry Cronin is a writer, filmmaker, and the creator of the Horsepower G comic book. He is also the writer of The Skinvestigator novel trilogy, along with the editor of The Healing, An unforgettable superhero comic tale by a collaborative group of 10 writer/artist teams each telling a chapter of the story. It's an anthology series, but Terry had a huge part in forging the overall story, providing beat sheets to each creator, and pairing them up with superstar artists like, Larry Waits, Barry Kitson, Lee Oaks, Sergio Cariello, Ben Herrera, and more.

We dug deep on the process of creating an anthology in this episode, from finding artists to hiring writers to how to write a good piece of short fiction. Listen to this one if you want to learn: 

How to fund an anthology

Why anthologies are a lot like mixtapes

How to pace an anthology

How to get chosen to be in an anthology

How to write a great anthology story

And much more.

Join Russell Nohelty (The Complete Creative) and Dr. Debra Holland (psychotherapist) as they chat about Dealing with anxiety, depression, and burnout.

By the end of this episode, you will learn much about how to properly deal with anxiety, depression and burnout. You will also learn a lot about writing different genre of books, and a lot of other great stuff from both Russell and Debra. Enjoy!

~

Debra Holland is the New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author of the award-winning Montana Sky Series (sweet, historical Western romance) and The Gods’ Dream Trilogy (fantasy romance.) Debra is a three-time Romance Writers of America Golden Heart finalist and one-time winner. In 2013, Amazon selected Starry Montana Sky as one of the Top 50 Greatest Love Stories.

When she’s not writing, Dr. Debra works as a psychotherapist and corporate crisis/grief counselor. She’s the author of The Essential Guide to Grief and Grieving, a book about helping people cope with all kinds of loss, and Cultivating an Attitude about Gratitude, a Ten Minute Ebook. She’s also a contributing author to The Naked Truth About Self-Publishing.

I sincerely hope you enjoy the interview.

You can find Debra on...

https://www.debraholland.com/https://twitter.com/drdebrahollandhttps://www.facebook.com/Debra-Holland-395355780562473/

 

Connect with Russell Noheltyhttp://thecompletecreative.com/https://www.facebook.com/russellnoheltyhttp://facebook.com/thecompletecreative/https://www.instagram.com/russellnohelty/

This week on the show we have Tim Powers, Philip K. Dick award-winning science fiction and fantasy author of Dinner at Deviant’s Palace and On Stranger Tides. I met Tim at Loscon and he made an offhand comment about how nobody should ever self-publish their book. I asked him to come on the show and make his case, and he agreed! This is his bio, straight from Wikipedia:

Timothy Thomas ”Tim“ Powers (born February 29, 1952)[1] is an American science fiction and fantasy author. Powers has won the World Fantasy Award twice for his critically acclaimed novels Last Call and Declare. His 1988 novel On Stranger Tides served as inspiration for the Monkey Island franchise of video games and was optioned for adaptation into the fourth Pirates of the Caribbeanfilm.

Most of Powers’ novels are “secret histories“. He uses actual, documented historical events featuring famous people, but shows another view of them in which occult or supernatural factors heavily influence the motivations and actions of the characters.

Typically, Powers strictly adheres to established historical facts. He reads extensively on a given subject, and the plot develops as he notes inconsistencies, gaps and curious data; regarding his 2000 novel Declare, he stated,[2]

“I made it an ironclad rule that I could not change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any days of the calendar – and then I tried to figure out what momentous but unrecorded fact could explain them all.”

Tim has been a published writer for a long time, and I really enjoyed his perspective on writing. Even though I don’t agree that there is never a reason to self-publish. He laid out his case very well for why somebody should look for a publisher, and even how to do it. I really enjoyed toward the end of the interview when he went through the step by step process for how to get a book published. It was a brilliant strategy, and even though he’s not a marketing person he clearly has some marketing in him because it’s genius in its simplicity.

I also really liked what he said about how to find an agent. Yes, he went through the exact process you should use to find an agent toward the end of the interview and it was great. There is a secret piece of the puzzle you need before getting an agent interested, and the way he talks about it is just fantastic.

The four publishers he talked about in this interview that accept unsolicited manuscripts are Tor, Daw, Baen, and Ace. I know I’m going to look into them and if you have a qualifying book then you should too.

If you liked this episode, please head on over to Tim’s Facebook page and website to say thanks. If you like the show, please head on over to iTunes. Rate, review, and subscribe today.

If you want to check out my Kickstarter Toolkit, the free resource I designed to help you launch your own project, filled with everything I’ve ever said about Kickstarter on my blog and podcast, click here.

Join Russell Nohelty (The Complete Creative) and Kristopher Wile (filmmaker) as they chat about Following your Hollywood Dreams and talk about other cool stuff related to film making.

By the end of this episode you will learn much about the film making industry, tips on how to become a successful film maker, and a lot of cool stuff as they share both their experiences in film making. Enjoy!

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Kristopher Wile was born in Greensboro, North Carolina to Eric and Belinda Wile. He began writing at an early age and would often bring along pen and paper on family vacations, only to have filled them with short stories by the end of the trip. Kristopher attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he began studying History and Classical Archaeology with the intent of entering academia as a professor of Near Eastern Archaeology.While at Chapel Hill, he stumbled onto the Carolina Production Guild, a student run production company devoted to the art of celluloid filmmaking. It was through his involvement with CPG that he filmed his first short film on Kodak Super 8mm film stock. The experience awakened his love of film and motivated him to pursue a career in entertainment. After moving to Los Angeles, Kristopher founded the production company Aureate Films with business partner Wally Schrass to produce commercials, music videos, and feature length content.~

 

I sincerely hope you enjoy the interview.

You can find Kristopher on...

https://www.instagram.com/kwiledirectshttps://www.instagram.com/aureatefilms/https://aureatefilms.com/

 

Connect with Russell Noheltyhttp://thecompletecreative.com/https://www.facebook.com/russellnoheltyhttp://facebook.com/thecompletecreative/https://www.instagram.com/russellnohelty/

Join Russell Nohelty (The Complete Creative) and Fabrice Sapolsky (Humanoids senior editor) as they chat How to Build a Personal Brand and talk about the right approach and mindset when building a brand.

By the end of this episode you will learn a unique perspective on the subject of building a brand, the right approach and mindset to be successful, and a lot of great stuff as they share both their experiences in brand building. Enjoy!

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Born in Paris (France), in 1970, Fabrice Sapolsky broke into the comic book world as creator of the French magazine about American comics Comic Box in 1998. But in December 2006, he wakes up one morning with the idea of alternate reality Spider-Man set in the 1930s. After sharing his idea with David Hine, they both decide to pitch it to Marvel comics as Spider-Man Noir. The first mini-series, will be published between Dec.2008 and March 2009. A second series, Spider-Man Noir: Eyes without a Face follows a year later (Dec.2009-March 2010). Both series have been blessed with critical and commercial success.

On top of his numerous activities, Fabrice created and curated his own comic book convention! After meeting with President of the Kol Israel Synagogue, Fred Polaniecki, Fabrice decides to create a convention like no other: the Jewish Comic Con. This convention, not a Jew-Centric con, is as much a celebration of the founders of the comic book industry (where 90% of the creators happened to be jewish) as a place to bridge communities of Brooklyn around a fantastic medium (comics, of course). The first edition took place on November 13th, 2016. A second one happened on April 29th, 2018.Fabrice Sapolsky edits, designs, draws and, of course, writes. He has many projects in development and likes the quote : “To Be Continued”.

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I sincerely hope you enjoy the interview.

You can find David on...

https://fairsquarecomics.com/ +1 (323) 405-9401https://twitter.com/fabricesapolskyhttps://www.instagram.com/fabricesapolsky/---

 

Connect with Russell Noheltyhttp://thecompletecreative.com/https://www.facebook.com/russellnoheltyhttp://facebook.com/thecompletecreative/https://www.instagram.com/russellnohelty/