Lessons learned from a failed Kickstarter

It nearly broke me, but I'm going to try again.

TL;DR: Please pre-order my book via Kickstarter.

The majority (56 percent) of all Kickstarter projects fail. So it really should have come as no surprise when the Kickstarter to publish my debut photography book Beauty Hunting failed last summer. I only managed to raise 32 percent of the money I needed to print a fairly modest run of 250 books.

Before I launched it, I spent a lot of time researching. I looked at photography book projects that succeeded and projects that failed. I spent time deducing what went right and wrong for those projects. And of course I knew I had a real chance of not reaching my goal and therefore not getting any money at all (Kickstarter is an “all or nothing” fundraising platform - so if you don’t reach the funding goal you set, you get nothing at all and your backers don’t get charged).

And yet, I still decided to go for it. Doing so gave me a good opportunity to reach out to people and talk about my work (something I find incredibly hard to do when it comes t…