Good and Cheap: Kickstarter-funded cookbook teaches you to eat on $4 a day
Eating food that’s both healthy and affordable can be a huge challenge, especially when you live in New York City. Now imagine that you receive monthly food stamps — valued at about $133 per month. That comes out to about $4 per day to budget for food. To eat healthy on that tiny, weeny budget is nearly impossible. Somehow food activist Leanne Brown turned a food budget challenge into a Kickstarter-funded cookbook: Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4 a Day. Learn how Brown launched her project and unexpectedly built a food movement by creating one incredibly popular cookbook filled with cheap, tasty meals.
What did you do to prepare for your campaign?
My husband and I started by asking everyone we knew who had run a Kickstarter for advice and feedback. Because my husband worked in video games, we luckily knew a few people who had already gone down that road. Even though my cookbook Good and Cheap is obviously not a game, most of the advice was still really worthwhile — especially the invaluable articles from Stonemaier Games.
Then we made a video with a good friend who also happens to be a super talented videographer. Basically we read, worked, wrote, revised, and tried to take all the good advice we could!
How big of an audience did you have on social media before your Kickstarter campaign?
Tiny. And I still have a pretty crappy social media presence. I’m just not very good at it! I didn’t even have a Facebook page when we started. I had a Twitter account with maybe 200 followers? A friend who is a social media manager in Vancouver made me a Facebook page and started lovingly forcing me to post there and elsewhere.
We benefited from the fact that my cookbook already existed as a draft PDF that was free online, so some people on Reddit were already excited about it. Because of that, the draft was making the rounds on Reddit and Tumblr in a more organic way than I ever could have pulled off even if I was savvy with social media.
Instead of social media, I sent personalized emails — like, hundreds of emails, each written one at a time, not a form letter — to everyone I knew. I had those ready to go on launch day and sent them all at once. That gave us a big boost and helped us get almost immediately to our $10,000 goal, which we hit in 36 hours. I also had a couple thousand people who submitted their email addresses to a form on my website after downloading the free PDF. So I ended up with a bunch of kindly agents who were supportive of the project and who helped share it on their social media channels.
What advice would you give to other creators about rewards?
My favorite reward tier was that, for $100, I would work with you to create a new recipe for the book, in addition to sending you a copy and donating two more books to people who needed them. Those recipes were so much fun; I got some incredible ideas, stories, and relationships from them. Because I only had a few dozen pages left to fill in the final book, we only offered twenty of that reward and they sold out really fast.
My general advice for rewards would be to keep it simple. Most projects should concentrate on their primary product. That’s what people really want, so focus on making that the best deal and the most clear. *For me, the goal was to sell books so that we could afford to give lots of other books away, so the buy-one give-one deal for $25, and buy-one give-two for $29 were by far the most popular.
You see a lot of Kickstarter projects that start adding on t-shirts and bookmarks and whatnot. I strongly advise against that! It’s just more stuff you have to do, and the extra money you bring in from those rewards rarely offsets the costs of making them, especially if you consider your time, or assign any value to the risk they add.
In short, don’t add anything that would be hard for you to deliver. And don’t make the rewards so long and complicated that they’re hard for readers to understand when they’re scanning.
What advice would you offer artists considering Kickstarter to launch their creative endeavors?
Kickstarter is great for people with fans who want to help. Hundreds of thousands of people had downloaded my PDF, and they were constantly asking, “how can I help?” It was great to finally have something that they could do! It worked out exactly like we all wanted, too — in the end, we were able to donate 9,000 free printed copies of the cookbook as a result of the Kickstarter campaign, as well as 24,000 copies that we shipped to non-profits at cost. That exceeded my wildest dreams, and helped me land a publisher for the second edition. With the second edition, we’ve now donated around 50,000 copies of the book.
On the cautious side, I would never try to do a large Kickstarter project by yourself if you can possibly help it. The campaigns are so exciting, but so exhausting. If you’re good at the production side, but not so hot at the communication side (or vice-versa), then get a friend or partner to help you with that, and cut them in on it if that’s appropriate. Be realistic and take care of yourself during the madness so you can hit the ground running with your product or business when your campaign is over. You don’t want to burn yourself out before you begin.
* Disclaimer: Having a one-for-one (pledge for one, donate one) reward tier is okay, but funds raised through a campaign can’t be donated directly to a charity. *
Bonus: Good & Cheap is licensed under Creative Commons, so you can download it for free. If you found this post helpful, please show it some ❤ and don’t forget to follow Kickstarter Tips on Twitter!
