One layer of data doesn’t tell the whole story – a review of returning backers to the Cthulhu is Hard to Spell: The Terrible Twos campaign

It’s hard to find new, interesting things to talk about in the data once you’ve run 11 Kickstarter campaigns, but Backerkit has been the one consistent about all my campaigns since 2014, which means they have new data for me to plum.

Before I go on, I should note that for some reason Backerkit did not pull all my data so the final backer number in Backerkit and the one from Kickstarter is off quite a bit on the original campaigns, but those campaigns are also very old. Unfortunately, I only have the data I have, so while the data is incomplete for every campaign before 2019’s Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter #5 campaign, all I can do is what I can do.

So, total backer count was down A LOT from my last three campaigns. It peaked during the first Cthulhu is Hard to Spell campaign at over 1,000 backers. I have been worried about it since we launched with a significantly lower pop than we got from the first campaign, and every day of the campaign we tracked further and further from that first campaign.

I’ve been worried about this since we launched the Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter #5 campaign and ended up with less than half the backers from the Cthulhu is Hard to Spell campaign, but that was a single issue and not an OGN or anthology campaign, so I had no real comparison. The same thing happened with the Godsverse Chronicles campaign, which ended up with 25% of the total backers as the Cthulhu is Hard to Spell campaign. However, that was a novel campaign, which meant it was not only a different genre and format, but also a different form, which gave me even less way to compare the data.

However, the Cthulhu is Hard to Spell: The Terrible Twos was the literal successor to Cthulhu is Hard to Spell. Same form, same format, same brand, which meant it was the perfect way to test whether we had bled backers since that first Cthulhu campaign.

We certainly did, as we ended up with 284 fewer backers than the first Cthulhu is Hard to Spell campaign. Aside from the creators involved and the time of year, everything else was the same, if not better than the first campaign.

Total numbers, though, only tell part of the story, so I used Backerkit’s new launch feature to compare my campaigns against each other. What stood out was not the total backers, but the returning backers.

If you look at the above image, you’ll see the total number of returning backers has increased from 0 in 2014 to 431 in 2020. It gets really interesting in this second image below, though, where you’ll see the campaigns broken up by campaign type (comics vs. publishing).

If you pull comics out into its own section, you’ll see that there is an unbroken vertical line from my first project until my last one. Even though the new Cthulhu campaign had 284 fewer backers that the first Cthulhu campaign, the returning backers increased by 73%, which means I was delivering something that people wanted, and those people backed again.

Success is built on returning customers, so seeing that increase was heartening to me that I’ve been doing things the right way.

Even the Ichabod campaign from 2019 which had 501 backers, down again from the high of over 1,000, still had more returning backers than the original Cthulhu is Hard to Spell campaign, where only 248 were repeat buyers.

On the publishing side, things were a bit less straight forward, but that mostly was because I Can’t Stop Tooting and Spaceship Broken were vast departures in tone and style from my previous work. My Father Didn’t Kill Himself was a mystery novel, I Can’t Stop Tooting was a children’s book about farting, and Spaceship Broken: Needs Repairs (now called Sorry for Existing) was a sci-fi novel…they were all over the place, and it shows when looking at the returning backers.

When you give people what they ask for and WANT, then your returning customer line goes up, and when you deviate from it, that line goes the other way. Never have I had such a stark reminder of that fact. When it came to the Godsverse Chronicles campaign, my first publishing project since 2016, I increased my returning backer total by over 4x.

Why? Because I released fantasy novels, which is my main brand, and books in my main universe, The Godsverse, which includes the Katrina Hates the Dead and Pixie Dust graphic novels. In fact, both Katrina Hates the Dead and Pixie Dust were novelized in that launch. People asked me for more of Katrina and Akta’s story pretty much since I launched those graphic novels, which meant I was bringing something people WANTED to market, even though they wanted comics, they still came for the novels, too.

The comics campaigns were a much straighter line of delivering similar products than the publishing side of things, where I released kid’s books and mystery novels and SF books. I’m hoping now with more stability in my publishing priorities, I will see more growth on the publishing side of things as well.

This is the kind of growth you like to see in a career. Returning customers are the lifeblood of your company. Frankly, from these numbers it seems more and more like the original Cthulhu is Hard to Spell was a fluke, especially since it had 776 new backers.

Perhaps it was carried somewhere that led to a lot of people backing, but I’m more and more convinced that the norm right now is what happened in this past campaign, which was still incredible, and not the 1,000+ backers we had on the first campaign.

Now, my goal is to grow the returning backers every campaign, which will give me a nice base to work with for every campaign moving forward, and then I just have to keep finding more and more new people, and layering them on, and eventually, I’ll be able to reliably count on many hundred more backers for every campaign, I hope.

This is a great lesson on how less might actually be more, and one layer of data is never enough to tell the whole story. Had I just looked at my total backer number, I would have been disappointed that we had almost 300 fewer backers, but by digging deeper I saw that the thing I REALLY care about, my precious returning customers, was doing better than I initially thought, and in fact, by that count, I was doing really well.