What I will remember about this Kickstarter campaign

What I will remember from this campaign is:

• Doing cross-promotional sharing with FORTY different campaigns, and spending nearly every morning looking for new cross-promotion opportunities. I probably sent messages to 200+ campaigns to get 40 who would share with me in all categories from art to games to publishing and yes, of course, comics. How many projects are you reaching out to during your campaign?
• Putting together bundles consisting of 43 different comics from 41 different creators, giving backers over $100 of free comics, and probably closer to $200. Together with cross-promotion, that’s close to EIGHTY collaborators (there was some overlap) during this project, and that doesn’t even include the lovely people who had me on their podcasts, wrote blogs, or shared the campaign, who all also helped. How many people are you promoting your launch with? 
• Sending over 40 emails to different segments about this campaign since July as the lead-up and then launch of this campaign. How many emails do you send to your fans?

When people say this campaign “blew up” I don’t necessarily see it that way. What I see is waking up every day, trying to find more promotional opportunities wherever they may be, and gaining backers one at a time over weeks. The first few days really did blow up. We raised $12,000 in five days, but the whole last three weeks was finding pockets of fans all over Kickstarter who might give Ichabod a try, and making sure people who were already fans knew we were there. Between those first five days and last five days we raised over $6,500, and that ability to inch up little by little over time is the difference between a campaign that barely makes goal and one that blows past it. How do you plan on utilizing that time between the initial launch and the final push?

Yes, I also shared in Facebook groups, and I’m sure I got a few backers from there, but they didn’t account for anywhere near what the above strategies provided.

This campaign I spent $75 on marketing, but I put in thousands in sweat equity, and that’s only because the right company told me the right lie at the right time and I was weak. Even I succumb to these things sometimes.

It’s definitely not easy, and it has never just come to me. I am still grinding every single day, trying to get $20 here and $10 there because it all adds up over time. All those big backers were more powerful because of all the smaller backers that helped inch us up a little at a time.

I don’t get writeups in Vogue or even big press releases. I would love those, but I get there by having a bigger network than most people, and finding ways to cross-promote with them. How big is your network? How are you helping them with their launches, and how are they helping with yours?