The Kickstarter for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour finished strong for Creature Features Publishing: $48,161. I was involved with some of the promotion and data management.
The book should be in stock sooner than expected and will be available at NightGallery.net.
I enjoyed helping out on this project because, although I’ve never seen an episode of Night Gallery (true!), I believe in the book and know it will deliver value for the readers.
I know the authors and publisher and how hard they’ve worked on it. It’s cool, it’s beautifully printed—it’s what the fans want.
I enjoy being a salesman...but only if I believe in the product. Some people can “sell ice to an Eskimo” and I don’t know how they do it. It seems scummy to me, if you’re knowingly taking people’s money and leaving them worse off. Yuck!
But things I believe in—then it’s fun, finding ways to get the word out and catch people’s attention.
If you ever attempt a Kickstarter, here’s the secret: it only works if either you are famous, or the thing you are promoting is famous.
If you don’t have one of those two things, it’s almost impossible. Sometimes I come across aspiring filmmakers promoting their projects and they’re asking for a lot of money and I can tell right away it will bomb.
It’s hard, but you just have to accept that nobody cares about you or what you’re doing, so you have to find some other way to entice the audience.
When I did my Indiegogo for my Sky Fighter short film, I was an untested filmmaker with an original story—I knew nobody would care about that.
But because I am lucky to have developed a following from Film Score Monthly (thanks everybody!), I had a hunch if I created a kind of “soundtrack CD pop-up store,” film music fans would support it—because they were getting things they knew and wanted.
Fortunately, thanks to all of the donors and the labels that provided freebies and coupon codes, it worked out.
I’ll be helping Creature Features with some projects in the months ahead—including the Jerry Goldsmith biography by Jeff Bond. I’m not going to make news about it this morning, but rest assured—it’s coming.
Thanks, everybody!