Crowdfunding with Ryan Hanley

Episode 14

In this episode I talk to successful marketer and author, Ryan Hanley, about how he crowdfunded his book Content Warfare using the Publishizer platform.

I begin by giving my own brief introduction to crowdfunding – that is running a campaign to raise money from a variety of people who get rewards based on their level of contribution. You can see Ryan’s old Content Warfare crowdfunder page here. Then in the interview I begin by asking Ryan why he crowdfunded his book. The main reasons he gives are

1. 1. Validating the concept

2. Raising money from other people

Then he discusses the big drawback of crowdfunding – using up your crowd in the campaign so that not as many people buy the book when it is released. We discuss the possibility of using higher value rewards to lower the effect of this.

I ask Ryan whether he is planning to release another book and if he would use crowdfunding again.  Due to family commitments he is unlikely to do one in the near future, but he would probably try for the traditional route with a large publisher, out of his belief that having a big brand publisher will help him to achieve more speaking engagements.

We have a discussion about why his book is in KDP Select.  It turns out that his sales in India make it worthwhile in itself (KDP Select authors get 70% royalties in India, as opposed to 30% for everyone else).

Asked about the possibility of crowd-funding a non-book related project, Ryan was enthusiastic (though less so about my idea of Ryan Hanley action figures…) as he made the point that the problem with taking buyers away from the initial push on Amazon was not a problem for most of these other projects.

Feel free to encourage Ryan to start making action figures….

More seriously, you can connect with Ryan at @ryanhanley_com, follow his podcast Content Warfare, or just visit his website at ryanhanley.com

Asked to describe his lessons with crowd-funding in one sentence, Ryan said:

Screw it let’s do it!