So you wanna raise $$$ cont'd.

Monday's blog was more of an explanation as to what a crowdfunding is, and that the two best are kickstarter and indiegogo. 

The biggest part of this is that now you have to find and convince other people, family, friends and strangers. All this without any money, or not wanting to spend your own money, if you have any.

I just asked for $2500 for my crowdfunding. When it was over I got $2000 which surprised me because I thought I'd get maybe $700. I can only say that it's because I have a lot of friends and family who, for some reason, thought it was a good idea.

But one of the first things you'll see is that a lot of your friends won't give you any money. At least the friends who now envy you because they haven't tried to finance a movie or a book like I did.
 
On the other hand, a lot of your friends will give you money. They're mostly the old friends and relatives, in my case my brother and my cousin. The other cousins didn't donate. 

My first effort at crowdfunding was trying to raise $1.5 million. That's where I got hammered. I raised $750.00 until I realized nobody was going to help me. And it was my own fault. 

To raise that much money, I would have needed a lot of support from people I knew and people who had at least something to be interested in. Instead I got comments like "Who's this guy", or "Spike Lee is just asking for $1 million and he's famous."

I quit before I began looking like a real loser. I couldn't beat Spike Lee. My movie was to be a sequel to my first movie, Ghostkeeper,

It was to be a much better movie and we had a small but good following and I am still attempting to get Ghostkeeper 2 going, but the regular way, getting financing from the industry not my friends.

For one thing, I don't have that many friends who have money.

So what do you do to get attention.

For my book, at $2500, I was hoping that I could get at least enough to pay the illustrator and the formatting person and the person who did the front and back covers.

And that's because I can't do any of those jobs. 

But somehow, the project began to work, I opened with just a little over $1000.00, which was very unusual. Enough so that it seemed to work itself after that. Some friends donated twice.

This was far better than the Ghostkeeper thing.

I can't really understand how it happened, but people liked the title, "How Not To Get Beat Up In A Small Town Bar," everyone laughed at it and the image I used was this:

 It seemed to live a life of it's own. I made 4 x 6 cards and circulated them in my Sherman Oaks neighborhood. Ironically the majority of my friends loved the card -- but none of them donated.

My cousin got a half dozen of his old Detroit buddies, guys I haven't seen in years. And my brother gave a lot as did a lot of his friends. That's what you want, to get friends who remember you.

Okay, it's not looking for $1 million, I won't try that again because it requires an army to fund the movie, and an actor, notably an actor that is of that genre (in Ghostkeeper, I needed a good b-name actor who could help.

Lastly, if you do a crowdfunding, the moment you start developing it, you will get a dozen or more "funding assistace people" who ask for money and promise to get people to your project.

I spent $9.99 for one company who actually got almost a thousand "looks" but nobody bought it. Although I don't know how they got the looks, maybe fake or maybe looks that nobody particularly liked.

In the end, I got $2000 (I donated the last $82 to make it even. It looked better at $2000.

Somehow it clicked, sure, just $2000, but considering my $750 for Ghostkeeper which was a disaster, smalltownbars.com did very well.