TL;DR Six Figure Crowdfunding is a succinct yet comprehensive dive into just about everything you need to know to create, run, and survive the aftermath of a successful Kickstarter campaign. It has just a little NSFW language, quite a bit of humor, helpful worksheets, and insights from many successful Kickstarter creators to maximize the chance that your next campaign will be a success. It is helpful, entertaining, efficient, and funny all at once.

About the Book

If you wanted to, you could build a fairly good sized library using only books about Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general, like all of these. I thought I’d write a quick review about one of my favorite books that covers just about everything (but not quite everything) you need to keep in mind when planning, writing, running, and fulfilling rewards for your Kickstarter campaign, albeit at a fairly high level in terms of depth. The book is Six Figure Crowdfunding: The No Bullsh*t Guide to Running a Life-Changing Campaign by Derek Miller and it is quite unique compared to most other books about crowdfunding. The book’s subtitle should give you a good idea of what makes it unique. In the book, Derek Miller, an experienced creator and crowdfunding consultant who has raised about $5 million from various campaigns, covers everything from creating a strong message for your campaign, to planning rewards, to marketing, to running a successful campaign, to fulfilling rewards after your campaign concludes.

Style

The overall style of the book is one of its biggest selling features. When you think of a book about crowdfunding, you probably envision something fairly dry. Running a Kickstarter campaign is certainly extremely exciting, but things like creating bills of materials, estimating shipping costs, and calculating marketing ROI do not always make for the lightest reading. Six Figure Crowdfunding has a very different style compared with other crowdfunding books. The writing is very direct, speaking directly to the reader using fun, sometimes NSFW, language. Here’s an example of a message that Derek stresses quite a bit throughout the book:

Attention is scarce. You’re in competition with dancing cat videos, raging battles in the comments sections of news sites, and cool naked people doing cool naked things with each other. Let’s just admit it … all of these things are really fun. In fact, I’m enjoying all three while writing this.

Another unique aspect of the book’s style is the use of input from many successful Kickstarter campaigns. Six Figure Crowdfunding is packed with quotes from numerous campaigns creators. Of course, Derek Miller is a highly successful creator himself, but it is very useful to hear the perspective of different creators, each with their own specialties and types of campaigns.

Finally, the book is very efficient to read, by which I mean that Derek gets straight to the point in each section. He does not spend too many pages over-explaining concepts or constructing long narratives like recipe blogs. The book has enough detail to be useful but it is also a nice, quick read.

It’s Interactive

Six Figure Crowdfunding not only explains concepts essential throughout the planning, funding, and shipping stages of your campaign, but also there are a number of worksheets, question guides, and formulas that you can use to help ensure you’ve done all the work to maximize your campaign’s chance of success. These include things like the Campaign Research Worksheet, the Five Eternal Questions for crafting your campaign’s central message, a Video Script Worksheet, Reward Ideas Worksheet, and many other resources to help you out.

What’s Missing

The book is, of course, not perfect. While the sections on crafting a campaign message, planning rewards, planning for fulfillment, and building a community are very good, the book does not go into much depth about the more technical aspects of Kickstarter campaigns. This is not necessarily a bad thing, after all, efficient writing is one of the characteristics I appreciated about Six Figure Crowdfunding. But if you are looking for really detailed information about aspects of your campaign, you might not find it in this book.

For example, while Six Figure Crowdfunding does have a great deal of information about how to ensure that, at the end of the day, your campaign will be both successful in raising its funding goal and be profitable, it does not cover the specifics of creating a bill of materials with primary and secondary suppliers, failure rate factored in, a markup for labor, and so on. If you are looking for highly detailed information, you may need other resources dedicated to those topics.

Summing Up

If you’re looking for a book that will explain, in very clear language, just about everything you will need to plan, run, and fulfill your Kickstarter campaign, I would highly recommend Six Figure Crowdfunding. If you need a textbook explaining all the mathematics and intricate details about industrial engineering, accounting, or advanced marketing strategy, you should look for other books. But compared to other, similar books, Six Figure Crowdfunding offers a fun, entertaining, and informative resource for finding success on Kickstarter. It also has extremely useful worksheets to help you along the way.