Why I'm Taking Paula Langford Book 3 to Kickstarter

I want to talk about money, which is generally considered bad form at parties and possibly worse form on an author blog, but here we are.

Specifically, I want to talk about the peculiar arithmetic of being an independent author, which goes something like this. To sell more books, I need to market them properly. To market them properly, I need money. To get money, I need to sell more books. If this sounds like a closed loop with no obvious entry point, that's because it is. I've been staring at this loop for some time now, the way you stare at a jammed door, convinced that if you just push in the right spot, it will eventually give.

The Numbers, Briefly and Without Tears

I'll spare you a full breakdown of royalty percentages, because nobody came here for a spreadsheet, but the short version is this: a single sale of a cosy mystery earns an author considerably less than a bookshop earns for selling you a coffee to go with it. A proper blog tour, the kind that gets a book in front of reviewers and readers who might genuinely enjoy it, costs real money. Multiply the sales required to cover that cost, and you start to understand why so many independent authors either skip marketing entirely and hope for the best, or quietly go slightly feral about it in private.

I've mostly done the first one. Hope, as a strategy, has a lot going for it. It's free, for one thing. It has not, however, been reliably effective.

Enter Paula Langford, Stage Left, Slightly Out of Breath

Book Three, Fatal Turn of the Tide, is finished. Edited, proofed, tightened in all the places that needed tightening, and I'm genuinely pleased with where Paula ends up this time. I won't say more than that, because I've spent months making sure the clues land in the right order and I'm not about to undo that work in a blog post.

What I don't have, and what royalties from Books One and Two haven't quite stretched to cover, is a proper launch. Not a quiet appearance on Amazon and a hopeful social media post. An actual, month-long blog tour, the sort that puts all three Paula Langford books, Checked Out at the Imperial, Murder Most Dramatic, and Fatal Turn of the Tide, in front of readers and reviewers who love this genre and haven't necessarily met Paula yet.

So I'm doing something I've never done before. I'm asking for help, directly, via Kickstarter, to fund that tour.

Why Kickstarter and Not Just, You Know, Asking Nicely on Facebook

Partly because a proper campaign with clear rewards feels more honest than a vague plea. If you back it, you get something for it, ebooks, extras, and the satisfaction of having helped a fictional amateur sleuth solve her third murder. Partly because campaigns have a natural urgency to them that an ordinary blog post doesn't. This one runs for twenty days, not twenty months, so there's a genuine end point rather than an open-ended request hovering in the background of my newsletter forever.

And partly, if I'm honest, because writing this post has been easier than I expected. I thought asking for money would feel excruciating. It mostly just feels like explaining a problem to people who might actually understand it, since a fair few of you reading this are writers, or married to writers, or otherwise acquainted with the special financial optimism required to keep doing this at all.

What Happens If It Works

All three Paula Langford books get a month in front of readers they haven't reached yet, courtesy of a proper blog tour rather than me refreshing my sales dashboard and willing it into existence. Book Three launches into the world with something behind it. And I get to keep doing this, which, chicken-and-egg economics aside, remains the actual point.

If you'd like to be part of that, the campaign is live now.

Back the Kickstarter campaign →

And if you don't fancy backing it, that's entirely fine too. Sharing it with someone who might is worth just as much to me, possibly more, since guilt-tripping people into pledging money has never really been my style and I'd rather not start now.

Either way, Paula sends her regards and asks that you not tell her what happens in Chapter Twelve. She's still catching up.