Business Questions

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

This is an opportunity for folks to discuss the business aspects of crowdfunding. What would you like to know about cyberfunded creativity and how it works? Do you want advice on a current or planned project? Ask your questions in a comment on this post.

Comments

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

I'd like some feedback about a little wrinkle in tip-allocation for my Fishbowl.

The situation is that I post a free bit of flash fiction each Friday. I've beeing doing that for quite a while before running the fishbowl and don't want to stop it - in fact, the first one I mainly ran to build up a bit of a buffer for those Friday stories. Apart from the occasional seasonal one, I go random with deciding which to post, number them and get a random number.

Now I'm offering people the chance to sponsor stories for public posting outside of that schedule, mostly with their fishbowl tips. (Want to offer *some* perk, and most of the setting-based don't work too well for me yet.)

What I worry about a bit is what to do with partially sponsored stories. What I did last week was giving the one partially sponsored story additional lots in the drawing for which gets posted - I decided any 10% sponsorship was another chance of being posted, one story was 40% funded, so if the random number was 1-5, that story got posted. (Which is what happened.)

What I worry about a bit now is if I make that a firm rule, would people think it unfair if the donation only paid for posting the story sooner rather than later, rather than for posting more words?

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>What I worry about a bit now is if I make that a firm rule, would people think it unfair if the donation only paid for posting the story sooner rather than later, rather than for posting more words?<<

That's a risk, but it's something that varies from one project to another. There are whole projects that run on a "pay to accelerate" model, and some fans like that. Others don't.

Do you have a "general fund" or do all donations come tagged for a specific project? In my Poetry Fishbowl, people can either direct a payment to a specific poem (whole or cosponsored) or into the general fund. The audience then gets to vote on how to spend the general fund, which can be used to reveal verses of an epic in microfunding. It took a while to evolve this system, but it's great for dealing with partially-funded pieces.

Re: Hmm...

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

Not labelled as such, but I left it open that if someone doesn't want to pick, they don't have to, but I'd make sure a certain wordcount would be posted extra for the tips.
If I had a situation of something being partially funded and someone else not wanting to pick a story themselves, I'd first put it to a partially funded story.

Re: Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

In my observation, labeling processes or options in crowdfunding is like paving a path. It's best to do it where people have already been walking, but once you do it, more people will go there. So if a general fund seems useful to you for filling out partially-funded stories, trying telling people about that and see if your audience will go for it.