I didn’t even try to get this book traditionally published. There are pros and cons to both traditional publishing and self publishing, but for what I wanted to make, self publishing made the most sense. Board games are a niche hobby, and children’s board games are a subset of that. So a children’s book about board games is super niche (which tends to be the types of things I make with my passion projects)! So even if I tried to go with a traditional publisher, it would be incredibly difficult to find one that wanted to publish my book.
Also, with self-publishing I would have full control over the process of the book, which can be both good and bad. Good because I’ll make what I want, and bad because I have a lot more work to do! But as I said before, I quickly had an illustrator in mind for the book, and in traditional publishing the publisher usually chooses the illustrator for you.
There are a couple of reasons I decided to do a Kickstarter. The main one is because I want to make a board book. When I researched how to print board books, they don’t do print on demand (one at a time), but have to do offset printing in large batches (at least 500 or 1000). So the Kickstarter will be to fund that offset print run. I’m hoping there will be enough interest to fund it!
The other reason is that Kickstarter can be good marketing, especially since it’s big for board games. I’m not sure what the crossover in market between people who get the big kickstarters and parents of young children is, but if I can make a good Kickstarter page, I’m hoping even people who don’t have kids might see it and tell their friends! You can feel free to tell your friends too!