By Zack Quaintance — At this point in our Kickstarter Campaign for Next Door, it’s pretty safe to say that we’ve hit a wall. We’ve had a really good run so far — better than we expected, to be certain — but we’re firmly mired in the Week 2 - 3 doldrums, where most of the folks interested in our book have heard about it and packed already…or they’ve signed up for a notification and will likely back when the time to do so starts to dwindle.

We didn’t get labeled a PROJECT WE LOVE by Kickstarter and at this point don’t seem likely to receive the distinction (sigh). As such, the organic traffic from the platform itself is also fairly minimal. So, the question then becomes…what do we do to promote? Without question, continuing to simply throughout the link along with the preview artwork we’ve shared already is not so effective. With all that in mind, I’m having to find more creative ways to keep reminding people of the existence of this campaign and this comic, which brings me to today’s…

ACTIONABLE KICKSTARTER COMICS TIPS: When you plan your campaign, hold back some different ways to promote your campaign for the week 2 and 3 doldrums. We’ve already talked about how important it is to prepare for this down time psychologically, but there are practical preparations to be made as well. One of them (perhaps the most important) is co-promoting, which was the subject of yesterday’s blog post. Another is keeping back some of the visuals.

Our campaign, for example, withheld this excellent variant cover by artist Anna Readman.

The jury is perhaps out on whether this was the right move. Doing so may have cost us the all-important Day One backers, who may have pledged had this cover been on the page to show-off the sense of humor on display throughout the book. I don’t know. But what I do know is that when we revealed this cover at the start of week 2, it supercharged our promotional efforts, leading to a brief surge. As a result, if I had it to do over again, I’d have prepared better (a theme of this blog) and had more eye-catching visuals in reserve to hit people with during this painfully slow third week. But as with many of this blog’s posts, that’s just going to have to be a lesson kept in mind for my next campaign!

Join us back here tomorrow when we talk about the value of coverage on comics news sites!

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.