Guenevere Lee Profile

The last two months of my life have been… interesting. I mean that in the best possible way. Indiegogo campaigns and conventions have made me pretty busy. At the beginning of the year I was facing a lot of financial issues. It wasn’t anything that was going to sink me, but then I got an email from my editor in the first week of January. She informed me that Morgan James was finally going forward to publish Pekari – The Azure Fish, the second novel in my historical fantasy series.

Of course this was great news, and something I’d been expecting for awhile now, but it came right when I realized I didn’t have the funds to market my book the way I wanted to. My first novel, Orope – The White Snake, came out last spring. I learned a lot marketing that first book by myself. If I wanted to market my second novel and be more successful, I would need to buy a tonne of author copies, not to mention all the travel expenses.

I explained to my editor that I wanted to push back to sequel until I was in a better financial position to promote my work, but she suggested something I hadn’t thought of before: Why not sell pre-orders through Indiegogo? It was something many authors did, included some friends of mine.

Now, I need to give a special thank you to Ricky Lima. He had done a lot of these campaigns. He gave me so much amazing advice about setting one of these up and how to get people involved. With his help, along with my editor, map artist, and audiobook narrator, we got the page up and running in about a week. You can still check it out here.

Most days it was painful to watch. In the initial launch there was some interest. But then days would go by without anyone ordering a copy or even visiting the page. It wasn’t until the last two weeks when things really started to pick up – and boy did they. I knew I would get a lot of late orders, but I was really overwhelmed by how much people were contributing.

The goal was to raise $5,300US. We got 86% of that. Even though we didn’t make the full amount, that’s all right. Some of that cost was just to cover overhead (Indiegogo fees, shipping, etc). So not getting the full amount is not going to impact me too negatively. All in all, this has been a rather resounding success. I’ve sold some books early, and feel like I’m in a better position now to attend conventions and book signings.

Pekari won’t be out until much later this year. If you missed your chance to pre-order a copy, no worries. Part of the funds raised through this campaign will go towards giveaways. Keep checking back here, and you may be able to get your hands on a free copy of the book