KickstarterForum.org

[ConnectionDeck]

We've got our press release lined up and ready to go, and a decent first list of who to contact, but we've been unsure of when the best time is to hit. We've got 13 days before we launch, and my leaning has been to start targeting online bloggers and such now, and try for print and traditional media right before the launch or right after - the worry is that if we contact people too soon it won't feel relevant and they won't look at it a second time.

I'd love any advice from Kickstarter Veterans and how they rolled out their press campaign.

[SarahinSF]

I'd be interested to hear views from people who've completed one or more campaigns on this too! I'm still in the middle and right now my feeling is that I wish I could have gotten some of the press pitch emails out sooner, but it took a lot of time to find appropriate places that actually responded. So far, most places either respond in a couple days or not at all, but there have been a couple exceptions, and in one case I succeeded in getting a website that had apparently miscategorized my email and sent the wrong cut-and-paste reply to give it another look, this time with the desired results.

My comfort is that when I have to do this again for Volume 2, I will have a list of news outlets that are responsive, friendly and overall easy to do business with -- the kind of places where an ongoing relationship will be very desirable. And I can not waste my very limited pitch time with people who don't care about what I have to offer or for whatever reason just can't respond in less than geologic time!

[ConnectionDeck]

@SarahinSF Thanks for sharing your experience! I think we'll take it to heart and start trying to get our releases out a bit sooner than we'd planned. Did you have a strategy around which press you approached first? How long before your campaign did you start sending them out?

[SarahinSF]

I think my press contacting/pitching is the part of all this I had the *least* strategized in advance, to be honest. I started out contacting fandom press outlets I was already familiar with and liked, especially the ones I knew people at -- I took recommendations from colleagues also. Those I started on, I want to say less than a week before launch -- two weeks would probably have been better. Four weeks might have been too MUCH lead time, with the single exception of sites that explicitly do review requests but have a long queue. (Unfortunately, a lot of such sites are either booked out for months or have shut down new requests until they work through their backlog. Another consideration is that unless you're willing to show them your KS preview page in progress, you'll need to either have a press kit-like thing or a product website you can direct them to, since the KS isn't launched yet.) If I had had more time and had my act more together I would have tried to get some review requests into the queue early enough to have a chance of coming out in a good timeframe.
As I burned through my initial, fairly small list of contacts, I started doing more internet research, especially looking for fandoms that are connected to but not exactly the same as what I do. (I.e., branching outside comics to look at the goth scene, horror fans, women-in-comics sites.) So far I confess I haven't had a lot of response from that.
I've also had to do a lot of the psychological work of getting past my resistance to pitching. I hate pitching. I especially hate repeated, sequential pitching. Makes me feel like a beggar at the door. But it has to be done and nobody's going to do it for me!
Next time around, I'll probably try to spread press out. Put in review requests considerably before launch, then start off with the outlets that showed themselves the friendliest or most fruitful maybe a couple weeks before launch at most, and then save a bunch of second- and third-tier contacts for ongoing during the campaign. I think it's good to have press things coming out at different points in the campaign because it gives you something to update about excitedly on your KS page, and give those outlets that are helping you out a nice shout-out in return.
But this is me the non-marketing person talking here, I'd love to hear from someone with more experience and savvy...