"Wizard of the Emerald City" on the iPad? Are all projects good for crowdfunding?

Inspired by the successes of the guys from the “Simple Science”, we also decided to try to turn to the public for help in financing . But, despite the fact that we need much less money, it turned out that crowdfunding is not such a simple matter. We conceived to publish on the iPad a wonderful tale "The Wizard of the Emerald City" by A. Volkov. Under the cut, we will tell about our experience.



upd. First of all, I want to say a huge thank you to all Habr readers for the support they have already had for our project. Despite the very different opinions that appeared in the comments, despite the loss of karma by me personally, dozens of people decided to help us and it was worth it. Thank you all. For us it is very important that somewhere, scattered around the world, we still have like-minded people.
')
And now,…

about the project

I do not know about you, but I really liked to read as a child. And, at one time, I read almost the entire district library. I think everyone in his childhood had his own list of favorite literary heroes, who could not do without the characters of Dumas, Verne, de Saint-Exupéry or Twain.
But one of the first books that won my heart was the fairy tale "The Wizard of the Emerald City" by Alexander Volkov. Adventures of the brave Ellie and her friends I first saw in a wonderful Soviet cartoon , and only then the whole series was read from cover to cover.


I especially liked the original illustrations of Leonid Vladimirsky, the one who invented Pinocchio in his time. It so happened that quite recently I met Leonid Viktorovich, who, despite his serious age, (September 21 will be already 93 years old), turned out to be a very lively and active person. And my proposal to release the book in the video application for iPad received the full support and approval of the author.


We want ours and your children, nephews and grandchildren to recognize characters that we know from childhood. Of course, now the kids have their own heroes: “It's time for adventure,” Luntik, Masha and the Bear, Spongebob, but the old ones, until the heroes have not been canceled. Alisa Selezneva, Buratino, Winnie-the-Pooh and Carlson, Moomin trolls and Peppy Long stockings are heroes for all times.


We hope that many adults will be happy to meet with good old acquaintances: the Scary, the Iron Man, and remember what seemed to be quite recently, but for some reason forgotten: illustrations by E. Rachev, figurines on flannels, clinging to a fabric screen, postcards from V. Zarubin for holidays, Disney on weekends, or the Tomb of Fireflies “Tomb of Fireflies” as a strange discovery, libraries and bookstores. We will try to preserve this warm warm atmosphere in our interactive book.


We do not want to overload the book itself with interactive. It seems to us that it is better if the parents read the book with the children. And then the children will be able to continue communicating with their favorite characters in mini games. For example, guess riddles with the wise Scarecrow, save Ally from the Ogre along with the Iron Tinman, or repel flying monkey attacks with a brave Leo.

Unfortunately, everything has a price in our world, and the release of our first free applications for users ( Belarusland and Bukvar ) has significantly reduced the stock of our own free funds. And for the payment of royalties to the heirs and developers need to pay. Therefore, we decided to make a project on Boomstarter to collect the required amount.

What we did

1. The first difficulty we encountered was that our team is in Belarus, and Boomstarter works only with residents of the Russian Federation. I had to urgently attract friends from Moscow for account registration.

2. Using the instructions, we created a project and painted the rewards to sponsors .

By the way, you can donate from 50 rubles , and 5 people who can send more than 10 000 rubles to the project will receive books signed by the author of illustrations, Leonid Vladimirsky.

By the way, for the project we even shot a promo video, as advised by all the crowdfunding gurus.
Unfortunately, many videos did not like it. The most frequent claims are “parochialism”, “dullness”, “no children”.
I can only say that this is our first video, we tried, but shooting is not so easy, as you can be sure of by watching the full version of the video for Habr exclusive at the end of the article.

3. After this, we started “bombing” our friends on social networks and this brought us in the first few days almost 8% of the requested amount, and specifically - 4,700 rubles :)

IMPORTANT! If for some reason we cannot collect the stated amount, then all the money will be returned to the sponsors.

4. To support the project on boomstarter, we created a promotional page http://wizard.kinderfox.ru/ , which contains pictures, banners and general information about the participants.

After that, they sent letters to the most popular social media communities dedicated to raising children, and several of them published links.

As a result, we received the first donation for 10,000 rubles, for which we are very grateful to Konstantin Ananich .

5. After that, we tried to give contextual advertising in Yandex, at the requests of the “wizard of the emerald city”, etc. But, despite the fact that this request is generally not the “dead” - almost 73,000 requests per month, the effect of advertising had no effect. With no competitors at all, we had a minimum number of impressions and regular reports that the ads "ousted competitors" and we had to "raise the stakes." Also, it did not bring any effect, except for likes, advertising on Facebook.

6. A week ago, the project became the project of the day at Boomstarter. Many thanks to the project administration for support. Although, the fact that this attracted only one new sponsor to our project said that the idea itself might not be so good.

Results

Despite the fact that the fundraising is still in full swing, we have already drawn conclusions for ourselves, which may be of interest to you:

• Remember: That which seems to you a very necessary and sought-after business will not necessarily turn out to be in demand by a wide audience. And vice versa.
• Do not be afraid of change. Constantly track and analyze feedback.
• Be more active. Feel free to ask for help even to very solid and serious projects or people. In our case, most likely, they also read and loved Volkov’s children in the children’s books.
• Prepare a press kit in advance. Even if you are not planning a PR campaign or you do not have money for it, a potential press release or a ready-made publication may be asked by potential partners who would like to help you.
• Believe in yourself. If you do the right thing - help will come

Separately, we would like to thank those who have already shared promotional banners on their pages. Perhaps thanks to you, your friends have joined our team.

We hope our experience will be useful when you start your projects.

We believe that together we will succeed! We believe that there is more than kind and light in the world and nothing will be forgotten.

And this, the promised video in the style of Jackie Chan. The funniest thing is from 2 minutes :)


Thank!

PS At the request of the strict GUARD, the post was moved to the profile blog. We apologize for those who left comments, necessary and useful. They could not be saved: (