Having wrapped my first Kickstarter campaign, I’m finding that I’ve learned an awful lot about crowdsourcing — and webcomics in general. I want to share one of those general lessons with you today. It’s about gauging the significant of reader feedback.

This is a topic we’ve talked about here before under many headings — whether to allow negative comments on our site; gauging reader interest in a new piece of merchandise; and so on. And I thought I had a good handle on it. But this Kickstarter proved otherwise.

The issue started when I heard repeated comments about how great it would be to include PDFs of the original How To Make Webcomics book in the reward tiers. And, fresh off achieving my $10,000 goal in three days, I was eager to do whatever I could to reward the people who has rewarded me. Of course, that book is not mine to make unilateral decisions over, but a short time later, I included a PDF of the book at a special reward tier.

I placed it at a level that would benefit the vast majority of my supporters. And some of them took advantage of it. But it was, by no means, a groundswell. That should have been my first tip-off.

I received this response from a commenter who listed a first name, but was otherwise anonymous (shoulda been my second tip off).

Hi, several people, including myself, would like to know: Will people who pledge more than $29 will get the PDF of How to Make Webcomics?

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