What do you actually do? Are you donating that money, or are you loaning investment capital? Because what I heard about kickstarters is that it's used to enable small businesses to raise the money they need to get their product into production without having to take a massive bank loan.
It is not a loan. Promising to repay provided funds is strictly prohibited. Selling shares in a company or project (or promising a cut of any proceeds achieved by whatever is funded) is also strictly prohibited.
Dropping all jargon, it works like this:
People who want to make various projects go to Kickstarter. These projects are supposed to be creative in nature, they are for designing video games, or building some tech gadget, or some work of art, or publishing a book, or funding a play, and so on.
They are not for generating general operating capital for a company, and it is not a loan.
Kickstarter is a way for a creative person to raise money from a wide variety of people. Every Kickstarter project has a minimum goal that is set when the project is established. If it fails to generate that much in promised fundraising, none of the funds are delivered. This way people aren't contributing to a project that won't have enough money to be successful.
They have to be projects for doing something specific, for making/creating/doing something. It can't be general fundraising for an organization or cause, for general living expenses for an artist or operating expenses for a company.
Kickstarter projects generally include some kind of premium for the pledge of funds. This could be tickets to the play when it starts, a copy of the book being produced, a copy of the video game being made, a T-shirt or mug with the project name/logo on it, and so on.
You know those "pledge drives" on PBS and NPR where they offer various incentives in exchange for a donation? It's similar to that. However, when you make a pledge, you are providing payment information to Kickstarter, through Amazon. They take your credit card information, but do not charge you until the drive closes (remember, if the project does not meet it's goal, no money changes hands).
In the Order of the Stick case, it started out as a relatively modest effort to raise money to reprint the OotS compilation volume "War and XP's", as a response to the constant requests Rich was getting to reprint the OotS books. Order of the Stick, including the books, is completely self-published. He has had to outlay the funds from his own pocket to cover the initial print runs of every book, which have all sold out.
Rich was very afraid he couldn't raise the $57,750 it would take for a minimum-size print run of that book, but he said at least then he would have an answer for why the books were out of print. For those that weren't buying a copy of the book, the basic pledge reward was the "How the Paladin got his scar" PDF comic (so even if you had all the books, or couldn't afford the books, you could still contribute and get something new you couldn't get any other way, and since O'Chul is a fan-favorite character, a lot of fans would like to see his backstory). He kept adding more incentive PDFs to keep pledges pouring in once it was clear this had a lot of support.
He met that initial goal, with plenty to spare, within 48 hours. He raised more than 20 times that goal, and as more and more money poured in, he expanded the reprint drive to every OotS book, and then to various OotS side-projects he'd wanted to do for some time (the coloring book, the boardgame expansion).
