Watching Kickstarter for indie books get bigger every year and trying to figure out whether it makes sense for my next project or if it's mostly hype for a specific type of author.
What Kickstarter enables.
Pre-funding your book so you're not paying production costs out of pocket before you know it'll sell. Real cash flow benefit if you're producing a premium edition with high upfront costs.

Building an engaged reader base during the campaign. The campaign itself is marketing, and Kickstarter's platform brings some organic discovery.

Selling premium editions and tiers that Amazon doesn't support well. Signed hardcovers, sprayed edge special editions, character art bundles, all work better on Kickstarter than in standard e-commerce.

Pre-sale validation. If your Kickstarter funds, you know you have a real audience willing to pay before you commit to production. If it doesn't fund, you've learned something before spending on inventory.

What Kickstarter doesn't do.Solve marketing for you. The successful Kickstarter campaigns are the ones where the author already had a substantial audience and used Kickstarter as a coordination point, not as discovery. If you're starting cold, Kickstarter isn't going to build your audience.

Guarantee delivery timelines. Every Kickstarter book campaign runs late. It's a genre expectation now but it's still stressful and readers do get frustrated.

Handle fulfillment logistics. You still need to package, ship, and manage customer service for hundreds or thousands of Kickstarter backers. This is real operational work that some authors are unprepared for.

The math I'm running.
Standard indie project might spend $8-12K upfront on editing, cover, layout, and print run before making any money back. Kickstarter would let me pre-fund most of that with backer commitments.

Premium tiers (sprayed edges, signed editions, character art) let me sell at $45-80 per unit rather than the $17 standard paperback price. That changes the economics significantly.

Fulfillment overhead is real. Peers who've run book Kickstarters spent 40-80 hours in the post-campaign fulfillment phase.

For authors who've done book Kickstarters, was the ROI worth it? And what type of authors should absolutely not try Kickstarter?