All new website and full Kickstarter
A double launch* week
It's been quite a week! And we’ve got lots for you to look at and participate in.
Our website is up!
On Monday, in the midst of the eclipse, we launched our full website. We invite you to take a tour and check out the design, our story, information about upcoming classes and multi-day workshops, and our unconventional submissions process. We promised we'd be doing things differently, and our submissions system—fair, transparent, equitable, respectful—is one part of that. We open for submissions on May 20, 2024. Please spread the word!
(Oh, and while you're on there, feel free to order a T-shirt with our snazzy logo. The GP looks fetchingly like a punctuation mark.)
Time to bite our nails: The Kickstarter is live!
The other BIG news is that we have launched our crowdfunding campaign, and Kickstarter has already labeled it as a "project we love." Phew! But I'm not going to lie: we are biting our nails and trying not to refresh our project page obsessively.
Why are we biting our nails? Because, according to the way Kickstarter works, if we don’t get pledges for the full amount we ask for ($60,000) by the end of the campaign, we receive 0 dollars. This is why it’s so important for those who support us to pledge now!
Visit the page to see all the rewards at the different pledge tiers. They range from a simple social media shout-out to fun merch like T-shirts and tote bags, to of course signed copies of our first books. And at the higher levels, we’re offering opportunities to have an (industry-relevant and approved by us) ad in the back of our books. Yes, you read that correctly. As recently as the 1970s (ok, to some of us that's not that long ago) there were ads in books, which helped cover the costs of book production. And there are still ads in the backs of print literary magazines, to this day. Why not go back to including a few tasteful ones at the back of the book, which doesn't interrupt the reading experience at all, to help support writers? This is another way in which we’re taking a new approach—being open-minded enough to discover even old ways of doing things that will work in our re-invented system.
We know you believe in our mission—will you take a minute to make a pledge? Early pledges give our whole campaign an incredible boost.
This is us yesterday morning, just after we hit “launch” on the Kickstarter over Zoom.
A writing friend recently mentioned a conversation she was lucky enough to have with Gloria Steinem at a writing retreat. During the conversation, Gloria Steinem said: "Optimism is a form of planning. If we don't imagine what we wish to happen as possible, it's never going to happen. So it's not only necessary, and sometimes practical, it is the only way we are ever going to move forward." This was just what we needed to hear today. We are optimistic that we will meet our funding goal—maybe even our stretch goals—and that we will move forward with this press and bring you, whether you are readers or writers or both, deep and meaningful experiences.
If you’d like to hear us talk more about publishing (I mean, who wouldn’t?), you can register for free for our May 2nd webinar (7 pm Eastern) with the Boston branch of the Women’s National Book Association.
*It’s actually a triple launch as Henriette’s third book, Last Days in Plaka, came out on Tuesday!
Thank you. But what's unconventional about your "unconventional submissions process". Looks pretty conventional to me : ) I'm not just joking around. Well, maybe I am, but issues like these are what I write about. If you have a new angle I could give you a shout out