All the people who told us that launching a Kickstarter campaign is a lot of work weren't kidding! We thought long and hard, and researched a ton, to decide which crowdfunding platform to use to help us get off the ground—or out to sea, to continue the galiot metaphor—and we decided on Kickstarter for several reasons.
We aim to be self-sustaining and demonstrate that art and business can co-exist, that a passion project does not need to be considered a charity, and Kickstarter is designed for just this thing: raising the funds to launch a business.
Kickstarter is well established and known; by this time there are few (in the US at least) who have not heard of it.
The platform will allow us to provide updates during the campaign, and give our backers an inside look into the process of selecting, editing, producing, and selling our books. We want to build community, and Kickstarter is designed for that.
The down side: if we don't meet our funding goal, we will get nothing at all.
Ack. So we have spent a lot of time crafting our message and distilling what we are all about. And we have crunched numbers—the average Kickstarter pledge amount, the percentage of followers who tend to back a project, the expense of the rewards, the percentage of backers who are likely to come from Kickstarter versus from our own community, the percentage that Kickstarter takes as a fee—and determined that we need to build up a following of 5,000 people to meet our base funding goal.
At times this feels completely feasible. Everyone we speak to about our ideas is wildly enthusiastic. After decades in the literary world, and just in the world in general, we have an extensive network. But at times it feels very daunting. We are competing against so much: social media, all the existing great books out there, streaming TV series, podcasts, Substack. In addition to all these forms of entertainment, we are distracted by world events and worries. It’s a lot.
But just yesterday I got yet another reminder of the importance of what we are doing.
I was chatting with another writer of mixed heritage who writes "literary" fiction as well as young adult fiction and narrative non-fiction, and who is considering a children's book. We love creatives like this, with versatile styles, with broad curiosity, with a desire to break through prescribed categories. We feel that expertise in one area can enrich work in another, not necessarily detract from it. But she's having trouble finding an agent, because all the ones she has pitched, despite loving the project she sent them, feel they can't represent someone who writes in so many genres. And when she suggests having more than one agent, maybe one for her YA and children's books and one for her adult ones, agents say no, they want all of her or none of her. So here she is stuck, with projects that agents love but won't take on. It is so frustrating. Our publishing house will be open to such writers.
We love creatives like this, with versatile styles, with broad curiosity, with a desire to break through prescribed categories.
So here we go. We can do this, right? You will help us? By the next installment of this newsletter, we will have set up our pre-launch page on Kickstarter. You'll be able to see our little video, read about our plans, check out all the rewards we are planning for our backers, and, if you are inspired by what you see, spread the word. The Kickstarter page will be in "pre-launch" status until we officially launch the campaign on April 10. It will then run until May 17. And then... we will open for submissions!
Meantime, we have some fun little outtakes from our Kickstarter video, which we filmed in Henriette's dining room. Bloopers—isn't that a fun word? (The Grammarist website tells us "Bloopers are a blunder of words or actions named after the oscillating feedback created by radio interference, called a bloop. They became popular entertainment in the 1950s and are now regularly placed at the end of many movies, made into television shows, and streamed online."
The real video will be up on our Kickstarter page in a week or so, and you’ll be the first to be notified.