At the 24 hour mark, the campaign has hit just under $4600. My readers are *amazing*.
This means a bunch of things:
1. “No Dominion” is definitely a go. On April 15, 2012 (6 weeks after RAVEN CALLS is released), backers for the project will get Gary’s story delivered to their in-boxes.
2. There will be a First 24 Hours Reward. This will probably be a short story. So far there are suggestions for a story about the Hollidays, a story about Ashley Hampton, or a pivotal scene or two from Morrison’s point of view. Suggestions continue to be welcome. :)
There is also a suggestion that I do a YouTube thank you video. In iambic pentameter. While tap dancing. I *can* tap dance, you know. :)
3. The campaign will stay open the entire 43 day run originally proposed, closing on November 14th. I need some time to write all these short stories, after all. o.O :)
4. The campaign is now a mere $1400 or so from the first Rollover Reward: at $6000, I’ll write an extra Gary story for everybody subscribing at $10 or above.
5. The campaign is more than 1/3rd of the way to the $12,000 high-end Rollover Reward of a limited signed trade paperback edition of the novella & companion stories!
A question from a backer: At some point, it would be interesting to know why you chose kickstarter instead of your publisher and what you are using it for (replacement of an advance? ), etc.
My publisher, Luna, doesn’t typically do novellas, is why. They’ve commissioned a few for specific projects (including WINTER MOON, which has the Walker Papers novella “Banshee Cries” in it), but it’s not their bread & butter. Also urban fantasy protagonists tend to be hot young women, not 74 year old men. :) If I end up writing as many short stories as it looks like I might, I may put the whole package together along with the novella and pitch *that* to my publisher, but that’s way out there in terms of possibilities. Right now, the Kickstarter campaign is providing me with the moral equivalent of the advance money a publisher would give me; without that advance, I wouldn’t be able to afford to do this project instead of something my publishers would pay me for.
The dollar amount, incidentally, $4000, was chosen because I’ve done a couple novellas as crowdfunds before, and they’ve brought in around $3K each. I got paid $4K for “Banshee Cries”. I’d been going to split the difference and put the Kickstarter fund-point at $3500 and add in cover art for the project if it reached $5K. But then I sort of went and jumped the gun and got cover art done ahead of time, so I folded the base cost of that into the KS fund-point and set it at $4K.
So there ya go. Transparency in Kickstarting. I’m happy to answer any other questions, too. :)
6. It also means if you keep it up at this rate for the next 40 days (which does seem wildly unlikely), you’ll commission yourselves an entire new series. I’m just sayin’. :)
I found this idea pretty interesting, and even might have had a little something to do with the questions you got asked. This model of self publishing is fascinating, and it sure seems like a good way to get enough of an ‘advance’ where you can afford to do the writing, as well as pay for things like cover art and editing (how will you go about finding an editor btw?)
I started a discussion on the Linked In group for “E-Books / E-Book readers” regarding using crowdsourced financing to facilitate self publishing, and (I hope you don’t mind) linked back to this blog posting where you explained some of your reasons. (and thanks for sharing that with us btw, very interesting)
Also thanks for making the copies of this for backers be DRM free. That’s something important to me as a reader since the presence of DRM just feels like I’m being punished for paying for something, and well I could go on but this isn’t my soapbox.
–Chuck
A Gary series? That would be wonderful! I love Gary and was sad to miss him in the last Walker Paper. :o)