Magic & Manners crowdfund

I mentioned this on various social media yesterday, but I’m still thinking about it now, so I’ll post here with more thought and detail.

I’m enormously enjoying writing MAGIC & MANNERS, my Pride-and-Prejudice-with-magic pastiche, and I’ve been contemplating what to do with it. I’d like to keep going, but being a writer, I’d also like to get paid for my words (crazy, I know!). I’m also particularly enjoying the whole no-particular-deadline aspect, which means I don’t know that I want to sell it traditionally right now, or even do a Kickstarter.

So what I’m thinking is doing a chapter-for-ransom style crowdfund: basically, I’d set up a Paypal button and post a new chapter for every $250* in donations. Odds are, that in order to maintain a degree of sanity, I would post a chapter weekly, so if somehow magically $833 or something appeared in the first week, that would be the ransom for 3 weeks’ worth of story.

All patrons who donate $5 or more would receive a full electronic edition of the book when it was finished, in whatever format they preferred. I could not at this point promise any kind of print edition.

I don’t know if there are any fundraising sites that support this kind of material-for-ransom model (someone pointed me at patreon.com, except that works exactly the opposite of what I’m thinking), so it might just be something run off my blog. Thinking, thinking! :)

*Why $250? Mostly because that equates to about a week’s worth of childminding in euros, although it also seems to be more or less the going rate for this style of crowdfund.