Kickstarter :)
Over the weekend, my friend E & I had this big discussion in which she told me I wasn’t squeeing enough about the “No Dominon” Kickstarter campaign. I said I was trying not to drown people in it, which she’d understood, but she still thought I wasn’t squeeing enough. So this morning I shall squee some, and talk about why crowdfunding excites me. :)
First off, the campaign is well over $7500 now, though not yet really near $8K. I suspect (in another lesson learned) that calendars aren’t an exciting enough Rollover Reward. :) I think it’ll probably get there, but it’s a good lesson for next time.
(Odds are it will be an Animals Calendar, because the campaign would have to reach a truly phenomenal dollar amount to justify doing the COMPLETELY AWESOME calendar idea I had after the fact, which is doing a CE Murphy Urban Fantasy Calendar, with location photos from all my urban fantasy novels: New York, Seattle, Boston, Cherokee County, Ireland-and the real Thunderbird Falls, which is outside of Anchorage. But I’ve only got a 6 hour layover in Seattle coming home, and that’s not enough time for even the most strategic strike force of photography expeditions to succeed.
Tell you what, though. If the campaign hits $8K before I leave for NYCC on Wednesday morning, I’ll bring the real camera along just in case. If it hits $9K (only $1400 away!) before I leave, I’ll at least do a desktop download version of the calendar, though it may be heavy on Irish & NYC locations rather than the other places. :))
Anyway, I’m still getting huge delight in having people subscribe-it’s over TWO HUNDRED FIFTY PATRONS now!!! that’s closing in on 100 more than my previously-most-successful crowdfunding campaign! o.O! <-- surprised scuba guy emoticon
And it is all reminding me that again and again, the thing that really hits home for me about crowdfunding is that essentially random strangers are coming together to help get art made. That sounds terribly snotty, I don't really think of my stories as art (I think of them as books or stories), but storytelling /is/ an art, the oldest art, and so: coming together to help get art made.
Even more specifically, to help get art that would not otherwise exist made. It's enormously unlikely that I would have written "Hot Time" or "Year of Miracles" or any of the ORSSP if I had not been supported, quite literally, by the kindness of strangers. I *wanted* to tell those stories, but I can't, as a rule, afford to tell stories for free, and novellas/short stories are a much harder sell in the fiction market than a full-length novel. But as it turns out, it seems that while I can get publishers to pay me for books, I can get--just people to pay me for novellas and short stories, and that means they're *totally* making a space where I can do things I would never otherwise be able to. And that's *amazing*.
I *love* that we're living in a time where instead of an artist requiring a single, extremely wealthy patron, it's possible to do something like a Kickstarter campaign and have hundreds of ordinary-income individuals become patrons instead.
*Kermitflails* That's what art and patronage *should* be: complementary and broadly accessible. Art is not for the wealthy, it's for everyone. The joy of being able to help support it should not be reserved for the wealthy, either, nor should the rewards of patronage (projects dedicated to/named for/inclusive of you, etc) be solely for the rich. I've done a bunch of silly little things already to say thank you to individuals who have hit benchmarks within the "No Dominion" campaign, and that's part of what this is all about: all being in it together.
So, y'know, thank you. This is an incredible thing you guys are doing, and I love you for it. (and in case you missed the link up above, the campaign page is here. :))
(x-posted from the essential kit)