So I have some fun news! I am launching a Kickstarter for my latest book, The Weyrdragon and the Fire Agate Necklace! It will launch next week on Wednesday, April 13th. Check out the campaign preview page!
This is my first Kickstarter and my first crowdfunding attempt for a creative project. Since I’m testing the waters, I am starting out small, and my goal is to raise $300. Not quite as much as the multi-million-dollar projects that tend to make the news, but that’s okay with me. The $300 funding will mainly help me cover the setup costs for paperback and hardcover versions of my book on IngramSpark. The funding will also help with the cost of getting cover files made for the print copies, as well as the cost of ordering some copies of the paperback and hardcover for backer rewards.
If this campaign is successful, I will probably also do another Kickstarter to get all three books in the Dragons of Arethia trilogy in print. Currently, the third book in the trilogy is not available in print, and I would also like to redo the covers of the first two books, and move them to IngramSpark for distribution instead of Amazon’s print on demand service. Why? IngramSpark’s distribution options are much wider, and my books would be available for bookstores and libraries to order at prices and terms that are familiar to them. Basically, if you wanted to get my book through your local independent bookstore, you could request that they order it, and it would be available through Ingram’s catalog, just like any traditionally published book! You could support an indie author and your local bookshop all in one purchase.
Why did I decide to try a Kickstarter campaign? You may have heard the news of Brandon Sanderson’s crazy successful Kickstarter that raised over 40 million dollars. Here’s a nice article on Kickstarter about it. The campaign itself is a pretty amazing example of a self-publishing success. But, I probably wouldn’t have really extrapolated what that could mean for me without this post from Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I recommend reading it. At the end of her post, she links to this free Kickstarter Best Practices for Fiction Writers class offered by Dean Wesley Smith and Loren L. Coleman, and I promptly signed up and started going through the lectures and doing research on Kickstarter. In the process, I backed a few projects and have added a fair number of ebooks to my library that I’m excited to read, so that is quite fun too.
So basically, I am trying a Kickstarter because it’s fun to try something new, to reach more readers, and complete projects that help me further my publishing goals. I’m starting with a small project to see how it goes, and I hope that I’ll have fun learning along the way. Wish me luck, and follow my project on Kickstarter or Instagram!
