Well, I was fascinated. There are competitors, but Kickstarter – the experts I heard were unanimous here – is still the kicker of choice, at least for fiction.
And I want to have more audiobooks made of my books, partly because I keep getting asked about them from older readers, the visually-impaired etc.. Though audiobooks are murder to market, and I've yet to make back all that I paid for my Susan’s – despite its winning gold in the eLit book awards and being a finalist for the Wishing Shelf...
Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained, I thought.
I then wasted several days of my life that I’ll never get back researching successful Kickstarters, making several videos, trialling them with friends, figuring out at what to put as my rewards, pricing those rewards and shoving it out there. (At that point I maybe should’ve screamed about it louder, but we all know writers who send nine million reminders about their new release, until we finally have to snooze them.)
And – yes, it WORKED!!!!!!!! – Just imagine how thrilled I was when I – almost instantly, too! – got swamped by 95,000 eager takers, mostly Nigerian, who each assured me that my Kickstarter exercised a fascination second only to deep-space exploration, and that, for only $1000 they could make my Kickstarter F-L-Y!!!!! 😊😊😊
One phisher was so overwhelmed with excitement about the stirring potential for collaboration on my “works of undoubted genius and global relevance” that he contacted me on no fewer than six social media sites, sounding successively more seriously unhinged as the long day wore on.
At a rough estimate, 85.5% of these phishers addressed me as, “Dear Great Author” – thus saving themselves all the fuss and bother of checking my actual name. Of course, auto-correct DOES tend to turn Pride and Perjury into Pride and Prejudice. If they wrongly assumed I’d penned the latter rather than the former “Dear Great Author” could make some kind of sense…
Number of actual backers? Yeah, you guessed it. Single digits.
In the end I got too depressed to even bother to advertise the page. BUT the Kickstarter's nearing its finish, soooooooooooo, if you'd like to support my Kickstarter and to help the visually-impaired, that'd be amazing.
You can get coaching on your novel, name a character, enjoy a pair of Darcy coasters etc. And if you help the Kickstarter AND you can make the London Book Fair, I will personally buy you a beer!!!
There. That's an offer only 95,000 could refuse!!!
Signed, Great Author (not) | 
