The people reading this blog can be broken down into three categories: 1) people interested in reading/writing, 2) friends/fans of mine and 3) Mom. As a member of group 1, one of the most difficult things I can attest to as a struggling writer is finding the resources to do what I love. Life brings with it a lot of bills and the lady at SuperCuts ain’t working pro bono, which means my first priority in life is sticking myself through the gummy grind of the 9 to 5. This is a pretty typical lifestyle for just about any writer, even the successful ones (you’d be surprised by how many of your favorite authors needed to work full-time while pumping the keyboard at the same time). As one can imagine, this puts some heavy shackles on the amount of time I—or any author, for that matter—can dedicate to writing.
Despite this, there are solutions out there for people like me. One of the more popular ones is Kickstarter.com. Kickstarter basically works like those fundraisers you used to do to pull in cash for your travel soccer league; the only difference is when someone contributes money to a cause, they don’t get candy. Instead, they get the grim satisfaction that comes from helping someone else achieve their dream while the donor is stuck shuffling through the muddy monotony they sadly refer to as a “life.”
How could you NOT invest in this?!
Despite that, I can’t say I’m against Kickstarter.com—I mean, in theory, it is a great idea. If one or two people were doing it independently, sure, it’d be a fun way to gather support for your dream of writing. But when you have a whole bunch of people doing it and you’re all asking people for their hard-earned money so that you each can make your dreams come true on their dollar, you essentially become just another orphan singing on the street for nickels. Don’t get me wrong—there’s definitely a cause or two on Kickstarter.com that I consider to be truly innovative and worthy of funding—such as this one that is raising money to create autonomous cheetah robots (it’s OK—you’re allowed to scream “AWESOME!” after re-reading that last sentence), but for the most part, you have a bunch of people looking for investors who in return don’t get much more than maybe a PDF and a shout-out in the “Acknowledgments” section for their contribution—essentially the equivalent of getting your name announced on the school PA system after selling the most candy.
So in what other ways can you find the time and money for your dreams after realizing Kickstarter isn’t for you? You can try this interesting approach to investments that a friend sent to me. For those of you who don’t feel like reading two blogs simultaneously, that’s a personal investment contract (PIC) they’re talking about there, and it might just be the perfect mix of brilliant and bat-shit crazy, if you ask me (and most people don’t). In short, the PIC works like this: Let’s say you have a rich friend, someone with a couple hundred Ks to risk almost haphazardly. Let’s also say this particular friend thinks you’re the bees knees—they’ve seen your talent and potential and they realize that in a perfect world you’d have the moxy to fly to the moon on rocket skates. Said friend also realizes that this isn’t a perfect world, and realizes your potential may never be fully realized while you’re dedicating 8 to 12 hours a days working like a sucker. So your friend invests $300,000 in you. After signing a PIC, he gives you the cash upfront to do as you will on two conditions: you give him a said percentage (let’s say 10%) of your yearly earnings, no matter what they are, for the rest of your life; and if you decide to buy out of the agreement, you do so for a pre-determined figure (let’s say $5 million). And there you go. You now have the means to support yourself while chasing your dream. Let’s say the first year starts off slow and you earn only $10,000–the investor takes a bath that year. But let’s say the year after that you hit gold. With the free time and resources that initial $300,000 brought you, you’ve had the ability to write the next big hit in the literary world: The Secret Zombie Passage to the DiVinci Code…Twilight (did I mention that you’re not the most creative author out there?). The book sells big time, lining the bookshelves of hardcore fans and casual readers alike while banking you millions in royalties as well as insuring you a fat advance on your next book, The Secret Zombie Passage to the DiVinci Code…Twilight 2: A Lament for Originality. Combined, the whole thing nets you a cool $3 million—right there, your investor friend has already made his money back and then some, not including what he’ll earn in the years to come, that wily bastard. Of course, that’s just a best-case scenario, but who is to say it hasn’t happened and can’t happen again?
Of course, success via Kickstarter or PICs is hollow, at best. Assuming you’re successful at using one or the other to
Those could be YOUR jowls--with the help of the right investor.
help you fund your dreams, wouldn’t that then devalue the very dream itself? I mean, the thing we all love about rags-to-riches stories is that the underdog triumphed over adversity or some shit like that. They went up against the odds to do something they whole-heartedly believed in and succeeded based on their own mojo, not someone else’s checkbook. If you’re able to write the greatest book ever, what does it actually mean if you couldn’t do it on your own steam? Writing a book with someone else’s financial help doesn’t make you a successful author; it makes you Stephanie Meyer, which I suppose would be OK for some people, but then you run the risk of just being in the whole “writing” game for the money, which is an empty reason to be involved in anything.
Nope, can’t agree with your conclusion at all. Regardless of my thoughts about kickstarter, your logic is faulty.
First, you don’t distinguish between funding for the writing of the book and funding for the launch of the book. As you know, these are two discrete processes requiring much different levels and degrees of support.
Second, you use faulty and unsupported logic to reach the conclusion that a funded project is equivalent to “selling out.” Worse, you infer that seeking financial support is equivalent to talentlessness.
What, then, is the difference between seeking financial support in the form of kickstarter, and launching your work through a publishing company? Oh, wait, you are a publishing company…you’ll have to clarify your argument in order for many independent artists to throw their support behind it.
And you have several typos.
lovelenox.
Thanks for your opinion, Lovelenox, but it is just that: an opinion. Just like my above rant is an opinion–hence the less-than-subtle title.
Your first point: Funding for writing a book and launching a book, I feel, are basically the same thing. They’re both a form of seed money, and for indie writers they probably both come from the same source with the only difference being how they use that money.
Next, I never used the phrase “sell out” for a reason, because I don’t believe users of Kickstarter or any equivalent are sell outs, nor do I believe they are talentless. What I was inferring was that having someone help you potentially takes a lot of your own steam out of the project. In my experience, I put considerably less heart into a project that doesn’t cost me anything, and I’m at my best when everything is on the line. If I were being funded by nameless donors, I personally would feel less responsible for my work since it’s not being fueled completely by my own blood and sweat. But that’s just me (this is where that whole “opinion” thing comes into play).
As for your third point regarding the difference between using Kickstarter and launching your own work through a publisher, I recommend going out and asking 10 different writers which they’d prefer: launching their book through Kickstarter funds or being published the old-fashioned way.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
In case you’re too busy thinking of snarky ways to attack my grammar, I’ll explain what that means: It proves that the two are completely different things leading to different results. The Kickstarter writer has the means to self-publish regardless donated funds. The process is easy and fairly cheap these days. But people raising funds through Kickstarter are asking OTHERS to fund their dreams instead of ponying up the money to do what they could essentially pay for themselves. In other words, Kickstarter leads to the same exact results for a self-publishing author, but they’re just getting someone else to pay the bills. On the other side, with a publisher, yes, someone else is paying the bills, but they’re also doing other things as well: editing the MS, assisting marketing efforts, etc. Plus, the publisher makes money back by producing an author’s work. Best as I can tell, most Kickstarter donors do not receive money back. Instead, they may get a PDF of free copy of the book, which is kind of silly on the author’s part since he’s essentially cannibalizing his own sales that way.
But I digress. This whole post was an exercise in opinion; I don’t need indie arts to put their support behind me, not do I care if they do. The bottom line is, I’m not against Kickstarter (which you would know if you read as far as the first line in the third paragraph before you launched your unprofessional but nonetheless insightful comment), it’s just not for me.
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