Seems like everybody’s Kickstarting these days. paidContent has a story on a Kickstarter Seth Godin launched for his latest book, with a goal of $40,000 that it blew past in 3.5 hours. Just goes to show you why Godin is one of the gurus of modern marketing, I suppose. It’s already over $150,000 when I checked it just now, and has 28 days to go. It’ll almost certainly have broken six figures by then.
One thing I will point out, though, is that the only e-book edition of the book included is a “digital preview” at the $4 level that you can read on-line for four days and then it’s gone. I don’t see any option for a permanent e-book, though you can get a hardcover at the $22 level and four at the $49 level. And then various fancier special-edition hardcovers going up from that. The lack of an e-book for people who actually prefer it seems like kind of a big oversight to me.
Update: When I sent a message to Godin about this, he pointed me at the project’s FAQ, which stated an e-book version would be available but not as part of the Kickstarter itself, because he didn’t have an easy way to “control the delivery to a proprietary e-book platform.” It’s a bit strange that someone who literally wrote the book on Internet viral marketing, and whose Kickstarter seems set to earn him more money than most published authors see from any several of their books put together before he even publishes it, is still clinging to the shackles of DRM.
