A post on BoingBoing links to a Kickstarter project put together by young-adult novelist Kate Milford, author of a novel The Boneshaker (not to be confused with the steampunk novel Boneshaker by Cherie Priest) to crowdfund a novella tying this novel together with its upcoming sequel, The Broken Lands.
Milford has set a goal of $6,500, and with 50 days to go she’s more than 1/3 of the way there. Her plan for the novella is to make it available in three editions: an Espresso Book Machine paperback, a Google Play e-book, and a special-edition pay-what-you-want e-book illustrated by ten teen readers, which will be available from her website, clockworkfoundry.com. And she’s not keeping all the money herself, either:
All the good folks who have collaborated on this project are getting paid at least enough to buy some fancy cupcakes or a tank of gas. Unfortunately, as some of the contributors live in NYC, I cannot guarantee that they will be able to do both. But if we exceed our goal, we’ll pay them more.
She adds in an update that several contributors have offered to donate their compensation to fund additional young artists.
In a comment on the BoingBoing post, Milford explains:
The biggest reason I chose to fund it this way is that I want to use resources that are independent bookstore-friendly, so I’m not using any Amazon self-publishing services at all; they get a cut from Kickstarter for handling the money, but that’s all they get from me.
Milford is far from the first writer to kickstart, of course. For example, I covered one of Greg Stolze’s crowdfunding efforts on Kickstarter that netted him $345 for a 3,000-word short story. One of the commenters on the BoingBoing article (the one Milford was responding to in my quote, in fact) wondered why use Kickstarter for something so small, rather than the huge sorts of projects (such as, perhaps, the record-setting e-ink-based digital watch I’ve been meaning to write a full post about one of these days) for which it was ostensibly intended, but the nice thing about Kickstarter is that it offers easy automatic funding for any size of project. And as Milford shows, this is something authors who want to eschew the Amazon route could use.
