1) The customers are called backers.
2) A project creator (like me) puts something new they've created into a campaign on Kickstarter. The created object can be just about anything. Mainly, I support books, comics, and Tarot cards, but I've also supported low-flow shower heads and wearable flash drives shaped like Star Trek comm badges. The point of the campaign is to solicit funds to bring their product to wider markets.
3) In return for supporting the campaign, the backers get some really cool merchandise!
4) The campaign is open for a set number of days (in my case, from July 21st through midnight PDT July 30th).
5) During the time the campaign is live, the backer can pledge for a certain reward package. For example, the backer can get all e-books or all paperbacks. In my current campaign, I set up a ‘Make Your Own’ package option where you can mix and match the items in a campaign via the 'Add-ons' feature.
6) A lot of creators also have 'Add-on' merchandise where backers can get extras of campaign items or special merchandise that's not part of the main campaign. You can select ‘Add-ons’ in my campaign if you want an extra paperback for your favorite niece, for example.
7) Yes, backers will need a credit or debit card to make their pledge. However, Kickstarter WILL NOT charge you yet.
8) The creator's have a funding goal. If there's enough pledges to meet or exceed that goal when the campaign's time is up, then the campaign is successfully funded!
9) If the campaign fails to fund when its time is up, The backers won’t be charged at all, but they also won’t get any merchandise.
10) If the campaign successfully funds, the backer's credit/debit card will be charged shortly after the end of the campaign.
11) If there is a problem with the backer's credit/debit card (hey, life happens), Kickstarter will contact the backer and give them a chance to rectify the problem. If they cannot fix the issue within 7 days, Kickstarter will cancel the backer's pledge.
12) Approximately, two weeks after the end of the campaign, Kickstarter deposits the funds from the campaign (minus Kickstarter's fees and any card processing fees) to the creator.
13) The creator then arranges for the merchandise to be made (if they haven't done so already) and delivers/ships the merchandise to the backers. In my case, physical books will be drop-shipped from the printer/distributor Ingram. The e-books will be downloaded via Book Funnel. And the extra merch will be mailed from me to you!
14) There's a very low incidence of scamming on Kickstarter. The company runs a pretty tight ship. However, once in a while someone slips through. So screen any creators! Hopefully, after writing and publishing for the last 15 years, you find me trustworthy!
I've successfully run two campaigns so far. The Books of Apep series is my third one, but my first under my company name, Angry Sheep Publishing LLC. I'm truly excited about this campaign because I had a ton of fun writing the books!
If everything goes smoothly, my backers will have their books a minimum of six weeks before the first book in the series launches at the regular retail sites.
If you have any additional questions about Kickstarter, take a look at their FAQ section.
Hopefully, you'll check out my campaign when it launches tomorrow! Thanks!
In the province itself, homes are engulfed and destroyed in minutes. Evacuations continue, but the province is running out of places to put people who have lost everything. Fire fighters are doing their damnedest, but many of the fires are raging out of control.
On Tuesday, Alter Ego's cover artist Jo-Anna posted a picture from her house. A sulfur-yellow cloud engulfed her neighborhood. You could barely see the house across the street in the weird haze. She lives in a small town roughly halfway between Detroit and Toronto, well out of the path of the actual fires.
Unfortunately, the jet stream is dragging the smoke from Western Ontario to the Atlantic.
Yesterday, gray smoke enveloped my current residence. We live about an hour south of Toledo, Ohio. The air quality index ("AQI") was 276. The dogs want to dally, but if the smoke badly affects my eyes and sinuses, I can only imagine what it's doing to my precious puppies.
Today isn't better. The AQI was 287 when I checked my phone. The dogs still want to dwaddle outside, but there's a chemical scent to the smoke that concerns me.
Hell, even our solar panels are only generating half of what they should be on a July day.
The sad part is there was a time when the U.S. would have sent crews up to Ontario to assist our Canadian siblings, just like they and Mexico would send additional fire fighters to assist with our own blazing countrysides.
Now, the rule in D.C. is every person for himself. Now, everyone suffers.
But we got a little lesson and some hope last night.
As I reported, Jane Doe Jr. had a baby. And the new fawn on the block thinks my flower beds are an all-you-eat buffet. But the queen doe of our yard's fluffle also likes munching on the flower bed. The deer and the rabbit ate side-by-side for a few minutes while Jane Doe Jr. watched from the other side of the wire fence running along the back of our lot.
Then the pair decided to play tag. DH tried to get shots of them, but this was the clearest. The gray mass near the fawn's butt in the queen rabbit's butt. The pair played in our yard for a quite while before the fawn trotted off with her mother.
For the first time ever, DH has named the backyard wildlife. The new fawn is now Bambi. The queen bunny is now Thumper.
And if Bambi and Thumper can eat a meal and play together, they rest of us can, too.
And woke up to the project already approved!
The wait is over. The campaign goes live on July 21st!
If you want to a notice so you don't miss this opportunity, click this link to go to the Pre-Launch Page and click the 'Notifiy Me On Launch' button!
Besides the fact that I no longer need glasses to drive. LOL
The Kickstarter peeps have added a ton of new tools to make things a lot easier for campaigners and backers. I'm trying a couple of the new things with this campaign. And I plan to use a few more with the October Kickstarter for the Justice 10th Anniversary hardback editions.
If you've never done a book campaign on Kickstarter or haven't done one in a while (like me) I highly recommend Anthea Sharp's Kickstarter for Authors. The second edition lays out all the recent changes in an easy to understand format.
(And yes, I stole her name for my Justice series heroine.)
Unfortunately, the many problems I've encountered have nothing to do with Kickstarter itself. It has everything to do with ordering certain crafting material from foreign countries and sending physical rewards overseas. The ongoing trade wars the U.S. president started when he took office has done a ton to hurt small companies like mine, even though he claims to be pro-business. That's why I'm starting over with a very simple, no-bling campaign. E-books are easy to send anywhere in the world, but physical goods have gotten ridiculously expensive to ship.
*sigh*
We'll see how things go with the two campaigns I've planned for 2026, and look over the data before I map out next years production schedule.
So, I've been hiding at Starbucks to work on Death Goddess Redeeming. Yay for trenta ice tea with a free refill!
I thought this story would be easy, but Isis's avatar is dealing with the emotional trauma of her original husband's death and her own flight to save her unborn son while protecting her charge.
It's bring back my own fears of when I was pregnant with Genius Kid. I thought I'd dealt with that shit, but apparently Subconscious feels the need to dredge up all the pain, grief, and anger in order write Reyna.
Thank goodness, I passed the book's halfway point yesterday. Things will get better during the downhill slide to the finish.
I hope!
Thankfully, it's been raining off and on here, and it's 25 degrees cooler! The plants outside already look a lot greener than they did yesterday under the massive heat dome perched over the eastern portion of the continent.
Seriously, it's hard to think, much less write, when it's that hot. Which was why I spent two and a half hours a Starbucks under their blessed A/C and a extra-large cup of their ice tea and got more words written in one day than I had the previous week.
I'm roughly at the halfway point of Death Goddess Redeeming. The info for the paperback covers for Death Goddess Walking and A Barrel of Vintner have been sent to their respective cover designers.
So, I'm off to get some words in before we meet the Niece and her parents for dinner tonight at our favorite diner. The food's relative cheap and oh-so-good!
All in all, a much more pleasurable Monday than the last one.
