Kickstarter: an ecosystem introduction

I want to do audio.

I talk to so many people who, when I tell them I’m a writer, their knee-jerk response is: I don’t have time to read, but I love listening to books in audio.  And I think that’s totally realistic and reasonable and a really good way to use time that might otherwise be wasted.  Fiction is good for the soul, and sitting down and reading a book is not always a realistic life event.

(Now, I cannot hear what people are saying to me unless I’m lip-reading, I’m so visually driven, something I figured out in my twenties, so while I really *appreciate* good audio performances, I have a hard time keeping up with the story.  It is not my medium.  This does not mean that I undervalue it as the best medium for other people.  Just want to make it clear from the front that I am not a large-scale consumer of audio, because it doesn’t suit the way my brain is wired.)

It isn’t just that it makes my work accessible to people who are genuinely interested and lack the opportunity to consume it.  It’s also the collaborative piece.

I am not a joiner.

I never have been.

I kind of do my own thing, and if there are people around who are doing the same thing, that’s really awesome, but I generally don’t alter my path very much to go find them.  It’s a balancing act, like everything in life, indulging that natural inclination to avoid anything that everyone else enjoys and breaking it to make sure that I have people in my life who I enjoy living my life with them.  I know better than to try to do true collaborative writing (as shiny as that always feels to me every time I think about it) because the idea of letting someone else control pieces of my stories is just… unthinkable, truly.  (I did do a shared-world series with Rob Peecher under my Jessie Noble pen name, true westerns, and that was AMAZING, but what made that work was that I was building my own characters and my own plots under a structure of setting and crossover characters that he had defined, going into it.  I wrote every bit of my stories, and he wrote every bit of his.  This worked.)  I have this fantasy of doing screen adaptations of… basically all of my work, and every time I really get realistic about it, I laugh, because that is so *opposite* of anything about how I like to work.  If I were to sell rights, I would have to sell them and walk away, I think, because I AM NOT A JOINER.

Audio has this secret, mystic loophole to it in that I’ve written the whole story.  It exists and it’s done and I’m happy.  And then this *other* creative professional comes and interprets the whole thing in an entirely new medium.  And getting to listen to that is like discovering an entirely new IDEA of my work.  I got to build that in collaboration with another professional who made something *more* out of it.

It’s incredible.

I want to talk to another creative professional about the decisions I made with language and character, the backstories that are woven into speech patterns and intonation that don’t quite make it onto the page, or that only live there in subtle subtext.  Do you know how many dialects there are running around in the Veridan series?  I do.  And a narrator *cares*.  It’s SO MUCH FUN.

And I want to make these.  For me.  For my audience.  Because it’s art and I love it.

But they’re very expensive.  Because there’s another human being out there who is going to have to put a lot of hours of their life into the creation of this product, and then some more, different human beings who are going to go do a bunch of technical work, supporting them and making them into the FINAL product.  The price that I’ve paid for audio is a little higher than average, but not much, and I think it was the right price for the specific situation and skillset I was employing.

Which means that it becomes a challenge to market it in such a way that it’s financially justifiable to create more.

Audio consumers have grown accustomed to their audio being cheaper than it was, fifteen years ago.

(Do I blame them?  No.  Genuinely.  They make their decisions and I make mine, and those don’t need to be seen as conflicting.  Amazon does not pay enough per sale to allow me to find an audience for it, there, so I don’t publish to Amazon at this time.  That end of the audio market is simply not my market.  We’re cool, guys.)

ENTER.  Kickstarter.

I had a vision that I would use a Kickstarter to fund the creation of one (or maybe both) of the remaining Carbon Chronicles titles, but as it turns out, the Kickstarter ecosystem isn’t a big fan of audio.

And here, we take a very big right turn.

Whiplash, I know.  Hold tight.

What I found, there, as I was doing my due diligence on how to run a Kickstarter and meet the community expectations was… a different world.

And it’s pretty cool, y’all.

Standard, basic offerings there for books include foil-embossed covers, reversible dust-jackets, sprayed images on the book edges, vellum inserts (I’m not even certain what this *is* yet), and custom interior art.  THEN they get crazy.  They start adding in things like white text on black pages (!), metal etched bookmarks, metal corners, LEATHER covers, all Kickstarter exclusive.  Stuff you can’t get anywhere else, ever again.  IT’S GORGEOUS.

And I haven’t even talked about the ‘name a character who’s going to die spectacularly’ or the ‘zoom call with author to talk about life the universe and everything’ offerings going on, here.  Seriously.

I thought that Kickstarter was about funding the upfront costs of creating independent products, and it still IS, but it’s so much more than that, in the book corner of this world.  It’s about making art out of the book itself, editions that are really special, just unto themselves.

And oh my gosh I want them.

I want all of them.

Later this year (I had started making real plans to do this yet this month, March 2024, and then realized that was shiny-object syndrome) I still plan on launching a Kickstarter with the hopes of funding out the rest of my Carbon Chronicles audio titles.  I want those to exist.  But I’m not going to be featuring my audio.  I’m going to be featuring exclusive hardbacks, Kickstarter exclusive bonus short stories, and we’ll kind of see where it goes from there.

I think I want to stay small, simple, and experimental with this first one, just test out whether I *like* doing things this way, but it’s a very exciting new aspect of interacting with readers.

So.  What I’m going to ask YOU to do is this: go check it out.  Understand that this is NOT an Amazon platform.  Everything is not seamlessly integrated into your phone, your computer, and your television to bring you every product you want with a zero-second delay and at the push of one button.  It’s not the cheapest price you can get anywhere on a commodity product that’s competing to sell a thousand units a day.  This is a chance to get something hand-designed by the creator at sometimes exorbitant cost that’s going to show up in three to six months, but that’s going to be one of a hundred of THAT THING that will ever exist.

It’s DIFFERENT.  But it’s beautiful and exciting, and I know you want a leather-bound, foil-embossed boxed-set edition of The Queen’s Chair.  (Boxed sets are currently not an option, but we’re waiting with baited breath for them to show up, and you *know* I’m jumping on that one as soon as it comes.)

Check it out, report back.

What do you think?