Enlarge to admire tongue piercing. Image Description: Me with celebratory hands up and mouth wide open and excited |
This is awesome for two reasons: Number one, we closed out at juuuuuuuuuust shy of $11,000.
There are a lot of things I could say to my detractors who thought I picked a very unfortunate path to financial writing solvency. They furrowed their brows when the take-home message I got from our SFSU guests was that the entire publishing industry was changing right in front of our eyes, clucked when I started a blog, sucked their teeth when I opted out of traditional publishing, looked down their noses when I invested time in self promotion and social media outreach, and made sure I knew (and I mean in no uncertain terms) that they did not consider my fledgling career to be "real" if I was not pursuing literary journals, an agent, and/or an MFA in literature. Many are now scratching their heads wondering how in the name of Apollo's right nut I was able to score a tidy advance on a debut novel (that I won't actually have to pay back).
And, as I say, there are many things I could say to these detractors.
After much thought and consideration, however, I've decided to take the low road. "Neener neener. Who's 'dumping a lot of wasted effort' now? Eh PROF?"
Of course I can't get too obnoxious without simultaneously thanking all of you. It's a humbling and uplifting experience to have people quite literally give you free money on the promise that what you are going to do with it is, we hope, totally cool.
The amount pledged is more than enough to supplement current incomes and for long enough to get the whole book written (not just a first draft). It's also enough to hire both a content and a copy editor towards the end of the process so that the polish is a little finer than most self published books. And because we hit the fourth stretch goal, I'll be releasing the book through e-format and print-on-demand formats.
All of this is a little over a year out. (You'll probably start to see the release date information in early fall of 2017.)
It's also awesome for a second reason: You won't have to read about it every single week anymore!
Here's where we are now.
- It's still another three weeks before I can sit down and really start in on this book. It's also another three weeks until all blog systems are fully functional with power levels in the green.
- In the next three weeks, we should see more and more blog sub-systems come back online one-by-one including "meatier" posts, vlogging (never forgot about this), weekend light weight posts, blogging for other blogs, and short fiction.
- It's still another two weeks before I am done with summer school, so we might need a bit more jazz hands periodically.
- Radiation ends tomorrow, and family left this weekend, and the Kickstarter is over (as exciting as it was, it was stressful and took a bit of energy to promote). You should begin to notice an uptick in blog post quality quite soon.
- And thank you so much for your patience through all of this.
I also remind everyone that tomorrow I will be posting the second semifinal round of our July poll for Best Non European Fantasy, so if you want to vote for who will go on to the finals, today is your last chance.
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