Why don’t you just Kickstart it?

Two things have been occupying my brain of late: VWORP!1 didn’t do bad for itself in an ebook bundle a while back, and I had a job interview a couple of months ago that went considerably better than any such interview I’ve had over the past several years, and yet I didn’t get the job. In the course of discussing these two things with friends, the inevitable question came up: Why are you even looking for a job? Why don’t you just do a Kickstarter/Indiegogo/[insert crowdfunding platform here] so you can stay home and write books?

Here’s my answer to that question, specifically, why I don’t plan on doing it.

It’s not that the thought of raising capital via crowdfunding has never occurred to me. It’s just that I don’t believe it’s applicable to what I’m doing.

Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other such platforms have been used to fund development of everything from a new generation of voice-activated computer assistants to putting a model TARDIS in orbit to new original TV series to reviving the UPN/CW series Veronica Mars in movie form. One of my personal favorites was the campaign to create, via 3D printing, semi-generic interlockable backgrounds for Star Wars action figures. Yes, please – I’ll take about 200 of each style, thank you.

And it’s been pointed out to me that one of my fellow authors in the ebook bundle did a Kickstarter campaign for one of his books. So why don’t I do the same? Wouldn’t raising an amount comparable to that resolve the lack-of-a-steady-income problem?

Crowdfunding is a marvelous thing. I suppose it’s probably the most blunt way to find out if you have an idea with legs. Now that big-name, big-money projects such as the aforementioned Veronica Mars movie and the Lord British computer RPG Shround Of The Avatar have waded into the mix, crowdfunding is also a reminder that even the entreprenurial space in the internet is ruled by those that already seem to have a head start on the rest of us.

Going waaaaaay back into the late ’90s, when I first affiliated theLogBook.com with Amazon’s affiliate program, I always contended that the site pretty much operated on an inverse-ratio version of the PBS pledge drive model: you buy stuff through the site’s links, you get the stuff you want, the site gets a slice of it through the affiliate codes. I’ve always really liked that model.

I don’t ever claim to be trying to make high art here, but rather engaging, informative stuff – both Phosphor Dot Fossils and VWORP!1 are very much labors of non-fictional love. But in their own way, documentary and non-fiction pieces are art. Just getting people to engage with the material is a challenge, especially if they’re not already predisposed in its favor. It’s a risk. And there’s another risk: that even with all the pre-release drum-beating that I can do, someone won’t like it. It happens. There were quite a few people who voiced, in a very public way, that Phosphor Dot Fossils wasn’t what they thought it would be (never mind the fact that I’d made very clear what it would be, and had in fact been showing an “early draft” of it for years at shows like OVGE). What Phosphor Dot Fossils was going to be was never, ever kept under wraps. If I had a dollar for every time I heard the comment “oh, so you put a Powerpoint presentation on DVD!”, I’d never have to work a day again in my life.

Kickstarter is at its best when it’s put to work on behalf of someone with an idea for a product that simply can’t be made without investment, something like Ouya or Ubi. I’ve seen Kickstarters where authors were essentially trying to raise money to pay their bills while they do nothing but write the book (yeah, right!), and I just can’t make that leap.

Writing is what I do. It’s something I do anyway. It’s something I’m going to do anyway. It costs me next to nothing to write – I need a little peace and quiet, a charged device or two if I’m away from the house, and time.

Should I charge you for a completed book? Yes. It represents hundreds of hours of writing, almost as many hours of layout and editing, no small amount of time doing the cover artwork myself, and no small investment of time for having watched and/or listened to the material covered in the first place. For that, yes, I will happily charge you the full cover price, and sign it however you like for free. (Wow, I’m not even adding a Repetitive Motion Surcharge for signing! What a bargain!)

Should I charge you for the promise of going to the trouble of the act of writing? No. I’m going to have written anyway. And writing is a terrible spectator sport.

I think Kickstarter is being misused. It’s being misused as a substitute for asking friends and family for a loan (though I realize that there are plenty of people who have no remaining family from whom to seek financial help). It’s being misused to gauge interest and raise funds for projects that could easily find Hollywood backing anyway (I’m looking at you, Veronica Mars – how many actual independent film projects are going to languish while a film financed through Kickstarter funds will probably get a multi-million-dollar marketing budget from the studio that owns the IP?). In short, it’s being misused to eliminiate risk from start-up ventures, which are inherently risky.

And there is a backlash. To quote just one example:

So if you have a great new idea for bringing back something old, a new old something that could only exist through kickstarter…wait. Wait until next year when, hypothetically, my current “backed” projects will either deliver, or flame out in spectacular fashion. Until then, I will have to ignore you, however potentially awesome you may seem.

People are getting, as Ben Langberg notes in his blog entry linked above, “Kickstarted out.” It’s starting to remind me of the 1982-83 video game crash: too many products to sink money into, and no way to tell from the marketing artwork which ones will fly and make something cool happen, and which ones will be by Mythicon… oh God, Mythicon.

Look, it’s a free world, and you can do whatever you want on Kickstarter and ask people to throw money at you. I wish you all the success and creative fulfillment in the world. To me, creative fulfillment involves risk. Kickstarter is at risk of eliminating the near-cliche of the struggling artist. If you’re not just a little bit scared and hungry, you are likely risking very little.

There’s also the missing puzzle piece: reality. I could go today and start a crowdfunding campaign and promise you that the money raised will go toward paying bills while I write the next 2-3 books. The truth is, I won’t be writing those 2-3 books 24/7 even if I make the mistake of promising to do so. I’ll be dropping everything to help Little E with school projects, and we’ll probably make a road trip to hit the arcade every so often, maybe grab some pizza on the way. I’ll have to stop working on the books to do laundry and dishes and catboxes and mow the lawn. And if an occasion arises where I actually succeed in convincing the long-suffering woman to whom I’m married to engage in completely recreational use of our respective reproductive systems, yeah, no writing is getting done that night. A book will still get done, eventually, but in the meantime, real life intercedes at every opportunity.

And I don’t just write books. I still write stuff for the site, and I still write and record a daily podcast (a daunting time-eater of a task, but one which I’m determined to see through to day 365), and I get on the blog and post screeds like this, or funny cat pictures. I get on Twitter and unleash a barrage of one-liners, bad jokes and promo posts upon my unwitting followers. Also not exactly what you paid for.

I also take on freelance work whenever it’s offered, as you do when there are bills to pay. I’ve been lucky in that there’s been a somewhat-steady stream of this to take on, often thanks to well-meaning friends who know I need the work (and the money). I also hit the brakes on the book projects to do this stuff.

And there’s the dark end of the spectrum too: in the shape I’m in, there may well be a massive heart attack that sneaks up on me and kills me tomorrow before VWORP!2 is done. My cats will probably be pretty upset by this – one less person in the house to give them scritchies. Now, I’m working on making conscious decisions to increase my health and avoid this possibility (and I’d like to think that fitting into a shirt that hadn’t fit me in over a year to go to OVGE was a sign I’m not doing too badly), but there are no guarantees. There are always risks. And sometimes you just have to face them down and own them, rather than trying to amortize them to the rest of the internet.

Anyone who feels really strongly about throwing money at me, there’s a Paypal thing over there on the right side of my blog. I will be blunt here: I expect nothing. You owe me nothing until I have a finished, printed book sitting on a table (either physical or virtual) between us that you want to buy. Anything anyone chooses to throw at me between now and then is generosity beyond reason, but it is not demanded. Unlike one crowdfunding project I saw some time back, in which a documentary filmmaker all but threatened to simply stop being a filmmaker unless the internet covered his expenses for him, I’ll be writing books regardless, and you can buy ’em here. Your investment in the work I’ve already done funds (and encourages – let’s not understate the importance of that) my future work.

In short: I string words together for my supper. Seeking “investors” for that simply doesn’t feel right.