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| From Morguefile |
To Be or Not To Be
A guy posts a kickstarter to try to raise $20k to publish his book on Hamlet* and raises (with 3 days to go) nearly $400k! Are you kidding me? Really? That's awesome on so many levels. Oh, he has to deliver now. And the stretch goals are pretty cool, too (they better be, when you top your goal by- what is that - 1000% or something...).
But there are a thousand other books sitting on kickstarter that won't get funded. Why this one? Who knows. In some ways, kickstarter can democratize the publishing business. Backers can decide AHEAD of publishing whether or not something will be, as this, a "bestseller" or a no go. And no warehouses full of books that didn't sell**. Authors and publishers and distributors know from the getgo how many, how much, and where to - well, with the initial run. I guess there could be subsequent printings. And the market gets saturated... And not every backer comes through (though I can't locate that statistic right now, of course). Less than half of the projects put on kickstarter get funded (43% is the number I keep seeing out there) and there's TONS of advice on how to do it right - which the guy above hit EVERY NOTE RIGHT. Frankly, I want to buy the book. And this might actually be the first project I support...
And by publishing - I mean film, music, art...um...virtually any creative endeavor you can imagine at this point...and a whole bunch I simply CAN'T imagine at this point***.
Traditional publishers will be around for a while, there's no doubt about that. There's too deep a system of agents and publishers and...well, I don't know the ins and the outs of the system - but music, film, books, whatever. Traditional routes will be there. But these...rogue, throw yourself out there and do it yourself avenues are taking hold. Backers of these crowdsourced projects are not called customers, they are, well, called backers. You might or might not get a product, even if you pay your money (most of the time you get what's promised). It's more like the old Patronage system of the arts from ages ago - except, well, not controlled by the patron, but the artist. The artist says I have this vision, will you pay and the Patron (the many-headed crowd) says, "Aye!" or "Nay!" And new art is born. Or consigned to the "what might have been" pile of never was...
*A Choose Your Own Adventure Book no less! Which is every shade of AWESOME!
**Which means I likely won't get my copy at Ollies... sigh... I'll have to look at Half Price Books in a couple years then... Of course, if you backed this...will you drop it at a used book store? Double sigh...
*** Check out the Antique Tea Van roaming London - art? commerce? both? neither? Kickstarted...
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