Patronize Me

Salon.com's Laura Miller has an interesting article here on the future of authorial income, in which she spotlights Kickstarter as an excellent way for an author to raise funds for a novel project. Over the last couple of years the crowd-funding website has become a popular platform for indie authors and other publishing entities to employ when seeking the always-elusive financial support they need for books they can't/won't sell to publishers and other special projects.

What Ms. Miller doesn't mention in her piece is that Publishing has the second-lowest successfully funded rate of all the categories on Kickstarter; according to Writer's Digest only 32% of the book projects placed on the site are fully funded. I'll also take an educated guess that the majority of Kickstarter book-funding successes are enjoyed by established names who can attract a large number of donors and/or widespread interest from funder crowd. Still, Kickstarter has successfully funded 4,000+ publishing projects since it began in 2009, so if you already have a following and don't mind seeking financial aid in this manner it could help with the cost of producing an indie title.