Kickstart Your Reading Life with the Crowd
Kickstarter helped Book Riot raise enough money to produce Start Here: Read Your Way Into 25 Amazing Authors (featuring moi, as it happens, with a second volume on the way), but that’s hardly the only bookish project on the crowdsourced funding site. Projects for virtually every literary niche are just waiting to be nudged along by the patronage of interested future readers. Here are just a few.
- Eric Tecce is hoping to create a hardcover collection and screenprinted apparel based on Edgar Allan Poe‘s stories. A Poe fan myself, a book that paired his works with a “visual representation of each story” would be right at home on my shelves.
- Do you have a toddler who doesn’t know his T.S. Eliot? Well, ME Gilligan may be able to help, if The Waste Land for Babies—A Picture Book reaches its funding goal. Gilligan hopes to produce a larger run of a book that began as a gift to a friend, and offers hand-painted postcards among the prizes for backers.
- There’s plenty in the nonfiction category as well, from a guide to preserving veggies, seeds, and herbs (seed packets for backers!) to a zine-turned-(hopefully-)book on the yoga of bicycling to a history of the Baker family’s descent from 17th-century immigration to decades of Appalachian feuds.
- You can help a group like Summer Literary Seminars make a book “after years of hosting some of the world’s finest writers and so many phenomenally talented students.”
- Or how about a periodical? Kickstarter is also the beginning of a number of literary magazines, including the successfully funded Vs. journal, Foxing Quarterly, and Zenith, a literary magazine featuring the work of teens from Hawaii. A far cry from the Virginia Quarterly Review, no?
- If you’ve had enough actual reading at any point, how about a game based on fables and fairy tales?
And that doesn’t even get into the main areas of fiction or comics and graphic novels, where the rule seems to be: if you want to read it, someone out there wants to write it—and give you the chance to help make that happen.
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