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START HERE: Read Your Way Into 25 Amazing Authors (A Book Riot Kickstarter Project)

Jeff O'Neal

CEO and co-founder

Jeff O'Neal is the executive editor of Book Riot and Panels. He also co-hosts The Book Riot Podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @thejeffoneal.

There are so many great authors and fantastic books out there that it is impossible to know them all. There’s so much, in fact, that is easy to miss amazing stuff.

That’s the reason we included Reading Pathways as a regular feature here on Book Riot since day one. We’ve written short, accessible, and passionate introductions to reading big-time authors, including Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, Jane Austen, Ray Bradbury, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Colson Whitehead, and Charles Dickens, among others.

Reading Pathways is far and away our most requested feature–we have readers asking all the time for installments on Virginia Woolf, China Mieville, William Faulkner, Joyce Carol Oates, Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Heinlein, James Joyce, Alan Moore, Stephen King, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, and on and on and on.

So, it’s time to kick it up a notch.

Today, we are launching a Kickstarter campaign to create, produce, and distribute a book version of Reading Pathways that we’ve re-named Start Here: Read Your Way Into 25 Amazing Authors.

You can find out all the details on our Kickstarter project page, but here is what we are doing in a nutshell: we are going to get people who know these amazing authors inside and out and have them show you how to best experience them for the first time. The contributors are going to be a mix of the Book Riot writers you already know and some fantastic outside contributors–so far we have Ruth Franklin (Book Critic for The New Republic), Ron Charles (Senior Critic, The Washington Post), Jane Ciabattari (former president of The National Book Critics Circle), and author Kevin Smokler.

We’re only going to do this if enough people want it. Here’s two ways you can be a part:

1. Back the project

For 10 bucks, you’ll be pre-ordering the ebook and for $75 you’ll be pre-ordering the ebook and print edition along with getting the opportunity to vote for an author to be included. There are some higher contribution levels you should check out as well (we know how to throw one heck of a party).

2. Let other people know about it

Book Riot is what it is today because you’ve shared it with people. Same thing is going to get Start Here off the ground. Sharing the project on Facebook would be super-helpful. Emailing the project to friends and family you think would be interested would be terrific. If you are on Twitter and/or have a blog, you know what to do.

Our mission is to write great stuff about books for you, and we think this is going to be awesome. We hope you do too. Thanks so much for reading…both books and Book Riot.