All I can say is “what?”1966 backers. $76,833.
I have never received that much for a single title in a single lump. The Absolute books might each $40,000 over their publishing lifetime, spread over years, occasionally boosted by Humble Bundles and the like. This is stunning.
My gratitude to everyone.
Some comments, in no particular order. I could put them in order, if my brain wasn’t fried from screaming NUMBER GO UP! NUMBER GO UP! all weekend.
- 31% of pledges were referred by Kickstarter. I suspect that’s from the “Project We Love” algorithm.
- The dashboard gives referrers for incoming links. 55% of incoming traffic was “Direct traffic or no referrer information. The big social media sites like Facebook and Hacker News show up as referrers. So, what’s that 55%? It’s some sort of web site. I suspect it’s the Fediverse, aka “Mastodon and friends.”
- What the heck? What the absolute heck??? How did any book I write bring in this kind of money?
The catch with Kickstarter is, of course, that I don’t get to keep the money. Half of it goes to fulfillment. Half of what remains gets held back for taxes. What remains is a nice chunk of cash, but I need a new car and some roof work. (I’m 57 years old and the roof is a 45-degree slope, I no longer climb up there.)
This has convinced me to run every single dang book through Kickstarter, though. Because lightning does strike twice.
If you missed the Kickstarter and want to preorder a print/ebook combo, I’ll have that up on tiltedwindmillpress.com in a few days.
I suspect this happened because you hit the perfect time in the news cycle (as a major os is behaving badly this year – recall, copilot, 11 upgrades and 10 loss of support next year) and many people are now looking at other options and thinking, “Maybe I should try something else for my main machine.” That’s what happened with me. Not expecting this to make things easy with the switchover, but thinking it will be good to know about in the future.
Not to metion your footnotes are *hilarious*. Some of us are from your fiction and writing kickstarters, not just the algorithm.