Marketing Soulwoven Part 3: Running the Kickstarter

This is part the third of a series of posts on how I've marketed Soulwoven. Part the first and part the second provide useful background.

Running a successful Kickstarter has a lot of facets. On the one hand, you're working to create the book, and it needs to be your first priority. On the other hand, you've also promised your backers a fly's-eye seat on the wall while you do it, and there's no question in my mind that fulfilling the second part of that equation is smart marketing.

So I consider a lot of the way I interacted with my backers during the Kickstarter a part of Soulwoven's marketing plan, even though I did most of those things to be good to my backers, and not because I wanted to do a good job of marketing (it's always about what you can do for them, remember?).

I started off with a long update a few days after the Kickstarter funded, explaining my thoughts on the whole process, what it meant to me, and why I was so grateful to my backers and how incredible what they did in funding the book was. You can read an adaptation of it here, but the full thing will only ever be available to the backers, as will the other Kickstarter updates I wrote. That was part of the deal I made with them; they got access to me as a creator that nobody else did.

And I did my best to be as accessible as possible.

I started before the Kickstarter even ended. I'd noticed as I backed other projects that I got much more excited about projects while they were still going on when the creators were excited and getting in touch with me about what was happening (excitement is one of the things you give backers in return for their money, or at least it should be). So I wrote about the editing that I was going to get, and I posted an example of the revision notes I was making as I worked through Soulwoven that month (I was getting in one last cover-to-cover revision before sending it off to my developmental editor). I wrote seven updates during the month the Kickstarter ran. Some of my backers were excitedly messaging me as I did it. Others upped their pledges. So that was good marketing, in addition to being A Thing That I Did Because It Was Right.

Once the Kickstarter finished, I kept up the updates---again, I knew from being a backer that having regular (not too often, but when milestones occurred) updates really helped make a person feel like they were a part of the process. I shared my budget, once I had all the final numbers hammered out. I let backers vote on the cover, then shared the final version when it came in. I shared the map when it came in. I tried to post at least once a month about where the book was in the publishing process, and I tried to anticipate questions and answer them (like "What's a galley copy?"). I made some videos and shared some photos as well.

Not everybody responded. Only about half of the backers voted on the cover choice. But that was totally fine; again, it wasn't about what they could do for me, it was about what I could do for them. If all they wanted was the finished product, or even just the momentary satisfaction of clicking the "Pledge" button, I was still absolutely thrilled to have them on board.

But overall, people really seemed to enjoy the process. When I talk to backers (the ones who interact with me, anyway), I get the feeling they really felt like they got their money's worth before the book even came out. Making that happen to me was very important as a creator, but it was also good marketing. Because happy readers are happy customers, and happy customers come back to you again.

And if there's an overall takeaway from this marketing post, it should be that. Make your readers happy. That's always been an imperative for most kinds of authors, but it's more important than ever in today's publishing environment. I've seen it over and over again in the indie world; the most successful authors aren't just the ones who can turn a phrase and crack a plot and build amazing worlds and characters. Their fans also love interacting with them.

I dealt with plenty of moments of panic as I was producing Soulwoven. I still have them now that I'm learning how to sell it. But during one of them, I happened upon a truth that has helped me keep perspective, and I'm going to share it with you because it's important.

You can't control whether\people will like your book. But you can control how you treat the people who do.

Marketing Soulwoven Part Two: The Kickstarter Launch

Okay, time for part two of the ongoing series of posts on how I'm marketing Soulwoven (you can read part one here).

The second stage of marketing Soulwoven came with the Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter, like Wattpad, was a thing I found out about via the news. I started backing projects on it in 2012, with Amanda Palmer's album Theatre is Evil. Over the next year or so, I backed several projects and got a chance to see firsthand how they worked---what was exciting about the process, what wasn't, what other people did well and poorly, etc.

Kickstarter, for those who don't know it, lets people pledge money to support a creative endeavor. For authors, it's a way of funding all of the many expenses related to publishing a book, like editing, marketing, and cover design. In the traditional publishing world, your publisher foots those expenses in return for a large slice of the profits of the book. When you Kickstart, your audience foots those expenses in return for various backer rewards and the fun of being a part of your creative process.

Launching the Kickstarter was the first time I began actively marketing Soulwoven to anyone. I knew from backing other projects and from reading up on it that having a good video was extremely important, so I turned to a friend of mine from high school who runs a small video production company in Denver. He did a bang-up job on the video, which more than paid for itself.

I also reached out to my Wattpad followers, of which there were several thousand at the time, and asked them what they'd be interested in getting as rewards from a Kickstarter. I built a survey using Survey Monkey and asked them to rank my ideas in order from most exciting to least exciting, and then to write in any ideas of their own. I didn't get a ton of responses, but I got enough to correct some misconceptions I'd had about what would be the most exciting. I also realized that I wasn't likely to have people from Wattpad pouring thousands of dollars into the Kickstarter.

So I set my goals low. I knew I couldn't adequately copy edit a book of Soulwoven's length (because I'd already copy edited Three Dances myself, and it was a bear of a job even for a book so short). So I told myself I needed $550 to hire a copy editor I'd worked with through my freelancing for Carina Press, and I set up my reward tiers pretty aggressively to hit that goal. I was reasonably certain I could convince 25 people to pledge $25 each to back to the book, and I filled the $25 reward tier with all the goodies my survey respondents said they wanted most. I also set a number of stretch goals for the campaign, which would add interior artwork and additional editing to the publishing process if they were reached.

It worked well beyond my wildest dreams. My core fans were extremely excited to back the book, and I hit my funding goal about 12 hours after the Kickstarter went live. I eventually received 660% of my goal, allowing me to bring on an interior artist and developmental editor, as well as to launch with a pretty significant marketing budget.

There were a few other marketing tricks I pulled out for the Kickstarter that are worth mentioning. I noticed that being part of a successful Kickstarter was a lot more fun than being part of one that wasn't going very well. I also knew that if the book funded quickly, I'd have another flashy hook I could dangle in my marketing copy. So I set my funding floor low with that in mind. I also set up my reward tiers in a way that encouraged interaction between me and my backers. I wanted to get to know these people, who were making my dream a reality. I also knew that the more contact we had, the more likely they were to remember me.

This is getting long, so I'm going to break it off here and talk more about the process of fulfilling the Kickstarter in another post. But first I want to mention another marketing caveat. It's true of anything you do marketing-wise on the Internet, but it's especially true of Kickstarter:

It's never about what they can do for you. It's always about what you can do for them.

Marketing actively to people can make you come off as a sleazeball at relativistic speeds. The world is full of people and companies trying to separate readers from their money. Don't do that. Don't be desperate. Don't be needy. Don't be pushy. Your needs are unimportant to people who have never met you, and if you put your needs above the needs of the people who have met you, you'll start to push them away pretty quickly.

So find out what your readers want and what you can give them. Then offer it to them. When you ask for something back, do it humbly and with a smile on your face that says, "I'll still like you whether you help me out or not." Let the money question ride quietly and unobtrusively in the backseat of your relationships with readers and fans, because that's where it belongs.

And watch Amanda Palmer's TED talk. It will help you put things in perspective.

Hubris and Its Wages

I put the last of the hand-annotated copies of Soulwoven for domestic Founder's Circle backers in the mail today. Still a few more copies to go overall, but for the most part, the mad sprint around the book's launch is now over, and I've got a few thoughts to share on hubris.

One of the wonderful things about creating these hand-annotated copies was that doing so let me go over the book again and again and again, moving through it at a pretty good clip and picking out themes and relationships between scenes and characters and chapters that I hadn't put in there consciously (there were also things I did put in there consciously, and I saw those too, but they were less interesting to me because I expected them).

In several copies, I found myself making the following note, or one very much like it:

A lot of the stories in the book are about hubris and its consequences.

This is quite true. Quay, the prince who leads his friends out of their homes without fully understanding his own limitations, is a lesson in hubris. Len, the Aleani who's spent his life hunting a necromancer and who continues that hunt in the face of everyone important in his life telling him to abandon it, is another. Leramis gets his own brief, painful lesson partway through the book.

I got my own lesson in hubris with these hand-annotated copies. I knew I could do them. But I'd never done them before, and in light of that, I probably ought to have set my sights a little lower than 26 copies for my first go. Today was the first day in about a month that I haven't had to spend three or four hours after work making one of those copies. I laughed aloud when five o'clock rolled around and I set down my normal work for the day, because I realized I felt like I was on vacation because I didn't have any work to do tonight.

I don't want to make it sound like I didn't enjoy making these books; I did. They're works of art (their quality is up for debate, but they're art nonetheless) in and of themselves, and each one's unique. I did about as many line drawings in the last month as I have in the rest of my life combined, and some of them turned out really beautifully. There's a depiction of the gull's feather in chapter 41 in someone's book that's among the best visual art I've ever made. I got to know the story I told more intimately as well; I realized that Dil's decisions shape the narrative perhaps more than any other character's and that hers is the only full hero's journey in the book, and I absolutely love that.

But I also got a lesson in my limitations while working on a book in which several characters receive painful lessons in their limitations. There's a certain irony in that that doesn't escape me.

Writer, beware thyself.

Unexpected Influences

I'm presently about halfway through doing the hand-annotated copies for early Soulwoven backers. Doing them has forced me to look at the book in a different way than I have before. Among other things, it's meant scanning for influences and spotting broad trends, because I jump around from page to page and sort of skim, which isn't a normal part of my writing or revising process.

One of the trends I've spotted is an unexpected influence.

I've never been a huge consumer of stories in the horror genre. When I was a kid, they terrified me. Like, seeing movie trailers for scary movies would give me nightmares, never mind the movies themselves.

And yet horror has its fingerprints all over key moments in Soulwoven.

It starts with the descriptions. When things get dark, really dark, the characters begin to see the world in the way that characters in horror stories do, where everything is out to get them. And their descriptions reflect that fact. There's a character with sharpened, yellowed teeth. There are undead crawling out of the ground and terrorizing people. And there's the dragon itself, floating in their minds and taunting, taunting, taunting them.

Soulwoven is a fantasy novel. There's no doubt in my mind about that. But if you wanted to, you could plot it against the structure of a horror novel and find a surprisingly high correlation. There's one (short) chapter, in particular, that's more ghost story than anything else in terms of structure.

So apparently, even though I didn't enjoy horror stories much growing up, and I still don't read a ton of them, they left a strong imprint on me. Maybe it's because they resonated so strongly with me that I didn't enjoy them. Or maybe it's because they terrorized me so much that their elements burned themselves so deeply into my brain. I can't really be sure.

But they're there nonetheless, and I don't think they're going anywhere. I suspect all writers have these sneaky little influences. There are things we're aware of that shape us (for me, Tolkien, Martin, Kay, Gaiman, Mieville, Hickman and Weis, the teams who wrote the Final Fantasy games, and much more), and there are influences we're not aware of until after the fact. With all the hours I've spent staring at and analyzing and fine-tuning this book, it's amazing to me that I continue to find things inside it I didn't know were there.

Incidentally, I think "What Lies in Darkness," the horror novellette I wrote for All Hallow's Write last year, is one of the best pieces of short fiction I've ever put together. It's up for free here on the blog as well as on Wattpad, and if you've got the stomach for horror, you might want to check it out.

What Fulfilling the Soulwoven Kickstarter Looked Like

Continuing with these week's theme of spreading the Kickstarter love out to the broader world today. When the print books arrived for Kickstarter backers, I was about a week behind schedule on them. So in order to get them out to people as quickly as possible, I had a signing and packaging marathon. I thought it might make for an interesting time-lapse video, so I shot one.

Enjoy! And then go buy the book. S'il vous plait.

Thoughts on Kickstarter

So let me be perfectly honest here: I'm cheating a little bit with this blog post. Shortly after my Kickstarter finished, I wrote a short essay on some lessons the process taught me about publishing, writing, and life, and how everything came together to make Soulwoven a reality. I shared it with my backers. What follows is adapted from that.

--

Several Big Thoughts occurred to me while the Kickstarter was up. I’ll try to get through them all here.

The first, and probably the most powerful, is what it means to say “yes.”

I have made a habit, in life, of going where the doors are open. I did not expect to enter publishing through the doors of a midlist romance publisher. But they said “yes” to me, and there I went. I did not expect to become a freelance writer and editor, but freelance clients said “yes” to me, and there I went.

I did not expect to become an indie author, but readers said “yes” to me, and there I went.

Publishing is organized around saying no. It has to be. As an editor, I get more submissions than I could possibly publish, even if I loved every one of them. As it happens, I don’t love every one of them. So I say no to the ones I don’t love, or I pass them on to others (who will also probably say no to them) if I think they’re very good but I still don’t love them.

This is a terrible thing to do to authors. We ask people to pour their hearts and souls into learning a craft and creating art with it, and then we ask them to come and seek our approval. Then we tell them “no” again and again until they reach the minuscule cross-section of people who would love their book and people in the publishing industry with the power to publish their book.

And then we wonder why some authors are unbearably arrogant or unbearably neurotic.

At any rate, I spent the first decade or so of my writing life being told “no,” over and over and over again. In the face of that, there comes a point where you honestly stop expecting to hear yes.

The first day of my Kickstarter was incredibly emotional for me. I was reasonably certain that, over the course of a month, I could get 25 people to pledge $25 each and get the book funded.

But the number of people who came right out of the gate not just to pledge, but to pledge big, absolutely astonished me. After ten years of being told I wasn’t good enough (or sometimes that I just wasn’t a good fit), I discovered in half a day that people believed in me who I didn’t even know were paying attention to me.

That was an incredible feeling, and it has kept me going for a long, long time.

Second, the Kickstarter taught me that there really is a revolution occurring in the world of arts and music and letters, and that it’s an honor to be a part of it.

I’ve read lots of articles proclaiming that digital publishing is ushering in a new era of something or another. I’ve always taken them with a grain of salt. Every prophet of the new seems to have something to gain from ensuring that it comes to pass. So I never drank the Kool-Aid.

And then, as I started to answer questions about the Soulwoven Kickstarter, I realized something.

The best music I bought in 2013 was all independently produced.

To be sure, I bought some good albums from music labels too. But the best? The most striking? The most inspiring? The most unusual and artistic? Indie. Or at worst, started indie and got picked up by a label after.

I’m not a part of indie music fandom. I know very little about bands, or scenes, or music in general. I have next to no sense of what I should like and what I shouldn’t. I just hear songs (usually on the radio), and then go buy the album if I like them enough.

So if the best songs I was hearing on the radio, which were succeeding against all odds in the land of Clear Channel and label dominance, were indie, that meant something.

I’ve long contended that music is about five years ahead of publishing. Up to now, indie publishing has largely been the breeding ground of the most commercial of commercial fiction. Fifty Shades of Grey, etc. Not authors who claim to be making great art.

But that’s going to change, and I’m excited to watch that wave hit the shore from the inside rather than the outside.

My third and perhaps most contentious Big Thought came about because of who my backers were. I know, personally, 51 of them. And those 51 contributed the lion’s share of the book’s funding.

In my head, I have a voice that tells me my success is therefore invalid. That my book was a pity case. That it was only what personal popularity I possess that motivated anyone to back me. The voice began speaking to me before my Kickstarter even launched.

And you know what? It’s full of it.

On the day the Kickstarter went up, another voice spoke up in my head, and it said, quite clearly: Who did you think your first fans were going to be? The staff of the New York Times Book Review?

That voice knows what it’s talking about. To be an author requires a certain amount of arrogance. You have to believe that you can write something worth reading. If you want to make a living at it, you have to believe that you can do it better than almost everyone else who’s trying the same thing.

That’s enough arrogance. You don’t have to believe you’ll be so good at it that you won’t need the help of your friends and family to succeed.

A lot of success stories start with “Using money borrowed from family and friends.” I didn’t even have to borrow. I’m giving things back, and they’re experiences and objects, for the most part, that no one else will ever get to have.

My fourth, and by far my most important and far-reaching Big Thought, involves the proving of an idea I had two years ago.

In early 2012, I went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, and I realized as I watched people fail and fail and fail trying to put up new climbing routes or face death on 8,000-meter peaks that I was jealous of them. Because they weren’t worrying about marketing or careers or star makers or success. They were doing what they thought was awesome. And success, if it came, came later.

That, to me, is what being indie is all about. More importantly, it’s what leads to good art and a sustainable career no matter how you publish.

So I decided not to worry about how I was going to succeed. I decided to just do things I thought were awesome and to trust that, if other people agreed with me, success would follow.

Now it has, and I am immensely honored to have had the support of so many wonderful people in making it happen.

Cover Reveal: Soulwoven

Hello, friends and readers!

There is much news to relate on the Soulwoven front. More on that in a few days, however, because today I want to focus on the book's cover!

Boom! The artist Kendall Roderick and I spent a few weeks hammering out concepts and working through revisions before proposing two variants to my Kickstarter backers. They chose this one overwhelmingly (it was my favorite too).

There are a lot of things I love about it. I think it does a good job of evoking some of the things that Soulwoven is other than an epic fantasy: it's modern in its construction and aesthetics and themes, and it's meant to be read seriously. And, of course, it has a dragon.

I'm a big fan of the ink-splatter effect as well (I pushed for it, and Kendall outdid herself making it happen). I wanted to work the idea into the book that the dragon isn't really of the world. It's not a new concept---I first saw it in Stephen King's IT---but it's one that resonated with me. The thing the characters are seeing as a dragon is just the closest shape their minds can give to something much more primal and unyielding than that.

Hence the grunginess and simultaneous definition and lack of borders to the dragon's shape.

Maybe I'm just digging too deeply, but this is part of the fun of indie publishing. I get to art direct my own cover, and that means I get to make it art. Or at least try to.

The print cover will have a slightly different layout. The dragon's body will wrap around the spine and onto the back cover, where it will circle around the marketing text there.

Enjoy! Share! Swoon! Tell your friends! Soulwoven comes out February 21, 2014. You can add it on Goodreads today!

News for the Week of 9.13.13: All the Things!

Hello, dear friends and readers!

I cannot believe two weeks have passed since the Kickstarter closed. It's been a crazy last month and a half for me, and I am late on informing the world of several things.

First: I will be at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Conference from September 20-22. On the 20th, I'll be one of many authors signing books. Come on down! You don't need a conference registration to come buy books (or you didn't last time I went). On the 21st, I'll be giving a workshop on cover copy for the indie author. You DO need to register for the conference to attend that. :-)

Second! One of my authors' first books with Carina launched in August (link here). It's called The Adorned, and it's a male/male fantasy romance. I won't apologize for that, because that's what the author writes and loves, but I will say that it is to me first and foremost a great fantasy, with incredible world building and beautiful prose. Yes, there's a love story (and it's a great one), and yes, that love story is between two men. But this story deserves to be read without preconceptions, because it's extraordinarily well written (if you don't believe me, read the reviews). If you're into fantasy, amazing prose, and great books in general, you should check it out.

Third! Wattpad BLEW UP for about the last 30 days before finally cooling off last night. There are now nearly 14,000 people following me there. That number boggles my imagination. I do not understand what it is to be able to click a button and send a message to 14,000 people, other than very, very cool. I have a lot of thoughts bubbling on Wattpad, but they deserve their own post. I'll share them soon.

Fourth! I have fun projects on the way for the fall. Last year I wrote Nadya Skylung and the Cloud Pirates during NaNoWriMo, and I think it's my best work to date. I owe The Unlikely Candidates a debt of gratitude for inspiring this year's crazy fall project, which I'm very excited about and which I have been doing a boatload of reading in preparation for (and which, I should note, will not impinge at all on the schedule for Soulwoven---this is a necessary precondition of its existence). I don't want to say too much for fear of jinxing it (and also because I may fail entirely in executing it---that's part of the magic of the crazy fall project). I'll also be writing a scary story in a marathon on Halloween, possibly alone and possibly at the same time as other writers.

So in short, I should have more good stuff for you soon.

Much love and thanks for your patience. I now have to go catch a plane to Wyoming.
-Jeff

P.S. The front range of Colorado is flooding. I grew up there and it means a lot to me. You can help it react and recover here.

Kickstarter Success!

So as you all can see from the widget over that way ------>

The Soulwoven Kickstarter successfully funded at midnight last night. It's going to take me a few days, I think, to fully process my thoughts on this, because there are a lot of them.

For now, I just want to share a couple of pictures.

This is what Kickstarter success looks like when you're facing a computer screen.

And this is what Kickstarter success looks like if you're a computer screen looking out.

I'll be back soon to tell you what it feels like to be an author who just successfully completed a Kickstarter, but we can start with the following:

It feels great.

-J

For New Readers

Note: I wrote this post originally to reach out to several thousand new followers of mine on Wattpad. But once it was written, I realized it might be worth sharing with a wider audience as well. So here goes!

TL;DR Thanks for taking a chance on me. I mostly write fantasy for young people. You can find a lot of my work on Wattpad. I appreciate your support and love talking to readers.

Hello friends and readers!

This post is mostly aimed at my new followers. Those of you who’ve been around for a while can feel free to carry on with your Wattpadding uninterrupted. :-)

But to the rest of you: a special hello! Many of you are completely new to Wattpad, and I want to thank you guys for choosing me as one of the first authors you’ve followed. I know a lot of you haven’t had the chance to read any of my work yet. That’s cool with me. I want to earn your support and readership, and I figure I’ll start by extending a welcoming hand and giving you a brief introduction to what I’ve posted here.

NADYA SKYLUNG AND THE CLOUD PIRATES is a fantasy steampunkish adventure written with middle-grade readers (11-14 or so) in mind. Judging by early reactions to it, it is by far the best thing I’ve ever written. There are only three chapters of it up on Wattpad, because I’m waiting to introduce it to the world with a bang, but it’s a good place to start and get an idea of what I write. 

SOULWOVEN is the reason most of you are here. Wattpad spotted it when I started posting it last year and asked to feature it. It’s an epic fantasy about brotherhood, friendship, young love, saving the world, losing your identity, and what we have left when everything is taken from us. It’s ambitious, and it’s a little dense, and it’s aimed at lovers of fantasy and literature ages 15 and up. 

Finally, THREE DANCES is a short story collection I published earlier this year. It’s five literary fiction stories done in a magical realist style that deal with tricks of language and myth, gender and sexuality, and growing up. It’s aimed pretty squarely at adults, but it’s a good read if you like its niche. 

I hope you find a book you love on my list. And if you do, I hope you take the time to let me know by voting and commenting (ed: or by buying Three Dances or backing the Soulwoven Kickstarter!). Those things are what make the world go round for us authors. And if you just want to say hi, drop me a line for that too. I’d love to talk to you. :-) 

Cheers, Jeff

Phone blog with pictures!

The Soulwoven Kickstarter is LIVE!

This will be the first of many Soulwoven Kickstarter posts. Because the Kickstarter is now LIVE! You can go here to donate!

A few protips about Kickstarter for the curious and uninitiated:

- You can pledge any amount you like and choose any reward tier that requires that amount or less. So if you want the Founder's Tier reward but were thinking of pledging more than $25, you can do so.

- You can change or cancel your pledge and reward choice any time up until the end of the project funding period.

- You can pay through an Amazon account.

If you're on the fence about pledging, just go and check out the site. I spent a lot of time (and got great help from my fans---thanks guys!) setting up the Kickstarter, and I'm proud of it. It's worth your time to check out, even if all you do is look. :-)

We've got 30 days to make this book a reality. Let's go do it!

And as always, thank you all for making this possible.
-Jeff

The Soulwoven Kickstarter is GO FOR LAUNCH 12:01 a.m. EST August 1!

Dearest readers, 

This is it! The Soulwoven Kickstarter has been green-lit by Kickstarter HQ, and it's going to go live tonight at midnight EST! Backer rewards to include: 

- DRM-free copies of the e-book 

- Signed copies of the paperback 

- Hand-annotated, one-of-a-kind signed copies of the paperback 

- Skype chats with me 

- Recognition by name (or Internet handle, or whatever) on a special thank-you page in the book 

- Access to early drafts of the later books in the Soulwoven story, while there's still time to plead with me to save and/or end lives, romances, & c. 

- And much, much more! 

The best rewards have limited quantities (I can really only make so many of those hand-annotated paperbacks), so make sure you get in early! Kickstarters have a history of leaving latecomers brokenhearted :-(. 

Check back here at midnight for a link to the Kickstarter page, where you'll be able to pledge. 

Thanks for coming on this ride with me, dear readers. You guys gave me the courage to do this, and that's a gift I'll spend the rest of my life paying you back for in story. 

Cheers, A Very Excited Jeff

Why I'm Doing the Kickstarter

Hello all!

Since I announced the Kickstarter, I've been fielding questions about it from friends, family, fans, and other writers. The biggest (what is it?) I hope I addressed in my last post. But the question I receive next most often is "Why are you doing this?"

So I've been mulling over the best way to communicate that. And then yesterday I got a message on Wattpad from a reader named Sarbjot, in response to a "Hey, thanks for reading!" I'd sent to him months ago. I got his permission to share it with the world, and it reads:

@realjeffseymour I'm not sure if I replied to this yet but I've read it before :), I will go back through and site on all the chapters that I liked I might have missed; and I would fan you as an author anytime, you have amazing writing skills and an very intriguing book to boot; which is why I will donate 30$ for the kickstarter, I don't want anything; honestly, I just want to see this book go public and want to see you make it in the writing industry! Have a good one! See you next book :)

This is what Kickstarter looks like. This is what indie art, these days, looks like. The world is full of people like Sarbjot, who just want to be a part of making a book, a musician, an author, or an artist successful.

Soulwoven is a project for that tribe. If I sent it out to publishers, it would fall into a great sea of fantasy books that are "good but tough to market" and drown there.

But through Kickstarter, I can give all the people who believe in Soulwoven, believe in my writing, and believe in me a chance to stand up and be counted. And when people do that, other people notice, and so on and so on until a book reaches as many people as it can.

I am nervously awaiting the video for my Kickstarter and wondering if I'm going to have to call Kickstarter HQ in a panic to try to get my project's review expedited. In the meantime, I'm making revision notes on the book. The next time you see it, it's going to be tighter, more polished, and ready for widespread consumption, and I think you're really going to love it.

Thanks for believing,
Jeff

News for the Week of 7.26.13: ONE WEEK TO KICKSTARTER! Also, Indiana.

Greetings, Friends and Readers!

Happy summer! The move to Indiana is complete, and the seas of boxes are receding and leaving a lovely island of new house for me to live in and work on. My new bedroom/office sits about a story and a half off the ground between three trees, and I feel like I’m working in a tree house.

More importantly, the Soulwoven Kickstarter is JUST AROUND THE CORNER! Assuming all goes well with a few last details to be checked by the people at Kickstarter HQ, the project will go live in a week, on Aug. 1. Over that week I’ll be dribbling out information about it through Facebook, Twitter, Wattpad, and my blog, so keep an eye out for Things Of A Soulwoven Nature.

One of those things, I’ve realized, needs to be an introduction to Kickstarter, because not everybody knows what it is. They do their own explanation best here, but the tl;dr version is that Kickstarter lets fans fund art, like books and music, directly. So rather than pitching my book to a publisher for financial support, I’m pitching it to you.

What that means in practice is that if you like Soulwoven and want to see it turned into a paperback and e-book, you can chip in toward making that happen. You pledge what you want to, and the billing goes through Amazon, just as if you were buying a book from them regularly. If enough people chip in to meet my funding goals, the money goes through at the end of the funding period (Aug. 31), and I start doling it out to the people who are going to help me make the book into something beautiful and amazing.

In return, Kickstarter backers get access to extras that can’t be found anywhere else. In addition to the book itself, people who pledge certain amounts will get rewards ranging from Skype calls from me to one-of-a-kind hand-annotated copies of the book, full of anecdotes about the story and how it came to be.

More info coming soon. Get excited! It’s going to be a blast.

Jeff

News for the Week of 7.9.13: Ohhh Yeah, Impending Kickstarter...

Dear Friends and Readers,

It’s time for another Fantastically Tardy Update!

And more importantly, the Soulwoven Kickstarter is coming closer and closer to reality, and I am super excited. I spent today in Denver filming the video with Frazer Lockhart of F-Stop Productions, a stand-up guy and killer videographer who’s helping with the project because he believes in it.

That’s sort of a trend, actually. The team’s all assembled and just waiting on the funding to get to work, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Copy editor Michael Valsted is waiting in the wings to polish the thing and make it bookworthy. Amazing web cartoonist Abby Howard is on board to do maps and illustrations. Killer editor Rose Fox is ready to help me rein in the story and make it leaner, sleeker, meaner, and better all around.

We’re going to make art, and it’s going to be awesome.

And in the meantime, Backer Rewards! Signed copies! Personalized, doodled-in, and mused-over copies! Meetings! Skype calls! World-exclusive backer updates! Short story collections! More stuff I can’t wait to share!

All we need is 25 people to pledge $25 to make this thing fly, and those 25 people are going to love what they get out of the deal, I guarantee it. Beyond that, it’s just going to get better and better.

The Kickstarter goes live on August 1. Mark your calendars. You’ll want to be one of those first 25, trust me. And then you’ll want to tell your friends and get them on board too, because the more money we raise the more awesome the book gets. Kickstarter’s great that way.

This thing is going to take over my world for a little while, so I apologize if all you hear from me for the next month or so is about Kickstarter. Other things are going on too, but this is The Important One, and the one that you guys can jump in and be a part of most easily, and I want to make sure everyone knows about it.

Hope you’re ready. It’s gonna be fun.

-Jeff

News for the Week of 6.12.13: Renaissance and The Craziest Summer

Greetings, dear friends and readers!

Ahh. It’s summertime, and I dunno about you, but I can feel it. Both in the ridiculously high temperatures outside and in the big jump in activity on Wattpad. Hello new followers and readers! Welcome to the party. I’m so glad you’ve come.

Soulwoven has experienced what is, for me, a very gratifying resurgence over the last couple of weeks, I assume as schools get out and people are looking for new things to read. It feels like a new lease on life for the book, and I’m thrilled that even seven months after I posted the full thing, new readers are finding it and loving it. Feedback and edits on the sequel are next on my to-do list, just as soon as I finish final revisions on Nadya, which should happen shortly (yay!).

Planning for the Kickstarter is going well also. The team and cost estimates are almost in place. The video should be shooting at the beginning of July. Shortly thereafter, as I move across the country, I’ll put it up.

Oh! That means it’s now time to line up PR for it. So if you have a blog, or you know someone who has a blog, or you’re a journalist or know someone who’s a journalist who covers these sorts of things, let me know. I’d love to send you/your acquaintances some information or do a guest post about just about anything you like.

In the meantime, I am working like a madman and the love of my life is thousands of miles away. So this is not my favorite summer of all time. But it has been an exciting one, and I’m glad you’re all along for the ride.

Cheers and summer fun,

Jeff

News for the Week of 5/31/13: Lateness and LOTS OF THINGS

Dear Friends and Readers,

Waagh! Sorry for the late update. Things have been a little crazy.

First, Soulwoven: Plans for the Kickstarter are coming along nicely. I’ve got a developmental and line editor in place (Rose Fox, who has an amazing eye and runs the speculative fiction reviews for Publisher’s Weekly---I have learned a lot from her just by reading her blog), and I’ve figured out the copy editor I want to work with as well. I just need to get in touch with him. I’ve also got a local company (F Stop Productions in Denver) lined up to do a killer video for it.

The survey to help design it is still open, and I could use more responses. Those of you who have responded already are awesome and I love you.

Second, Nadya: I’m working my way through final revisions now, and it’ll be out on submission by the end of next month barring any major setbacks. I’m very excited about it---it has love and loss and jokes and airships and fire spirits and science and lots of other fun things.

Third, Other Stuff: I had a very productive meeting with an agent last week when I should have been writing this update instead. We talked about a lot of things, but perhaps the most important is a collaborative project I want to do on Halloween this year. It’s going to involve a bunch of writers (pros and semipros and amateurs alike) staying up all night writing scary stories and Twittering, and it’s going to be awesome. More on that to come.

So that’s May in the life of Jeff. Hope your spring has sprung in a most lovely way.

-Jeff

News for the Week of 5.16.13: Kickstarter Survey, Homebuying, Soulwoven: Exile, and Nadya Revisions

Dear Friends and Readers,

It’s survey time! I’m building the skeleton of the Kickstarter for Soulwoven, and I want your help! I’ll talk more about it below, but for now, link here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XR6QC6G

Here’s the deal with the survey. Kickstarter lets people like me fund projects they don’t have the scratch to pay for themselves, like buying professional services for long books. It also lets people like you support the creation of art by pledging money to a project. In return, you get special, one-of-a-kind rewards. The survey is going to help me figure out what to offer as those rewards. I’m choosing to publish Soulwoven this way because I want to make you guys as big a part of the process as possible. And I want to make sure that there are backer rewards in the Kickstarter that you’ll get excited about.

So please drop in and share your opinions. It’s a four-question survey, and well worth your time if you want to help this thing get off the ground and get some awesome stuff in return.

In. Other. News!

My fiancee and I bought a house. The process of that has been taking up a great of deal of time that would have otherwise been spent writing. You have my apologies for that.

But!

I’ve finished a full draft of Soulwoven: Exile, the sequel to Soulwoven. It’s now waiting for me to finish some work revising Nadya so I can get Nadya back to an agent who showed some interest in it. Once I’ve done that, I’m going to take one last look at Exile and start sharing it with my trusty team of early readers. Hopefully it will be on its way to you guys by the end of the summer.

I’m extremely excited about the stories I have coming up for you guys. If you haven’t yet, check out Three Dances and buy a copy via the links on Wattpad or my website. The more books I sell, the more time I get to spend writing.

Cheers and springtime love,

Jeff