What Crowdfunding Would You Like to See?

[ysabetwordsmith]

It occurred to me that there may be folks wondering if they should try crowdfunding, or wondering what kind of project to attempt.  That got me thinking about what kinds it would be nice to have more of.  

There are tons of people writing fiction but some niches still under-served.  A handful of us writing poetry, more would be good.  A handful doing character icons, good ... but I haven't seen anyone who currently does more than a single character per icon or who specializes in non-character icons like houses or starships.  There used to be an illustration project that sketched scenes from other people's work, with donation thresholds for working more on the most popular sketches.  A few music ones have come and gone.  Oodles of people draw webcomics, but there's not much of that activity here.  I know at least one fine art photographer into crowdfunding; more would be awesome.  I'm also very partial to nonfiction and would love to see more folks trying that in this business model.

What kinds of crowdfunding project would you like to see, or see more of?  What have you toyed with trying but haven't done yet?

Comments

Would love to see

[dialecticdreamer]

Icon-sized art, not because I want to use multiple icons, but because I want to gift them to stories (and the authors) I enjoy, and am clearly stuck at the stick-figure stage of drawing.

I would pay cashy monies to have computer desktop images of certain scenes in my own stories, with the solemn oath that I'm not going to post them anywhere. I simply cannot DRAW them myself. Which is a frustration of Tantalus, let me tell you!

I would like to try my hand at more demifiction, or writing to specifications instead of just a simple prompt.

Re: Would love to see

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Icon-sized art, not because I want to use multiple icons, but because I want to gift them to stories (and the authors) I enjoy, and am clearly stuck at the stick-figure stage of drawing. <<

That's a cool idea.

>> I would pay cashy monies to have computer desktop images of certain scenes in my own stories, with the solemn oath that I'm not going to post them anywhere. I simply cannot DRAW them myself. Which is a frustration of Tantalus, let me tell you! <<

I can see how that would be useful too.

>> I would like to try my hand at more demifiction, or writing to specifications instead of just a simple prompt. <<

Oh, I forgot to list demifiction! <3 Favorite of mine too.

I've written bunches of it for Torn World. I like making up plants and animals. I built almost the entirety of the marine megafauna food web. Every "sea monster" that conflicts with humans has a specific reason for doing so, with lots of variations. It ranges from "territorial aggression" (deathfins) to "boats look sexy!" (blimpfish) to "boats are fun puzzles filled with tasty snacks and the wrecks make great nests" (smartarms).

Re: Would love to see

[itsamellama]

By icon-sized art, do you mean digital or analog, that isn't of characters? :o *curious*

Re: Would love to see

[dialecticdreamer]

I'm thinking digital art meant to be used as icons on this site, like my mosaic picture. Analog-created art, scanned at a decent resolution would work just as well, and for some people would be easier to create.

Just because I'm perfectly happy with ONE icon doesn't mean I wouldn't love to indulge giving friends one as a gift.

Re: Would love to see

[itsamellama]

Oooh, gotcha. I had thought of icon-sized meaning teenytiny affordable bite-sized analog art the first time I read it :D Thank you for clarifying~

(I should get cracking on my non-human/character skills >.>;; )

Re: Would love to see

[ysabetwordsmith]

Crowdfunding would certainly be a way to practice your nonhuman/object art skills, or you could start offering them free and see if it works enough to sell later.

[magistrate]

I never got around to doing the research on this, but I'd love to see something like Kickstarter except for... really small projects? Like, "If I raise $100, I'll be able to take two days to sit and hand-code a utility like the Bingo generator" sort of thing.

Kickstarter seems like it has way too much overhead, and I don't like that it's tied to time elapsed and not money raised; I want something where as soon as it funds, the campaign sends me the money and I can get to work right away and not wait another month.

And I know some things, like FundRazr, send the money right away, but... I dunno. Maybe it's just a matter of finding the right platform from among the gajillions out there, but I feel like what I want is a very simple utility and everything I look at is more complicated than I want.

(But hoo boy, if I could get into a groove with it, I would love to crowdfund a bunch of little web applications to help writers in various ways.)

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I never got around to doing the research on this, but I'd love to see something like Kickstarter except for... really small projects? Like, "If I raise $100, I'll be able to take two days to sit and hand-code a utility like the Bingo generator" sort of thing. <<

That would be awesome.

>> Kickstarter seems like it has way too much overhead, and I don't like that it's tied to time elapsed and not money raised; I want something where as soon as it funds, the campaign sends me the money and I can get to work right away and not wait another month. <<

Kickstarter is right for a certain bandwidth of projects, and not at all for others.

>> And I know some things, like FundRazr, send the money right away, but... I dunno. Maybe it's just a matter of finding the right platform from among the gajillions out there, <<

Here is the guide to crowdfunding sites that I made. Where I could find information about how they work, I included it, but a lot of them bury that info or don't even list it, which makes comparisons very difficult.

>> but I feel like what I want is a very simple utility and everything I look at is more complicated than I want. <<

Agreed. Feature bloat is more like ... feature caterpillar zombie explosion. 0_o It produces choice paralysis for some people, where they can't even get started. For others, they try to work their way through the options methodically but it's so complex and counter-intuitive that they drop things or make mistakes and it just turns into a mess. Like the post office now, used to be you had limited options but they were very clear and it was easy to decide. I spent a fucking hour the other day on their website trying to figure out how to send things at the best price, and still realized later that I'd missed some vital information. *headdesk*

A very simple crowdfunding site would probably be popular for that alone.

>> (But hoo boy, if I could get into a groove with it, I would love to crowdfund a bunch of little web applications to help writers in various ways.) <<

Trying to raise funds that small, you might be able to do it by hand, on your own blog and/or this community. You're the only coder I know who's doing things like this but some of what you do would be immensely useful. I would happily chip in toward expansions for the bingo card generator, I use that thing a lot. Being able to automate the prompt merger function, for instance, or that character generator that's on another page -- because the setup is over my head, but I can use the easy-click bingo stuff.

One of my author-friends wrote a program to plot human generations for his crashed colony, to see how far they could breed before dying out. It told off the births and deaths, so he could see clusters of deaths, and he wrote those into the novel (Dark Water's Embrace). It was apparently a pretty simple program, as such things go, and you just put in how many breeding-age males and females you started with (he had 7 adults if I remember right) then it plotted the results. Add another layer of coding and it could be customizable ...
* What is the average lifespan? (human ~75 years, dragon ~500)
* What is the average breeding span? (human age ~12 to 50, dragon age ~50 to 400)
* What is the average number of young per birth? (human 1, dragon 12)
* What is the average number of years between births? (human ~2, dragon ~100)
* What is the average birth rate per breeding adult? (human 3, dragon 36)
AND/OR
* What is the average replacement rate per breeding adult? (human 2.5, dragon 1.5)
... basically taking the questions out of the lists of datapoints used to map population curves, however detailed you want to get. You can pin down variables like death rate if you know them or let the computer randomize.

Coding for more than 2 sexes would probably be MUCH more complicated. I'd love seeing the results. But even a vanilla-human model would be incredibly useful. I have tons of SF colonies. I could get so, so much use out of Let's Launch a Colony! just wanking the numbers until interesting things happened.

Re: Hmm...

[chordatesrock]

The dragons in your example undergo reproductive senescence? That is a really uncommon trait! Now I'm interested in dragon reproductive senescence!

Re: Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Everything wears out. Many lifeforms die near the time their reproductive capacity ends. But the more complex the lifeform, the wider that margin tends to be because there is value in elders if they can perform other duties. Since I'm imagining these dragons as sentient, but pretty violent, they clutch like dumb lizards but have a high mortality rate. Elder dragons tend to be wise and powerful, which helps them survived even past breeding age.

It varies though.

[mdlbear]

Hmm. I've been in a creative slump for the last several years, and I've never been productive enough to do a prompt call. Maybe for non-fiction; there are a few subjects I know well enough to write about.

I could write about my songs, and the songs I cover; a few have extensive notes, but most don't, and notes could really enhance my site.

And, of course, I should write more. Poetry and meta seem to be where I'm at currently.