August Crowdfunding Post

[ysabetwordsmith]

What are your planned crowdfunding projects for August? What did you accomplish during July?

The August Creative Jam will be Saturday 15-Sunday 16 with a theme of "Science & Scientists." Please check in then to leave or claim prompts! 

Comments

Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>I'm hoping to launch another Shared Worlds prompt call during August, with a bit of a shift in focus.<<

That sounds like fun.

>>The current plan (subject to change) is to sell off 10 $30 short stories, written to prompts, to be released into the Shared World canon. All of those will be released free-to-read online, but people who want to support LE can also donate $5 to get all the completed stories as a .pdf (and hopefully as a .mobi and .epub, if I can figure out the conversions).<<

What about microfunding? I'm interested in sponsoring stories, but I'm far more likely to scrape up $5 than $30.

[magistrate]

For this one, I don't think microfunding will work out too well, though I do want to find a way for it to work for future Shared Worlds prompt drives. (For this one, there's an added layer of bureacracy involved in getting the fundraiser approved, for various reasons. So I can't much mess with the architecture of the thing.)

A while back, I was chatting with friends and I outlined the type of microfunding I'd like to see – a tipping point model (where as soon as Project 1 hits X in funding, people are charged, and the project is on) which would allow two critical things:

1: Multiple projects put up for bidding at one time, and
2: People to designate multiple potential targets with a bid which would only fulfill one once the target was hit.

So, for example, if I had $5 and I thought that projects A, C, and E all looked good, I could do one combined bid on all of them. Then, if project C funded, I'd be charged $5 and my bid would disappear from projects A and E.

The advantage of that would be that you'd have a lot less difficulty getting enough consensus to fund a story (because people wouldn't be locked into choosing one or another) while still protecting the bidders from being over-charged (because otherwise, if I wanted to move all three projects toward their tipping point, I'd have to run the risk of being charged three times). I think that kind of model would be the ideal way to micro-fund a prompt call which produced actual stories and still net the author (or other content creator!) a reasonable amount of money – more than you'd expect one person to shell out.

(To put that in context, when I publish, I aim for pro-paying magazines, which pay a minimum $.06USD per word; $30 is less than I usually get for reprint rights, let alone a short story. But making stories accessible in this sort of prompt call pushes down payments to a token level, if I want one person to be able/likely to buy them. Meanwhile, looking to microfund any individual prompt response ramps up the overhead because you have to get a bunch of people on board, and when you want to end a prompt call with 10-20 different responses, it's just too much overhead for me and my drastically limited time.)

To be honest, I'd probably be able to spend a lot more time doing these sorts of things if I had access to a tipping-point model like the one above – and that's just down to the realities of needing to make money to pay the bills. If I could just fiction-jam with people to make ends meet, then heck yeah.

...what's especially frustrating is that while I'm pretty sure I have the coding chops to make all the database/scripting part of a site like that work, I have nowhere near the confidence I'd need to do the integrations with PayPal or Amazon Payments or whatever else you could process payments through, and nowhere near the time to either research those technologies or code a website. (Maybe if I could get enough breathing room to sit down and hammer out what sort of payment integration I would even need I could Kickstarter it, but at the moment the project is just big enough to make my head spin.)