The Kickstarter Diaries 8: The New Reward, Neither Physical Nor Digital

 

 

The latest in my series of behind-the-scenes accounts of life at the helm of a crowdfunding campaign.

There are those who like to plan fundraising campaigns down to the last penny ahead of time—goals, timeline, messaging and whatnot—but I am not one of them.

To be sure, having a certain sense of purpose and direction (“Queen Isabella, I am confident that America is in that general direction”) is important, but when you are working interactively with a large group of people over a month, things change, and the entire enterprises heaves this way and that like a small wooden boat on the Atlantic.

Yesterday I wrote about the pitfalls of offering rewards; last night we had the last meeting of my By Hand Book Club. These events alone, which would never have shown up on any planner’s timeline, have made up my mind about the next new reward—not just for financial reasons, but because of something deeper, as deep as the ocean on which this enterprise sails.

Here’s the thing: as soon as the By Hand Book Club ended, I started missing it. And the BHBC was in essence only the past five weeks of a Sunday online discussion series that has been going on for two years, ever since it began as the Writing Beyond Writing Book Club.

And what a fascinating experience it has been, not just a chance to have the most illuminating, far-ranging conversations I’ve had in my life, but a vehicle for developing friendships, exploring territory that has no name in standard intellectual terms, and is leading toward the establishment of a field we call Writing Studies.

But even more than that, it has been the chance for people to tell stories that would not interest anyone else in their lives, to advance theories that would leave most people looking blank, to boldly go, as they say, into what the poet Wordsworth called “strange seas of thought,” and make them less strange but no less interesting.

We have had occasional guest speakers including the world’s leading expert on khipu, the Andean textile knot system; a South African calligrapher in sand; a philosopher teaching calculus using origami…. I mean, isn’t this what keeps us alive?

So I’m introducing a new reward: anyone who pledges at the very modest level of $10 will be included in the mailing list for the Sunday discussion group for a whole year. Which also means that if you miss a session, you get sent the recording of the video and the Chat, which is always full of links, and a parallel discussion.

When identifying a new reward on Kickstarter, I have to say whether it is physical or digital. Well, these conversations are physically rewarding in the sense that no matter how tired or sick I’m feeling, by the end I’m humming with energy. And they are digital in that they take place over Zoom. But really, their nature is something else entirely—a plasma, perhaps. A current. A field. An ocean.

 

Pledge HERE. By all means pledge more than $10 if you want to. Just saying.