The Kickstarter Diaries 16: Night and Day

 

The latest episode in the increasingly unhinged behind-the-scenes account of a crowdfunding campaign.

 

Running Kickstarter campaigns is like planting a garden. Each time you think, “This year I’ll get it right.” Instead, every year you simply make a different set of mistakes.

In crowdfunding, unlike gardening, the faults and shortcomings are all my own. Can’t blame anything on the weather, or the insects, or the deer. At least the mistake I made this time was one I have never made before: I forgot time.

More specifically, I forgot time zones and the rotation of the Earth.

The majority of my longtime supporters live in the United States. Cambridge, England, where I have just moved (and to those of you who have sent messages of support and sympathy over the fact that I still have no furniture and am sleeping on couch cushions on the floor, good news: my effects, including my bed, are supposed to arrive tomorrow) is five hours ahead of East Coast time, eight hours ahead of Pacific.

Each morning, then, I rise early, get to work setting the machinery of crowdfunding in motion, and…nothing happens. No matter how heartfelt my appeal, everyone whom I want to appeal to is still asleep. It’s eerie and disturbing: whatever I do for most of my day cannot possibly do any immediate good.

Morning, then, is a ghastly form of suspended animation. I plug the (seemingly endless) gap by doing sudoku. I start with the New York Times daily sudoku, Medium. That usually takes up about 20 minutes. Then I move on to Hard, which is more of a challenge. The psychology of it is transparent: faced with a situation over which I have no control, trying one tactic after another with no guarantee any of them will work, I resort to problems that, if only I exercise enough brain wattage, I can conquer.

If I finish the Hard one and still nothing is happening on the Kickstarter front, I go to https://www.websudoku.com/, which has an extraordinary family connection: its author compiled a sudoku for my collection of Endangered Alphabets Sudoku (currently awaiting reprinting), and his partner is a longtime Alphabets supporter—and in fact may be reading this diary!

Things get worse. The longer I stare at the unmoving total, the more an insidious mentality starts to creep in: It only moves if you move it.

To some extent, this is true: if I did nothing, nobody would even know the campaign exists. (I’ve actually met people who think they can just create a Kickstarter and the funds will automatically roll in.) But the converse is equally true: I can do everything in my power every moment I am awake and it can have no obvious, direct effect at all.

The longer the campaign goes on, the more suspicious, even paranoid I become—specifically, about the West Coast.

If I do everything I can and then go to bed (rather, couch cushion) around 10 p.m. GMT, it’s still only 5 p.m. on the East Coast, 2 p.m. on the West. Surely when the Pacific Time folks get home from work, get my messages, realize how much they want to support my campaign, and make a pledge, they’ll do so while it’s night time for me. Right?

But here’s the thing: throughout the entire campaign, not a single pledge has come in while I was asleep. Not one. It can be a great day (as it was yesterday and the day before) until nightfall, but when I flip my laptop open in the morning, the total has apparently frozen in time.

This leads me to one inescapable but psychotic conclusion: I control people’s minds.

While I’m awake and sending out brainwaves toward followers and friends, they unconsciously receive them and reach for the blue button. As soon as I relax my intentionality lobe, though, everyone (especially on the West Coast) is suddenly free to think what they want to think, and their minds fill up with, oh, basketball scores or the Epstein files.

Scientists! Neurologists! You should be studying me!

I am available any time, in return for a sizeable pledge to this campaign.

 

Whether you are a brain researcher or not, you can and undoubtedly should pledge HERE. I am probably watching you.