Episode seven in my behind-the-scenes account of running a crowdfunding campaign. We’re starting the second week of the campaign, and as usual the initial surge of interest has waned and the gnawing sense of desperation is growing. The seasoned Kickstarter campaigner has several strategies to call on in this situation. The P.G. Wodehouse strategy: […]
The sixth episode in my behind-the-scenes account of life in a crowdfunding campaign moves into the realm of theoretical physics. At Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, near where I used to live, there is a Cold Regions Research Engineering Laboratory, where they study the strange physics of crowdfunding campaigns. (You might think these must […]
The fifth entry in my diary of life behind the scenes in a Kickstarter campaign is about things built, things written, things with meaning. Yesterday, partly as an increasingly necessary distraction from the stress of running a Kickstarter campaign, I sat in on a seminar discussing something about which I know pretty much nothing: […]
The fourth entry in my diary of life behind the scenes in a Kickstarter campaign. The attacks by the bots have subsided, and we are finally down to the serious business of fundraising. Though even that is not as straightforward as it might look—and I use the word “look” with good reason. Now […]
The third entry in my diary of life behind the scenes in a Kickstarter campaign. The first two entries recounted being attacked by bots as soon as the campaign started. Today I reflect on the most successful and disastrous Kickstarter I’ve run, the 2020 campaign to fund my Mongolian tabletop game Ulus: Legends of […]
The second entry in my diary of life behind the scenes in a Kickstarter campaign. The first entry recounted being attacked by bots as soon as the campaign started. Now read on… On the second day of the campaign, whose total was actually falling farther and farther from its goal as the fake bot […]
I’m going to try something a bit different for this Kickstarter campaign–I’m going to write a campaign diary, something more personal and (I hope) more interesting and entertaining than the usual series of pleading appeals. And I’m going to start with literally the first ten minutes of the campaign, and a robot. Or ten. I […]
The background When the trailblazing Australian anthropologist Piers Kelly, the Indiana Jones of the minority writing system, began researching one of the many written forms of the Hmong languages of southeast Asia, he discovered something unusual and fascinating. Yes, as you’d expect, their writing mostly consisted of symbols we’d call “characters” or “glyphs” […]
My new book By Hand is already prompting such fascinating discussions–the term “crusade” has been bandied about–that I’ve decided to launch the By Hand Book Club (BHBC). It will build on the amazing success of the online Writing Beyond Writing Book Club, which arose out of the launch of Writing Beyond Writing and continued on […]
My new book By Hand explores the importance and benefits of writing by hand, especially in an age of digital tools and AI. To celebrate the art of handwriting, I’m holding a contest in which three winners—from any country in the world, whatever language they speak and whatever alphabet they use–will receive free copies of […]
