Raising Money For Your Writing Before You Write It.

One of the perceived down-sides of being a writer during the 20th century has been the fact that in the overwhelming majority of cases the author has to spend a long period of time working on the craft of their writing without seeing any money for their work. And then after they are done with the writing they had to go through a long period of finding a place to sell it--sometimes the second task taking even longer than the first. For hundreds of years there have been a select group of writers who were fortunate enough to get commissions to write, have contracts--get paid in advance before they even finished their work. However, in the 21st century--the playing field has leveled. Now, thanks to convenient places on the Internet ANYONE can get funded before they even finish their project.

Now when I say anyone, I don't literally mean ANYYONE. As in, a high school kid who never wrote before can't just go online and get thousands of dollars funding for his highly speculative project. But those who are serious and preferably have even the slightest reputation for working in the field they are in--poets, bloggers, essayists, fantasy authors, don't have to seek permission to get advanced funding--they can get it directly from people interested in their work!

Take the fiction writer who is working on a novel. Say this fiction writer has already been writing for a couple of years--has a website dedicated to his own work or at least a blog. Maybe he's published a few short stories in various places so he has a little bit of a fan base already built up. Say that a few short stories he had been writing deal with a character that people tend to like--and he wanted to write a novel about this character, maybe explaining more of the back story. So say this author decides to put up a fundraising campaign for this project on indiegogo to cover his printing costs.

He sets the amounts for donation to the funding campaign at 25 dollars, 50 dollars and 100 dollars. For the 25 dollar doners he offers them a free autographed copy plus their name listed as a patron in the back of the book. For 50 dollars, a free signed copy of the book, their name listed plus a painting of the character portrait of the main character, autographed by his artist friend who designed him. For 100 dollars, say he offered a free limited edition hard cover copy of the book upon completion. The author is happy because he is raising money for his project and the fans are happy because they are not only contributing to the development of a project they are eager to see--they get cool rewards relevant to the project as well!

If the author can manage to convince a few dozen or a few hundred people to contribute to this campaign--he can raise quite a bit of money to start the print run--which gives the entire book tour an edge with the added satisfaction of already selling copies to fans before the writing is even done!

Now of course this strategy won't work if the author happens to be flaky and if they never deliver what is promised--they can end up in legal troubles, and at the very least, earn a horrible reputation that keeps them from ever doing something of this nature again. But if they take their writing seriously, people trust them, like the work and are dedicated--this is a valid option to give many authors who are stuck in that limbo stage between above amateur, but not quite professional, the kick they need to give their projects life.

www.indiegogo.com


www.kickstarter.com


www.gofundme.com

are just three examples of websites that offer this type of service (for a small fee out of what you collect from the fundraiser.) Thousands of creative projects have already gotten funding through this method (me and my co-editor for Perspectives, Poetry Concerning Autism and Other disabilities used this tool to raise our printing goal and not only met our goal, but we exceeded it once word got around!) If you are an author who takes writing seriously, but is looking for that extra push for a project you have in mind, this method might just work for you.