Kickstarter, Day 1

At 8:30 am this morning, I clicked the Launch button and watched my Kickstarter project aimed at funding the completion of So Far Appalachia go live.

The moment was both anticlimactic (no band started playing) and terrifying (the clock started ticking). Years of writing, researching, and editing suddenly became very real, and the fate of my project had a shelf life.

I wrote an email to my closest friends, included a link to my project, sent off the first batch of emails, and then went about my day. Fortunately, I spent the day teaching my students how to tell stories so I couldn’t obsessively check the Kickstarter page or read the notification emails filling my box.

It’s not an accident that I launched the project on a day I couldn’t sit in front of my computer. That’s a lesson I learned in 2003 when McGraw Hill releases Dungeons & Dreamers. I spent hours reloading the Amazon.com page so I could see our daily rank.

I have never felt less productive than that particular day, and I was in no hurry to reproduce it.

Instead, I tried to focus on the fact that I’d reached another milestone in this project, and now I’d find out just how interesting people found my pitch. And that’s all any writer really wants: an opportunity to tell his story.

Today begins the 30-day journey to find just how far my opportunity to tell this story will go.

* * *

P.S. A big thank you to everyone who has already contributed. We had a stellar first day, raising nearly $1,300. There is still a long way to go until we can rest, but it’s a good start.

Tomorrow we get back to recording our Podcast series.

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