Bookstarter

I’ve been thinking a bit about crowdfunding. What with Kickstarter repeatedly crossing the $1 million mark and every creative person I know trying out the model it was pretty inevitable that it would be on my mind. I’m wary of it, of course, as like most things of worth it’s never guaranteed. If anything it’s those people who’ve put the hard work in for years on end who benefit most, which is how it should be really. Reputation and all that.

But the model still intrigues me. I seem more willing to throw £20 at an idea by someone I respect than to buy a £10 thing from a stranger, and often I’m not that bothered about the reward. I just want to see them do it. The world seems to only encourage the mediocre and tedious. If something genius gets through it’s in spite of the dominant system, not because of it. Big media is never going to properly reward the stuff I like. That’s up to me and people like me. Call it what you like (micropatronage rings most true with me) but it strikes me as as sustainable and socially responsible as any other system.

Anyway, I had an idea for a crowdfunded project which I’ve run over a few times in the shower and am now going to blog out of my system to see if it has legs. For this is how I work. This is not a statement of intent, merely a conversation between myself and you, dear reader, to see if I have something worth pursuing.

Lately I’ve had an itch to write something substantial. I had it last year but that was more that I felt I ought to write a big thing. Now I feel I need to.

A few years ago I found myself seen as an expert on Internet stuff. There was new shit occurring and people were confused so they asked me to explain it. I did so and that was all lovely and put me in the position I’m in today where I don’t have to lug boxes and dig gardens to pay the rent (not that that’s a bad living – I miss it sometimes).

Time marches on and most of the stuff I was explaining back then has become common knowledge. Yes, there are still millions of people who think they don’t know how to tweet and who need a holding hand in setting up their first blog, but there are hundreds of thousands of people more than qualified to help them. This stuff is not hard, and that was the point.

Meanwhile the Internet as an entity is as mainstream as mainstream can be. I touched on this in my Flaneurism shouldn’t be easy post which you could see as the mutant premature edition of this mythical book. I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with contemporary thinking about “the Internet”, clouded by the monoliths of Google, Amazon and even lovely old Wikipedia. We’re encouraged to think these beasts are important when the should maybe be considered aberrations.

I’m not sure exactly what I think right now. That’s why I need to sit down and write a book. But I’m pretty sure we’re at the end of one stage and the beginning of another. Like most epochs it will echo the past while being something distinctive and new. The best of the metaphors and analogies that race through my brain before being rejected as nearly but not quite is a return to smallholding, the notion of owning your online presence and identity. I see this with the “you are Google/Facebook/Twitter/insert-here’s product, not their customer” line but also the CASH Music plan to build a music platform that can’t be sold to some big media company once the VCs want their money back. (Note that CASH Music just reached their Kickstarter target…) I like this quote of theirs:

The whole Internet thing was supposed to make things egalitarian, but it didn’t. It’s mostly startups with big money and major labels making weird deals and everyone else still working so hard and keeping their heads above water.

So it’s something about that. Except that’s just a part of it. I’m not interested so much in reacting against the shit as ignoring it and making it irrelevant. I’m interested in a life where it’s possible to have immense awareness of the world around you, both local and global, but never see an advert or read a newspaper. Where SEO and Google ranking just don’t matter because there are more valuable things out there. Not valuable in a wishy washy hippy way but valuable in a dinner on the table, hard cash kinda way. When I say cinema advertising should be eradicated I’m not just being a grumpy moaner. I actually think we can find the resources to remove it if we put our minds to it.

So yeah, I want to write a book about that. And other stuff.

I reckon I need a good month to get the words down. After that there’s the whole editing process but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In order to take most of a month off I reckon I need about £1000. That would give me the breathing space and peace of mind to knuckle down for at least 4 hours a day.

And it was at this point that I did the sums. £1000 is the same as 100 people giving a tenner, or 50 people giving £20. Add in some big ticket rewards (limited edition prints, I’ll come and photograph your dog, stuff like that) and it starts to look doable. I noticed that Pier Review raised over a grand from just 34 people giving an average of £30 a head. And it’s notable that there is no book, just the promise of one. I suspect (and I’m speaking about myself really) that most people just wanted to see them do it and considered £30 worthwhile.

I just gave £25 to John Allison because I enjoy his comic every morning and want to see him continue doing it. I don’t want anything in return other than his comic. I put £30 or so towards a Al Davison’s new book which I’d probably buy anyway. He’s going to send me a sketch, which is nice, but I don’t really need the sketch. I’d be happy for him to just make the book. With CASH Music I bought a t-shirt, because there was an option to buy a t-shirt, but I don’t really need a t-shirt.

As Fi was quick to point out when I ran this by her, not everyone is like me and I know better than to generalise from how my brain works. But I’ve seen this sort of thing happen again and again. When I did Going Deaf For A Fortnight way back in 2005 I raised £100 from people who wanted to read about me going to pubs and watching bands. More prosaically, when a cartoonist I admired was in real financial trouble people who had enjoyed and benefitted from his work over the years dug deep. He now has a number of books out. That is reward enough.

Each situation is unique. I’m not predicting anything. I will lay out my stall, make my pitch and see what people think. If I raise a grand then I’ll write a book. If I raise more then I’ll get someone (probably Fi) to edit it. If I don’t then I won’t.

Next question is when. May looks fairly clear. Gives me a couple of months to figure out the best way to do this and then do it.

Expect blog posts.

(Yes, I’m aware of Leanpub and think it’s a fascinating service which I may well use. I’m also thinking about giving donors access to the Google Doc I’ll write the book in so they can see it being typed in real time though I suspect livecasting writing is a very niche market.)