David Rogers
How much is pledged to Kickstarter every day? $1.24 million is how much.
Wow.
Kickstarter just released its financials for the first quarter of 2014, and the numbers show that a total of more than $112 million has been pledged to the various campaigns live on the site from January to March. During that time, 4,497 projects have been successfully funded. As far as backers go, 887,848 people donated to projects during that time period, and 679,413 of those were new backers.
These figures come about a month after the company revealed that a total of $1 billion has been pledged to projects throughout the history of the site.
And in the midst of all the projects and the millions of dollars is the publishing category, where authors of all manner and ilk raise money to turn their dreams into books.
We’ve even been lucky enough to help out by printing a few successfully funded Kickstarter books ourselves, and love watching what’s new in the publishing category.
Of course, not all of the projects in the publishing category are book projects, but here’s just a sampling of the wide array of book projects that have been funded thus far:
Hello Ruby A children’s book that teaches the fundamentals of computer programming to kids.
To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure A “chooseable-path” version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “Chooseable-path” is the “trademark-skirting” version of a series of books folks of a certain age may remember very well.
The Great Discontent Magazine, Issue 1 Like many magazines these days, “The Great Discontent” began online. The founders decided to use Kickstarter to raise money for their first print issue.
William Schaff art book with 10” LP by Jason Molina William Schaff has designed some great album covers for some great bands (Okkervil River, Songs: Ohia), but including an exclusive album by the late Molina may have helped this project reach nearly double its original goal.
These are just a few projects that exemplify the creativeness and eccentricities of the book printing projects on Kickstarter. While not all projects will achieve funding, the site can be a great place for the right project. For more on how Kickstarter works for self-published authors, you may want to check out our article on how crowdfunding works for authors. Also discussed are other popular sites IndieGogo and Pubslush.
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