Future Visions

Why am I doing a Kickstarter for The Princess of Panchala? First let me answer the easy questions.

How often do novels get funded on Kickstarter? A quick walk through Kickstarter’s Fiction Project pages shows that quite a few don’t succeed, but a surprising number of them do. To be honest I’m not certain of the breakdown, though I’m sure Kickstarter could provide enough statistics to dry out your eyeballs. But that’s not really the point, more on that in a bit.

Why am I linking through my website rather than directly to the Kickstarter page? While clicking through might put off some people, having a very simple link makes it much easier to promote, and some people that I ask to promote my project don’t care to link directly to Kickstarter. But there are more compelling marketing reasons than that as well. It’s very easy and simple to tell people to go to terramythos.com rather than a complicated URL with slashes and dots. And go to Google and type in “terramythos” (everyone, please, go ahead…it only strengthens Googles algorithms) and see what comes up…my site, my Kickstarter page and at the bottom images of my Kickstarter graphic and my bio picture.

So why Kickstarter, when I don’t have any published novels? While that’s not entirely accurate at the time of this post, I’m not at liberty to disclose more than that yet…let’s just say that publishers move at glacial speed in more than one respect. And while my published credits are meager, again that’s not really the point, which I’ll get to shortly.

Why do this when the odds are so much against success? Our society places far too much emphasis on success, without valuing the benefits of experiencing failure. Already I have probably learned more about marketing and self-promotion than a $400 seminar could teach me in a weekend. Sure, I would like it to succeed, but I’m not afraid to fall down because I’ll learn so much more than sitting on my arse waiting for luck to tap me on the shoulder.

Why not self-publish or go the traditional route? Getting published is far more of a game of chance than we’d like to believe. While nothing can take the place of solid craftwork, there are a sickening number of superb artists that get no recognition simply because they haven’t managed to be in the right place at the right time when the right person was there. But I also believe that to a large extent we make our own luck, and I do not want to be an Accidental Artist.

Which is where I’m really going with this. I have spent many years honing my skills, face to face with some really crappy writing and worked hard to get to a point where I honestly believe I have worthwhile material to share with the world. I will be the first to state that I still have far to go as an artist, and my greatest fear is that I reach a point where I don’t think I can do better, because that is the day that I stop growing.

So all this to answer the question, why do this Kickstarter? To publish a book, yes, but more than that. To publish the first book of a series, yes, but that’s not all. What this is really about is to Kickstart me as an artist.

It is no accident that midway through my Kickstarter video I display the Om symbol (ॐ) and say that I hope the viewer will join me on my creative journey. I have trained and practiced to get to this point, and am ready to set out for my Mount Everest.

I’m not going to look back, and I do hope people will join me.