The Mitzvot kickstarter

Mitzvot was funded as a Kickstarter to help with the costs of cover art and publication. The campaign ended on August 30, 2022 and raised $4759 — 951% of the original goal.

Stretch goals

• $750 ✨ Backed! ✨ — An extended appendix chock full of information about the world and the people in it.
• $1,000 ✨ Backed! ✨ — “Selected Letters”, an extended epilogue to Mitzvot and thus the Post-Self cycle as a whole, perhaps an additional 20,000 words added to the book.
• $1,250 ✨ Backed! ✨ — As with the previous books, there is a piece of writing that is mentioned in Mitzvot; in books 2 and 3, those works are excerpted on the part pages. This stretch goal is for adding those!
• $1,500 ✨ Backed! ✨ — Hardcover editions of all four books. Should this goal be reached, these will be available as an add-on either in addition to or as an upgrade from paperbacks.
• $1,750 ✨ Backed! ✨— Two interior illustrations for the book, also by Iris Jay!
• $2,000 ✨ Backed! ✨ — A special edition box set of the four volume series in a slip-case. Should this goal be reached, the slip-case will be available as an add-on to all tiers, in case you already backed the hardcovers. This will be a backer exclusive, minus a few extras to be used for auctions and gifts.
• $2,250 ✨ Backed! ✨ — Commissioned interior art for all four books (may cause slight delay in production of the hardcovers)
• $2,500 ✨ Backed! ✨ — Post-Self TTRPG setting (I have notes for both Fate and d20!)
• $3,000 ✨ Backed! ✨ — Paid anthology of short stories commissioned from authors interested in the setting.
• $3,500 ✨ Backed! ✨ — Extra $1,500 split among artists¹
• $4,500 ✨ Backed! ✨ — Podcast episode on The Anthropocene

Post-mortem

I am completely overwhelmed by this campaign.

I began with a goal of $500 in order to help subsidize the cover. I chose this number because I felt like it accomplished the goal I wanted, was appropriate to what I had guessed my audience size to be, and allowed me to set some small stretch goals (up to $2,000) that I thought folks would enjoy and might be attainable, but which wouldn’t be missed too much if they weren’t reached. My concerns with the campaign were that it would fall flat due to my relatively limited reach and what I estimated was a fairly small audience.

Instead, the campaign was funded in four minutes. Within the first day, it breached $1,000 (235% funded), meaning that both the appendix and extended epilogue were funded. By August 10th, all stretch goals had been reached when the project hit 430% funded, meaning that I had to come up with a new list of stretch goals, so I came up with goals to $3,000, all of which were reached by the 23rd. At this point, I realized that I needed to keep an eye on my level of commitment to the project and the amount of time and energy that I was able to give while balancing work, school, and other life stuff, so I decided that the final stretch goal would be at $3,500, which was for all funds past $3,000 to go straight to the visual artists, who always deserve more love. During the last two days of the campaign, I listened to the Everybody Now podcast’s episode “The Anthropocene”, an open source episode that anyone can post to their own podcast, optionally with responses. In an ill-advised fit of pique, I decided to add a final stretch goal at $4,500 of a single podcast episode consisting of “The Anthropocene” and a response to the episode in the context of the Post-Self universe. Sure enough, this was reached within an hour of posting, and the campaign ended the next day at 951% funding.

I offered rewards for:

• the Mitzvot ebook
• all four Post-Self ebooks
• the Mitzvot paperback
• all four Post-Self paperbacks
• the Mitzvot hardcover
• all four Post-Self hardcovers
• all four hardcovers plus a video chat and a message in the back of Mitzvot

The choice of rewards broke down to the following:

Interior Art

Adding interior art to the books seemed like a natural step, given the visual focus of the furry fandom and as a way to break up otherwise fairly dialogue-heavy writing. Part of this was inspired by the fact that Iris Jay, who does the covers, provides me with six thumbnails to choose covers from, and, when I chose two from the batch for Mitzvot, I had to leave some really good ones behind. Now, I don’t have to! I can just throw more money at Iris for her to complete those two.²

An easy choice for additional art was Jade of Jaiyandt, who draws amazing skunks (and has drawn a skunk Odist before, even). She seemed happy to contribute, which is good, because, gosh. Skunks.

The third contributor brought on was Floe, with whom I’ve worked extensively in the past. He looked through a bunch of the summaries and image ideas and fell in love with a few. He’s already started on one of the pieces, and I’m sO EXCITEDDDDD. It’s nuts.

Finally, I’ve been talking with Cadmium Tea about some AwDae art for Qoheleth, and he seemed pretty on board, but that conversation is ongoing.

A Post-Self Anthology

At $3,000, backers funded an anthology of Post-Self short stories. The goal was to open a call for submissions paying 8¢/word with a $250 maximum (approximately 3,200) words with the option to write up to 10,000 words. When I brought this up in a writing chat, interest was fairly strong, and there are now 15 people in the Telegram channel for planning the anthology. I’ve already received one submission, even! The working title for the anthology is Clade, but the final title will depend on the submissions received. The cover has already been mocked up and the interior production should be fairly smooth (unless someone does something crazy with typesetting which, y’know…).

Part of the work involved in this depends on how many submissions I get: the more I get, the more I pay out, and the less I get, the more of my own writing I include. I have three stories I could potentially include, and which ones wind up in there depends on a lot of factors, such as how much time I have (one still needs about 5000 words thrown at it), the content of the stories I do receive, and word count for the anthology overall. I’ll likely release it as a paperback and ebook, and submissions that don’t wind up in the book itself will be released on the book’s site (e.g: clade.post-self.ink).

Work tracking

Work is being tracked on Trello. Backers and Patrons have access to this for now, as they are receiving updates ahead of publication. Want to see what all is going into the project? You can help support me on Patreon for as little as $1/mo. This helps support my writing addiction.