Then people argued that $10 was too much to ask for an ebook. And it's ridiculous to treat someone as a pariah for daring to ask for the money to live in return for a product people want. It's ridiculous to demand that an author give out a book as a perk in a Kickstarter without taking any money for herself for the work. It's ridiculous to expect that a writer must have a day job, as though writing should never be treated as a career. Stacey Jay shouldn't demand to be a full-time writer. Well, people argued, most authors have day jobs. I doubt that programmers on crowdfunded video games decided to go without paychecks for the months the games took them to make. But I'm pretty certain that Rob Thomas and Kristin Bell did not work on the Veronica Mars movie for free.
So, what made this one different? People said that Kickstarter isn't designed to pay the salaries of the people working on the project. Crowdfunding creative projects is not new. A crowdfunded novel featured on the longlist for the Man Booker prize for the first time this year. Zach Braff crowdfunded a movie on Kickstarter. The project with the most backers before that was the point-and-click video game, Broken Age, and that's just one of many video games made through Kickstarter. Simply putting the suggestion of a future novel out there was worthy of vitriol and doxing.Īnd why? I'm sure most people on the internet have heard of the Veronica Mars kickstarter, where a movie was at least partly funded through the crowdfunding site, to the tune of 5 million dollars. And yet Stacey Jay was driven off the internet by her audacity to even ask people to consider supporting her project. Those that people don't support don't get funded. Those that enough people support get funded, and the projects happen. Jay was eventually doxed and threatened via email, after which she reopened her social media accounts and posted her own furious response to events on her blog.Īll this over a Kickstarter. There are many, many artistic Kickstarters out there. The backlash got bad enough that Jay cancelled the Kickstarter, and then closed all social media accounts, but this did pretty much nothing to stop things. Most of the anger seemed to focus on the fact that Jay included living expenses in her Kickstarter, with people suggesting that readers shouldn't be expected to pay her mortgage and bills. The book hadn't done well enough for her publisher to be interested in releasing any more, but it had done well enough for her to think that self-publishing would be worthwhile, and she decided to make a Kickstarter both to fund the project (she's a full time writer) and to test the waters to see if enough people actually wanted a sequel.Ĭue the internet backlash. Last week, YA author Stacey Jay put up a Kickstarter to fund the sequel to her novel, Princess of Thorns.
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