Seen on BoingBoing the other day: an update on crowdfunding site Unglue.it, which has launched five campaigns to crowdfund the free Creative Commons release of specific books. The site has successfully released one book, receiving $7,578 from 259 supporters to “unglue” Oral Literature in Africa by Ruth Finnegan for a CC-BY release—meaning that people can make whatever use they want to of the work as long as they include attribution of who it was originally by. The BoingBoing post linked to the blog of Joseph Nassise, author of the book Riverwatch that was the subject of one of Unglue.it’s campaigns. On...

  MakeUseOf has a post discussing how to use UK-based crowdfunding site Unbound, which represents itself as a Kickstarter exclusively for books. The site acts as both a fundraider and a publishing house all in one, allowing you to get people to fund your project and then to publish it in one convenient location.  We've mentioned Unbound a few times before, such as here, and we've talked about Kickstarter a lot lately. It's good that there are more funding options for people who want to get their books or e-books published. What this article doesn't make clear is why people would want to...

Seems like everybody’s Kickstarting these days. paidContent has a story on a Kickstarter Seth Godin launched for his latest book, with a goal of $40,000 that it blew past in 3.5 hours. Just goes to show you why Godin is one of the gurus of modern marketing, I suppose. It’s already over $150,000 when I checked it just now, and has 28 days to go. It’ll almost certainly have broken six figures by then. One thing I will point out, though, is that the only e-book edition of the book included is a “digital preview” at the $4 level that you...

On Techdirt, Mike Masnick calls attention to a Kickstarter project by self-publishing author Aaron Pogue, in which Pogue seeks to raise $30,000 to release the third book in his self-published trilogy into the public domain. (He’s already dedicated the first two to the public domain, though apparently hasn’t made them available legally for free download.) It’s part of a project called The Consortium, which aims to be a modern-day patronage system, allowing fans to pay authors a salary in return for those authors putting their works into the public domain. The Kickstarter has only raised $4,135 in pledges from...

On his blog “Get Published Now, David J. Vallieres looks at a Kickstarter-style crowdfunding project based around a small-press-published historical horror novel called The Express Diaries, with a goal of $5,500. The idea was to get paid to create a deluxe edition of the book before it even shipped, and also create some buzz so that their regular self-published edition would get a good sales boost at the outset. It seems to be working well: As of this minute they have raised a total of $7,195 for this project. By my count they have promised delivery...

Earlier today I mentioned the Evil Hat Productions RPG tie-in book Kickstarter project, which has scored enough pledges to bring it in at second place in the Fiction category, right behind a book of made-up Finnish folklore from Regretsy, and ahead of a project to publish an edition of Huckleberry Finn with the “N-word” changed to “robot” (which is probably poking fun at the edition I talked about here). When I mentioned it to a friend, he pointed out the Kickstarter project that Rich Burlew, webcartoonist behind The Order of The Stick, ran that concluded in February. I...

And speaking of Kickstarter crowd-funded fiction projects, Wired’s GeekDad has a post on a Kickstarter project by Evil Hat Productions, publisher of the Spirit of the Century pulp adventure RPG (which I’ve mentioned before a time or two), to fund a trilogy of novels in the game’s main setting. Started with a goal of $5,000, thus far the project has received almost $37,000 in pledges, making it the second-most-highly-funded fiction Kickstarter ever. As it received more funding, the Evil Hat folks added a series of “stretch goals”—premiums they would kick in if the project hit certain targets—and the donations blasted...

A post on BoingBoing links to a Kickstarter project put together by young-adult novelist Kate Milford, author of a novel The Boneshaker (not to be confused with the steampunk novel Boneshaker by Cherie Priest) to crowdfund a novella tying this novel together with its upcoming sequel, The Broken Lands. Milford has set a goal of $6,500, and with 50 days to go she’s more than 1/3 of the way there. Her plan for the novella is to make it available in three editions: an Espresso Book Machine paperback, a Google Play e-book, and a special-edition pay-what-you-want e-book illustrated by...

Earlier today I posted about how self-publishing was affecting the modern science fiction genre. As it happens, independent publishing is not just for self-published e-books; io9 has discovered a Kickstarter project called “Save the Scifi!" by publisher Singularity & Co., aimed at purchasing publishing rights to out-of-print classic SF titles, scanning them, and publishing them as e-books and in print. The project had a goal of $15,000, which would have covered purchasing the rights to the first four books it was planning on republishing. It has currently been funded to $32,916. The titles to be rescued have not yet...

I received an email the other day from Mark Baumer, a writer who is launching a Kickstarter project for $50,000 to write 50 books in a year. On the project website, he writes: Mark Baumer has never published a book. He is going to write and publish fifty books in one year. Each book will be a unique object. There will only be about 100-500 printed copies of each book. He is asking a website for $50,000 to cover the costs of printing, editing, and layout for all the books. All the money raised on this...

So says an article in the always-excellent Publishing Perspectives.  Here's a snippet: Crowdsourcing the funding to self-publish books isn’t a new idea. Kickstarter got the trend going more than a year ago, Unbound took it a step further (just to name two examples). But how about using a service like Kickstarter to sell print, translation and film rights — as well as to secure bricks-and-mortar retail distribution? Author Alex de Campi and illustrator Jimmy Broxton are doing just that. Using Kickstarter as a platform, the duo seeks to raise $27,000 over the next two months to fund...

I received a Facebook message from writer Greg Stolze today extolling his latest project. Stolze, probably best known for his work on role-playing games including Unknown Armies and NEMESIS, has taken to writing reader-funded fiction using the Kickstarter fund-raising website. Prior to short stories, Stolze also wrote some role-playing games using this method of funding, which he terms “the Ransom Model.” At the fund-raising site of his latest effort, “Two Things She Does With Her Body,” Stolze has posted a video of himself explaining the idea, as well as links to the PDFs of the two previous stories that Stolze successfully...