Kickstarter Wrap-Up
So, we’re in the final 24 hours of the Kickstarter. It looks like we’re going to fall just short of the goal of the illustrated version of the Three Doctors post – though I suppose a last minute push is possible. Someone buying the Soldeed video, for instance, would put the goal in sight…
EDIT: Actually, we’re now just $600 from doing the Blake book. It could just about happen…
In any case, if you want to get in on the Kickstarter, you probably should get going – several of the reward levels are deals that I’m not planning on offering again at the end of the Kickstarter. Most notably, the $10 “starter kit” of ebooks is the only time you’ll be able to get the first three volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum at that price for the foreseeable future. And while I may offer commissioned essays and signed books through other means soon, I don’t intend to offer essays that will go into the books again at all.
Finally, a general answer to questions I’m sure I’ll be getting – I’ll be in touch with all of the backers through several means. First, I’ll send out a backers survey in the next few days to figure out the Kickstarter-exclusive essay topic (basically, I’m going to suggest the upcoming Marc Platt audio The Beginning, and unless there’s a sizable objection, do that) and to get everyone’s e-mail. At that point I’ll have a Soldeed-esque THREEEEEE ways of contacting you: your e-mail, Kickstarter updates, and this blog. I will basically use all three regularly when I need to update you with anything.
No, failing to meet the $15k stretch goal does not mean I will never do the Blake/Three Doctors book. It does mean that I’m going to wait until I see how the Logopolis book does, however, before I make plans.
Any other questions I’ll happily answer in comments. Or discourse at length about what I have or haven’t learned doing a Kickstarter.
In any case, I just wanted to use today’s post to say: whether you have donated, are about to, or just can’t manage it, thank you. The last month of running this blog has been an absolutely wonderful ride. I was hoping to be able to get to the original $1k goal that would let me pre-fund the Hartnell book itself, and was prepared to fund it out of pocket if I fell short.
I woke up the next morning clearly not having to worry about funding the Hartnell book again. And that’s just been the beginning. I get to do a special edition of the Logopolis post, to start selling t-shirts, mugs, prints, and other cool stuff, and to start in on the podcast commentaries, all of which are terribly exciting.
And perhaps most importantly, it formed the point where I really started thinking of this as my primary job and source of income, with adjunct teaching as a sort of hobbyist sideline. Which is a really nice and satisfying place to be. That the Kickstarter month coincided with the new site launch, getting to do the DePaul event, the new series, and a bunch of other stuff is just tremendously, wonderfully gratifying.
So having said that, let’s carry on. I’ll keep targeting five updates a week, three of which will be Eruditorum entries, plus a nice weekend chat thread. The blog will remain the same old thing that you know and love, except for those of you who know and hate it, in which case it will still remain the same. And over the next year or so I’ll tease and explore some other projects as we move forward – the oft-mentioned British comics project, yes, but also… other idle ideas I have. So those will surface someday. But first, tomorrow, The Long Game, and the oft-desired discussion of forty-five minute episode structures and their limitations. (Well, one part of it. Father’s Day is part-written at the moment and also about that.)
But mostly, you know.
Thank you.
May 14, 2013 @ 1:12 am
What an an inspirational achievement! From niche blog to primary source of income. Well done indeed Dr. S and the best of British luck with all your future projects. I'm looking forward to recieving the updated Hartnell volume plus all the others. You' ll forgive me if I bathe a little bit in the warm glow of reflected glory in knowing that my small donation helped you achieve your goal and also that you went for my suggestion of covering 'An Adventure in Time and Space'.
May 14, 2013 @ 2:21 am
Glad to see it's been such an enormous success. Congratulations!
I feel a bit like cheating in that two of my suggestions for extra essays ("Deadline" and "The Masters of Luxor") have been taken up. Looking forward to these, and "The Beginning" (which I had also been secretly hoping for but didn't even have to suggest!)
May 14, 2013 @ 3:49 am
Congratulations! I contributed because I want to live in the kind of world where you could make a living doing this kind of work, and figured it was about time to follow through with action of some kind.
May 14, 2013 @ 7:52 am
If I sign up to work one more overnight that would pretty much cover the Soldeed contribution.. decisions, decisions…
May 14, 2013 @ 9:28 am
I didn't realize it was this close to curtain call!
… although thanks to a typo I nearly pledged my house. :\
May 14, 2013 @ 9:34 am
I wasn't sure if the $75 option came with any books (and it's sold out anyway), but if you're interested in hearing I do have a suggestion on something I'd appreciate hearing about in the future. (If it makes a difference, I'd be willing to go ahead and up my pledge to $75 for the sake of being heard out). It's a bit more of a social thing than a series essay, but it ties very much into what Russell T. Davies and John Barrowman were doing with Torchwood.
May 14, 2013 @ 10:25 am
Just upped my pledge to cover the rest of the money needed to reach the $15,000 dollar goal, can't wait to see that Blakean masterpiece π
And thank you for this wonderful blog. Looking forward to the rest of the new series and hearing more about your future projects; I'm already psyched for the Morrison/Moore thing, or will that cover British comics generally?
May 14, 2013 @ 10:30 am
HUZZAH! You made it to $15,000! Congratulations!
So…now that you'll definitely be making the Three Doctors via Blake book, I have a proposal: would you consider making a second Kickstarter project to fund your other Blake project, and include a reward tier comprised of your Three Doctors book and the newly typeset manuscripts? I'd ask you to make it a reward tier on this project, but it's a bit late for that.
May 14, 2013 @ 10:39 am
Count yourself fucking lucky I only won £7.50 on the lottery last week, otherwise you would so have been doing that Soldeed death scene. And it wouldn't go on YouTube – I'd have organised dark ritual viewings at Who conventions around the world, with the participants forbidden on oath to divulge what they had seen. It would be the stuff of legend.
May 14, 2013 @ 11:22 am
Ian Levine is probably already reconstructing it as we speak.
May 14, 2013 @ 11:27 am
It is probably a good thing for all concerned that, thanks to the month-long Saga of the Late Paycheck, I could not pledge until today. All the slots in the spin-off book are taken, and I can no longer spend more money than I ought forcing you to write an essay treating the Doctor Whooves fanvids as a spinoff. π
May 14, 2013 @ 12:03 pm
Abigail : OW. Soda out the nose HURTS when you read something like that.
Phil: Gratz on hitting 15K, I look forward to getting you more money at some point for the Three Doctors book.
May 14, 2013 @ 12:17 pm
Of course, I'll also contribute to the rounds of congratulations on the success of all the Eruditorum's projects.
Looking forward to what you have to say about The Long Game too. Until recently, it was actually my least favourite episode of the Eccleston year, expending the great Simon Pegg in such a mediocre script only compounding its offense to me. I thought an especially silly idea was that the word of the Doctor that the strange technology of this world was somehow "wrong," was our only evidence about this. The episode was about introducing a new world to us, an era we and the show more generally had never visited before, and I found there was no way for us to become invested in the apparent "wrongness" of the environment.
Then I had something of a revelation regarding how it worked. For my 30th birthday this February, I had a pretty epic party (three of my friends who are local Hamilton DJs agreed to spin, one of whom also let me use his house). One wild thing I did was have one of my Eccleston year discs repeating on a projector. No sound, because I wanted it just to be a wild visual on the wall, rather than turning what should be a party about me into a party about Doctor Who. I have my priorities after all.
That disc was the one with The Long Game, Father's Day, and The Empty Child/Doctor Dances. And I realized, semi-drunkenly looking at The Long Game, that it worked visually perfectly. Each scene clearly communicated what was happening and what the story was about without a single word of audible dialogue being required to understand it. My respect for the story grew immensely after watching it silently. It was a perfectly told visual story about one of the central moral principles of Doctor Who: Never accept the dictates of authority blindly, because once you question, you can be the agent of your own liberation.
And the dialogue was absolutely unnecessary for any of its content. The mild cheesiness of much of the spoken words in the episode largely got in the way of its narrative. Watching it silently let the story get its meaning across much more clearly than it ever had before. And while The Long Game still isn't my favourite story of the season, pretty much all my negative feelings toward it disappeared.
May 14, 2013 @ 2:08 pm
Just pledged at the moths-fly-out-when-I-open-my-wallet pre-order level. Congratulations on your success thusfar & I look forward to the Volume 1 2nd E and the future volumes!
May 14, 2013 @ 2:09 pm
I'm in a very, very good mood – go ahead and up your pledge to $75 and you can have the essay request. Or just make your pitch in comments and see if you persuade me. π
May 14, 2013 @ 2:10 pm
Whoof – $16k achieved, huge congrats!
…though I wonder what people have against the Graham Williams/JNT Tom Baker period, given that that's the only "buy an essay in this book" option not taken.
May 14, 2013 @ 2:11 pm
Dear Philip:
Would you like an extra 150% of your original goal in the last couple hours of your campaign? You would? Oh, okay, here you go.
Sincerely,
The Internet
May 14, 2013 @ 2:14 pm
Actually, it has been taken – there was someone who contacted me privately because they didn't have a Kickstarter compatible credit card, and who sent money via PayPal accordingly. I had my wife pledge to hold the slot, but as we could really use to not have $110 vanish from our bank accounts for a few days while Kickstarter processes it, and since the amount was now irrelevant to whether we made any stretch goals I went ahead and cancelled it at the last minute. Hopefully nobody swoops in and takes it, but if they do I guess I'll just have two custom essays there.
May 14, 2013 @ 2:23 pm
Actually, I've decided to do a Blake manuscript that should be a very quick project and quite cheap to do in the near future. The Book of Thel is proving extremely, extremely easy to work with visually, and doesn't have any in-print facsimile editions at all. So I'll probably work up a version of that in the next few weeks and put it out, just to get a sense of what an obscure little title like that does in the way of business. And then I'll evaluate from there. It will be pretty easy to fold those into the British comics project when the time comes, so that's a possibility too. We'll see. But they're definitely on a more front burner than they should be considering the breadth of my commitments.
May 14, 2013 @ 2:23 pm
Thank you for putting us over the top. π
Morrison and Moore are going to be the spine of the British comics project. But the project is going to be quite digressive and wander around many other aspects of British comics. I may do a Coming Soon post about it in the next few weeks, just to share my initial thinking and get feedback from you lot.
May 14, 2013 @ 3:36 pm
Oh, somebody pledged at the Soldeed level.
God help us all.
May 14, 2013 @ 3:49 pm
Bam! Made my itty bitty pledge with seconds to spare.
Sadly, I could not figure out how to add the Logopolis book. Would it be possible to send you that money separately, Phil?
May 14, 2013 @ 5:48 pm
Ditto for me- I tried adjusting my pledge to get the book but it doesn't seem to want to stick.
May 14, 2013 @ 8:20 pm
Lawks-a-lordy, that was an exciting few hours watching the total tick over $15 000! Congratulations Phil, I'm so happy for you – especially the change of attitude from "side-project" to "primary source of income". I am very humbled to have contributed in some way to such an amazing project.
May 15, 2013 @ 12:21 am
Hey Phil, I was wondering if it'd still be possible for me get the starter kit with the Kickstarter exclusive essay if I sent you $15 through PayPal? I'm also unable to use Kickstarter or Amazon because of a lack of credit card.
May 15, 2013 @ 7:12 am
Congratulations! Though I'm a latecomer to the site, I recently gorged myself on the ebooks and am really enjoying the essays on the New series. I also count myself a proud, though minor, contributor to the success of the Kickstarter.
One thing I did want to say: I read the ebooks on my Kindle and enjoy highlighting particularly pithy asides and witticisms from the essays. What surprised me, as I read through the latter half of the Troughton book and all of the Pertwee book, was how difficult it was to find one- or two-sentence thoughts/aphorisms. Instead, for the thought to make sense, I had to select nearly an entire paragraph. That's really cool.
Some writers express their thoughts compactly at the sentence level, but some writers think at the level of paragraphs. Those paragraph-thinkers typically, for me, have richer, more nuanced styles, and I think Dr. Sandifer exemplifies that.
As someone who does the occasional bit of editing and writing coach stuff, I'd love to have a post on how you write, or how your writing style/methods have changed over the course of this extravaganza.
May 15, 2013 @ 6:08 pm
I'm pretty sure he just channels the ghost of William Blake… π
May 18, 2013 @ 5:02 am
Real glad to be a contributor in my own small way with the $25 package. So congratulations and well done Phil! Aewsomw – over $16,000!
Good one. And great to be part of this.