Buy Eldric the Wizard and the Helpful New Neighbour Today!
Well, our Kickstarter launch has come and gone! We have been public about our project since early this year, and we have been talking about it since late 2024. It’s surreal that, as of now, our Kickstarter has been live for a few days. But here we are.
By following the link below, you can support The Village at the Crossroads project, and purchase our first book: Eldric the Wizard and the Helpful New Neighbour, if you haven’t already.
CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE A COPY NOW!
Why Support the Kickstarter?
If you’re browsing our website and reading this blog, its likely that you’re at least loosely familiar with what we’re trying to do and how we hope to do it. If not, there are earlier blog posts you can visit to get some details on the project. You can view them HERE, HERE, and HERE.
With our Kickstarter Live, we will learn over the next month whether or not our efforts are intriguing to a wider audience, and if its something that should be pursued. That desire to test the market and validate the concept is the primary reason we opted to pursue a crowdfunding campaign. Ultimately, we want to see if this style of book is something people would be willing to buy.
Children’s books are an interesting category on Kickstarter. The average money raised in a Children’s Book campaign is about $6,500, compared to $16,000 across the entire “Publishing” category on the website. It makes sense. Novels, art books, and non-fiction books would likely be listed at a higher price point – they are more time consuming to make, and therefore demand a higher price. Children’s books are, by design, also shorter and cheaper to print.
For us, the time invested in this project has been significant. Over 200 hours of art, and close to that again in writing, editing, and all of the marketing and promotion that we have pursued this year. That’s not a complaint… we’ve enjoyed the project very much! But if we are to do it again and again for a series of books, we want to know that we aren’t the only ones interested.
Pledging Early Helps!
Our campaign will run for a full month (until November 22nd ). We will be grateful for any support we receive. If you back our campaign, thank you in advanced. It means the world.
That said, there is a very measurable benefit in starting the campaign with momentum. Already, the success we had with our pre-launch and the first hours of the campaign earned us the coveted “Project We Love” badge.
We were also thrilled to find out that our campaign made it onto Kickstarter’s Homepage via the “Fresh Favorites” category. At the time of writing this (4 days into the campaign) we are still there. It’s awesome to be so easy to find and we’re hoping that this presence on the front page extends our reach to folks who maybe hadn’t been aware of our project previously.
We hit all of our launch day goals. The surge of support, both pre-and-post-launch, allowed us to get the attention of Kickstarter we had desired. That is 100% attributed to the supporters who have helped us. Those early pledges went the distance!
Less Than a Month to Go
We now move into the bulk of the campaign, which is admittedly a slower time than the initial 24 or 48 hours. As mentioned, this is when we determine whether or not there is a critical mass that thinks this is an idea worth pursuing. This Kickstarter campaign will help us measure that. Best case scenario, the campaign is a smashing success and we have a clear mandate to write more stories in this world. We hope that’s the outcome. If not though, we still hope we’ve done enough to be able to print books for the bookshelves for the kids in our lives. At the end of the day, that’s why we started this project.