Absolutely thrilled that FIREFLY #1 hits comic shops today! The book continues the adventures of the band of outlaws and outsiders who starred in Joss Whedon’s beloved FIREFLY television show and SERENITY movie, and is written by yours truly with art by Dan McDaid, colors by Marcelo Costa, letters by Jim Campbell, and editing by Jeanine Schaefer and Gavin Gronenthal.
I’m hugely biased, of course, but I think the book is terrific and if you like space cowboys, fun worldbuilding, and/or stories about a found family of outsiders driving each other crazy while grappling with the wounds of war, this book is for you!
Keep scrolling for a lettered preview of the first few pages of the book, and ask your local comics shop to hold a copy for you today!
Also, here’s a brand new interview about the book and here’s a great review from ComicBook.com that concludes, “Excellent craft and a compelling story come together to create a comic book that Browncoats are likely to be very, very pleased with.”
If you haven’t had time to check it out, please do take a peek and back it before it’s too late! Co-written by me and Jonathan Coulton, art by the great Takeshi Miyazawa and Jessica Kholinne, letters by Simon Bowland! About an awesome girl who has to grapple with the challenge of having a mean friend! It’s gonna be awesome!
And here’s some brand new art from Takeshi Miyazawa and colorist Jessica Kholinne to tempt you!
So this is it, friends! The last 24 hours of the Kickstarter campaign for THE PRINCESS WHO SAVED HER FRIENDS children’s book! It’s been an incredible ride. We’re currently at $88,000, more than double our initial ask and just $12,000 from a stretch goal that will unlock 10″ x 13″ mini-posters for every backer who orders a physical reward.
THE PRINCESS WHO SAVED HER FRIENDS tells the story of our heroine, Gloria Cheng Epstein Takahara de la Garza Champion, as she grapples with the fact that her new friend, the wicked Queen, is still kind of mean! What do you do when one of your friends treats your other friends badly? Well, read this book and find out how one awesome girl handles things!
This is the kind of big, fun, but emotionally honest children’s book I’ve always loved, and artist Takeshi Miyazawa and colorist Jessica Kholinne are doing spectacular work bringing it to life. Check out this gorgeous new page that’s just come in:
If you’d like to learn more, please do check out the interviews with me and Jonathan Coulton at:
Just a little stunned to have an essay in Poetry Magazine this month — which includes excerpts of my high school poetry!
The magazine has a feature called “The View from Here” in which it gets folks who aren’t generally known for their poetry to talk about the meaning of poetry in their lives. So I dug into my old high school notebooks and read through dozens of my old poems. Hoo boy! It was harrowing and fun and ultimately opened my eyes to how important poetry really has been in my development as a writer and a human being.
Three weeks ago Jonathan Coulton and I launched a Kickstarter campaign for THE PRINCESS WHO SAVED HER FRIENDS, a sequel to our children’s book THE PRINCESS WHO SAVED HERSELF.
So here we are, three days from the end of the campaign, and I thought I’d share few thoughts about what’s worked and not worked for us in terms of getting the word out. (And if you like this kind of analysis, please do check out my KICKSTARTER SECRETS ebook, which spills all my secrets about crowdfunding!)
First, the campaign’s done great! We hit our initial $39,000 goal on the second day, hit two stretch goals over the next couple of weeks, and are now closing in on what will probably be our final stretch goal — at $80,000, backers at the $12 level and above all get free PDFs of Korean and Spanish translations of the book.
But the data reveals some interesting details about what’s driven support. Check out the chart below from Kicktraq.com, which shows the amount of money in pledges the campaign has taken in on each day.
The most obvious thing to note is that we got a huge wave of support on the first three days. That’s when Jonathan and I messaged everyone on our personal email newsletter lists and the Kickstarter lists for our previous campaigns (including Code Monkey Save World, The Princess Who Saved Herself, ABC Disgusting, and Kickstarter Secrets) and hit our social media hard.That was enough to get us a few thousand bucks over our initial $39,000 goal, which was spectacular. It also was confirmation of that bit of basic advice from the Kickstarter Secrets book, which was to set a goal that’s reasonable given the audience you’ve already built. I was honestly a bit nervous about that $39,000 goal — no matter how many of these projects I do, I never QUITE know how it’ll all work out. But given the thousands of backers we’d had on previous Kickstarters, it felt reasonable. Thankfully, it panned out as we hoped.
So then the chart shows a very typical pattern for the next three weeks — small surges on Mondays/Tuesdays, followed by gradual attrition through the week with the lowest points over the weekends and holidays. The honest truth is that it’s incredibly hard to get any attention over the weekends and holidays. This last weekend is particularly instructive. From Thursday, October 4 to Sunday, October 7, I was tabling in the Artists’ Alley at the NYCC, handing out hundreds of PRINCESS WHO SAVED HER FRIENDS postcards. But that Saturday was worst day of our campaign, with only six new backers and $307 in pledges. That Sunday we got a bump because Kickstarter very kindly put us on the front page of their website for the day. But Monday was a national holiday, and we plummeted back to our second lowest grossing day of the entire campaign.
I have no regrets about printing up those postcards — I’m sure many of the folks who picked them up checked out the campaign later in the week. But you can’t expect in-person events like that to generate immediate backers the same way online announcements can. And anything you do over the weekend is competing with everything else everyone’s doing over the weekend.
Sometimes you can goose numbers on slow weekends and holidays by posting things on social media. I never give up — if you follow me on Twitter, you know I post about my Kickstarter projects every single day. SHAMELESSLY. But I’ve also learned to hold off on BIG announcements (or even updates like this very note) until a non-holiday weekday, just because I know more people will have the time to pay attention to it.
So in that Kicktraq chart, those bumps you see on Mondays and Tuesdays aren’t just the natural progression of things — they’re also the result of us timing our updates and announcements to when folks are actually checking their email.
For example, on Monday 9/24, Tuesday 10/2, and Tuesday 10/9, we announced new stretch goals, emailing our various big lists. And on all of those days we got nice bumps.
I’ve been pretty darn pleased with how the campaign has gone so far. But if I had to do it all over again, my notes to self would be:
1. Work a little harder on press.
We got some great coverage from a few sites and podcasts. But I didn’t work my press contacts as hard and as far ahead of time as I have with projects in the past. This was just a time issue for me — I didn’t have the bandwidth to chase as much press down early in the game. I’ve also realized that as a sequel, THE PRINCESS WHO SAVED HER FRIENDS isn’t quite as press-worthy as the original book was, so it may have been harder to get coverage for it. Fortunately, as a sequel, we had a built-in audience from the earlier book that helped balance the scales. Still, I’m doing a bit of extra hustle to scrounge up a little last-minute press for the last days of the campaign. Wish me luck!
2. More video updates.
I’m old enough that I still prefer reading a page of text over watching a short video online. But millions of people LOVE online video, and we could have reached more folks if I’d made some more videos to promote the project. During the original Code Monkey Save World campaign, I recorded Jonathan signing at a couple of our in-person events and posted those videos online with links to the campaign, and they did indeed pull in backers. And for years, I’ve thought about making a music video of Jonathan’s original “Princess Who Saved Herself” song using art from the book. But I’ve never had or made the time. Similarly, Kickstarter now has a “Kickstarter Live” video feature that I’ve never made the time to figure out how to use. These are shiny, beautiful tools in the box that I’ve got to try out some day.
3. More process posts like this.
It occurred to me pretty late in the game that since I’m doing a new Kickstarter, the fine folks who backed my book Kickstarter Secrets would probably be interested in the behind-the-scenes experiences of running it. So here I am! But it would have been smart for me to have made a couple more posts like this earlier in the campaign as well. In my experience on all my previous projects, a lot of people are really hungry for practical info about how these books are made and how these campaigns are run. Again, something to remember and make time for next time ’round!
So there you have it! Hope this little glimpse into the process has been interesting to you, and if you’d like to check out and back the campaign, please don’t hesitate!
I’m thrilled to report that I’ll be talking with the great Nicole Chung about ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW, her searing memoir about her experiences as an adoptee, this Wednesday at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in NYC!
Hey, friends! I’m going to be at the New York Comic Con all four days this week! I’ll be spending most of my time at table B22 in the Artists’ Alley, signing and selling books and prints. I’ll have some new things this year, including free mini-prints of THE PRINCESS WHO SAVED HER FRIENDS and some other cool stuff, so please do come see!
And I’ll be doing the panels below. Word to the wise: if you’re a FIREFLY fan, you DEFINITELY do not want to miss the BOOM! panel on Friday.
