The Journey Is Everything: Let's Write A Book Together

So I’m trying out Kickstarter for the first time this coming Tuesday, September 9.

What’s Kickstarter? Several people I’ve told this to have asked the same thing. I always think, Wait, you didn’t hear about the potato salad guy? Or the Coolest Cooler? But then again, I’m plugged in pretty much all day so I hear about everything.

Kickstarter is the world's largest funding platform for creative projects. A home for film, music, art, theater, games, comics, design, photography, and more.

For instance, the actor/filmmaker Zack Braff turned to Kickstarter to help make his movie Wish I Was Here. He needed to raise 2 million and ended up raising 3 million. The film is already out and I’m still wanting to see it because it looks great.

I’ve been thinking about doing a project on Kickstarter for a couple of years now. About a year ago, I started paying lots attention to it and even studying what works and what doesn’t. I had a certain project in mind for it.

Some of you who pay attention to my writing & my blogs know I’ve spoken about this really big idea that morphs Stephen King’s The Stand with Lost. I almost contracted with a big publisher to do these three books but that fell through. The idea has been with me over a decade, and I’m really hoping to do those books one day.

So why not do that series with a traditional publisher, you might ask. Well, the idea is ambitious and risky, and the stories I write on my own are already a difficult sell because I don’t quite fit into a box. So publishers have been hesitant to pick up that series.

So my goal had been to launch that series with Kickstarter. But then I began to reconsider.

I thought to myself, Let me test the Kickstarter waters.

That Stand-meets-Lost project is still something I want and need to write for me. I think it’s pretty brilliant but we’ll see. But that’s all about ME.

What if I did a project that ends up being about everybody? A group project?

So I thought about all my recent collaborations and an idea hit me.

What if I collaborate with the world?

I’m wanting to do a project where I collaborate with possibly hundreds of people.

How does this work? Well, I won’t get into specifics here, but it will be all about the concept of collaborating. And the real experiment will be whether people value participation over prizes. Because with most Kickstarter projects, the more you contribute in terms of money, the more things you get. A t-shirt, a poster, dinner with the director, a tour of the city with the musician, etc.

For my Kickstarter, the more money you contribute, the more valuable the idea will be.

So one person can pick the premise of this story I hope to write. Another can pick the genre. Another pick the title. And so on.

It might sound silly with the end result resembling a train wreck. But I think it could really be brilliant piecing all these things together. I’ve been doing that with the collaborations I’ve done. So it’s fun thinking about weaving together ideas and sentences and anecdotes into something.

What will it possibly look like?

We’ll see. The first thing is to see if I raise the money in order to do it.

I’m sharing this with those who care a lot. It’s a fun and creative experiment. But it will also be a legitimate project for me.

Every single collaboration I’ve done has been taken very seriously. And every one of those books has a part of me in them. This would have a lot of me in it, of course, but then again it might have 450 others in it too.

My goal would be to use my expertise in my writing and my zany imagination to create something that’s really pretty incredible. But that’s the goal of every single project I sit down to write. I try my hardest. I really do.

So stay tuned. This Tuesday at 9 a.m. central time I’ll launch my Kickstarter campaign called OneStory. I’ll be sharing the link on my Facebook page and Twitter. I hope you can be a part of it in some creative way.

The journey is everything, as I often say. So let’s take one together and see where we go.