Guest Post -Andrea Jonhson and the Little Red Reviewer Blog’s Kickstarter

Steph P. Bianchini January 4, 2019 2 Comments

It is with a lot of pleasure that I welcome here Andrea Johnson, one of the best blogs around reviewing speculative fiction. Andrea is now launching a Kickstarter campaign, and she talks here about it.

Why Kickstarter?

Why go through the stress of Kickstarter to fund The Best of Little Red Reviewer when I could just self publish on Amazon, have a book, and be done with it?

You know, self publishing probably would have been a lot less stressful. I could have taken my time, been super meticulous, done everything in secret, been all “I don’t need any help, I can do this myself!”, and then still had a book that I was promoting.

You ever have a project with no deadline, and since there is no deadline there is no sense of urgency? I know how my brain works, and when I don’t have a sense of urgency I just sit around and don’t do anything.  Doing this through Kickstarter forces me to have a really strong sense of urgency! I have to promote the project! I have to get everything lined up, and oh good lord the spreadsheets! I have to keep promoting it and be really annoying on twitter! And it will eventually end. The Kickstarter time will run out, and this project I am excited about will be funded, or it won’t. Yes or no, zero or one. This is binary – it either will be, or it won’t.

But there’s more to it than that.  I’m using Kickstarter as a viability test.  Literally – are my reviews viable outside of my blog? Are they something people want to see exist beyond a computer screen?

This Kickstarter is a viability test of the physicality and permanence of book review blogs.  Are book review blogs just a fad? Will we disappear the moment the internet evolves into something new and our work doesn’t apply?

If this Kickstarter funds,  my work will exist in the real world, it will be actual ink on a page. If this Kickstarter funds, not only are my best reviews viable outside the internet, but maybe yours will be too!

So yeah, there’s a reason I’m doing this crowdfunded and not just self publishing through Amazon.

I had someone ask me in an interview if The Best of Little Red Reviewer could become a yearly thing. I laughed out loud and No, because this is eight years worth of material.  But what if “The Best of such-and-such” could be come a yearly thing? Every year, another blogger crowdfunds their best work. Wouldn’t that just be quite a thing?