So, here we go again. I’m trying to fund a new anthology with a Kickstarter campaign. There’s a good reason why I am doing this. I want to be able to offer authors a good rate for their stories. I can’t put the money up myself because the chances of getting it back are not good. Fight Like A Girl #2 has done incredibly well award-wise, but it has sold fewer then 150 copies. That’s a measure of how hard things are for a small press these days. Using crowdfunding will hopefully mean we sell more copies, and that we can pay the authors something closer to professional rates.

Of course running a Kickstarter campaign isn’t easy. A lot of them fail to meet their targets. And as soon as one goes live you are absolutely deluged with emails from scammers trying to sell you their expertise. Many of them claim to be associated with Kickstarter. They are not. One offered me a $30,000 investment if I paid him $300. I’m only trying to raise £5,500. It is bizarre.

However, the scammers will get victims because doing a successful Kickstarter campaign is hard. It was difficult enough when Twitter was useful, but now that the social media environment is so fragmented, and so many people are terrified about the rise of Facism, it is massively more so. I don’t expect to succeed without effort.

But there is a plan. Because the anthology will be about Welsh history and legend, we will be running regular updates showcasing how weird that stuff is. Most days I will post an update, either written by me or by someone else associated with the campaign, about some person or creature that might feature in a story in the book. I am hoping that these updates will draw people to the campaign page just to read them, and that some of those people will decide to pledge.

That’s the plan, anyway. But I will also be begging people to pledge on a fairly regular basis, because that is absolutely necessary. You can do so here.