A Crowdfunder's Strategy Guide

PREFACE

This book was supposed to be a young adult dystopian novel set in the year 2094.

In March 2012, I was six months into the design and development of Viticulture, the game that would later become the cornerstone of my company, Stonemaier Games. I was burning out. The game was in a pretty good place, but it wasn’t ready for Kickstarter, and I had neglected my other creative passion, writing, for a long time.

I had also started to understand how big a commitment it is to design and publish a game, and I was worried that once I went down that path, it would be really difficult to accomplish my lifelong goal of writing a novel.

I’d tried to write novels before. Two of them, specifically. I approached both as epic projects that would take years ...