I hardly slept last night.
Racing through my mind at 4am were thoughts that ranged from rabid excitement, to paralyzing fear (aaaah), to a healthy dose of curiosity about how all this will go, to ‘I wonder where all my bobby pins went?’. As of 10am this morning, Abigail Ricarte and I have launched our Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for Vizkidz and the first book in our series — Penelope Pie Throws A Pizza Party, and now it is all out of our hands (well, almost).
Our Kickstarter Project is live!!!!!!!
It’s been a long process just to get here. I know when we started I thought that putting together a Kickstarter project was going to be simple. I mean all we wanted to do was publish a little children’s book. Surely coming up with the idea and creating it would be the challenging part.
Oh you silly fool.
Little did I know that I would soon be spending hours upon hours researching the basic logistics: setting up vendors and reliable printers, specs for submission, how to form an LLC (thanks New York State for being a total PITA), business bank accounts, shipping providers and costs, taxes (should have seen that one coming), accounting — the list just goes on and on. If anyone ever told you self-publishing was easy they were lying to your face and you should never forgive them.
But! After all of this, we are finally ready to push “launch” on our little project, and I am at once terrified, incredibly excited, and ridiculously proud. Even if we aren’t able to meet our goal to raise $15,000, Abby and I have stuck to our guns on putting this together. There have been plenty of occasions on which I would have much preferred napping and watching the Kardashians to working on this project all weekend, yet here we are.
Today (and for the next 30 days or so), Abby and I are going to be bothering you with requests that you back and most importantly share our project, updates on how the process is going, snippets of press coverage (Well, hopefully. Bloggers we’re coming for ya!), and stories about how we’ve built this world of Vizkidz, the logistics of the campaign, and didn’t murder each other along the way.
And then, fingers crossed, right before Thanksgiving we’ll tell you how we just hit our target, and successfully raised the funds to launch Vizkidz and Penelope Pie Throws a Pizza Party, in the nick of time for the holiday season. (And then you can totally steal your kid’s book and fill in some of the blanks on data viz you haven’t wanted to admit to your friends and coworkers. 😉)
Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being part of our project, and for believing in the world of Vizkidz!
