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4 Bookish Kickstarter Campaigns to Get Excited About!

Kickstarter is a crowdfunding corporation founded in 2009 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler. The company is based in Brooklyn, New York, and is focussed on creative projects such as films, comics, journalism, literature, and video games.

It has kickstarted (oh! I see where they got the name from now!) many excellent projects you may have heard of, and a few you may not have. We have gathered a handful of the best literature-based projects out now, or made possible, thanks to Kickstarter. Just click on the heading of each campaign to take you to the corresponding Kickstarter page, or find the Amazon links below each book.




This wonderful book is a great example of how well these crowdfunding campaigns work. We have featured this book previously on For Reading Addicts (read it here!) as it was such an innovative project. One of our Reading Addict minions, sorry- writers, even backed the campaign when it was in its early stages.

“A children’s book that reinvents fairy tales, inspiring girls with the stories of 100 great women from Elizabeth I to Serena Williams.”

Dog of the Dead reached its goal of $3000 worth of pledges with only 2 hours to go. This graphic novel written by Maxwell Shepherd and illustrated by Eli Beaird is a zombie horror with a cheeky canine twist. Inspired by Calvin and Hobbes, Homeward Bound, Futurama, and Dawn of the Dead.

“Though originally written as a short story in 2015, the medium of comic books was always meant to be its final destination. Eli Beaird saw potential in the project and took it on as a first full writer/illustrator collaboration after writing his own works throughout his career.”

Joel Doerfel’s background in philosophy, linguistics, liberal arts, and slam poetry inspired this fascinating project. Motivated by William Shakespeare’s own linguistic creativity, Doerfel created his own sonnets in response. Public reviews of the collection of 154 sonnets in Neon Shakespeare have called them ‘challenging’, ‘fun’, and ‘fascinating’. It sounds perfect for many of our Reading Addicts!

“For a little extra fun, I’ve sprinkled a few “easter eggs” throughout the sonnets–like a sonnet that rhymes with the digits of pi, or reads the same backward and forward, or rearranges Shakespeare’s words into a new sonnet.  Although these experimental gems are rare in the collection, they add to its uniqueness.”

This next Kickstarter campaign is a little different and I am not sure what to think about it. Authors Gabriel Diani and Etta Devine take a sideways look at Huckleberry Finn and its liberal use of ‘the N-word’ and alter it for the 21st century. They replaced all pejorative terms used for the character Jim with the word ‘robot’. It will be worth a look to see how they make this work… It seems they are doing it as a sarcastic response to publisher NewSouth attempting their own (misguided) censorship by replacing ‘the N-word’ with the word ‘slave’.

“Replacing the black characters with robots in the book will maintain the integrity of MOST of Mark Twain’s themes. It will also make the book more attractive to racists who wouldn’t ordinarily read a book sympathetic to the plight of African Americans in the Antebellum South.”




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