Welcome to Booktopia 2024! 📚 a literary extravaganza of creativity and collaboration from a diverse group of writers and artists collectively running book crowdfunding projects from September 5th toSeptember 26th.
The more Booktopia projects you back, the more limited FREEBIES you will earn ✨
⚔️ 2 FREE Cross Collaborative Freebies for every Cross Collab Project Pair you support!
📚 1 FREE Limited Edition Booktopia 2024 reward if you back FIVE [5] or more projects at a reward tier*
*Only pledges to physical reward tiers or main digital offerings qualify towards earning these FREEBIES. Please refer to individual campaigns for unlock requirements.
Join the fun - Back Booktopia 2024 📚 projects to qualify for
free rewards!
It's Saturday and we've unlocked a stretch goal so secret that we didn't even know about it!
Care Halverson, who designed our book cover, just casually dropped this painting in our Discord conversation, like it was no big deal.
So we asked, Care said yes, and we're adding it to Grandmaster: both books get an extra art plate!
The goodies don't end there. As a thank you to all of our backers, we're also dropping some additional digital goodies from Care in the Backer-only section below, including a couple of coloring pages and some wallpapers for your phones!
Send your finished coloring pages to [email protected] and we'll include our favorites in an upcoming project update.
A VALDEMAR SHORT STORY SURPRISE
It turns out we're not the only Booktopia campaign with Valdemar stories!
We were excited to connect recently with Anthea Sharp, the bestselling author of the Elfhame series, and a frequent contributor to Misty's Valdemar anthologies. Anthea is currently crowdfunding a fairy tale collection called Mermaid Song, with a companion volume called Faerie Hearts. And Faerie Hearts contains (with full rights and permission, of course) one of Anthea's Valdemar stories: "The Gift of Love!"
As soon as this update is done we're heading over to pledge for Anthea's books, because how cool is that?
TRIVIA CORRECTIONS
Question Nine created a LOT of discussion. While more than 80% of backers selected the correct answer, a small number of close and careful readers made a very good case for other options.
We will [edit] not count this question towards the final trivia point tally.
It's so much fun seeing the love that you all have for every aspect of this world. The collective knowledge about Valdemar that this fandom shares is staggering and magnificent.
THE MID-CAMPAIGN SLUMP
A few backers have commented with concern about the pace of pledges slowing down and whether we'll reach our stretch goals.
The good news is that the mid-campaign is almost always slow. All of the excitement and momentum happens at the beginning and at the end. That makes this a great time to share more detail, build community, and enjoy the journey before we have to buckle up for the final whirlwind of a week.
BUT... this is also a great time to join the campaign if you're one of the thousands of followers who's waiting for the right moment! After all, now we have COLORING PAGES.
When I found out that Mercedes Lackey was going to have a book in Booktopia, I got so excited I started bouncing in my seat.
And we were on a car trip back from Illinois. You should have seen the looks my husband and kid gave me. If they didn't already think I was crazy, that would have done it.
My kid, in the long run, thought it was cute and told me, "It's funny seeing you fangirl over somebody."
Sigh. You gotta love it when your eighteen-year-old refers to you as 'cute'.
I went on to explain to this kid how heavily Lackey's writing has influenced me, both in terms of world-building and giving me a love for fantasy and strong women in fiction and in terms of who'd I grow to be as a person.
She planted seeds in me at a young age, on tolerance and love and acceptance and it's taken me years to understand just how deeply those seeds were planted and how much they affected me.
Authors, through their writing, can do amazing things-Mercedes Lackey is proof of that.
As I've been working on my book, I've been building the backstory that goes along with Ivy's heritage and her people and while in some ways, I pull from common mythology, I'm also weaving my own and Ivy's an animal lover. As I write more, I learn more and her love of animals goes deeper than just liking them--they're drawn to her and that ties into her heritage.
She likes to adopt rescue animals and currently has two pet cockatiels that she got from a bird rescue group. For the past days, I've been working on an illustration that I might either put in the book or use as a vellum insert.
I'm not sure just yet, but you can check out my illustration of geeky love below. Note: I didn't draw any of the images. I used hand-drawn illustrations through Canva and designed the layout, but that's all the credit I can claim.
Backers, you get to read an excerpt and meet Ivy's babies.
We just crossed over our second stretch goal, and now our anthology will come with 5 illustrations! We're hoping to have our amazing illustrator from our previous anthologies, Katie Cordy, work with us again. Here are some previous examples of her work, including one of the pieces in Fiery Deeps, our new anthology releasing this Tuesday!
We've got another 11 days to go in the campaign, so keep getting the word out to friends and family! Our next stretch goal is looming on the horizon. This one is again to pay it back to our anthology authors (and we're already starting to get submissions!)
At $8,000, We'll pay all our writers another $0.01 per word!
Remember, after that, we get fancy at $10,000, with upgrades for our hardback version!
Hope your September is stupendous, and I'll talk to you soon!
