Our crowdfunding effort, originated to help you help us bring the world’s first science fiction magazine – Amazing Stories – back into print, ends in just 25 hours from now.
At a little after noon on April 7th, the doors will close. (Visit the campaign here.)
It’s looking right now, as we edge closer and closer to funding 2/3rds of our goal, that we aren’t going to reach that goal.
This is the nature of the beast.
Internally, we’ve done some self examination. Our conclusions suggest several things we could have improved on, several things that we might have misread. If this effort is replicated in the future, we’ll be addressing those as best we know how.
Externally, we continue to see a good amount of (seemingly) genuine enthusiasm. It’s just not translating into the level of funding we’re looking for. As we know, as we all know, there can be a world of difference between genuine enthusiasm and opening up the wallet.
We were surprised to find how little negativity we were subjected to; there’s a small, yet endlessly vocal, group of individuals who have attached themselves (think leeches or lampreys, or better yet, the parasitic Tongue-Eating Louse – quite frankly I can’t think of a better analogy) to the SF community who revel in negativity, apparently believing that they can simultaneously cure their low self-esteem and elevate their careers by attempting to denigrate, belittle and harass those they perceive as their (undeserving) betters. We did a fair amount of strategizing in anticipation of attacks (several of these trolls had previously stated that Amazing Stories is a hotbed of SJW liberalism), and other than a few feeble attempts on Facebook (and, no doubt within their own sad little bubbles), we’ve heard little from them. No doubt they’ll take our non-funding as an opportunity to crow a little, bleating about our supposed failure and claiming this as an example of how damaging diversity, liberalism, Social Justice, biased publishing, the Hugo Awards, SFWA, and all the rest are to our community and industry. This could be hurtful until the source is recognized. It’s like a twist on the Helen Keller quote – “I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet“. I cried because we failed to fund, until I met a bunch of trolls who’ve failed at being human. (I get upset over the things they say, until I see what odious little trolls they are, so small minded, stunted and perverse I can’t even summon pity.)
They’ll perceive our unsuccessful funding attempt (if that transpires) as a “failure”, all the while ignoring their own egregious failures at what it means to be human; they’re incapable of reoognizing their own faults, acknowledging their own “failures” (and if I weren’t a mensch, I could rattle off a whole string of such), missing out on the fact that you learn far more from making an attempt at something and not succeeding than you do from succeeding on the first try. They may not realize it, but they’re actually the beneficiaries of “failuire”. We all are. As one small example, Edison tried over a thousand different ways to make an incandescent light bulb before hitting on the right elements. Had the internet been around back then, no doubt these little weasels would have been excoriating his temerity at trying to improve on gas lamps. Had NASA stopped after their first few failures to launch a man-rated rocket, there’d be Soviet missiles orbiting over our heads right now, and our trollish friends would have been extolling the virtues of Soviet-style Socialism. Talk about irony.
Regardless, they certainly aren’t worth more than a couple of paragraphs (and that’s being generous), so I’ll move on. The Amazing Stories team is incorporating its “failures” and working on ways to continue to achieve its goals; there most likely will be another funding attempt with a few things changed around; we’ve become much more knowledgeable of the ways of the Kickstarter (and will be happy to share that knowledge) and will continue to move forward.
