Shadowhawk runs down a couple new, exciting kickstarters.

“A kaiju anthology with stories from some of my favourite writers? Sure, I’ll be having seconds! And supporting another favourite author  for his unpublished short story collection? Yes please!” ~Shadowhawk, The Founding Fields

Ever since 2011, Kickstarter has really taken off on the crowd-funding scene, helping set some really amazing records and bringing back to life some amazing old entertainment works. Of course, publishing has also embraced it wholeheartedly, or at least authors have, such as Matt Forbeck, Bradley P. Beaulieu and several others who’ve managed to run several successful kickstarters and are sort of gurus on the subject. Matt Forbeck certainly is, given that he’s gotten a full four projects fully funded, and then some!

New projects go up on Kickstarter all the time, whether they are for tabletop boardgames or fiction anthologies or genre documentaries or even movies as in the case of the Veronica Mars which is the first such project to make it through kickstarter, and in such a way! The creators asked for $2 million from fans, who responded by contributing more than $5.7 million! That’s the power of Kickstarter. Can anyone deny it?

Surely not. I’m sure that among you there are several people who have helped fund numerous projects on the site, for whatever purpose and that you’ve really enjoyed all the different perks that your funding bought for you. In that vein, I have a couple of really neat kickstarters for you today. One of them, the kaiju anthology kickstarter, I even had a small hand in putting together since I recommended some of the authors, authors that I thought would be a good fit here. No points in guessing who they are!

Kaiju: Age of Monsters

by Ragnarok Publications

This is a kickstarter to fund an original anthology featuring short stories by some of the best and brightest writers in the industry. Nick Sharps, who had the idea for this, will be one of the editors on the anthology, alongside Tim Marquitz and J. M. Martin, the co-owners of brand-new SFF imprint Ragnarok Publications. All three are great friends of mine and I’ve even had the pleasure of being featured in Manifesto: UF, an urban fantasy anthology edited by Tim with stories by Nick and me.

So really, exciting times ahead! I’m really looking forward to seeing this kickstarter get funded, and get funded big! All those reward levels are just so damn juicy!

As of right now, the project is 55% funed and is moving along pretty well. (Link after the video).

Kickstarter.

Explore Strange New Worlds

by Ari Marmell

Ari Marmell is one of my favourite fantasy writers from last year, with his two Widdershins Adventures novels Thief’s Covenant (review) and False Covenant (review) as well as his Darksiders tie-in novel The Abomination Vault (review). The first novel was really, really good, but the second novel, not so much. And the tie-in novel was all kinds of awesome. So yeah, I’m definitely a fan of Ari’s work.

Recently I came to know that Ari was putting together a kickstarter to publish an anthology featuring some of short stories, whether already having seen publication in various magazines or as yet unpublished. As a fan of his work, I cannot deny the lure of this anthology and I’m certainly looking forward to reading it.

The kickstarter at the moment is about 60% funded already and still has more than two weeks to go, so plenty of time for you all to chip in and support him. And I do recommend it. Hopefully my reviews convince you to back him! (Link after the video).

Kickstarter.