I can personally vouch for the principles and practices presented in this book, but that’s probably kind of obvious. Sandra has worked with many other people and organizations over the last decade, so this book is far, far more than just (!) the life experience of someone who wrangled a single cartoonist into profitability while managing her own career writing children’s books and short stories.
Follow the links above to read more about the project. It has funded, and just yesterday Sandra crossed the “we get to make an audiobook” stretch goal. The project closes in two days, though, so if you want to throw some momentum into it on the home stretch, now’s the time.
As part of this project I’m designing two posters, both of which will have all seventy maxims on them. Yesterday I spent a few hours tweaking various text attributes like kerning and quote height, and finished up the two-column version of the poster. It’ll be a 16″x20″ thing, and will look something like this…
If you want to get your hands on one of these posters, perhaps for the wall of your office, or maybe the local kindergarten, jump in on the Backerkit project today. We’ll be printing extras, of course, but backing the project is the only way to ensure that we set one aside for you.
And speaking of Backerkit… this project is an experiment, a stress-test of a new soup-to-nuts crowdfunding service, an alternative to Kickstarter. For several projects we’ve used Backerkit in conjunction with Kickstarter, because Backerkit makes fulfilment easier for complex projects. They’ve been around for a while, and we love working with them.
We still like working with Kickstarter, but it’s good to have an alternative—especially since Kickstarter briefly flirted with adding NFTs to their blockchain infrastructure, sending much of their community scrambling for other options. They’ve backed away from that ledge, at least for now, which makes us happy. Also, we are happy to be trying out a different service. We like having options.
Unsurprisingly, there are a couple of maxims that may apply here:
50: If it only works in exactly the way the manufacturer intended, it is defective. 30: A little trust goes a long way. The less you use, the further you’ll go.
(You, too, can cite maxims as if from memory… all you need is one of these fancy new posters on a wall where you can see it.)
I finished painting the two Chinooks a couple of weeks ago, and have been busy layering stuff behind them for assorted desktop wallpapers and for the promised 8″x10″ print. Absent those layers, this is what the Goddess of Earth, Wind, and Plumbing looks like before and then after her temper-tantrum…
The Two Chinooks, by Howard Tayler
I’d write more about this project, but I have another project to write about, so I’m gonna move on to that update next.
The project closes this Friday, October 20th, at 5pm Eastern time. I’d love for you to not miss out on it.
If you’ve never purchased a Schlock Mercenary book before, this is a great place to start. Mandatory Failure functions well as a stand-alone story, but it’s also the first book in the capstone trilogy for all of Schlock Mercenary. See, I wrote Books 18, 19, and 20 as a trilogy because that structure helped me keep things focused—no small challenge when wrapping up a story that took me twenty years to write.
Anyway, the Kickstarter… we’ve unlocked some ship coins, and a mission patch, and some desktop wallpapers. If you want any of those (especially the mission patch, which is a Kickstarter Exclusive) you should back the project now, before it closes.
Here’s the link, just in case you scrolled past it…
