Electric Velocipede Kickstarter Funded! Started First Stretch Goal!
Less than a week ago, we posted here to talk about the Kickstarter campaign we launched to fund next year’s Electric Velocipede issues. We hit our $5,000 goal with two weeks to go.
Wow.
I guess people want to see more Electric Velocipede! Once you hit your goal on Kickstarter, in a lot of ways you’re done. However, since people can cancel their pledge at any time before your campaign ends, you want to keep talking it up so that more people pledge to cover the chance that a few might drop out. Also, with so much time left, it felt wasteful to just do nothing.
A lot of Kickstarter campaigns will run stretch goals once they reach their initial funding request. That way, there’s a reason for people who want to give to keep giving (you’d hate for someone who wanted to donate to feel like they missed their chance).
With that in mind, we’ve started our first stretch goal: we want to digitize all of Electric Velocipede‘s back issues (you can see the glorious cover to issue #1 on the right) and make them available as epubs, mobi files, and PDFs so that people can read them on whatever device they want to. We’ve had a number of people asking about it, often international backers, and we think it’s a good idea. We’ll need about $2,500 to do this, and we’re already more than $1,o00 of the way there!
It will take some doing for this; we need to get electronic rights from the first thirteen/fourteen issues’ worth of authors and then we need to convert the files. Neither of which is terribly complicated, but it is time-consuming. But it will be worth the effort. We’ve got a lot of fans that have come to us recently who have never been able to read copies of older issues since we always really small print runs.
We have a bunch of different things in mind for stretch goals, but this felt the most important, given how much it will benefit our readers. If we achieve this stretch goal, anyone who’s backed at $25 or more will receive electronic copies of all back issues of Electric Velocipede. That’ll be issues #1 – #21/22. That’s almost $1 an issue! Plus, at $25 you’ll get a print copy of a back issue, and a electronic four-issue subscription starting with issue #25. You’ll get almost the entire issue run for your $25 investment. You won’t regret it.
Apex Magazine turns 40 with its September issue, featuring 
Last winter, I saw an excellent game on Kickstarter called Empires of the Void (
The cheap shots are kind of tempting — analogies, or allegories even, about the SAT as a form of gladiatorial combat. Some of my students do experience the test that way. Certainly the SAT has become a fasting ordeal, now that it’s four hours long and still allows only one break long enough for scarfing down an energy bar. But I’m not enlisting the aid of Katniss Everdeen to fight the College Board over its test. Odd as it sounds, there are some admirable, humane aspects to the SAT in its current incarnation. I’ve just started using the Neo-Roman culture of Suzanne Collins’s Panem setting to work to take the fear out of Latin-derived vocabulary words.