The Renfrow Story

Asking for money is just always awkward, at least for me! But making this book a reality is going to take more money than I have to spend on it, so I find myself venturing into the world of Kickstarter, an online funding tool. The way Kickstarter works is you have to define your project and set a specific goal. People offer support at different levels, in exchange for something you offer, and if you reach your defined goal in defined time period, then your project gets funded. If you don’t meet your goal, then nobody is out any money and you don’t have any project funding.

So I am in the midst of learning how to setup a campaign on Kickstarter. I’m planning to launch it on April 10. I’m looking at support levels that will range from $10 on up. The $10 level will get you a copy of the ebook once it is available. The other levels add on a physical copy of the book, and at higher levels donating copies of the book to libraries in Iowa and Chicago.

The library book donation idea is one that is near and dear to my heart. I’ve worked at the public library in Grinnell since 1991. I know the power of libraries to make stories like this available. I also know library budgets are always tight. Not every book that is donated to a library will be added to the collection – it always has to meet the selection criteria of the collection development staff. But I’ll work through the Iowa Library Association and find a way to get this book to any library who wants it in their collection. And I’ll figure out a way to do the same for libraries in the Chicago area.

One thing Kickstarter highly recommends is creating a short video about your project. So the last couple of days I’ve been playing with video creation. I thought it would be fun to include little glimpses of Edith’s Grinnell, so on my lunch hour I ran around town and recorded myself at various locations. I put this first test video on the project Facebook page . The most irritating thing I discovered is that Facebook creates auto captions. I actually love that they do this. My only complaint is that the Facebook AI doesn’t know how to spell Grinnell and there isn’t an easy way (that I’ve found) to edit the captions. So I need to see if I can figure that part out. If you want to see the video, you should be able to watch it here.