I'm off to the races
A new book and a new Kickstarter campaign
Sorry I missed last Monday’s newsletter—it was my birthday (68) and I was delighted to get calls and emails and Facebook messages from so many friends and family that I got distracted from getting any real work done!
(not my actual cake. Marc and I shared a small chocolate lava cake to celebrate.)
When I had some free time this past winter, I looked through all my unpublished work to see if there was something that I could clean up and put out there. I found an unfinished story which began with a guy poised for a bungee jump in the jungles of Venezuela.
I realized there was a lot of back story to get out before that jump, and I started writing, and The Big Race took off. Jeffrey and Ray have been married for 25 years, but Ray has recently cheated. That forces them to look at their relationship and see if they should stay together.
They come up with the somewhat hairbrained idea to apply for The Big Race, my version of a certain race around the world for a million dollars. They figure that the stress of working together will show them if they have a future or not.
(Spoiler alert: They are smiling on the cover, and it is a romance novel…)
My editor wrote: “What a delight. I devoured this.” and my beta readers enjoyed it too. One wrote, “I love your work but, this was exciting, emotional, breathtaking and so much more.”
It was a lot of work to coordinate the landscape, the challenges, the other teams, and the emotional progress for my two heroes, but I think it paid off.
The Big Race publishes tomorrow (September 2) but you can pre-order it from Amazon now and have it on your Kindle when you wake up tomorrow!
For the rest of the month, I’ll probably be writing you about my Kickstarter for After the Party: A Jewish Teen’s Guide to Finding Your Path. A year or more ago, I heard in a podcast that for most Jewish teens, their religious education ends at the bar or bat mitzvah.
Today, we're losing more Jewish souls to voluntary assimilation than Europe lost to the Nazis in some of history's darkest chapters. I realized that this was my “Queen Esther Moment,” when I had to stand up and do something.
There’s almost nothing in the market like what I’ve written—a complete guide to Judaism from a teen’s point of view, with ways that teens and their parents can stay engaged in Jewish life.
But I wanted to do whatever I could to reach the widest audience for this book, which admittedly isn’t that large. Jews are such a small percentage of Americans, and many readers don’t have kids or grandkids to buy this book for.
I turned to Kickstarter to widen my reach. If you aren’t familiar with the company, they provide launch pads for books, music, and all kinds of physical items. The launch pad is a way to gauge interest in an item. If the launch fails that provides information to the originator. Maybe there isn’t a market for what is being offered.
If you want to back a project, you commit to paying a specific amount of money and receiving a “reward” in exchange. In my case, you can get an ebook, a print book, or an audio book. If the Kickstarter fails (if I don’t get at least $500 in pledges) you owe nothing. And I’ll simply put the book up on Amazon for sale.
Right now the project is in preview. I would love you to click on this button and see the preview I’ve set up. Click the button that reads “Notify me on launch.”
You can see it, and decide that it interests you, without any commitment. (You do need to set up a basic account with Kickstarter, which is free.) The consultant I hired to make sure I get everything correct says I need some “followers” to show social proof before I launch. And if you have any comments, you can make them in a window on the side of the screen.
As you know I love to teach, so over the next few weeks I’ll be walking through how and why I set up the Kickstarter and what I learned.
With love and gratitude,
Neil
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