It funded. My gratitude to everyone who backed, spread the word, or called me mad.

My goal on book Kickstarters is deliberately set below actual production cost. I want it to fund. I’m going to publish it anyway, and I’d rather get $500 to production cost than set a goal of the actual price and fail to fund.

I’d like to think that the US government deliberately decided to trash my campaign, but no. They trashed everyone equally. I’ve run enough Kickstarters that I know how they go. Kickstarter provides a graph of every campaign’s funding status. They all have very similar graphs. The dollar figures on the Y axis vary by book, but the shape is similar. Here’s my last campaign, Apocalypse Moi.

Every campaign funding has this shape. There’s an initial surge, a steady upward slope, and a final surge. Here’s Laserblasted.

That three-day dead spot in the middle is where the tariffs were announced. After that initial shock I did attract more backers, but other backers canceled their pledges or switched from hardcovers to ebooks. Again, I don’t blame them. But without that economic shock, the graph would have looked very different.

The good news? In absolute dollars, Laserblasted raised more than Apocalypse Moi. That’s cool. The bad news is that Laserblasted is wholly original, not a collection, and so expenses are much higher.

Laserblasted will be the first new release offered in print and ebook exclusively through my web store for a few weeks. It will trickle out to other stores.

Again, I don’t blame folks for not backing. When the plane loses pressure, put on your own air mask before helping others. This post is simply to tell others that they are not alone.