[masraum]

Wow, this is pretty interesting and impressive.

This sci-fi / fantasy author is running a kick starter, and it's almost double the previous largest kick starter, by double (and seems on track to make the double mark).
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-four-secret-novels-by-brandon-sanderson

Previous double 20,338,000
Current amount (ends today) 40,082,000

He beat the previous record in 3 days. He was looking for $1,000,000. He's now at 40x that amount. As the amount has gone up, he's been adding stuff to the pot.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/4/22960365/brandon-sanderson-fantasy-novels-kickstarter-cosmere
An excerpt from the link above.

Prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has just broken the Kickstarter record for the most successful crowdfunded project of all time, cracking the $20,338,986 milestone set by the Pebble Time all the way back in 2015.

Sanderson’s achievement isn’t just notable for the sheer amount of money raised but for the speed. The project — for four new novels that the author wrote in secret over the course of the pandemic — was announced on Tuesday, March 1st and broke the record by early Friday morning, March 4th.

The project’s original goal was to raise $1,000,000 in 30 days; Sanderson hit that number in around 35 minutes, according to The New York Times. The campaign currently exceeds 82,000 backers and still has 27 days to raise additional contributions. The Pebble Time ended its record-setting campaign with contributions from 78,471 backers.

As with any Kickstarter — and especially high-profile projects with huge numbers of backers and scale — there’s always a risk that the products won’t materialize or that the company won’t follow through (like infamous crowdfunding disaster The Coolest Cooler, now the third most funded Kickstarter campaign). That said, Sanderson’s project feels a little less risky than most, given that the author has already written all four of the novels, in addition to the fact that books are a relatively solved problem in terms of mass production.

Sanderson’s company, Dragonsteel Entertainment, has successfully run a Kickstarter before — a $6.7 million project for leatherbound editions of The Way of Kings that ended with almost 30,000 backers, so the company does have some experience handling fulfillment for large projects like this.