In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m going to admit that Scott Roche is a friend of mine and therefore the opinions below might be somewhat jaded.
First off, I published an essay a month or two ago that riled up a lot of people. I was incensed regarding authors asking their fans to basically pony up an advance to write a book. I still see serious ethical problems with using crowd-funding sites like Indiegogo, Kickstarter, and GoFundMe for this purpose. If you haven’t done the work, why should you get paid? Especially if those same fans are then going to be expected to buy the book they already paid for?
I also said that these crowd-funding sites should be used to raise funds for editing, artwork, and layout. In other words, the story is done. The work has been done. All that’s left is to polish the product for sale.
Since I’m an author in the game who’s running his own publishing company, I know all too well what it takes to bring a book to market. If you’re going to produce a good quality book, it takes quite a chunk of change unless you rely upon the kindness of strangers. Even putting out a quality e-book requires an editor, some artistic help, and intimate know-how. True, e-books are cheaper, but I’ve heard over and over again from my own readers how much they want something for the shelf.
Scott Roche has done the work. He’s bringing out the sequel to his Y/A Sci-Fi adventure series “Ginnie Dare.” For a dumpy white guy, this is absolutely cool. Scott has a protagonist that is female (pretty damned rare these days from said dumpy white guy consortium) , and is the heroine of the story.
Because of the first volume’s popularity, and because Scott has a desire to craft stories for kids as well as adults, Scott decided Ginnie needed another tale. Thus, he’s raising funds to cover editing costs, layout, design, and etc. What Scott is not asking for? TO GET PAID. The money he’s raising is going only for the book’s production and to make sure his production partners get paid. As they should.
So if you have kids and want them to read, you need to support these kinds of efforts. There’s a lot of indie fiction out there for the major genres, but something targeted toward kids and adults is kind of rare. Scott’s only a little ways from his goal and it would be great if you could kick in a little money to the cause. If not, then help pimp him–he’s kind of cute too (no, not really).
Ginnie Dare: Blockade Runner campaign