Kick-Start Your Way to a Writing Career?

If I had a dollar for every time, this week, a writer has said to me, “The economy sucks! Writers needs trust funds!” I’d be a buck richer. I mean, just yesterday the idea of a trust fund seemed so, well, preposterous. I was all, Yeah, sure, trust fund—hey, can I finish your Black Label?

You know what I mean.

So you’ll understand how the following news struck me as serendipitous when I stumbled into it earlier today:

This emerging writer kick-started his own writing career by asking a bunch of strangers to fund his novel-in-progress and 570 people actually backed him to the sum of $13,942?

True story.

A new grassroots web marketing/funding platform, Kickstarter, is the key to his apparent success. Billing itself as “A New Way to Fund Ideas & Endeavors,” Kickstarter claims to be a funding platform for writers, artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers, and more. Check it out.

Do you have a project on Kickstarter? Are you funding one or many? Is it as good as a trust fun? Really? Tell us your tale.