Random administrivia: You may be wondering how the project's video sounds so good. My friend Maya Kuper of Studiomedia Recording is to credit for that one. I propped her on various "micro-blogging" services in the past, but I should give a formal mention here. We devoted an entire evening to get it right, and her patience and talent can't go unmentioned. If you have any need to record voiceovers or music in the future, and you live in Chicagoland, now you know where to go.
Focused administrivia: Fifteen days left. Getting down to the proverbial wire. It feels pretty great to hit various milestones, but in the long run, they don't mean very much if the project isn't funded in full. It's a little disingenuous to throw a party over the momentous occasion of hitting halfway if we end with only 60% and nothing comes of it. So for the next two weeks, I'm focusing entirely on getting us to the end of this project. I'll restart writing on December 06, and should be finished with my next draft of chapter 1 by December 15.

I spent three hours yesterday talking with a Kickstarter administrator, about 5 feet away from where I'm typing this. After sleeping on it and thinking quite a lot about what all was said, one major thing stuck with me: the most successful project creators bust their ass to get the word out. Quite a bit of that is through tweeting and facebooking and tumblring and complaining on my own part. But I'm not as well-known in my field as certain other people, and tweetblrbooking can only take you so far when your initial audience is, by default, substantially less.

There are many ways to bridge that gap, but probably the most effective - and certainly the most common - is through word of mouth. If I talk with the 200-odd folks who follow me on Twitter about Cadence & Slang, then I'm reaching 200 people. But if I compel a tenth of those people to write about this project on their own terms, then I'm suddenly reaching vastly more than 200. Orders of magnitude more. (And then the people reached thuswise write about it, and so on, etc., into infinity, and then suddenly I have my own Wikipedia article, a third of which is accurate.)

This means: the more people that you tell about this project, the better. This also means: this is about you just as much as it is me. When you tell others - via Twitter, through personal emails, carrier pigeon, trebuchet, paper airplanes, anything - you benefit, too, because you're increasing the likelihood that you get whatever you pledged for, and you're supporting independent publishing in a way that didn't exist just six months ago.
I think Kickstarter projects are all about this sort of support. For example, if you go to my own Kickstarter profile, you'll see the project I started, but also the ones that I've chosen to back. Because of the financial stakes involved, people don't back projects lightly. It's not like favoriting a photo on Flickr or liking a post on Facebook. Showing your volitional support for a cause, and putting your money behind it, can become a point of pride - sort of a way through which one can suss out your values and beliefs as a backer. I value ridiculous emoji translations of classic novels. You may value something different, like saving an indie music festival or a hilariously inadvisable homerolled fusion reactor. Or Cadence & Slang.
Which is all to say that quite a few very complex things can be pulled out of a mechanism that is, at its core, astonishingly simple. There are so many intangible psychological aspects to the otherwise simple premise of home-rolling your own fundraising drive that pausing to think about them can drive a project creator nuts. When do you launch? How do you market it? What gifts do you offer? How do you make it beneficial for pledgers? How intimately do you link those pledgers with your own project's narrative? What's your project's final dollar amount? How much of the project are you willing to bankroll? Do you highball or lowball the estimate? How do you determine the end date?

Thinking about all that, this is one of the scariest things that I've ever done.
Next: How I came up with the estimate, timeline, and logistics.