Kickstarter

Dear Backers,

We are thrilled to announce that Plympton is joining forces with DailyLit, the oldest and largest digital distributor of daily serialized fiction. Chosen as the #1 book website by the Sunday Times in London, DailyLit has been delivering great books and series in short installments directly to readers’ inboxes since 2006. More than 800,000 readers have received over 50 million installments through DailyLit.

This announcement has special resonance for our Kickstarter backers because Albert Wenger, who is the co-founder of DailyLit along with his wife Susan Danziger, first learned of Plympton when we emailed him to ask him to support Plympton’s Kickstarter campaign. (He came in at $100.)

That email started a months-long discussion which ended with Plympton taking over the operations of DailyLit. Albert and Susan are now investors and advisors to the combined company.

The addition of DailyLit’s worldwide distribution platform gives Plympton’s original fiction wonderful exposure and we have ambitious plans for DailyLit as a platform.

We’re planning to reveal more of our DailyLit plans in March in Austin, where we are one of eight finalists in the SXSW Accelerator startup competition in the entertainment and gaming category. The launch of the new DailyLit features will be timed to coincide with the release of our new titles, as well as our launch parties in New York, Boston, and San Francisco.

Speaking of our our new titles, over the last several months, our editorial team have been busy commissioning new series for Plympton/DailyLit. Upcoming titles will include original fiction by, among others, Rachel Kadish, author of the critically-acclaimed novels From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story; Deni Bechard, whose debut novel Vandal Love won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; Julian Gough, whose second novel Jude in Ireland was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and who has twice been nominated for (and once been awarded) the BBC short story award; and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, who we had long admired for her novels The Effects of Light and Set Me Free, and who came to us through our Kickstarter campaign! 

We also remain committed as ever to discovering emerging talent. In fact, Yael will be teaching a class at Grub Street in Boston later this month in order to encourage students to try their hand at serial fiction. 

Happy reading!

Yael & Jenny (and Jacky and Justin)

So first. Thank you. Your enthusiastic support has already been translated into support for some wonderful serials projects. Some surveys for backers have been sent out. Others are coming soon! We are working our way through them.

So the news today! Plympton co-hosted a conversation about the future of fiction with Twitter and The New Yorker fiction editor at the New York Public Library (One Kickstarter backer came down all the way from Boston for it! We love our backers.) And the big announcement that came out: The first ever Twitter Fiction Festival will take place from November 28 to December 2 online. Anyone can apply to take part: published, not-published, self-published. The deadline is November 15 with announcements of the participants scheduled for November 18.

Plympton will be included in the festival, and we are actively brainstorming how. The assignment is to push narrative form on a global real-time platform. If you want to join in on our discussion, sign up here for our twitterfiction[at]plympton.com list.

And there will likely be a party on the afternoon of Saturday, December 2, in New York City. Our Kickstarter backers will get a limited slice of dedicated invites. 

Other notes. We just got back from the Frankfurt Book Fair, where we spoke at the O'Reilly's TOC conference, where we had a lot of interest in our work from other publishers around the world: Spain, Germany, Italy. Serialization is a format that resonates across borders. 

Know anyone who missed the window for our Kickstarter? We set up a form for those who missed at plympton.com/join.

More updates soon.

We'll keep this one simple. Thank you. We just ran down the clock and met 188% of our goal. It's beyond our wildest hopes.

We're putting your support to projects that we are certain will delight, entertain, and enlighten and that we hope will make you proud.

Thanks for being part of the Plympton community.

Yael & Jenny of Plympton

Dear supporters,

First off, wow. Two days to go and we're over $20,000 past our goal! 

We don't know where to begin in thanking you for your enthusiasm. But how's this for a try? On Thursday October 18th we'll be throwing our first-ever event, a conversation between Twitter and The New Yorker on the future of fiction hosted by the New York Public Library with generous sponsorship by The Brown Institute for Media Innovation. It's an invitation-only affair for writers, agents, and editors but we've set aside a limited number of reserved seats for our different levels of suporters on a first come first served basis. You can RSVP here: http://plympton.com/events/twitter-new-yorker-nypl-fiction/kickstarter-rsvp/

Here's a little more about the event:

Andrew Fitzgerald, Twitter's head of Editorial Programming and representative to the publishing industry, will give a presentation about the uses of Twitter for creative story-telling. Fitzgerald argues that Twitter is a platform ripe for experimentation and that we are only just in the early stages of learning what we can do with the 140 character tweet. He draws on examples of authors experimenting with Twitter, including Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole.

He will be joined by Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, to discuss the publication of Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan's short story Black Box via Twitter this past May.

Twitter will make a special industry announcement at the event.

The presentation and discussion will run from 3 to 5 p.m at the New York Public Library's South Court Auditorium. A reception afterwards, from 5 to 7 p.m., will be hosted at The Bar Downstairs, located across the street at 485 Fifth Avenue.

Seating capacity is limited at 177 so don't forget to RSVP. http://plympton.com/events/twitter-new-yorker-nypl-fiction/kickstarter-rsvp/

And, hey, while we're at it, let's try to make it to $55K before the clock runs down tomorrow night! Think of all the great fiction we could produce. We sure are.

Hope to meet some of you soon,
Yael & Jenny of Plympton

Thanks to you we've reached $30,000 with six days to go! We are grateful and overwhelmed, not just for your pledges but also for the messages of support, both public and private, that have been coming in all month. Your enthusiasm has put a fire under us, the kind of fire that produces great fiction. That's a kind of fire, trust us.

Let's not stop here.

$30,000 means we've reached our Kickstarter goal. It's a huge accomplishment and one we owe entirely to our supporters. But the more we earn, the more we can great fiction we can produce - more great writers, more great series, more great cover art. Every dollar between now and October 9th means more room for growth, experimentation, and creativity. More shaking things up for a better literary tomorrow. And don't forget our parties! You really don't want to miss those. Let's keep this thing going.

Yael & Jenny of Plympton