（日本語は下にあります）

Today, we’re excited to announce a partnership with Kodansha, one of Japan’s leading publishers, to support creators in Japan across all categories.

Connecting creators in Japan with the rest of the world

Through the partnership, Kickstarter will provide Kodansha’s team with the tools, knowledge, and resources to help creators in Japan bring projects to life on our global platform. With these insights and tools in hand, Kodansha will advise creators on how to effectively tell their stories and find supportive audiences on Kickstarter.

It’s a great time to love games. We are stoked-and-a-half to report that backers have now pledged more than $1 BILLION to Games projects on Kickstarter. And we’re just getting started!

Since launching in 2009, the Games category has grown steadily, helping titles like The Banner Saga, Exploding Kittens, Darkest Dungeon, Kingdom Death, Shovel Knight, and many more get the funding they needed.

Backers like you have funded nearly 17,000 Games projects, bringing to life the beautiful, bold, and unexpected visions of creators from across the globe. We’ve seen projects that made us laugh, cry, shoot lasers at bad guys, and think about games in totally new ways.

And as we’ve grown, we’ve continued to look for ways to support our creator community and get our backers the latest info. Whether it’s through our weekly emails, Projects We Love, or our creator-focused podcast, we want to give our more than 3.2 million Games backers the latest from the bleeding edge of independent games projects.

With $1 billion in pledges under our belt, we can’t wait to continue to grow Kickstarter Games and bring you more of the irresistible projects you never knew you needed.

On May 11, join a daylong conversation about fostering a more inclusive, fair, and vibrant publishing landscape

The world of publishing has changed dramatically in the last decade. Amazon has become a dominant channel for book sales (and almost everything else). Viral tweets can lead to bestsellers. Local journalism outlets like Gothamist have shuttered—and been reborn. Writers are struggling more now than ever before. But in other ways, it hasn’t: Publishing still isn’t representative of the world we live in, which leaves important stories untold.

And yet, passionate independent writers and publishers have developed innovative ways to connect with audiences and create economic opportunities in an uncertain time. While the conversation about the future of writers and publishers is a complicated one, it’s one I’m hopeful about nonetheless.

On May 11, 2019, I invite you to join this conversation with The Next Page: Creating the Future of Publishing, a digital conference hosted by Kickstarter. From 9 am to 5 pm ET, we’ll host discussions with some of the leading thinkers in the current magazine, book, web, and comic publishing landscape from the Kickstarter community and beyond.

Together, we’ll contemplate the big questions—around topics like the intersection of publishing and tech, how to bring about a dramatically more diverse publishing industry, creating economic sustainability, and cultivating strong communities—and begin to consider what the next decade of publishing could look like. I’m hopeful that these conversations will help us begin to build a more inclusive, fair, and vibrant publishing landscape.

Register to attend for free and preview the conference agenda.

To the Kickstarter team, creators, backers, and friends: 

I’ve decided to step away from the CEO position at Kickstarter to focus on high-level and long-term company needs in my role as chairman of the board. 

We’re just about a month shy of Kickstarter’s 10th birthday. Ten years ago, I took a leap with Yancey and Charles to create a platform with a simple mission: bring people together to help bring creative projects to life. And in doing so, Kickstarter came to life in ways I never could have imagined. In just ten years, we have accomplished so much together, with over $4.2 billion pledged to projects and nearly 160,000 projects from all over the world being successfully funded. 

When I returned as CEO in 2017, I initially intended to spend about six months working to set up a long-term foundation to ensure Kickstarter remained aligned with its mission, and to set the next leader up for success. Those months quickly became two years dedicated to developing a better way to deliver on the core aspects of our service through a robust operating system, a strong product, and the team we have assembled at Kickstarter today. 

I feel confident in what we’ve been able to accomplish, and even more confident in the next generation of leaders. And as a part of this decision, I’m happy to announce that Aziz Hasan, the head of Kickstarter’s Design & Product teams, will be stepping into the role of running day-to-day operations as interim CEO—with the Kickstarter PBC board working with Aziz over the next weeks and months to make this role permanent. 

Aziz is an experienced leader who joined the Kickstarter team early last year. He is deeply committed to the work, mission, and staff, and I cannot imagine Kickstarter in better hands. 

It’s been a true honor to serve as CEO for the first five years of this company and again for the last two. As we’ve been saying around here ahead of our milestone birthday, 10 is just the beginning. And I cannot wait to see what the next 10 years of Kickstarter will bring.

Like everybody else who loves music and…[squints at list]...huge untamed crowds and walking through piles of unsorted recycling, we’re off to SXSW Music!

For the next week, my cohort Russell Elliot (of Kickstarter’s People Team, but also a brilliantly successful Kickstarter Music creator and oh my god have you heard this song??) and yours truly will be kicking dust all over South Congress, sneaking into your shows, eating all the tacos, trying on all the most psychedelic vintage, getting selfies with our heroes, and most importantly—

—seeing you, your band, your friends’ bands, and your friends’ band’s bands, and talking to you about music.

We wanna have all of the good, bad, inevitably weird ‘I didn’t think people were supposed to talk about that’ kinds of conversations, whether it’s gender disparity in festival lineups, adding morality clauses to label contracts, how to book shows if your town doesn’t have any shows, what the scene is like (or what you want it to be like) where you’re from, being the queer weirdo outlier in a macho genre, being a better ally in this industry, conquering stage fright and performance anxiety, and, of course, how to run a successful Kickstarter Music campaign.

Earlier this year, we announced an open call for the fourth edition of our Creators-in-Residence program. We received hundreds of applications from amazing, independent creative people, and today we’re thrilled to announce our eleven residents for the spring 2019 season.

From March through May, these residents will make use of the space and resources at Kickstarter’s Brooklyn HQ to plan, launch, and fulfill campaigns across categories. Learn a bit more about them below, and stay tuned for their projects.

Join us in welcoming eleven talented creators into our Brooklyn HQ for the next three months

Versión en español a continuación.

Kickstarter is once again teaming up with the Guanajuato International Film Festival to support emerging Mexican filmmakers through workshops, training, and Kickstarter campaigns.

For the third year in a row, Kickstarter is teaming up with the Guanajuato International Film Festival (GIFF) to support emerging Mexican filmmakers. Twelve teams of students from all across Mexico, selected by GIFF, have launched Kickstarter projects to fund the production of short narrative and documentary films which will premiere at the festival in July.

GIFF is the only film festival in Mexico to offer an educational program for students. Each year, students from universities across the country are chosen to take part in workshops and training to help bring their film projects to life.

The program is divided into two initiatives: Rally Universitario (University Rally), which challenges students to produce a narrative short in just 48 hours, and Identidad y Pertenencia (Identity and Belonging), which features six short documentaries that explore the regional identity and contemporary challenges of life in Guanajuato, Mexico.

Keep reading to learn more about the 12 projects that will premiere at the 22nd annual Guanajuato International Film Festival. You can support them all on Kickstarter now.

Films include Boy Howdy! The Story of Creem Magazine, Strange Negotiations: The David Bazan Documentary, and festival favorite Knock Down the House.

Another amazing lineup of Kickstarter creators will bring their documentaries, narrative features, and shorts to Austin, TX, for the SXSW Film Festival (March 8–16, 2019).

“The SXSW Film Festival is known for welcoming fiercely independent, smart, fun, and often irreverent filmmaking. It's no surprise that Kickstarter creators often make up a significant portion of the festival's lineup,” says Kickstarter Film’s Liz Cook Mowe.

Kickstarter’s Film team will also be at SXSW this March cheering on Kickstarter-funded filmmakers at their films’ world premieres (Follow @Kickstarter on Instagram for live updates), enjoying too many breakfast tacos, and meeting with filmmakers interested in running campaigns. 

Will you be at SXSW too? Get in touch with our Film team at film@kickstarter.com.