From Auteur to Author: The Tao of Crowdfunding Goes to Print

It’s official––I’ve just signed and mailed away a contract to pen The Tao of Crowdfunding for Filmmakers for Michael Wiese Productions!

Based on my blog series of the same title, this book will be centered around practical tips that DIY filmmakers can use to lead them to the same success I had when I crowdfunded $6,300 on IndieGoGo for the award-winning short film Cerise in 2009.

Shortly after, I wrote “Read Me Up Before You (Indie)GoGo,” in which I offered some advice on what I’d learned during my three month crowdfunding campaign. Then I decided to write a few more posts, and when my first Tao of Crowdfunding blog post “The Three Ps for a Successful Film Campaign” came out, it was very well received by the indie film community, so much that IndieWIRE printed a short write-up about the post, which emphasizes personalization in one’s pitch, perks, and promotion as the key to crowdfunding success, and sites examples from projects of indie film friends who’ve raised substantial amounts of money either on IndieGoGo or Kickstarter. There’ve been two other blog posts so far, “A Practical Guide to Crowdfunder Etiquette” and “Twitter Tips for Crowdfunders,” the latter of which appeared on indie film icon Ted Hope’s IndieWIRE blog Hope for Film.

Since then, I’ve lent a hand to over a dozen IndieGoGo and Kickstarter campaigns, but I thought it was time to up the ante a bit and put all my insights into an affordable book that’d fit nicely on ever filmmakers shelf, right between other MWP books like Psychology for Screenwriters and Film Directing: Shot By Shot. So I wrote up a proposal and sent it away, and after a few email exchanges, a inspiring phone conversation with MWP Vice President Ken Lee and a revision of my table of contents to reflect that of a 200-page book––well, here we are.

And what’s really awesome is that amongst all the other books about crowdfunding that are currently in circulation, The Tao of Crowdfunding for Filmmakers would be the first one dedicated to crowdfunding for something other than start up businesses, and it would be written by a filmmaker for other filmmakers.

My book will follow the same conventions as my blog posts––it will serve up practical advice backed up by screen grabs and Taoist wisdom. It will also feature a “Trignosis” of several successful projects and why they were successful (so many of my closest crowdfunding friends on Twitter and Facebook will be hearing from me soon about that––hint, hint Phil Holbrook, Gary King, and Brendon Fogle, to name a few…)

I’ve given myself six months to research, write, rewrite and deliver my complete manuscript to Michael Wiese Productions, one of the two most well-known filmmaking book publishers out there. It’s definitely a bit of a challenge, especially with my current teaching schedule and Mating Dome editing, but crowdfunding is a hot topic that evolves extremely fast, which means I’ve got to move twice as fast.

So while it looks like I’ll be taking a brief hiatus from my own filmmaking endeavors to write The Tao of Crowdfunding for Filmmakers, which is scheduled for either a 2012 or 2013 launch, I’ll be applying my writing talent and crowdfunding insights and experiences to my first major publishing credit, one that will be certain to help many indie filmmakers like me successfully finance the road to their dreams, one dollar at a time.