Ghostling Kickstarter

To make a long story short: I’m doing a Kickstarter to republish my first books! I’d be ever so thrilled if you’d go over to the prelaunch page and click the “Notify me on launch” tag to get an email when the project launches. You can opt-out anytime.

The full story

10 years ago, Canadian digital publisher Evernight Teen published my first novel. It was a contemporary, academy-based paranormal novel about 16-year-old Mimi, a girl who’s followed around by ghosts. Six months later, the sequel came out, and a couple of years later, the threequel. Evernight Teen are a great little publisher, always willing to give debut authors of YA a chance.

To keep business sustainable, many small digital-only presses skip the structural editing stage and take books that are already decent quality in their manuscript stage, only putting them through a copyedit and proofread. This means my books never got developmental work with an editor. In the meantime, I got picked up by major Australian publishers for my adult and children’s books. I now have 18 books under my belt! I always kept a soft spot for my first books, but as time went on, I started to wish I’d had more time to develop them, make them better, learn and grow as a writer and work with a developmental editor on them.

This year, I realised the rights had reverted to me for books 1 and 2, and book 3 was only a year away from rights reversion. I asked the publisher and they very kindly granted me back the rights to all three of my books. Then I made a big decision.

I’m going to republish.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been rereading the three books, making copious notes on things like character arc, narrative development, setting, plot holes and (the best bit) new ideas. I’ve opened up The Seventh and dived in, reconstructing the story with all my hard-won knowledge over a decade of being a published author. What I can’t get over is how enjoyable it is! It’s almost like working with another writer’s draft, building and enhancing the writing to add more depth, colour and humour, deepen the emotion and heighten the stakes. If you’ve ever written fan fiction, that’s how it feels!

It’s at the stage where I’m having trouble sleeping, the ideas are so thick and loud in my head! I wake up at night and try to use my Notes app with bleary, squinty eyes. I’m over two-thirds through this initial rewrite already! In fact, you might have seen me put the title out to my Substack Hive Mind and I collected brilliant suggestions which helped me land on the right title.

Here’s the exciting bit!

I’m going to try a Kickstarter to make my vision come to life. Kickstarter is like crowd-funding, but with rewards for the pledgers. So if you pledge money, you get something in return, like copies of the book or even discounted mentoring with me (more on this in a minute).

I have a vision for a visually stunning book with a mystical mandala on the cover and a vibrant title in silver-white: GHOSTLING by Ash Harrier (I’m using that pen name for my paranormal/magical stories, children’s and YA books).

It will have professional structural editing, proofreading, beautiful formatting and come in multiple formats. It will be an e-book. A softcover. A hardcover. Maybe even a deluxe edition and an audio book. There will be merch!

Inside, it will be dedicated to my supporters and at the back, under the Acknowledgements, it will contain a list of the people who came along on the ride, backed the book and made it happen.

What is a Kickstarter?

If you haven’t heard of Kickstarter, it’s a platform where you can pose an idea, people who love the idea can back it with various amounts of money (from $1 to much larger pledges), and it all adds up until you hopefully get the green-light and can make the project happen. In return for pledges, you earn rewards, like ebooks, merch, softcovers and add-ons such as mentoring sessions and book club visits. I’m launching my Kickstarter around July and hopefully have copies of this beautiful book in people’s hands by the end of 2024. I’ve just finished making my Kickstarter video and you can watch it here on Tiktok.

I’m SUPER excited and curious to see how this goes. If it tanks, at least I will have done something adventurous to celebrate my tenth year being a published author and my 50th year on the planet.

Get your popcorn!

Are you interested in following my journey? I’ve got a prelaunch page on Kickstarter you can follow here and watch what happens.

If you’re wondering if you can tell people about this and get them following the journey, the answer is yes. Send them this link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ghostling/ghostling-a-paranormal-novel/