117 Publishing Projects Showing What’s Possible on Kickstarter

Many authors come here to publish beautiful books, but we’ve also helped fund zines, literary spaces, launch parties, podcasts, digital news outlets, and so much more.

By Oriana Leckert and Margot Atwell
Kickstarter
October 26, 2020

Kickstarter’s Publishing category is home to so much more than books.
Over the last 11 years, this community’s backers have pledged over $200
million to bookstores, independent presses, art books, literary spaces,
literary festivals, radio programs, podcasts, news outlets, and, of
course, lots of books.

Here, our Publishing team has shared a list of some of their favorite
projects, which we encourage new creators to draw inspiration from in
terms of positioning, storytelling, reward ideas, community engagement,
and more. (Plus, be sure to check out our creator tips for Comics, Journalism, and Publishing creators.)

Books

•  Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls A groundbreaking book filled with stories of incredible women throughout history.
•  Attack Surface Audiobook Boingboing co-owner and open-culture activist Cory Doctorow’s independently-produced audiobook for his latest techno-thriller.
•  Sesame Street’s Autism Book Sesame Street’s first-ever crowdfunding campaign raised money to help children and families, funding a digital storybook featuring Julia, the first muppet with autism.
•  The Time Scouts Handbook A handy guidebook for intergalactic time-travelers of all ages, created by California nonprofit 826LA, which supports students and teachers across Los Angeles.
•  Derby Life A crash course in everything roller-derby penned and published by Margot Atwell, who spent six years running Kickstarter Publishing.
•  Food City A treatise on the lost history of making food in New York, completed through this campaign by the author’s daughter, in honor of her mother who passed away before she could finish the book.
•  Bed Bug: The Return of the World’s Most Reviled House Pest Science journalist Brooke Borel raised funds to do research for her book about crawly critters, which was recently published by the University of Chicago Press to much acclaim.
•  Elastic City The culmination of the 14-year Elastic City journey: a book collecting stories of 35 participatory art walks as well as 40+ artistic prompts for readers to create their own.
•  Daniel and Ismail: A picture book about a Jewish boy and a Muslim boy who bond on the soccer field—translated into English, Hebrew, and Arabic

Literary events and festivals

•  The Worst Book Launch Party Ever An incredibly, intentionally awful launch party at Brooklyn’s powerHouse Books for Josh Gondelman & Joe Berkowitz’s You Blew It, which brought backers into the party-planning process through creative rewards like choosing which terrible song(s) would be played five times in a row.
•  All Black Cats launch party at The Strand A spooky scary party for Chronicle Books’ reissue of the Kicktarter-funded All Black Cats Are Not Alike, in partnership with the ASPCA, at New York City’s venerable independent Strand Bookstore.
•  Moby Dick Marathon A three-day marathon with 150+ readers each sharing 10-minute sections of Herman Melville’s classic whale tale at New York City’s nonprofit Housing Works Bookstore.
•  She Podcasts Live A weekend-long festival of learning and camaraderie for women at all stages of their podcasting journey.
•  PULP Public School A membership-based online academy presented by a female-helmed digital outlet for news and culture dedicated to sex/uality, reproductive rights, and all things body.
•  Bronx Book Festival Two days of panels, workshops, talks, author signings, and tons of books in NYC’s Boogie Down Bronx.
•  Well-Read Black Girl Writer’s Conference and Festival The Brooklyn-based book club and online community furthered their mission to celebrate Black literature and sisterhood with a festival featuring talks, classes, panels, and lots of literary guests.
•  Montana Book Festival Building on MBF’s 15-year legacy, this campaign brought new ideas and perspectives to the annual Missoula, Montana, festival that gathers authors and book-lovers from across the West.
•  San Jordi Festival 2020 The NYC version of Barcelona’s Sant Jordi Book Fair: four days of literature in translation, all moved online at the last minute due to—well, due to the curséd year 2020.
•  Wordplay Book Party A massive two-day book party in Minneapolis, Minnesota, convening 10,000+ book lovers to celebrate literature.

Bookstores

•  Duende District Pop-Up Bookstore An intersectional shop founded by a Latinx woman, serving Washington, D.C.’s immigrant and minority communities.
•  Milkweed Books A nonprofit, independent bookstore in Minneapolis, launched by the beloved independent publisher to nurture the best literary art and build an engaged bookish community.
•  The Ripped Bodice Founded by two sisters in Los Angeles, California, this is the only bookstore in the entire United States dedicated exclusively to romance novels.
•  Coven Bookshop An English-language Bookshop and café in Paris, France, dedicated to intersectional feminism, engaged literature, and ethical hospitality.
•  Kew & Willow Led by three female former booksellers, a new bookstore in Queens, New York—only the second for the entire massive borough.
•  Twenty Stories An independent mobile bookstore operated out of a renovated vintage van showcasing and sharing 20 new titles each month all across Los Angeles.
•  Street Books A bicycle-powered mobile library in Portland, Oregon, lending books to people who live outside.
•  Poetry to the People Literary nonprofit House of SpeakEasy retrofitted a 27-foot truck into a mobile library, then took it on a 10-day, 10-stop tour from NYC to New Orleans, with events, workshops and readings all along the way.

Literary spaces

•  The Rocky Mountain Land Library A historic cattle ranch in Colorado turned into a literary “home on the range” by two veteran Tattered Cover bookstore employees.
•  The Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library A bigger and more beautiful home for the museum dedicated to Indianapolis, Indiana’s native son, opened on the 10-year anniversary of his death.
•  London Centre for Book Arts The first and only public studio space in London for artist books and art-led publishing doubled in size, making room for so many more workshops, classes, artist residencies, exhibitions, and publishing collaborations.
•  Literary Lots For two years in a row, Literary Lots brought books to life by transforming vacant lots near inner-city libraries in Cleveland, Ohio, into interactive, book filled playgrounds for children to enjoy.
•  A New Home for the Independent Publishing Resource Center After a 300% rent increase, Portland, Oregon’s nonprofit IPRC relocated to a new space to continue facilitating all manner of artistic and creative practices.
•  Little Free Library Big Book Access Campaign A major push to help the social enterprise nonprofit Little Free Library install hundreds of tiny book boxes across the US in rural and urban “book deserts.”
•  OlioHouse A sleepaway school for lifelong learners in Upstate New York, featuring weekends full of classes, seminars, and talks from humanities professors.

Indie press books

•  Don Quixote: Brooklyn-based Restless Books created a beautiful illustrated edition of Don Quixote and offered backers access to an online seminar on the book taught by Cervantes expert Ilan Stavans.
•  DOC/UNDOC
  The great City Lights brought together performance artist Guillermo
  Gómez-Peña and book artist Felicia Rice to create a lush,
  multidimensional book combining 19th-century print technology with
  21st-century digital typography.
•  Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft, and ConversationAn
  anthology of Indigenous poetry in which each poet presented new work
  alongside resonant pieces from previous generations, all lovingly
  produced by Massachusetts-based Tupelo Press.
•  Shout Your Abortion
  In 2015, Amelia Bonow and Lindy West kicked of the #ShoutYourAbortion
  movement. Three years later, PM Press brought this book to life to
  chronicle the inception and nationwide growth of the movement, telling
  beautiful and diverse abortion stories from all across the United
  States.
•  My Struggle: Book One Archipelago Books, a Brooklyn-based press focused on works in translation, published Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book One
  in 2012, when the author was still relatively unknown in the US. Two
  years later they ran this campaign to fund a beautiful hardcover edition
  befitting the sensation the series had become.
•  A Spaceship in Bronzeville
  Mouse Books, Chicago-based publisher of pocket-sized literary treats,
  brought out this Afrofuturist trilogy set in a speculative version of
  one of the country’s most iconic African American neighborhoods.
•  Summer of the CicadasCalifornia’s
  Red Hen Press continued their commitment to nurturing queer voices by
  publishing the Quill Prose Award–winning Chelsea Catherine’s Summer of the Cicadas.
•  The Chemical Wedding by Small Beer Press
  Massachusetts-based Small Beer Press made alchemical magic by bringing
  to life a weird and beautiful illustrated hardcover edition of a
  400-year-old science-fiction novel, reimagined by John Crowley and Theo
  Fadel.
•  McSweeney’s
  A sweeping campaign befitting one of the world’s most beloved
  independent publishers, designed to fund a huge wave of books and
  magazines and accompanied by a smorgasbord of more than 120 delightfully
  quirky rewards.
•  Microcosm Spring Books
  A whole season of books designed to empower and entice, from
  fermentation to sustainable mending to the yoga of bicycling, put out by
  DIY stalwarts Microcosm Publishing.
•  Enchanted Lion
  A slew of remarkable and gorgeous children’s books, all designed to be
  as thoughtful, complex, nuanced, and honest as young readers deserve.
•  Flamingo Rampant Discovery
  A year’s worth of bold and beautiful picture books, sharing values like
  racial justice, disability pride, and loving, positive LGBTQIA+
  families and communities.

Exquisite objects

•  The Bolted Book / Depero Futurista A stunning reissue of the landmark avant-garde design project: Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero’s Bolted Book—described
  as “not just a book, but a portable museum”—this replica was picture
  perfect, down to the bolt through its binding. This was a collaboration
  by Designers & Books, the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York,
  and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto in
  Italy.
•  Bibliotheca
  An oversized, elegant four-volume edition of the Bible, designed
  without its modern encyclopedic and navigational conventions, to be
  consumed as it was in ancient times: as pure literary art.
•  The Great Gatsby
  Thornwillow’s exquisite Art Deco–inspired edition of the classic novel,
  featuring handsome typography, multicolored plate illustrations,
  letterpress printing, heavy archival stock, and genuinely engraved
  covers bound by hand.
•  Reissuing Newton’s Opticks
  One of history’s great scientific works reimagined in high artistic
  form by Kronecker Wallis, from a cover that reflects the light with the
  tones Newton described, to interiors tinted by his rainbow.
•  The Tiny Type Museum
  A limited run of 100 marvelous miniature museums in custom handmade
  wooden cases filled with genuine artifacts from the history of type and
  printing.
•  The Way of KingsA beautiful leatherbound two-volume set of Sanderson’s bestselling fantasy epic The Way of Kings.
•  I Will Live Forever
  Meditations on mortality by Maëlle Doliveux, award-winning innovator of
  three-dimensional cut paper cartooning and illustration.
•  The Broadside Library
  A curated selection of artfully crafted, letterpress-printed
  broadsides, collecting titles old and new, famous and obscure,
  flamboyant and refined.
•  GREAT: Photographs of Hip-Hop 2002-2019
  Seventeen years of pictures from one of the most celebrated and
  accomplished music photographers, Mel D. Cole, filled with iconic images
  of Kanye, Rihanna, Erykah Badu, Common, Tyler, Pharrell, The Roots,
  RZA, A Tribe Called Quest, A$AP, Uzi, and more.
•  Le Pater
  A massive, glorious reprint of Alphonse Mucha’s deeply personal 1899
  masterpiece of symbolism, a retelling of the Lord’s Prayer filled with
  mystically coded illustrations, brought to life by Century Guild.
   

Indie magazines

•  BOMB Magazine
  A venerable nonprofit arts & culture publication, which has been
  publishing in-depth interviews with artists of all disciplines since
  1981.
•  Kazoo An inventive print magazine for girls ages 5–10, inspiring them to be smart, strong, fierce, and true to themselves.
•  Guernica Annual The first-annual print edition from the decade-old online literary and intellectual journal.
•  Ìrìn Journal
  A biannual periodical exploring Africa and African culture, with
  stories on food, fashion, history, art, design, film, and more.
•  The Oxford American’s Texas Music Issue
  An entire issue dedicated to the astonishing musical legacy of Texas,
  from the great Mississippi-based magazine for Southern literature and
  culture.
•  Uncanny Magazine
  A Hugo Award–winning online magazine filled with groundbreaking science
  fiction and fantasy, poetry, prose, and provocative nonfiction.
•  Fatventure Mag A print publication sharing stories from fat creators who love joyful movement but not toxic diet culture.
•  The Second Shelf Quarterly
  An online bookshelf and print magazine focused on increasing the
  visibility of women’s writing and contributions throughout history.
•  Racquet Magazine An artfully designed quarterly showcasing the best in-depth writing on modern tennis culture, from art to fashion to history.
•  Anxy Magazine
  A biannual design-forward publication that illuminates inner worlds,
  personal struggles, and foolish fears, through interviews, essays,
  reported features, and visual stories.
•  Slant’d
  An annual magazine packed with personal narratives about the Asian
  American experience, as well as an online and IRL community with
  gatherings, parties, and more.
   

Zines

•  True Trans Bike Rebel: Taking the Lane #15 A feminist bicycle zine about riding across—or beyond—the gender binary.
•  Solidarity Onboarding A zine collecting friendly pro-worker mementos and quotes, designed to help tech employees unionize their workplaces.
•  Street Flash Zine A photo series focused on climate activism and social justice issues in New York City and beyond.
•  Pinko A biannual publication dedicated to discussions of capitalist sexual relations from a queer communist perspective.
   

Subscription boxes

•  All We Have Is Each Other
  A monthly box filled with books and t-shirts advancing radical ideas
  like mutual aid and solidarity from PM Press, aiming to make the dark
  days of 2020 a little bit brighter.
•  Margins Box
  A monthly box featuring books by Black, Indigenous, and other
  young-adult authors of color alongside handcrafted items from BIPOC
  creators that relate to the books’ themes.
•  Snail Mail Party A USPS-venerating subscription club, with packages full of postcards, zines, and other delightful surprises.
•  The Alignist
  One novel about pressing international issues delivered each month,
  along with relevant ethically sourced artisanal goods, recipes,
  illustrations, and author Q&As.
   

Digital media

•  Tortoise
  Kickstarter’s most-funded journalism project to date was the launch of a
  new digital media endeavor in the UK: a community-supported slow-news
  organization helmed by executives from BBC News, the Wall Street Journal, and Sony Music.
•  Bring Gothamist Back The relaunch of NYC’s beloved local digital media outlet, reborn in partnership with public radio institution WNYC.
•  Brick House
  A daring experiment in reader-supported digital media, with nine
  publications joining forces and sharing resources to create an
  independent journalistic alliance.
•  Block Club Chicago
  A nonprofit news site dedicated to reliable, nonpartisan, and essential
  coverage of Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods, born from the ashes of DNA
  Chicago.
•  Brooklyn Deep
  Civic storytelling and investigative journalism from Central Brooklyn,
  one of the largest historically Black urban centers in the United
  States.
•  Feministing Times Ten
  A 10th birthday present for the pioneering feminist website, including a
  site relaunch, a full redesign, and sustainable infrastructure to serve
  the outlet’s vibrant online community.
•  Aurore A curated community and online home for true erotic stories, written by, for, and centering feminist and queer voices.
•  Media Diversified A nonprofit digital media outlet working to foreground the voices of people of color and diversify the media narrative.
   

Radio and podcasts

•  Radiotopia: A Storytelling Revolution
  A new kind of public radio filled with adored shows, which raised so
  much more than the original goal that the creators also made a pilot
  development fund for new producers and hosts.
•  Black Diplomats
  A podcast and video series about foreign affairs from a Black
  perspective, featuring interviews with people of color who specialize in
  global issues.
•  The View from Somewhere
  A deeply researched podcast about the myth of “objectivity” in
  journalism, and the journalists throughout history, often from
  marginalized communities, who challenged and changed the field for the
  better.
•  Bellwether
  A podcast of speculative journalism—true stories of the world as it is
  through the lens of what it might become—and a campaign run in a wild
  way: rigged so that no matter how much money it raised, the project
  would be cancelled if it didn’t reach 1,000 backers.
•  Zaatari Radio
  A radio station in Jordan’s Zaatari Refugee Camp designed to empower
  its residents to navigate challenging circumstances, created in
  partnership with humanitarian volunteers from the UK.
•  Country Queers
  Stories of joy, struggle, resilience, creativity, isolation, fear,
  love, and community, told through interviews with rural, small-town, and
  country LGBTQIA+ folks across the U.S.
•  Animal Meditations
  A collection of guided meditations that bring the listener into the
  minds of a variety of animals, from a sloth to an egret to an octopus to
  a rattlesnake.
   

Bookish swag

•  Botanica Tarot Deck
  A gorgeously painted, floral-inspired tarot deck that explores the
  biological roots of the Arcana through the lore and mythology of the
  plant kingdom.
•  Literary Art on Letterpress
  Classic texts reinterpreted as stunning black-and-white letterpress
  posters designed by independent creative studio Obvious State.
•  Custom Litographs
  Elegant and chic infinity scarves printed with custom quotes—from
  classics to contemporary literature, including prose written by campaign
  backers themselves.
•  Tak: A Beautiful Game
  Bestselling fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss teamed up with James Ernest
  and Cheapass Games to create the abstract strategy game from the wildly
  popular novel The Wise Man’s Fear.
   

Literary documentaries

•  We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
  The first and only documentary about Joan Didion, told by her friends,
  family, colleagues, and critics—and through her own work.
•  Unstuck in Time
  A definitive meta-documentary about the great Kurt Vonnegut, filmed in
  snippets from 1982 until the author’s death in 2007, by his close friend
  Robert Weide.
•  The Maya Angelou Documentary
  The first documentary of Dr. Angelou, created by friends from her inner
  circle, reflecting on the ways history, culture, and the arts shaped
  her life—and how she, in turn, helped shape the world.
•  Worlds of Ursula K. LeGuin A feature-length documentary exploring the remarkable life and legacy of the groundbreaking science-fiction and fantasy author.
   

Anthologies

•  Women Destroy Science FictionA tongue-in-cheek anthology of science-fiction stories written and edited by women and produced by Lightspeed Magazine.
•  The Wind Is Spirit: A Bio/Anthology
  A celebration of Audre Lorde told in Griot style through living color
  and vivid photography, with personal essays, stories, poems,
  recollections, and memoirs from a diverse group of contributors.
•  Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong
  A collaboration between Coffee House Press and Walker Art Center that
  brought together more than a dozen writers to talk about how taste
  develops, why we love or hate something, what art is, and why we all
  love cat videos on the internet.
•  A Larger Reality: Speculative Fiction from the Bicultural Margins An anthology produced by the Mexicanx Initiative and Fireside featuring 14 stories by Mexicanx artists, writers, filmmakers, culture shapers, and fans.
•  Anchored in Deep Water A seven-book fisherpoet anthology filled with original poetry, prose, and songs of commercial fishermen and women.
   

Unclassifiably literary

•  Out of Eden
  Pulitzer prize–winning journalist Paul Salopek’s dispatches from a
  10-year “slow journalism” journey, retracing the steps humans took from
  the beginning of time and telling stories along the way
•  Relaunch of Reading Rainbow
  A tremendously successful campaign to design a tablet app based on
  LeVar Burton’s beloved children’s show, filled with books and video
  field trips, with thousands donated to disadvantaged classrooms across
  the country.
•  Bellingcat
  An online platform bringing together citizen investigative journalists
  to use open-source information to report on critical global stories.
•  LAAB
  Cartoonist Ron Wimberly’s full-color broadside newspaper is a
  laboratory for audacious thinkers, writers, artists, musicians,
  theorists, cartoonists, and genre-defiers.
•  Stay Gold A negative-space sculptural installation of the words STAY GOLD in Miami, Florida, inspired by Robert Frost’s poem.
   

Archival projects and reprints

•  Save Their Stories
  An incredible undertaking to catalog, preserve, and make available
  online—for the first time ever—more than 200 handwritten diaries from
  the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collection.
•  The Studs Terkel Archive
  Digitizing more than 1,000 of Pulitzer Prize–winning radio host Studs
  Terkel’s radio programs to preserve his legacy and make his work free
  and publicly available.
•  Preserve 30,000 Historic New Orleans Newspapers A heroic effort to digitize 42 years of Daily Picayune and Times-Picayune newspapers from the turn of the 20th century, using a cutting-edge high-speed scanner designed for large delicate documents.
•  Reading Zimbabwe
  An interactive digital library committed to the discovery and
  celebration of Zimbabwean literature, as well as a physical People’s
  Library in Harare.
•  Reprinting Ai’s Killing Floor
  Tavern Books’ 40th-anniversary edition of the groundbreaking poetry
  collection by Ai, master of the dramatic monologue and patron saint of
  everyday tragedy.
   

Poetry

•  The Lost Poems of Pablo Neruda
  A collection of previously undiscovered poems by the great Pablo
  Neruda, brought to life in a splendid edition filled with both English
  and Spanish text, rare archival photos, facsimiles of the lost poems,
  and more, by Copper Canyon Press.
•  Translating Feminisms
  A set of chapbooks showcasing poetry, essays, and intimate
  collaborations between female writers across Asia, from Vietnam to Nepal
  to South India.
•  One River, A Thousand Voices
  A beautiful accordion artist’s book made of one single long sheet of
  paper by SVC Letterpress, displaying Washington State Poet Laureate
  Claudia Castro Luna’s poem honoring the Columbia River and the Native
  populations who have long called its banks home.
•  Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic
  A 250-page anthology of poetry and photographs arising from the
  pandemic, produced by Tupelo Press and featuring unique 12-page folios
  from 16 essential poets.
   

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