I don’t usually plug people’s crowdsourcing projects but I might have to change that. Crowdsourcing platforms like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter are amazing tools creators can use to market and get the support they need to get their books, games and products off the ground while involving you, the awesome readers, players and users. And there are so many great projects being put out there, I would be remiss to not talk about about them.
Today I want to talk about Innsmouth Free Press and their crowdsourcing campaign on IndieGoGo for Sword and Mythos. I really like Innsmouth Free Press. A lot. They’re a micropress out of Canada that puts out reviews, a magazine and releases anthologies. I have both Historical Lovecraft (you can read my review here) and Future Lovecraft and if you are into weird fiction at all, you really should pick them up. Silvia Moreno-Garcia and editors such as Paula Stiles and Orrin Grey know how to pick them.
One of the reasons I love Innsmouth Free Press is because of their willingness to acknowledge Lovecraft’s issues (i.e. his pretty obvious racism) and charge forward with the genre, encouraging stories that flip race, sex, gender, class and everything on their head, inspired by the Mythos while rejecting the ugliness and cruelty of -isms from yesterday and today. It is possible to write about Cthulhu and not have mongrel cultists. Innsmouth knows it. We know it. They show it with the stunning, twisting and troublesome fiction they put in their anthologies.
And now they have an IndieGoGo! As if kicking the issues in the Weird genre wasn’t hard enough, they’re striving to expose and cut it out of Sword and Sorcery too. Lovecraft and Howard were good friends as some of you may know, and their fiction and worlds intertwine in many a story. The IndieGoGo is for Sword and Mythos, and anthology meant to bring these two iconic genres together. Innsmouth Free Press wants to be able to pay the contributing writers professional rates for their stories and put out more anthologies, novellas and other works of fiction out throughout the year (one of the future titles is called ‘Jazz Age Cthulhu.’ Yes. Please). If anyone is going to pull it off, it’s Innsmouth Free Press.
So get thee to IndieGoGo and support them! $5 gets you a postcard from Canada and $10 gets you a DRM-Free ebook of Sword and Mythos when it comes out. There are lots of other reward tiers that will allow you to get access to some of the titles I mentioned above. Silvia Moreno-Garcia has wrote about Sword and Mythos and the fun genre Sword and Planet (think Pirates of Dark Water. Now never unthink it) to get you even more excited about this new ground that is just waiting for Cthulhu to stomp all over?
Who would win in a fight? Conan or Cthulhu?
I don’t know…
