Hi, everyone! We have just six days to go in our online fundraiser for Gareth Porter’s very important planned book Manufactured Crisis: The Secret History of the Iranian Nuclear Scare. We’ve just topped getting pledges for 2/3 of the $10,000 we need for this.
Can you do anything to help us get the remaining (as of now) $3,303?
As I explained on the main Kickstarter fundraising page there, we need the money because Gareth needs to take 4-5 months out from his (excellent!) daily journalism in order to write the book– and yes, he has bills he needs to continue paying during that time. My publishing house, Just World Books, is run on a shoestring. We simply can’t afford to pay the kind of “advance” that big publishers dole out (or, used to– not so much these days, anyway.) And we don’t have the time it would take to get foundation funding… even if there were any foundations prepared to invest in this hard-hitting, myth-smashing work of Gareth’s.
Our BIG thanks to all JWN readers who’ve contributed so far! (Including those of you who’ve recently increased your pledges at the site, which was very much appreciated.)
If any of you have been sitting on the fence, or saying– “Oh, that looks worthwhile. I must get around to sending them a pledge sometime… “– Well, the time is now. Please do it!
If we don’t reach our $10,000 goal by 8 am EST on December 12, then according to the rules that Kickstarter uses, we don’t get ANYTHING at all. That is, we don’t get any of the $6,697 pledged so far– and we don’t even get the contact details for the 103 fabulous people who’ve made those pledges. So we’d be starting, essentially, back at Square One in our quest for funding for this project, which would set it back by many months.
Our current plan is to have Gareth start his work on the book about now and spend 4-5 months writing it. (He HAS so much material that he’s amassed for it. Now, he just needs to pull it all together into book chapters.) Then, JWB will do our usual excellent and speedy edit and layout on the manuscript… and we’d hope to have the final PDF’s ready by next September; printed copies by October.
We are so ready to get this project rolling.
Please do everything you can to urge your friends and colleagues to chip in, too. Here is a short URL you can use for the fundraising page on Twitter, Facebook, listservs, etc: http://bit.ly/ManufCrisis. And here is the PDF of a flier (leaflet) that you can print out at home and hand out to family, friends, or colleagues.
You can tell them about the super rewards that are offered there at various levels of support. (Hey, no-one has yet signed up for the “Dinner for you and three friends with Gareth, where he’ll talk about his book” option yet!) But in a very real sense, the biggest reward is knowing that by getting this vitally needed project on the road, you’ll be helping to prevent the warmongers and disinformation experts from jerking us all into yet another catastrophic– but oh, so easily avoidable– war.
Thanks for all the help you can give us in getting this fundraiser successfully over the finish line.