This blog post is being written as things happen.

There is definitely a high as we push the button to go live. I’m nervous that no one is going to help back our project.

Getting to this point has been crazy. I’ve spent numerous hours building out the project page, having people review it and making tweaks to it. I contemplated having a video versus not having one, and was still going back and forth on it as we launched the project.

I took ample advantage of the great cover design that Leo Black made for us, building it into various graphics all over our project.

Annie and I got on Facebook and promoted the launch of the Kickstarter campaign. I also went to Reddit, Google+ and even LinkedIN to try to garner some support. As the first few pledges came in, I started to feel super excited. The nerves started to disappear and the full wave of excitement was all that I could feel.

About an hour in, I felt like I was running the Reading Rainbow campaign. Each pledge of ten to fifty dollars felt like a million dollars. The goal, which seemed so far away before we began, was nearly ten percent complete.

With a little over a month to go until our Kickstarter is complete, Annie and I can’t even explain our excitement. We are hopeful that we will make our goal, and I’m preparing for the worst, as I’ve heard horror stories of campaigns fizzling out after the first week.

There is so much we want to do with our book, and while we won’t stop working on it if the Kickstarter fails, our ability to see around one hundred people with a copy in hand might not come to fruition.

Every pledge feels amazing to receive, and each social share brings our campaign in front of more people, and provides us with more opportunity for pledges, but I lost it a bit when I refreshed the screen after an hour of sitting at the same number to see that our contribution amount had doubled. How do you find the words to thank someone that decides what you are doing is worth investing in? I know, even as a writer, that I don’t have the right words to convey how appreciative I am.

Annie and I made sure to ask our family to share our posts, in hopes that their friends would see it as well. The goal of course was to get our Kickstarter in front of as many people as possible on day one.

I also made sure to submit the campaign to KickTraq and add their Day One logo to our Kickstarter as well. This was partly promotion related, but mostly just to have public tracking of how we are doing. The data delay between Kickstarter and Kicktraq is such that it isn’t that useful for first day fun. Also, I’ve always found their trending values to be overly high projections.

On Google+, I made the mistake of posting just to my followers originally. A close friend of mine asked me if he was allowed to share the posting with his own friends, so I re-posted it publicly to reduce any confusion relating to permission.

I had a few people that couldn’t financially support our Kickstarter ask how they could help, and the simple answer was to post about it where they could. With thousands of people seeing mention of Second Class Supers on Twitter, and thousands more on Facebook, we hoped that it would just be a percentage game, where one or two percent becoming supporters would push us to our goal.

I contacted our cover designer, and he wanted to post it on his DeviantArt page with a link to the Kickstarter, so I quickly sent him the cover with text to post, and he did. Check it out on his DeviantArt. It was awesome to receive support from him, and we owe him a lot for his continued help and support.

Going to bed on day one, we had stalled at eleven backers, and close to 20% of our goal raised. I still felt very hopeful as I fell asleep. Just a few more days like our first, and we’d be at our goal. I was confident that we would make it until I woke up and saw that we were still at the same level.

Now, I don’t know how much to promote our Kickstarter. I don’t want to overwhelm people, or annoy them. I don’t want to spend a bunch of money on promotion because that’d cut into the budget we are setting aside if our Kickstarter is successful.

I posted a status message on Twitter as an overview of what we were able to accomplish on the first day. I also received a message from Mike DeAngelo, the author of Tellest, someone that understood what we were trying to do, as he too Kickstarted his novel using cover art from Leo Black. He asked if we would be interested in being interviewed about our book for a section of his website. I quickly responded “yes” and I’m now waiting to talk to him again.

I also received multiple messages from people wanting us to purchase their promotion services, or do a trade of one dollar for one dollar supporting of each others projects. I expect to receive a fair number more of these messages as we go through the next month of promotion and development of our Kickstarter.

Day one officially ends at noon today, and then “day two” begins! Want to help us out? Check out our Kickstarter.