The Silver Cord, by Kevin Kelly and others

My friend Kevin Kelly is senior maverick at Wired, editor of Cool Tools, co-founder of Quantified Self, and author of many books. He has been working with some colleagues for the last 8 years on a graphic novel called The Silver Cord. He sent me a hard copy, and it’s terrific. It’s available free to read online, and you can also buy it as a full-color paperback. He has also launched a kickstarter for the sequel. He says:

I launched a Kickstarter fund today.

At the same time today I released a 210-graphic novel about angels and robots I have been working on for 8 years. You can read it for free on the web. I call it a techno-epic. Or speculative theology. It’s visual, cinematic, and presents a world I promise you have not seen.

But I am also joining the Kickstarter joyride partly to explore what audience-funding, user-financed, hive-mind VC’ing is all about. I suggested four years ago that 1,000 true fans might be able to support an artist with direct, unmediated pre-funding, but I would have never predicted that tens of thousands of creators would be successful a few years later using this model.

I am convinced that crowd-sourced pre-funding is a BIG DEAL, and may prove to be a disruptive force in the networked world.

Anyway my project, The Silver Cord book, is my first try at fiction. My co-authors and I are giving away the first book, hoping that those who enjoy it will want to fund the concluding book. First part of the story is free; the ending will cost. We’ll see how well that works.

The Silver Cord on Kickstarter