CROWD-FUND
WITHOUT A CROWD
n one of the more entrepreneurial approaches to crowd-funding, Thomas Corfield, author if the now infamous Velvet Paw of Asquith Novels, attempted to raise funds to edit his books despite having no crowd to draw upon. While most people would find this nonsensical, we ask whether it borders on brilliance. After all, technological innovation stems from those few who approach things in a manner no one else dares, either because it didn’t occur to them, or because it’s downright stupid. There have been several examples of the ludicrous blossoming into remarkable success. Cars, for example, arose from the idea of injecting horses with petrol, and libraries appeared when someone decided to put a roof on shelving. In this edition of Funder Weekly, we ask; is Thomas Corfield innovative or stupid?
Before we consider this, let’s discover what was going through his mind to even consider the notion of crowd-Funding without a crowd: very little, it would seem. The instigator behind the idea was his friend, Janice Fairwether, a features writer for InReveiw and Collumism, both imprints of News Time. According to her, Thomas considers success to be a four-letter word—and not just because of his spelling, either. Thomas, she says, has never experienced success. In fact, the closest he gets to achieving anything is his morning bowel movement, which gives him an enthusiasm she can vouch for, but doesn’t wish to talk about. Shortly after a particularly successful one, she suggested to him that crowd-funding might be a means to get some money together to edit his books and make them into something more useful than lumps for propping up wonky table legs or burning. His books were not only unreadable, she says, but so badly written that some chapters consisted of nothing but verbs. He had no money at the time, having been bankrupted by ongoing legal proceedings brought against him by the entire publishing industry, which presumably accounted for the sense of achievement he found in his morning movement. She goes on to explain that if his writing reflected his state of mind before he was forced to deal with his legal proceedings, then she could only imagine the state of it afterwards—which, she says, might account for the deep sense of meaning he found in his aforementioned movements. It might also explain his behaviour when they first met, which was eccentric in the extreme. As a result of all this, Janice was the driving force behind the project, while Thomas sat in the background and sobbed. Janice and Ian Frapp, an IT consultant from Strang, put together the proposal and launched the project in January this year.
The angle we used, Janice says, was one of sympathy for Thomas’ plight. It was not an easy task. Here was a man who couldn’t write anything worth reading, and the public’s view of him was rapidly deteriorating in response to the prosecution’s determination to portray him as a danger to readers. Which, she admits, he was, considering she’s one of the few people who have read his books, and couldn’t see in colour for a month afterwards. She suspects this is from where her determination to help arose; there was a clear and present danger to others if the books weren’t edited properly and had nothing to do with obscure German book clubs.
Considering the lack of crowd from which to draw funds, it’s imperative to know the breakdown of the project if they were hoping to have any success. There is certainly a virility that can make obscure projects successful, but it pivots on those making a commitment to fund believing they’ll gain something from it. Like the floating of a company. investors want a return. Either monetarily, in the case of the stock market, or in a product, in the case of crowd-funding. So how could Janice, Ian and Thomas hope to achieve anything when potential investors were already aware of how dreadful the existing product was? According to Janice, it’s what they didn’t do that made all the difference.
Because they had no crowd to draw upon, they had no one to promote it to. Nor did they market it for the same reason. Having no crowd meant they were forced to rely entirely on viewers browsing the currently active projects. More importantly, they used the loathing being cultivated by the media to their advantage. (cont)
I
To fund or not to fund. Is it even a question?
iMagazine / April, 3