Fully Funded
Less than 24 hours after launching a Kickstarter, Teal Blake reached his funding goal for his first children’s book.
Painter Teal Blake had intended on going live with his first Kickstarter campaign at around 10 a.m. on April 11, but nervous energy got the best of him. “I was a wreck in the days and weeks leading up to it going live, so instead of waiting until 10 a.m. I posted it at about 2:30 that morning,” he says.
“I just wasn’t sure how it was going to be received.”
By breakfast on that first day, he had $5,000 in crowd-funded pledges. “It was a huge weight off my shoulders,” he adds. “At that point I thought four or five days would really bring it all together.” In reality it was about four or five hours. By dinner the project, with a goal of $15,000, was fully funded…and then some. (At press time it was at $31,000.)
The project more than 200 financial backers were supporting was Blake’s first children’s book,
J is for Jackalope, a book that
the artist has written and also illustrated. The story follows the little cowboy Samuel C.B., who ropes and later befriends a legendary horse-sized jackalope. Like many before him, Blake was told the story of the fabled jackalope—a jackrabbit with antelope horns—from his father, the painter Buckeye Blake. “My father always had a jackalope head and then when my boy saw it of course he points at it and wants to know what it is,” Blake says. “So I would just make up these stories about the jackalope, but before long he wanted to see pictures of the jackalope.”
When it came time to assemble the book, the artist realized he had most of the materials ready to go. His initial plan was to do a small run of books and then give them to his cowboy buddies who had children, but interest grew until a wider release felt more appropriate. By doing a crowdfunded Kickstarter campaign to fund the book, it allowed Blake to self-publish the book, have more freedom over its release and distribution, and allowed him to offer perks for supporters, including custom editions of the book, ledger paintings, watercolors and even an oil painting.
Now that the project is fully funded, Blake hopes to release the book to a wider audience, including to fans who missed contributing to the original Kickstarter campaign. For more information about Blake and J is for Jackalope, be sure to visit www.tealblake.com.