New Stretch Goals, Booster Update, and a Smidge of Tech Support!
almost 3 years ago – Sat, Jun 19, 2021 at 02:04:55 AM

Hello lovely backers!

Wow, what a DAY yesterday. Thank you all so much for your enthusiasm about our big, collector’s book. YOU ALL ARE AMAZING.

We just wanted to jump in quickly both to say THANK YOU and to give you an update about the stretch goals. From your comments,  we know that a lot of you are considering the Patron Level so we wanted to get you a glimpse ahead, especially before the early bird tier ends on Monday, June 21. Of course, it's our hope to be able to add more cool swag to this tier over the course of the campaign.

UPCOMING STRETCH GOALS

Our goal for the remaining 11 days is to alternate between creating new items for everyone and swanking out the big book for you avid collectors—so it’s just as sparkly as your decks!

In that light, our next two goals are Big Book focused. First off, instead of using the same design for our deck on the big box, Edge (the amazing artist who did the box and mini-guidebook design AND the ink suit cards) will be creating a new design 100% for scratch to be oh-so unique and beautiful.

If you’re curious, here’s some of the references we are tossing around between us. We’re going for that cool leather-bound-classics look (Don’t worry, we won’t actually use leather!).

Which leads me to our next goal (because few things make Edge happier than designing with foil in mind):

For anyone who already snagged the big book (either as an add-on or in the Patron Tier) these stretch goals won’t increase your pledge amount. Everyone getting the physical big book will just get a SWANKER one automatically.

HELPING CHANGING PLEDGES

Thank you all so much for your messages about how to add the Big Book on or how to change to the Patron Package. I added this write-up to the FAQ page, but I wanted to update you all here too. Here’s the step-by-step (courtesy of Seven’s Alleyman campaign that LoopyCat drew up for them):

1. Click on the green "Manage your pledge" button on this campaign page on the top right corner. Click on it.

2. You're taken to a page where you can change your payment details. Scroll down, at the bottom, click on "Change Your Pledge" (yes, I know it doesn't sound right, but it's the correct one, I promise).

3. You are taken to a page where you first simply reconfirm your pledge that's already highlighted (click on the "Pledge [whatever $ amount it is]" button).

4. THEN you are finally taken to the page where you can add stuff. Add your items, then click CONFIRM.

5. Another page comes up with your pledge and added items and new total, click to CONFIRM.

You can check to make sure you got things right by simply opening a new tab and going to the Literary Tarot campaign to check your pledge amount at the top of the page (and of course checking for your email confirmation from Kickstarter).

NOTE: For anyone who pledged in the first 24-hours of the campaign for an EARLY BIRD tiers, Kickstarter has informed us there is a bug that's making it difficult for you all to add things. If you are struggling with this, please drop us a message and we can shoot over a custom url they supplied us with to skip the bug!

BOOSTER PACKS

Don’t think we’ve forgotten about your Booster packs! We’re utterly blown away by all your suggestions for the Lovers Card, and Helen will be back with you all next week to lay out a concrete schedule and plan for how and when we will vote on all the pairings.

Alright, dear backers, we’ll be back next week to give everyone a wider look at the upcoming stretch goals, fulfillment options, and your boosters when Helen rejoins the world of the living on Monday (fingers crossed). In the meantime, I’m gonna try to buckle down with the artist team to make sure we have many more cards to show you next week, so I will be a wee bit slow to answer comments or messages until Helen is back to help! But we will answer any questions you have, even if our responses slow until Monday when we’re back.

Have an incredibly lovely weekend and thank you SO MUCH for your continued support and general awesomeness. Your kind and excited messages bring us all so much joy!

Cheers,

Dani, Helen, and the Brinkeroos!

Big Book, Free PDF, and Guidebook Logic
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 02:53:47 AM

Hello lovely backers!

And we’ve unlocked another stretch goal! The Big Guidebook is now unlocked!

However, before we get into talking about what all is in this new, big guidebook, we want you to know that we hear you. What drew you to this deck were the artist pairings, the literary classics, just all that literary-ness of the project as a whole. So there are two things we want to clarify.

First, because you've reminded us of what part of this project drew you in, we will be giving away a PDF of this larger, fancier, deeper guidebook to all backers getting a deck (including the $10 Digital Only tier) for free.

Second, we want to help clarify how the mini guidebook already shares the hard work of these amazing authors and why they made their pairings. The mini guidebook is not just a Rider-Waite rewrite; each entry is written by the author who made the pairing, explaining what the card means through the lens of the classic they chose.

That's right, the little guide is already sharing—with the author's own words—what the card means, and through that, why they feel the text matches the card. This is explaining the pairing through creative writing (what, of course, these authors do best).

The fact that this many amazing wordsmiths combined to donate over 1,000 hours of their time to help us raise money for charity is a beautiful, staggering sign of just how incredible and generous the community can be.

Our authors have worked incredibly hard on these entries, and we are humbled and honored that they would take so much time—rereading their classics, pouring over the card’s history—all so they could distill that magic into entries that hopefully enchant seasoned tarot readers, but also create a welcoming and inclusive route for new people to get engage with the wonder of tarot.

Please understand we're not just giving you standard meanings from a Google search. The mini guidebook is a work of love and literature just as much as the deck itself.

WHY DO A BIG GUIDEBOOK?

What the larger guidebook book shares is further information on the more granular process of getting to that point and full-page art (which you can read all about in the next section, because we are SO EXCITED ABOUT IT). It's what our advisors suggested, what the author came to us with originally, and how we worked together to pair it down to a single card and a single literary classic.

So if you want to see what pairing they made and how the author feels they match, that's already inherently part of the mini guide, as they wrote the card meanings themselves with their pairing in mind.

The larger book goes deeper into how the pairing happened, and while we can't just offer the larger guide for free as a hardcopy (it was not factored into the cost of the base deck pledge), we are more than happy to share it as a PDF to all of you so you don't feel like you're missing out on the behind-the-scenes action.

We're sure a few of you are asking why we don't just fit the extra info in the mini guide. The pairing information added to the larger guidebook is already larger than the entire card meaning that just perfectly fits in the mini guide. To fit it, we'd have to at least triple the thickness of the little book, and we still wouldn't be able to fit a full page of art in there to go with. That's just not a reasonable ask of a little guidebook, unfortunately.

The mini guide will have what you need to read your deck, while the larger book, whether in the free PDF or in the add-on hardcopy, can help you appreciate the art with larger clarity and learn more about this very fun and awesome process.

FINALLY: THE BIG GUIDEBOOK

Now that we’ve discussed the mini guidebook, let’s look at the big old collector’s edition! This is a big, beautiful book for the ultimate collector. It combines full page art (because our team of artists have been working their bums off to create these gorgeous cards and they deserve to be seen in all their sparkling detail), the meaning from the mini-guidebook, a quote from the classic that reflects the pairing, and a behind-the-scenes look at how each author and our tarot advisors worked to create the pairing.

Here’s a look at how that looks on the page:

This big old book will also include pages before each suit that explain the renaming, how-to-guide to setting up a reading (for anyone new to the world of tarot), and a glimpse of how we created the look and feel of the collection. (The mini guide also talks about the suit renaming, no worries!)

This larger guidebook will be 6x9 inches, hardback, with high-quality full color glossy pages (approx. 180 pages+). It’s available for $30 as an add-on or you can snag it in the Patron’s Tier, that just opened MOMENTS AGO, in which will get you EVERYTHING this campaign offers, including the entire F(r)iction digital back catalogue (which is, to say the least, a lot of books) and all new stretch goal items (even if they are add-ons) will be automatically added to this tier for FREE!

And because we want to thank everything you have been supportive early on, we’re going to have an Early Bird special for this tier—from now through end of day Monday (PT)—to make it easier for all of you who really want to go above and beyond to support this project!

We'll also show off some of our pages next week (which we couldn't be MORE excited about!).

Thank you all for your enthusiasm for this project and for the cause that it supports. We are very moved by your support and excited to continue unlocking new elements of this project to enhance your pledges.

We believe in storytelling for its incredible power to bring people together, to spark empathy, and to make us kinder, more inclusive humans. Thank you for being a part of that.

Cheers,

Dani, Helen, and all the Brinkeroos

P.S. Helen has been working her tail off to get some new fulfillment options for you all, but she got very ill this week (poor thing), so we’re aiming to have some good news for you next week. Thank you for your patience as we try to make this cheepier for you all!

Guidebooks Galore!
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 01:03:29 AM

Hellllooo lovely backers!

Helen here, Boss Lady #2! I’m jumping in with a wee update as Dani is running all over the shop today doing her usual day-to-day job for Brink Literacy Project as well as cramming in some podcast interviews for this project. A lot of you have raised some great questions about the guidebooks that we wanted to answer for you ASAP!

Mini Guidebook Versus Big Art Guidebook

We have not communicated as clearly as we intended about the differences between our mini guidebook versus the bigger art guidebook. Apologies for the confusion caused, and hopefully this update will help to clarify matters!

Mini Guidebook

This is a 92-page booklet with one page per card. Each of these pages will be written by the author who developed that pairing telling you what the card means (but written through the lens of the literature that the card was paired with—check out the example below!). It will also include instructions on how to use the deck, including a page per suit to explain the renaming. We can’t stress this enough: you don’t need anything else besides this mini guidebook in order to be able to use the deck for readings.

Big Art Guidebook

The Big Art Guidebook is a bigger version of this guidebook, plus it will also include additional behind-the-scenes info about how we created this deck. Each card will get two pages, spanning full page art, the same card meaning from the mini-guidebook, AND a few additional titbits that look at the process of how the pairing was chosen by each author (including the cards that each author considered and what was important to the author to bring to light when they made their pairing), plus a quote from the work of literature that the author selected that reflects that pairing. This book will also include author biographies and other background info about the deck. You don’t need this book in order to be able to use the deck for readings. This is more of a collector’s item for the ultimate tarot geek, a wonderful mashup of art book + guidebook + behind-the-creation delve. Plus it includes full page art so that you can see the cards in all their illustrative glory!

Other Information

Thank you to everyone for the AMAZING Lovers card suggestions after our most recent update. We have received SO many standout, diverse, unusual suggestions already, which have made us all the more excited to dig into them all and get back to you on this! It’s inspiring!

Finally, we're in the process of putting together a graphic so that we can update it with all the cards that we have revealed, so that you can compare and contrast them more clearly and easily. It's important to note that, as per our FAQ on our campaign page, we’re still in the process of creating the deck. As of right now, we have finished more than 20 cards and we're producing them at a rate of 20-25 cards per month, so we will continue to unveil more incredible pairings and artwork throughout the rest of the campaign as they are completed and released. As a nonprofit, we were not able to create the entire pack before the campaign, as we needed this funding to be secured in order to know that we could even afford to finish the deck, given that first and foremost this product is a fundraising tool for our nonprofit mission.

Thank you all for bearing with us as we work out the kinks in this process. This is the biggest Kickstarter our nonprofit has ever run and we cannot thank you enough for all the incredible support for our mission. We will be back with more news in the next few days!

Cheers,

Helen, Dani, and all the Brinkeroos

Big Book, Lovers Booster, & Arcana Deep Dive
almost 3 years ago – Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 03:27:17 PM

Hello lovely backers!

What a great weekend! We blew through our fifth stretch goal (woot!), swanking out all our mini guidebooks. Now this little baby is gonna sparkle:

And now we can reveal the NEXT stretch goal, something you all have been asking for since the very first day. OUR BIG GUIDEBOOK will be available as an add on the moment we unlock this bad boy...

You heard me right, we’re going to unlock a big old monstrous look at every single card in the deck (full page art, card meaning, and the pairing logic from all our celebs). When we unlock this beauty, I’ll be back to give you an in-depth look at the book, show off some pages, and give you a cool little compare-and-contrast view of the mini-guidebook verse this huge beast!

In the meantime, thank you all for your questions about the Arcana issue and F(r)iction (and for your patience as I got all these pretty graphics ready for you). Here's a look at the add-on issues of our lovely books...

ARCANA DEEP DIVE

For all of you at the Reader Tier (or who added a subscription onto your pledge!), you’ll be getting an issue of F(r)iction all about the mysteries of the Arcana. Here’s a look at the INCREDIBLE interior artwork going into that fine issue…

Arcana includes over 20 stories, essays, poems, comics, and memoirs all delving into magic and mystery. Get ready for stage magicians tapping into real magic. A quiz helping you figure out if your wife is a changeling (or just devilishly free thinking). There’s a heart wrenching memoir about a tarot reading that changed the author’s life forever. Poetry about the joy (and terror) of creating. There’s even an original comic by Rebecca Roanhorse, taking us on a mystical adventure into the cauldron of creation.

Every story, whether about tarot directly or brimming with a different magic, is art directed to pull tarot cards into the scene, using the power of each card's meaning to bring important themes forward. Here's a particular favorite of mine, from the very first story we locked for this issue (story by Chelsea Sutton, art by Suit of Parchment artist, Brad Clayton). Just guess what this story is about by these three spot illustrations...

F(R)ICTION DEEP DIVE

For those of you snagging a subscription as an add-on, you’ll see a lot of familiar faces from the tarot contributors in our pages (if you’re curious how we knew so many amazing authors, that's how!), but our real passion is to launch new careers and elevate marginalized voices. So get ready to read work from emerging talent that you don’t know about yet…huge emphasis on the "yet."

To bring each unique theme to life, each issue is reimaged anew. For example, take a gander at the different color palettes, interior design, and aesthetic direction for our last few beauties…

Just like this tarot deck, the proceeds from the sales of all our issues go to support our nonprofit mission to use storytelling to change the world.

BOOSTER PACK VOTE

Over 1,200 votes have been cast, and this vote was CLOSE (well, aside from Seven and their Death campaign. But one cannot try to fight the power of Seven—or our “Fairy God Seven” as I like to refer to them on Slack).

This means the Booster pack will include new cards for Death, Lovers, the Fool, the Moon, and (by ten whole votes) the Star.

So let’s start with Lovers!

What we need to do is brainstorm a few options (out of copyright please, so we get to use all these funds for the charity and not legal fees) that capture the heart of the Lovers card! Toss all your ideas into the comments here, and I’ll collect the most popular in a Google Poll for the next update!

For anyone wanting to add this booster pack to their collection, it’s in the add-on section for five buckeroos!

Thank you all again for being a part of this crazy project. I’m so excited to (fingers crossed) unlock that big guidebook and see the art for your boosters!

Cheers,

Dani, Helen, and the Brinkeroos

Booster Packs, Final Postcard, and the High Priestess
almost 3 years ago – Sat, Jun 12, 2021 at 04:54:39 AM

Hello lovely backers!

I’m stoked to announce we broke through yet another stretch goal, and now everyone who backed for a physical deck will ALSO get three swanky postcards for FREE! Woot!

So far, The Moon (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and The World (King Arthur) have won the first two spots, but the last card is being decided RIGHT NOW. Here's what we are selecting from...

There are a few more hours left to vote, so please do help us decide here.

BOOSTER PACK ANNOUNCED

Inspired by our tarot advisor and all around badass, Seven, we’re taking a page from their Alleyman playbook and creating a swanky little booster pack of five favorite cards from the deck with BRAND-NEW pairings and art. You can keep in the originals. You can swap them out. You can hide them in unsuspecting bookstores. It’s up to you!

But who will decide these pairings?

After reading all your comments and messages over the last 10 days, we’ve decided to pass the gauntlet entirely over to you all! Thus, we’ll be tackling this in stages.

Stage 1: Vote for which five Major Arcana cards you all would like to feature in the booster pack via this Google Form (We do hear the concerns from some backers on social media polls on twitter, so we’re shifting over to Google Forms for this booster pack vote).

Stage 2: We’ll announce the top voted cards next week, and then open it up to possible pairing options in the comments.

Stage 3: Card by card, we’ll bring the top pairing options you all suggested to the entire backer community and have you all vote on your favorite!

Stage 4: We’ll commission out the art and then keep you posted with the thumbnail concept progress, allowing the community to weigh in at each step of the creation (so you get the exact same experience that each of our celebrity authors do! Woot!).

NEW AUTHORS ANNOUNCED

Just when you thought the roster couldn’t get any swankier, guess who’s taking up the mantle of the High Priestess (could there really be a more fitting author?). Pairing reveal to come…

HAPPY THINGS FROM THE INTERWEBS

Speaking of reveals, did you check out this other stellar author joining the team?

• https://twitter.com/s_t_gibson/status/1403023339837349889
  

Alright, my friends, I’ll be back next week with which Major Arcana cards you all wanted in the Booster Pack, and we can start pairing those bad boys up! Have a great weekend, and—as always—thank you so much for being a part of this project!

Cheers,

Dani, Helen, and all the Brinkeroos!