Publishing has a lot gatekeepers, and it can feel like you have to wait for an invitation or acceptance to do things. But those are just feelings.
The reality is that there are so many ways to bring your dreams to life these days. Enter, the Kickstarter for Martial Hero.
When Strange Horizons e-zine had a story submissions call for Wuxia themed stories, a number of my friends and I eagerly waited to hear back. Alas, the Wuxia special edition was quite small and SH only acquired a few fiction pieces. Accordingly, we were sitting on several stories with no home. So then we started kicking around the idea of making our own anthology.
This is where my love of books shows up big. I roll up my sleeves and decide we are going to MAKE SOMETHING. Specifically, a Wuxia book. That is how Martial Hero was born. I began to reach out to author friends of mine that loved cdrama. Sunyi Dean had a Chinese gothic story. Jeannie Lin said she would contribute a story. And so on.
Then I started to think about this physical object and what it would look like. I wanted it to have french flaps. (see prior posts on making a special edition book) It was challenging to source a printer that would do a small batch.
You see, back then I thought my little passion project was exactly that–LITTLE. I only wanted to print a small quantity. Maybe 100 at the most. That’s a Print on Demand sized job. That makes it hard to get add ons to make a special edition.
This project stalled out. Ken and I were launching Ebony Gate, then Blood Jade, and then Pearl City. It was a lot. But I never forgot about Martial Hero.
Fast forward two years. I had a vision for Martial Hero that I should treat it like a charity anthology, and that we could donate the profits to the Chinatown Development center since they funded housing. But Kickstarter didn’t allow charity projects. So I wrote a check and donated my “future profits” anyway. The contributing authors all took a reduced payout on the stories as well.
And by then my indie friends were getting special editions printed overseas. Doing offset print runs in Shenzhen. I thought the minimum piece order was too high. 300 pieces. Could we even move 300 Wuxia books? I held my breath and ordered 300 copies.
JC Kang told me to order 500. He and I had been selling in person at live events like Dragonsteel Nexus and he was confident that we would find the readers.
Each step along the way I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the next phase. But the proof was all around me. Ken and I had been selling well at live events for the last two years. As in, we were selling over 1000 books a year just doing a handful of events. JC was right, so I took a leap of faith.
I ordered 500.
Then JC said, “I thought you were ordering 1000?”
Long story short, it turns out back in the late 90’s JC used to live in the SF Bay Area. He had in fact volunteered at the very organization that I had made the first donation to. He agreed to fund printing another 500 copies and selling them at his sword shop in Virginia or through his own live events to sell the rest and donate the profits to non-profit.
That still left me with 500 copies to find a home for.
So I ran a Kickstarter. I had never done a Kickstarter before. I studied it for 3 years and watched what other people did. Even so, I remember Russell Nohelty saying that it was typical to pack something like 35 physical books, and that the rest of the backers usually backed digital copies. I thought, “Sure, I could pack 35 books.” I set the goal at $1,000. I was an unknown creator and I wasn’t sure how the Kickstarter community would respond to a niche Wuxia project. We tried to get the word out, through swaps and newsletters. The day before launch, the project had 200 followers. I was cautiously optimistic.
I hit the launch button on June 9, 2026. In the time it took me to tap out an Instagram post that our KS had launched, I got a text from Rinoa Ko. We had funded in 13 minutes.
The first day was insane. Like watching a rocket launch. Four stretch goals unlocked in the first 24 hours.
I had been told that it was typical to hit a dead zone after the first 48 hours. We had 200 backers in 7 days. $10k pledged in that first week.
I had been told that the dead zone was typical with zero backers for the middle of the campaign, or even negative backers as people withdrew. We averaged 5-9 backers a day in the “dead zone” of the campaign.
48 hours before the campaign ended, I had been told there could be a surge. We had 263 backers. I thought maybe we could reach 275 and unlock the last stretch reward which was a virtual tour of JC Kang’s favorite swords.
Surely we would not need a 300 backers stretch goal?
I reached out to our artist at Saiyre Illustration. Would she license Alcove of Water to us so that I could add a vellum print for physical tier backers at 300 backers? She and I worked it out and I thought well, if we don’t hit 300, I still have a lovely piece that I could use for a short story cover later.
Friends, we ended the campaign at 322 backers. After late backers this morning, Martial Hero has 329 backers and over $16k in pledges. For my “little” project. We will be packing considerably more than the 35 copies I estimated.
This has been a really humbling exercise for me, and showed me that the things I love are not too niche, that there is audience out there, and even more than that…people are rooting for you. People are happy to show their support when you go out there and make something.
Julia Vee 