Kickstarter Conclusion

This morning we reached the end of the 30-day Kickstarter campaign for my second cookbook, The Buslife Kitchen: Recipes from the Road. We set out a month ago to raise $15,000 to print the first 2500 copied of the book I’ve been working on for the past 2.5 years. With 40 hours to go on the campaign, we crossed that threshold! The final tally is $16,016 from 191 individual backers. Thanks to all of you, this book will be printed! I truly cannot thank you enough for helping me realize this dream and turn this project into a reality. But I am going to try to express my experience and my gratitude.

To be perfectly honest with you, I hate asking for help. You can ask my wife, my friends, my family—I really try to avoid it. Because it’s vulnerable. And vulnerability is difficult. Particularly when it comes to asking people to support my work, to help my turn these past few years of cooking, shooting, and writing into a real book, it is an incredibly vulnerable place. Running a Kickstarter campaign means challenging the ever-present impostor syndrome and putting my work out into the world for judgment. Neither of these are easy tasks for me. No matter how proud I am of what I produce, the inner critic is always there to whisper in my ear that no one gives a damn and it’s all just pity (at least that’s what I hear in my lowest moments).

All of this is to say, thank you all for your support. Your contributions to the Kickstarter, your social media shares, your kind words, they all mean the world to me. As much as I sometimes like to pretend that I can do things on my own, everything is a group effort. Neither of my cookbooks would exist without your support. I am so, so fortunate to have such a wonderful community around me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.