**UPDATED ON JUNE 19th, 2014** Hi everyone, just wanted to give a quick update since a lot of you had been asking about this which I really appreciate, and I wanted to keep you informed on my plans. I am actually planning to run this Kickstarter this fall either in August or September. I wanted to wait until I released another original song, Awakening, because I figured that would give people an even better idea as to what to expect from my original album. I’m just going to leave the rest of the original post below but I wanted to let you guys know what was going on, thanks so much for the interest in this!

(original post below)
Hi everyone! I’ve been doing a lot of planning this month to prepare for a Kickstarter for my first original album and I wanted to give you some insight as to why I’m choosing to use this platform to try and fund this album. If you guys aren’t familiar with Kickstarter, you can read a short summary of it by clicking HERE. I released my first original song “Nebulous” along with a music video about 6 months ago, and I was so grateful to read so many positive reactions to it and to hear that you wanted me to release more originals! Because I’m still a completely independent musician, I’m very cautious about where I invest my resources because I want to make sure that I can continue working as a musician for as long as I possibly can! So after I released Nebulous, I wanted to wait and see how many people liked Nebulous enough to download it before I released more original music. While I’m incredibly happy and proud of how Nebulous turned out, I still actually haven’t made back the production costs that I invested in making both the audio and video (so far I’ve sold about 700 downloads over the last 6 months). Even though I really enjoy working on original songs (I’ve already actually composed but not fully produced a few others) it would make me nervous to invest in an entire album of original music based on those sales without knowing that enough people would be interested in supporting it.

That’s why I feel that Kickstarter is a perfect way to try and fund this album because if enough people are interested to purchase my original album on Kickstarter before it’s release, then I will be thrilled to work on it and finish by August this year! I keep seeing more and more comments and receive a lot of messages from people asking me to release more originals, and I take what you guys say very seriously so hopefully enough of you are really interested in this! Since I’m just trying to cover my most basic costs for producing an album, I’ve structured my rewards in such a way that they’re almost exactly what you would end up paying for a product in my Store. However, to make this Kickstarter more special and interesting I’ve decided to include a lot of unique things that I don’t offer in my Store like personalized signed albums, limited edition signed photos, a custom USB drive loaded with my album in a lossless file format and videos, a personalized thank-you video, special edition t-shirt and more! Since I’m still managing everything myself, it’s really difficult for me to figure out an easy way to offer those types of things regularly in my Store, so I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity for me to offer those items as part of the Kickstarter in a way that I can actually manage since a lot of people already request those things!

Kickstarter Details
I’m setting my goal at $18,000 because this will cover the production costs for 12 songs including recording time/equipment, mixing/mastering, professional album photography and artwork, physical album production, and additional shipping/supply costs. If I’m fortunate enough to receive anything above and beyond the $18,000, that will all go towards making new music videos for my YouTube channel and tour costs for my upcoming shows this year. My goal with this is to eliminate the financial risk of completely funding an album by myself since I’m not sure that enough people are interested in my music.