When I first saw the headlines https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/books/brandon-sanderson-kickstarter.html, the first thing I did was to check out Kickstarters in the various categories applicable to me. Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter still appears to be the record-holder for musical projects. Books of poetry don't seem to do very well, but some non-fiction projects have been highly successful.
I looked up Brandon Sanderson's website, and liked the extract from the first book. He said he was influenced by "The Princess Bride," and I have to agree with him about the frustrating passivity of the heroine of that story. The extract from "Tress" reminded me of Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching novels, and I decided that I would purchase it as soon as it was available in print format in regular stores. I am currently going back and forth between nonfiction books from the library and my mother's collection of Bengali language books.
And then I read the article in The Mary Sue and some of the attacks on Twitter. I was angry that the Black female author Stacey Jay was harassed and doxxed in 2015 for setting up a Kickstarter worth $10 500 for her YA novel, which she was forced to take down. I think it's legitimate to not want to give money to an active donor of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, with its history of racism and homophobia - Saladin Ahmed and G. Willow Wilson are outspoken left/liberal practitioners of Islam, not conservatives.
It's easy to put down Sanderson's success all down to privilege, but it's what you do with your privilege that counts. Amanda Palmer undoubtedly benefited hugely from her partnership with Neil Gaiman, but not every woman married to a successful man manages to be financially successful in her own ventures.
And do we really want to go down the route of purity-policing? I'm still pissed off at the Nielsen Haydens over Racefail, which is why for the longest time I boycotted Tor. Jaymee Goh had no problem starting the process of rehabilitating the Nielsen Haydens, while simultaneously attacking white bellydancers and yoga practitioners and telling a white male author that he should suppress a book that he had worked hard at just to make her feel good. I'm glad Nora K. Jemisin got her McArthur genius grant, and I'm glad at how genre fiction in particular and popular culture in general has exploded in diversity since Racefail. But I'm not happy at the way the Nielsen Haydens, Will Shetterly, and Elizabeth Bear refuse to apologize to Spiralsheep, Willow, and the ones that I don't know about simply because they haven't written manuscripts that would make Tor look good. And I'm not happy at the way in which WOC and QTIPOC online activists will tear white women who offend them to shreds while playing nice with white colleagues and gatekeepers in publishing, academia, and the non-profit sector.
I'm also annoyed at the pearl-clutching by some people over a single author making so much money. He didn't get that money from the government, individual readers chose to pay him, and he has a lot of individual readers. Would all writers be able to duplicate his success? No, because he's been in front of readers through traditional publishing for years - he was commissioned to finish Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time series - and he was able to support himself with a job teaching creative writing at Brigham Young University. It comes down to the time/energy/money triangle - he had the time, energy, and money to cultivate his fanbase, and the money to set up a company to deal with a lot of the tasks of self-publishing. And he won't necessarily be making that much money, because he has to devote a significant portion of the Kickstarter revenues on actually fulfilling his orders.
So, like so much of daily life in the Western world, this is actually a good argument for Universal Basic Income. If authors didn't have to worry about paying the bills, they could take on part-time and volunteering work - you still need to get out into the world to get inspiration - and focus on writing, publishing, and building a following. For me, disability benefits have acted liked UBI, although for the longest time I found it hard to live within my means because it was only recently that the rates increased a little and I moved in with my mother, which improved my standard of living. I'm hoping that disability rates will improve further and there will be enough of political willpower to implement UBI in Canada. Most authors will never make 21 million dollars on Kickstarter in 3 days, but they would be happier with a lot less than that, unlike billionaires who never seem to be satisfied with just one yacht.