Publishing a book through crowdfunding 👩‍🎤 Elena Favilli, Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls
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Episode at a glance:
GUEST: Elena Favilli
COMMUNITY: Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls
HOSTS: Bailey Richardson & Maggie Zhang
“It's important that people realize that extraordinary women are not just the heroes of the past, but they are around us every day today. They are already part of our communities. We just need to look a little deeper and more carefully, but they are already there.” - Elena Favilli
Show Notes
Elena Favilli found herself at the center of an all too familiar story of women in the startup world. She was in Silicon Valley working on her company Timbuktu and finding it hard to make friends with investors, get support, and raise money as a woman.
Elenva Favilli reading the stories of women from around the world in Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.
From that pain point, she made it her mission to contribute in her life to gender equality. Elena began researching gender representation in children's books to start. After observing her favorite children's stories, she noticed they all centered around male characters. She asked the bold question: what if this was different?
Elena started a newsletter called “Who Framed Cinderella: Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls,” where she promised each week to showcase one story of an amazing woman like Maria Sibylla Merian, a 1700s scientist and artist who discovered the metamorphosis of butterflies (before that people thought butterflies appeared out of mud like magic!). She sent out the first newsletter to 25 friends and received eager responses for more stories like Maria’s. So each week she continued to tell stories of historical figures and contemporaries until she reached 4,000 subscribers. With an audience behind her, she launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for a book that quickly exceeded her $400,000 goal climbing to a total of $1.2 million in funding, breaking a record as the most crowdfunded campaign in literary history.
An inside look of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and the story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Rebel Girls shifts a narrative by spotlighting real women as the heroes and showing kids that women can do amazing things just like men. Elena published Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls with the help of 60 women illustrators around the world and a sequel with crowdsourced stories from dedicated readers. We talked with Elena about how she used crowdfunding to gauge interest and how she has collected contributions from readers, telling the story with her audience.
While you’re listening, keep an ear out for three of our favorite insights from Elena:
Test a product with your community.
Leading up to the first Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls book, Elena used a simple. newsletter to see if people were even interested in hearing fairytale-like stories about women in history and the present day. When the list reached 4,000 subscribers, she knew she had momentum and launched a Kickstarter campaign not just to get resources, but also to gather a community for future projects.
You can’t fake the funk.
Elena grew up reading fairytales and when looking back she noticed the main characters were overwhelmingly male. That’s the reason the company and the community exist: to change the gender iniquity in our world by putting women at the forefront. Because this purpose is so sincere for Elena and her team, it shows up in the investments they make and Rebel Girls hasn’t strayed from its purpose even as they’ve grown. Instead, they’ve developed new and exciting ways for their community to tap into it. In addition to telling the stories of female heroes in their books and on their podcast, today they also recruit female illustrators for their books and curate an all-female cast of narrators for their podcast as well.
Create a culture of reciprocity.
Rebel Girls uses their platforms to spotlight the stories of everyday female heroes suggested by their community members. One example is the Black Mambas — a crew of women who are taking on poachers and winning, saving animals in South Africa from extinction. The community suggested the Black Mambas to the Rebel Girls team, and the team community listened–featuring their story in a sequel of the book.
The team at Rebel Girls has developed editorial guidelines and a submission and vetting process that allows them to source stories from the community even as it grows. By shining a spotlight on these community-sourced stories, they acknowledge their community members contributions–a crucial step when you’re working with people who are passionate.
👋🏻Say hi to Elena and Learn more about Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.
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