An Update on the Indiegogo Campaign for the 50th Anniversary Saturday Night Live books

It did not succeed.

As you have almost undoubtedly forgotten, the end of the Indiegogo campaign for my Saturday Night Live-themed books We’ve Got a Great Show for You Tonight and We’ve Got a TERRIBLE Show For You Tonight recently ended.

I don’t blame anyone for missing the end of the fundraiser because, like a big old idiot, I myself missed the end of the fundraiser. And it was MY fundraiser. For MY project. That could have had a huge positive impact on MY career had it succeeded.

Yet I somehow forgot that my campaign ended a few days ago and NOBODY reminded me, including Indiegogo.

I refrained from looking at the campaign’s total because I thought, for the sake of my anxiety and my sanity, that I should not keep a running tally of how much I had raised because I’d only become depressed and discouraged.

I did such a good job that I missed not only seeing how much I had raised but also the end of the campaign altogether.

Only two times matter in a crowd-funding campaign: the beginning and the end.

If you’re lucky, there will be an explosion of excitement and anticipation at the beginning of a campaign.

Your fans are excited! There’s a cool new project in the works that YOU can make a reality through your support, enthusiasm, and money. You’re excited. Money is flowing into your account. Thousand upon thousands, on the first few days alone! Heck, you might meet or exceed your goal on your first day.

I’ve had beginnings like that. It’s exciting! It’s validating! It makes you feel like you matter, and your books, words, and ideas have a generous and appreciative audience that can’t wait to see what you’ll do next.

The end of a crowdfunding campaign is as important as the beginning. This is crunch time. Everything matters in the last two days. You do the full-court blitz in an attempt to remind the world that you have a wonderful new project they’ll want to be a part of, but they must act IMMEDIATELY, or they might miss out.

To put things in The Best Show terms, I pulled a real choke job when it came to sticking the finish. I had planned to advertise my campaign as widely as possible. I was going to try to get Seth Myers, who follows me on Twitter, inexplicably, to retweet my campaign to his millions of followers.

Oh, but I was going to be a terror in all the Facebook groups I belonged to! I wouldn’t let ANYONE forget about the imminent end of my big Saturday Night Live campaign.

That’s not how it played out, however. In an unfortunate turn of events, I FORGOT about the imminent end of my big Saturday Night Live book campaign.

I would need to raise more money than ever before to justify a project that would more or less be a half-to-full-time job for nearly two years. I’d need to raise at least thirty thousand dollars to feel like I could pursue the project without losing a substantial amount of money in the process.

Instead of getting more money than ever, I got way less than I had with any other book campaign.

I raised just under six and a half thousand dollars when the campaign ended.

Would it have made a huge difference if I’d realized that the campaign was ending and made a huge final push? Would it have raised twenty thousand dollars in a matter of days? Would one of the celebrities who follow me on Twitter tweet about it? Could I have harnessed the awesome power of the internet to make my crazy dream a reality?

The answer to those questions is both moot and “I don’t know.” I have no idea whether I could have made the campaign work in the end because I missed everything but the start because of neuroses, fear, and a stubborn need to self-sabotage.

Though Indiegogo has flexible funding, which means that I can keep the money raised I am not going to do so. Though I confusingly haven’t gotten a dime from Indiegogo yet, I apparently need to refund everyone myself, which I will happily do but seems like an unnecessary pain in the ass.

Even when a crowdfunding campaign ostensibly does well it can be a money-losing proposition. For example, I made a little over eleven thousand dollars for the Kickstarter campaign for The Fractured Mirror. That seemed okay, if not great, but once Kickstarter and my illustrator get their cut, it’s more like eight thousand dollars. I’ll need to spend a lot of money publishing what will be VERY long books (around 700 pages) and I’ll also need to buy a lot of my old books as part of the campaign. After expenses, that eight thousand dollars looks more like two thousand dollars for a book that required an enormous amount of time and energy and took me two full years to finish.

Even when I win, I lose.

It’s not a good sign that my greatest fears are all backed by incontrovertible empirical evidence. My self-doubt brings copious receipts. Lots and lots of receipts.

It’s also not an encouraging sign when, twenty-seven years into your career as a professional writer, even your fans and readers respond to your anguished self-doubt by asking if maybe you could get into a different line of work as this whole “writing” thing doesn’t seem to be working out. Unfortunately, the only other job I’ve ever had was as a video store clerk in the 1990s. I’m not sure getting a job as a customer service representative at Blockbuster is even an option at this point.

I’ll have to look into it.

I also couldn’t help but notice that while some of y’all were excited about my Saturday Night Live project I got a lot of comments from beloved readers and commenters that essentially said, “Are you sure you want to do this? It might not be the best use of your time and energy, and also, the overwork might drive you insane.”

What does this mean for you, follower of the Nathan Rabin movement?

When the campaign ended my original vision of the project ended with it.

That’s probably a good thing because my crazy brain has this awful habit of thinking that I’ll need to volunteer to do an insane amount of work and keep executing big ideas or people will lose interest in me. Then the sane part of me has to scale back on all the impossible promises my crazy brain made in a possibly manic state.

I would be taking on an impossible amount of work in the project’s original iteration. I volunteered to watch nearly 1000 episodes of a 90-minute television show that can be pretty damn painful at its worst. I vowed to do this in time to put out two books on October 11th, 2025, Saturday Night Live’s fiftieth birthday. That meant that I’d have to see and write about two or three episodes a day, even during weekends, in order to meet what now seems like an impossible deadline.

That deadline is out the window. I still plan to write We’ve Got a TERRIBLE Show For You Tonight but it will come out when it’s ready, not to meet an artificial deadline. I probably won’t write We’ve Got a Great Show For You Tonight either.

Writing about historic disasters is much more entertaining to write and read about than historic successes. I also plan to keep on writing Every Episode Ever, the newsletter where I write up every episode in chronological order, but if the workload proves impossible, then I might scale things back to five or three times a week.

Every Weekend Ever has gotten off to a pretty good start. I made it harder by doing it on Buttondown but I have almost four hundred free subscribers and almost fifty paid subscribers.

It would be wonderful for my career and psyche if Every Episode Ever could continue to grow and find an audience. Lord knows I can use a win right now.

Am I disappointed? Definitely. Do I feel guilty about the central role I played in its failure? Of course but I’m trying to focus on the positive.

I thought my Saturday Night Live books idea was wildly commercial, a can’t-miss proposition considering how much hype there will be over its fiftieth season.

As is often the case, the universe disagreed with me. Once again, a can’t-miss proposition ended up missing by a large margin.

I recently learned that I’m Autistic and have ADHD, in addition to being the parent of two neurodivergent boys. That rocked my world and made me want to write a book about discovering you’re autistic deep into your forties and how that affects your life but, more specifically, your relationship with your children.

I don’t write about my life as a father as much as I write about stupid bullshit that nobody cares about except for me but I am a dad first and foremost and a husband second. That’s my life. That’s what I was put on earth to do, and I think I can write about my emotional life and my life as a father facing a unique set of challenges, both internal and external, in a way that will be funny, insightful, poignant, and universal. I think that this autism book might matter in a way the Saturday Night Live books do not.

Writing about my autism and my boys, with my therapist wife acting as consultant and/or co-author, would be a way to bring our family closer, whereas having to watch and write about 1000 episodes of Saturday Night Live in less than twenty months would take me away from my family and make me less present. It would put unnecessary stress on my family life and mental health, whereas exploring everything I just learned about myself and, by extension, my boys, would be a way of bringing us closer together.

I’m choosing to be hopeful. I want to see the bright side, the silver lining.

The campaign’s failure might be the universe telling me that that was not the right book to pursue and that I should settle the fuck down and write about something meaningful and substantive that could reach an audience beyond my base.

The universe also wants me to finish The Fractured Mirror. I’m nearly finished with a mammoth tome I couldn’t be prouder of, but my ADHD brain got distracted by the bright and shiny Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary idea, and my anxieties told me that I should have something big lined up in case my next project fails.

I will continue to write Every Episode Ever. I still plan to write We’ve Got a TERRIBLE Show For You Tonight and books documenting each of Saturday Night Live’s five decades. But I will be doing so on my terms and in a way that will allow me to also focus on the other aspects of my career that demand my time and attention, like my website Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, this newsletter (NOTHING is more important than finishing my journey through James Belushi’s complete filmography!), pursuing freelance work/employment, the Travolta/Cage podcast and finishing and promoting The Fractured Mirror.

It doesn’t look so bad or hopeless when I put it that way.

The Indiegogo campaign for my Saturday Night Live books failed. But it’s not the end. In many ways, it’s just the beginning.

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