It's back, it's being Kickstarted, and we're totally doing a second book this year: a basketball/hockey combo mag that will launch in September. Note: this is what's called a "stretch goal" if we make 50k—which we did last year—the basketball/hockey book will be paper. Otherwise, eBook.
Here's the spiel:
Hail To The Victors is a yearly magazine from MGoBlog that previews football. It's like Athlon or whatever, except instead of two pages by an intern who doesn't know who Dennis Norfleet is you get 128 pages from the kind of internet obsessives that start their own websites just so someone might read what they have to say.
As an independent publication, we can do things like have a beautiful cover with Denard Robinson or Taylor Lewan on it unencumbered by "TEN WAYS TO MAKE YOUR PUNTER BEHAVE," or have heartfelt personal memoirs that made our previous publisher break out in hives. This is indie, which means it can be weird, which means it can be good in ways other previews can't.
Each edition comes with:
FULL TEAM PREVIEW. Written by Brian Cook of MGoBlog; goes down the roster in excruciating, unbowdlerized detail. Yeah, Athlon, put "unbowdlerized" in your magazine.
OPPONENT PREVIEWS. Each scheduled opponent is previewed; you can know how much fear and hope to have.
TWISTED BLUE STEEL. Michigan's players and coaches profiled. We say goodbye to Denard.
TECHNICAL DOSSIER. Nitty-gritty details on Michigan's schemes, recruiting, and prospects. Stats and diagram heavy. This year's focus: what is an Al Borges offense going to look like?
OLD BLUE. 20 or so pages about Michigan's history. This year's section features Ron Kramer stories. Unedited Ron Kramer stories.
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THE SHIRT
This year's Kickstarter exclusive shirt plays off the awesome "Sports" GIF Ace put together of Facepalm Guy and Rapture guy.
Not quite final. We're tweaking it to look better.
Many thanks to both Facepalm Guy and Rapture Guy for being cool about this.
You can also get last year's Photobomb shirt:
If neither of those strike your fancy we'll have a half-dozen popular MGoShirts available.
WHY IS THE GOAL 30K INSTEAD OF 20K?
We anticipated we'd sell a significant amount of books post-launch last year, which was not really the case. 30K is basically what it costs--it's actually still a little short--and we'd like to not lose our shirts. If this year's like last year we won't have a problem.
NEW BONUS NEW NEW NEW BONUS BONUS
Basketball! Hockey! We're launching a second book covering basketball and hockey. We project it will be 2/3rds to 3/4ths basketball given the level of interest in the two sports -- oh and that whole Final Four thing. We are committed to doing the book either way. But here's one of those Stretch Goal things: if we don't hit 50k, it'll be an eBook. If we do hit 50k, it'll be a real magazine and everything.
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Risks and challenges
Last year we had issues collating and shipping effectively; this year we plan to address those by using a custom solution at UGP's storefront instead of the many-points-of-failure system we used before.
One thing we learned: we can't accommodate unique requests (ie, I want ten books sent to these addresses) effectively. Hopefully you find something to your interests in the offerings; to better fulfill the promises we're making here we have to hold it to just the listed options.