Crowdfunding Consultant and Editor for Hire

Crowdfunding Consultant and Production Manager

I bring over 40 years of work in printing and graphic design, 30 years in e-commerce and internet marketing, and 15 years of success in crowdfunding to your project, helping raise millions of dollars for others and over $400,000 for my own work. The sweet spots of what I offer are structuring a project’s details, developing a budget, and managing logistics. I project managed the all-time #1 Kickstarter tech book (and #14 overall out of nearly 70,000 publishing campaigns), and crowdfunded my own book on comic history in February 2024, which finished in the top 150.

Contact me to discuss my involvement. I offer a free 30-minute discovery call to talk over project details, explain my rates, and figure out how we might work together.

On press at Penmor Lithographers in Maine with Shift Happens (Photo: courtesy Marcin Wichary)

If you’re looking for help with your campaign, the best time to reach out is several months to two years before you think you want to launch.

I can work with you on manufacturing bids, modeling revenue, deciding on rewards, writing the project story, and assembling a video story, as well as give you insight into how you need to prepare from a business perspective (taxes, licenses, credit card fees, chargebacks, returns) and anticipate fulfillment costs. My social media presence and acumen, along with industry contacts, contribute to a campaign’s success.

I can take a book all the way to printing and distribution. This includes traveling to a printing plant to oversee page as they come out of a press—I spent 100 hours on press with an author client on their book in 2023, and 12 for one of my own books in 2024—and working with fulfillment warehouses, including pre-processing data to meet their quirky needs.

My Crowdfunding Expertise

After acting for five years as the editor of Shift Happens for author/designer/photographer Marcin Wichary, I took on its project management, bringing the three-volume book through crowdfunding, printing, and fulfillment. We raised over $750,000 at Kickstarter in February 2023 for nearly 4,500 sets of books (totaling 1,376 pages in a slipcase), and sold out of the rest of the printing within a year with effective post-Kickstarter marketing. You can read a detailed essay about our journey on that book and lessons learned in “How We Crowdfunded $750,000 for a Giant Book about Keyboard History.”

Marcin offers this endorsement of our work together:

“Glenn’s decades of experience are matched by curiosity and an excellent problem-solving attitude; he was a helpful and attentive partner during the few critical moments of the campaign.

“The book was a success both in terms of writing, producing a well-made object, backer interest (#1 tech book in the history of Kickstarter), and even as a campaign itself, with many backers commenting this was the best-run crowdsourced campaign they witnessed.

“Glenn was instrumental, and I would recommend hiring him for any book/printing-related projects, especially those with unique considerations.”

With Dan Perkins, the creator of the weekly editorial cartoon This Modern World, about to celebrate 40 years in continuous publication, we raised over $130,000 for a collection of the last five years of his comics after publishers turned him down. His dedicated audience was eager for it. Dan wrote in an issue of his newsletter:

“I really have to give all possible credit to Glenn. He had this surgery scheduled [see this post] and he still agreed to take on my big project, and timed it out so well that we hit every mark we needed to hit and got the initial, pre-delivery phase of things wrapped up exactly on schedule.”

I’ve advised other campaigns informally or as a paid consultant that have collectively raised millions of dollars—some as little as thousands and others in the upper hundreds of thousands.

I became interested in project-based crowdfunding early on, writing a number of articles about Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites. (See my 2010 Economist article, for instance.) I began running campaigns for my own projects in the early 2010s and have raised over $400,000 across nine campaigns, all seen through to successful completion and delivery. The gem of these campaigns is the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule, which raised $74,000 during crowdfunding ($165,000 including post-campaign sales) for 108 handmade cases of typographic and printing artifacts—and fulfilled it during the height of the pandemic in fall 2020 just six months behind. A second edition of the book created for that project, Six Centuries of Type & Printing, had a nearly $70,000 campaign in early 2025, and reached $110,000 by the time it shipped in July.

My biggest personal project to date, funded in February 2024, is How Comics Were Made, a book about the history of newspaper cartoon production and reproduction. It raised nearly $170,000 in pledges and finished out with total revenue of $250,000 for its first printing. The book was promised for and delivered in October 2024. Andrews McMeel Publishing acquired my book in late 2024, and their new edition appeared June 2025 in bookstores worldwide.

On press at Hemlock Printers in Vancouver, BC, Canada, with How Comics Were Made

Editor

I’m available as an editor for hire on an hourly or project basis. My specialties are editing non-fiction technology books and articles on technology and science, including reported stories, product reviews, and research coverage. I’ve put in as little as an hour to help someone punch up an article or application for a journalism job and as much as 200 hours over five years on the above-mentioned Shift Happens, for which I carried out three edits in stages from draft to finished text.

What can I bring to your writing or to your publication as a contract editor? An approach that preserves the best of an author’s voice while bringing an eagle eye to weak points, from top-level structural issues down to word choice and punctuation. I try to help layer an author’s work, bringing more depth and texture while keeping the language crisp and evocative, tailored to its destination. I like to think of editing as a way to make a writer’s words shine brighter to tell a story more richly.

My Editing Experience

I’ve been editing and writing most of my life—I first put a red pencil through words at age 9 or 10, working on a student-run elementary school newspaper while also writing a regular column. I have been editing professionally since the 1990s. Several publications have hired me to work on individual articles and for contract stints.

Delivering a talk about type history

From 2018 through its publication in 2023, I worked closely with author Marcin Wichary on Shift Happens, an authoritative work on the history of keyboards, from early typewriters to the latest input devices in glass and plastic. Putting in about 200 hours on editing, I helped him shape an early complete manuscript of over 350,000 words into a final refined version weighing in at 260,000 words. This job included high-level developmental work: we removed chapters, re-ordered parts of the book, and broke it into two volumes. In later passes, I worked down to the granularity of line edits.

I also helped coordinate bringing in other professionals for proofreading and indexing, provided design critique, built budgets for crowdfunding, and obtained bids from and negotiated with printers, print brokers, paper brokers, and fulfillment houses. As mentioned earlier, the campaign was highly successful and received a remarkable amount of positive media coverage during its crowdfunding and printing stages.

I also served as the freelance editor for Mark Harris’s Kickstarter-paid, editorially independent investigation of a crowdfunding campaign for a palm-sized drone that failed to deliver most of its promised rewards. Earlier, I spent several months as a contract editor at large at Wirecutter and The Sweethome, sister sites dedicated to producing deeply researched and tested product reviews. My work at those sites included editing guides on mirrorless cameras, USB battery packs, rain jackets, surge protectors, electric razors, and budget Android phones.

From 2012 to 2014, I was the publisher and editor of the non-fiction electronic periodical The Magazine. I commissioned and edited around 300 reported stories and essays for its run.

What My Writers Say

I asked several people I’ve edited about their experience working with me, and they gave me permission to share their endorsements.

I hired Glenn initially to help me with higher-level editing of my first book, *Shift Happens, but over the years of our collaboration, as Glenn’s talents and expertise became more obvious to me, I involved him in many more aspects of the book’s eventual (successful) process. — Marcin Wichary, author, typographer, photographer, and much more, and creator of *Shift Happens

Glenn is one of the very best editors I have worked with. Not only does he scrub copy until it shines, catch errors both obvious and obscure, and ask the most useful awkward questions, he also adds genuine weight and substance to any project he is working on. He’s diplomatic, attentive, rigorous, and utterly focused on quality, even under tight deadlines. — Mark Harris, freelance science and technology writer, managing editor at Anthropocene.

Glenn is the best editor I have ever worked with. He is prompt, respectful, friendly, energetic, enthusiastic, and demands the highest of standards in the most polite way imaginable. He also has the most complete grammatical knowledge I have encountered and has exceptional attention to detail. I would love to work with him again in the future. — Naomi Arnold*, New Zealand-based freelance journalist, author of *Southern Nights

I’ve written for Glenn in various capacities on and off for longer than a decade. He’s as good as it gets from start to finish. Need some help finessing an idea so that it’s just the right angle? Just ask Glenn. Struggling to describe esoteric technology in a compelling way that anyone can understand? Glenn will smooth over your rough edges. He’s the kind of editor who hands back your copy and you sigh with relief because your story went from decent to top notch. — Nancy Gohring*, freelancer whose work has appeared in Wired, the New York Times, the Economist (Babbage blog), MIT Technology Review and the *Seattle Times

Many aspects of my interaction with Glenn now strike me as rare: He plucked my pitch from a blind submissions pile and then provided advice, encouragement, and eagle-eyed edits in equal measure. Whereas so many editors take a slash-and-burn approach, Glenn is an ideal combination of cheerleader and taskmaster, challenging writers to produce their best work but also confident that they can and will. When I hit turbulence, Glenn was the co-pilot, compass in hand, who kept the route smooth and straight. His edits made my voice stronger and clearer and I feel lucky to have worked with him. — Colleen Hubbard*, freelance writer and novelist, author of *Housebreaking

I always felt good filing a story for Glenn—I knew the draft was about to get a lot better. He’s great at helping to work through hangups on structure and even his small suggestions brought new life and clarity to every piece I worked with him on. — Gabe Bullard, journalist, podcast producer, and digital editor

Glenn Fleishman is the kind of editor I love to work with: He has high standards and focuses on what’s best for the piece, but always leaves room for the writer’s voice. He also gives good assignments; when I wrote for The Magazine, I always felt that Glenn did a good job of assigning pieces around a theme, but without ever publishing a predictable roster of pieces on a given topic. — Matthew Amster-Burton, author of Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo and co-host of Spilled Milk podcast

Glenn edited a dozen of my feature stories for The Magazine, and I learned how to be a better writer in the process. Glenn was always honest and direct in the editor/writer relationship, which is valuable; I never worried about what the final cut might be like, because the lines of communication were always open. (With other editors, I’ve often found ex post facto edits that show up after going to press.) Five stars. Would write for again. — Chris Higgins, author of The Blogger Abides and a freelancer journalist and filmmaker

Glenn is a writer’s dream editor: His guidance makes your arguments stronger, your sentences pithier, and, most importantly, he keeps you from being a danger to yourself and others. And all this while making you think the best suggestions were all your own idea! — Erin McKean, founder of Wordnik.com, former editor-in-chief of American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press

Glenn came out of nowhere and launched himself to the top of my list of favorite editors. He treats his writers fairly and with respect, winning their loyalty—and their best pitches—in return. *— Joe Ray, food and travel writer and photographer and author of *Sea and Smoke

Glenn was an excellent editor to work with on my story “Paging Dr. MacGyver: The rise of DIY medical devices” for The Magazine: proficient, professional and personable. I highly recommend his services. — Julian Smith*, journalist and author of *Aloha Rodeo

Banner image courtesy of the late Stumptown Printers (Portland, Ore.), which had a nicely functioning Linotype hot-metal typesetting system.

Get in touch via email at glenn@glennf.com or through the form below. I live in Seattle (Pacific Time)

Glenn Fleishman interrogates the past

through dogged effort, uncovering the missing links

Taking mumbo jumbo and turning it into tasty technology gumbo

Brain Center |