All monthly backers on our Patreon and our Ko-fi get access to one free short-story per month (fluff, rated gen or teen, up to 2,500 words). We’re actually playing catch-up right now – we fell behind on fulfilling this reward while I was dealing with health issues, but all the stories are now written and in various stages of being editing for posting to our account, and we’ll be sharing them over the next few weeks! So, if you want to read a whole bunch of wonderful short stories, full of fluff and good feels and queerness, and all written by authors transitioning from writing fanfiction to original fiction, why not back us and check them out? Backers can also access all the past backer-stories – that’s ten short stories you can read right now, just by backing us!
This month’s story is:
Title: Not So Trivial Matters
Author: Nickel J. Keep
Genre: Modern
Rating: General Audiences
Relationship: enlm
Character Features: non-binary character
Tags: anxiety, coming out, emotional hurt/comfort (mild), fluff (domestic), internalized transphobia, past tense, pov third person limited, slice of life
“Sky? Are you almost done in there?” Matthew’s calm, reassuring voice rang from the other side of the door, not settling Sky’s nerves in the least bit. “We need to get going.”
“Yeah,” Sky replied after a moment. They took a look in the mirror. Matt had told them it would be okay, that they could dress how they felt most comfortable. Standing in the bathroom and regarding their reflection in the mirror, the knots in their stomach drew tighter. Where there had once been long brown hair now rested a short mop of green, styled into a quiff. Their lack of chest, hidden by the binder that had arrived that morning, was startling. But it felt right. Paired with a slightly baggy T-shirt and boot-leg jeans, they almost didn’t recognize their body.
It was perfect.
Want to read more? Become a monthly Duck Prints Press supporter on Patreon or Ko-fi and this and lots of other great stuff can be yours!
Did you know that our Patreon backers get a lot of exclusive blog content? We post multiple times a week to our Patreon blog, sharing teasers, art previews, behind-the-scenes glimpses, extra information on our financials and expenses, opportunities to participate in votes that determine the types of content we create, exclusive fluffy short stories, exclusive slightly-longer erotica stories, 24/7 “AMA” for the DPP management team, and more! Further, to make sure that we’re always transparent about how much work we’re doing and how we spend our working time, we also post a Weekly Business Update every Friday, giving a synopsis of all the progress we’ve made in the previous week.
We know that not everyone uses Patreon, and often people don’t want to have accounts on multiple websites, especially when those websites involve spending money monthly. We never want anyone to feel they have to join Patreon just to get access, so now we’ll be cross-posting all our exclusive backer content to both Patreon and ko-fi! For features such as surveys, which Patreon offers through internal functionality but ko-fi doesn’t, we’ll now list the surveys through a third-party website (probably Google Forms, for now) to make sure that all our supporters, regardless of platform, get a say!
What does backing us get you?
I’m so glad you asked! We offer 4 backer levels, each building on the previous.
Mallard Duck Backers: $3/month on Patreon or ko-fi
access to our backer-exclusive blog, featuring business updates, teasers, works-in-progress, art sneak peeks, and more
one free short story per month, up to 2,500 words, written by one of our authors, rated gen or teen (usually, these stories are fluff).
voting rights on polls that determine anthology themes
Muscovy Duck Backers: $5/month on Patreon or ko-fi
everything that Mallard Ducks get, plus…
ask us anything! leave us a comment or send us a message with a question about what makes Duck Prints Press tick, and get the inside scoop written just for you (and our other backers…)
complimentary copies of any works of fiction under 1,000 words long that Duck Prints Press publishes
nominate themes for blog posts, prompt lists, short stories, and more
voting rights on surveys to determine the monthly 2,500 short story, themes for blog posts, etc.
Canvasback Duck Backers: $10/month on Patreon or ko-fi
everything that Muscovy Ducks get, plus…
a backer-exclusive extra reward for backers who also support our crowdfunding campaigns
one free erotica story per month, up to 5,000 words, written by our authors, rated M or E
one free e-book from our catalog each month
voting rights to determine the theme of the erotica story
Mandarin Duck Backers: $25/month on Patreon or ko-fi
everything, yes everything, that Canvasback Ducks get, plus…
a complimentary copy of all “flat” merchandise produced during our crowd-funding campaigns (for example, art prints, bookmarks, stickers, enamel pins, magnets, keychains) even if you do not back the campaign (if you DO back the campaign, and you choose a level that includes this merch, you’ll get 2 of everything!)
a Duck Prints Press T-shirt (3 months backing required)
two die-cut stickers per year, produced in June and November each year (1 month backing required)
one merchandise item per year, distributed annually in August (last year it was two art prints!) (3 months backing required)
optional inclusion on our Premium Support List, which is included in all our e-books and published in all our print books!
As you can see, we have a whole lot to offer! And, supporting Duck Prints Press monthly helps us maximize the amount we can pay our creators – our monthly crowdfunding supports our software expenses, consulting costs, professional/legal services as need needed, supplies and hardware, and more. Our goal is to have our Patreon + ko-fi support total enough that it covers all our overhead each month! This would enable us to pay authors 90% royalties (we’re currently paying 75%), and we’d be able to afford to pay the authors who do the backer short stories (they get edited for free and the story rights revert to them in six months, so they don’t get nothing, but we’d love to offer cash-in-hand), and produce more merchandise, and raise the hourly pay for our staff, and I (the owner) might be able to take a paycheck someday, and, and, and. There’s so much we’ll be adding as we grow, and we’d love you to contribute to making that happen!
So.
Do you love queer creators? Do you love queer stories and art? Do you want to support fanfiction authors pursuing their dreams of publishing their original stories?
This is your moment!
Support Duck Prints Press monthly on Patreon or ko-fi, and help us grow!
(want to support us with money, but not monthly? You can always buy us a one-time ko-fi, or check out our shop, featuring our currently available book titles and our merch!)
Duck Prints Press LLC is thrilled to share that our second crowdfunding campaign, aimed at raising $12,000 to enable us to publish And Seek (Not) to Alter Me: Queer Fanworks Inspired by William Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” has come to a successful conclusion! Over 30 days, 242 backers contributed to support us for a total of $14,914 US.
Backing the campaign was the only way to get a print copy of this gorgeous anthology, but it’s not your only purchase opportunity! We expect that the e-book version (in ePub, Mobi, and PDF formats) will go up for sale on our website sometime in July; if we have any extra merchandise, we’ll likely offer that for sale at that time, too. So keep your eyes peeled (and make sure you follow us on social media!) and you can be among the first to hear!
Whether you backed this campaign or not, always remember that you can support us, and the fan-creators-transitioning-to-original-creation with whom we work, by backing us on Patreon. Alternatively, if you prefer Ko-fi, we don’t yet offer a subscription model on Ko-fi but we will soon (we expect to set it up in the next week or two! We’ll likely also open a merchandise store there) so consider following us there, and you’ll get a notification when we open up monthly subscription options there! And, of course, you can buy our books and merchandise anytime through our webstore!
Wondering what’s next for Duck Prints Press?
We’re so glad you asked, because the answer is: a lot!
Our next two anthology, She Wears the Midnight Crown and He Bears the Cape of Stars, are in-process. These two anthologies feature stories involving masquerades – in all kinds of settings, and with a very loose definition of what counts as a masquerade! She Wears the Midnight Crown focuses on wlw stories. He Bears the Cape of Stars focuses on mlm stories. Both include a huge variety of settings, types of characters, relationship models; we’ve got lots of genderqueerness and poly, too. Authors’ final check in is today; based on the editors’ reviews of work submitted at Check In 1 and Check In 2, trust us, you are not gonna want to miss these two books! We’ve also recently (technically, today!) contracted an artist for the two front covers – more on that in the coming days!
The crowdfunding campaign for these two anthologies has a planned June 15th launch date, but! As promised in January when we were recruiting authors, we will not be continuing our relationship with Kickstarter. Instead, we will be working with Seed & Spark, an independent crowdfunding platform that focuses on projects that tell stories; they primarily work with film media, but we’ve had a lovely e-mail chat with the folks there – they’re happy to have us, and we’re delighted to be an early (but not the first!) book publishing project launching there. We’ve got a member profile there already set up – so, if you have an account there, we encourage you to give us a “follow,” and if you don’t have one yet, now might be a great time to make one! We’ll also share a followable version of our project at least a couple weeks before launch – we’ll make an announcement when the time comes, so be on the look out.
With the help of our Patrons, we’ve officially decided on the theme for our fifth anthology! The project is still in its early planning phases – we have a theme but no title or schedule – but at our management meeting this week, we’ll be discussing a tentative timeline for production which amounts to, “hopefully formally announced/opened for recruitment in June, with an anticipated crowdfunding campaign in the fall or early winter.” Expect an announcement sometime in late spring or early summer.
We’re also in the very early planning stages of an erotica anthology and our next “Queer Fanworks Inspired By…” anthology. Both would have 2023 crowdfunding releases.
Now that we’re almost caught up, work-wise, on the backlog of editing that resulted from my health issues, we’re also looking to other “next projects,” especially working on publishing more novels. We expect to build on our existing relationships with A. L. Heard and Tris Lawrence, by publishing a re-edit of Hockey Bois and editing and helping crowdfund further books in Lawrence’s “Welcome to PHU” ‘verse. We’re hoping to have Hockey Bois our sometime this summer and a crowdfunding launch for “Missed Fortunes” and “Into the Split” (books 2 and 3 of the “Twinned” trilogy) sometime in Quarter 4. In addition to these known projects, we’ll be opening the floor to authors who’ve previously worked with us, likely in late summer or early fall, to discuss projects they may have in mind or in progress that they’d be interested in pursuing and potentially publishing with us. We’re tentatively hoping to publish 3 – 4 anthologies in 2023 and up to 4 novels. And, as always, you bet your bottom dollar everything is gonna be hella queer!
As you may be aware, Patrons at the $10 and $25 level on our Patreon get access to one erotica story per month, written just for them – but, what you may not realize is that after 6 months, the rights for those stories revert to our authors in full, and they can do what they wish with those stories – including publishing them with us! One of our authors has opted to do so, and we’re hoping to have the story published on our website by the end of April (more information on this soon)! We’ve been hard at work tweaking our website and shop configuration in preparation for this, and Alessa Riel has developed an awesome variation on our standard Dux logo, for all your citrus-scale needs…
We’ll share more on the erotica label soon!
And none of this includes our ongoing projects – our regular blogging on writing, publishing, and prompting (we’ve been expanding our stable of blog post authors!); events like #drabbledaysaturday on Twitter and May Trope Mayhem (coming in 2 weeks!); our monthly Patreon short stories and erotica stories; and more!
As you can see, there’s a lot in the pipeline, and there’ll continue to be more to come. The success of both of our first crowdfunding campaigns has been a huge boost for us, helping us build a profile, grow our relationships, develop more reliable streams, and more. Thank you all for your support, your reads, your signal boosts, your backing, and your interest. There’s loads more work to do, of course…but the result of that work is going to be a growing catalog of amazing queer works by queer authors and artists, and honestly? We couldn’t be more excited about what tomorrow will bring!
Well, we’ve had a VERY exciting last 36-hours-or-so, that I wasn’t able to post about as it happened because I was traveling.
Exciting thing the first:
On Friday afternoon, we were notified that Kickstarter had selected us as a #projectwelove!
Exciting thing the second:
On Friday evening, we reached our primary funding goal of $7,500! Add Magic to Taste will definitely be a reality after our campaign ends!
Exciting thing the third:
Yesterday, we reached our first stretch goal, which means that the book will have a full-color second piece of artwork by @lizleeillustration (Instagram | Twitter | Personal Website) on the back cover as well as the first! We’d already prepared for meeting this goal; LizLee had sent us three sketches, from among which we picked the cover – a second of the sketches will be modified to be the back cover, and here’s a sneak peek!
Overall, it’s been a REALLY thrilled few days, and there are so many good things to come! We are at $9,000 so far for funding, and we have stretch goals planned through $25,000 – which we doubt we’ll reach but oh would it be so so so exciting if we did! Backers will get extra merch (at no additional cost to themselves!) and our authors will get pay increases and the Press will be better able to pay our staff and monthly expenses – so if you’ve been considering backing the project, let me tell you: this is a sure thing, and you should at least give it a look!
You can support Duck Prints Press by backing our Kickstarter for Add Magic to Taste, a collection of heartwarming queer stories set in magical coffee shops, bakeries, and the like – read more about it here!
