BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
A Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for a new book by BikeBiz executive editor Carlton Reid has achieved its £6,000 funding target. Bike Boom is a book about the global resurgence of cycling from 1970 onwards. The 21-day Kickstarter campaign has another 19 days to run.
Bike Boom is the sequel to Reid’s best-selling Roads Were Not Built For Cars, which raised funds on Kickstarter in 2013 and was published last year. This 330-page history book reached the top of the Kindle charts on Amazon.com, in the automotive category, besting Jeremy Clarkson’s petrolhead books.
The campaign for Bike Boom set out to raise £6,000 in pre-publication pledges. It hit this target within 36 hours. One of the backers was Olympic gold medallist and transport cycling champion Chris Boardman. He pledged £107 to become one of the book’s seven "patrons".
Bike Boom will be available in softback and hardback versions as well as Kindle, ePub and interactive iPad versions. When published last year the hardbacks for Roads Were Not Built For Cars sold out in six hours, and the softbacks were all gone within a week. The history book has now been picked up by American publisher Island Press of Washington, D.C.
For Bike Boom Reid will be interviewing industry figures and bicycle advocates active from the 1970s through to today. The "boom" he’s researching is, in fact, a number of booms, including the mountain bike boom of the 1980s, and how the number of cycle users in the Netherlands was stabilised by the provision of bicycle infrastructure in the 1970s.
Those pledging for the book get backer-only updates and will get the Kickstarter-only first edition.
Bike Boom is due to be published in April 2016.
