The Modular JavaScript book series is going to launch its crowdfunding campaign in a week. If you already follow me on Twitter, this may sound like old news.

I want people to be excited about Modular JavaScript, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise! Here’s what’s happened thus far.

Pre-launch Thunderclap Campaign

We’ve started a highly successful Thunderclap campaign, which at the time of this writing has 260% support and 1.9M in social reach. Thunderclap campaigns are similar to crowdfunding, except that you contribute your social reach instead of hard cash. The way it works is that once the campaign ends, on November 11th, a single tweet (or Facebook post) will be posted to your account. The kicker is that Thunderclap posts your message alongside everyone else’s, resulting in 260+ people tweeting about Modular JavaScript at the same time.

Quite a few of the backers for the Thunderclap campaign have some serious reach. Smashing Magazine contributed their 991K followers, JavaScript Daily backed us with 222K followers, Lea Verou chipped in with her over 72K, and so on. In total, backers have over 1.9M followers in aggregate, making for 1.9M potential people who see these tweets. That’s the campaign’s reach.

I first saw a barrage of tweets about CSS Conf 2016 on my timeline, and I was impressed by the “shock and awe” aspect of their social outreach – how did they do that? After some snooping around I found their Thunderclap campaign, which peaked at 405K of social reach, and I knew I wanted to run one of these for Modular JavaScript.

There’s an @mjavascript Twitter account you can follow for everything related to the series. Upon launch, a week from now, there will be a bunch more ways to learn about the series, contribute to it with either code or donations, and read the raw content – for free – as I work on it. The same content that’s managed on GitHub repos will also be available here on ponyfoo.com, but prettified with CSS in such a way that it almost feels like any Pony Foo article you’ve read before.