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Publishing a book through crowdfunding 👩‍🎤Elena Favilli, Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls

27 Jul 2020

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“It's important that people realize that extraordinary women are not just the heroes of the past, but they are around us every day today. They are already part of our communities. We just need to look a little deeper and more carefully, but they are already there.” - Elena FavilliElena Favilli found herself at the center of an all too familiar story of women in the startup world. She was in Silicon Valley working on her company Timbuktu and finding it hard to make friends with investors, get support, and raise money as a woman. From that pain point, she made it her mission to contribute in her life to gender equality. Elena began researching gender representation in children's books to start. After observing her favorite children's stories, she noticed they all centered around male characters. She asked the bold question: what if this was different? Elena started a newsletter called “Who Framed Cinderella: Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls,” where she promised each week to showcase one story of an amazing woman like Maria Sibylla Merian, a 1700s scientist and artist who discovered the metamorphosis of butterflies (before that people thought butterflies appeared out of mud like magic!). She sent out the first newsletter to 25 friends and received eager responses for more stories like Maria’s. So each week she continued to tell stories of historical figures and contemporaries until she reached 4,000 subscribers. With an audience behind her, she launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for a book that quickly exceeded her $400,000 goal climbing to a total of $1.2 million in funding, breaking a record as the most crowdfunded campaign in literary history.Rebel Girls shifts a narrative by spotlighting real women as the heroes and showing kids that women can do amazing things just like men. Elena published Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls with the help of 60 women illustrators around the world and a sequel with crowdsourced stories from dedicated readers. We talked with Elena about how she used crowdfunding to gauge interest and how she has collected contributions from readers, telling the story with her audience. 👏Learn more about Elena and Rebel Girls at: www.rebelgirls.com/📘Pre-order Rebel Girls' new book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Immigrant Women Who Changed the World✨Learn more about our correspondent Maggie Zhang on her blog, CommonplaysThis podcast was created by the team at People & Company. We published GET TOGETHER📙, a handbook on community-building. And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.Hit subscribe🎙 and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.

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3ª PARTE | 17 DIC 2025 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

01 Jan 1970

El Partidazo de COPE

13:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

01 Jan 1970

Fin de Semana

12:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

01 Jan 1970

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10:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

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13:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

01 Jan 1970

Fin de Semana

12:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

01 Jan 1970

Fin de Semana

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Get Together

Publishing a book through crowdfunding 👩‍🎤Elena Favilli, Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Other recent transcribed episodes

3ª PARTE | 17 DIC 2025 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

13:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

12:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

10:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

13:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

12:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

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