Many on her mailing list were taken aback; after all, this was a woman whose Instagram feed is pure real estate porn, who was the subject of a Financial Times article last year called “Jane Green: Chick-Lit Author and Property Tycoon” and who is married to one of the scions of the Warburg banking family.

Or as one friend who forwarded me her site put it, “I just got this from a multimillionaire.”

“This is not a rich lady asking her readers to give her money for a vanity project,” said Christy Fletcher, Ms. Green’s agent. (Ms. Green declined to speak.)

“She started because she is very creative and she wanted creative control,” Ms. Fletcher said. “It’s like, if you want it, order it; if you don’t, don’t. It’s just asking people to buy your work, only on Kickstarter instead of in a store.”

Well, not quite.

Given the frequency of the email solicitations, and the level of intimacy expected in the exchanges (another would-be author offered “immortality” to one lucky donor by writing her into her novel for $1,000), it’s not quite like ordering on Amazon. It’s more like Amazon stops by your house for a drink and at midnight is still chatting, while you try not to glance at your watch.

I wanted to find a sociologist to comment on this phenomenon. When I searched for “sociologist” and “GoFundMe,” I came across this: “Send a sociologist to GDC!” Apparently a gamer working toward her Ph.D. in sociology needed money to attend a conference to complete her work on gender performance in rock music video games. That wasn’t what I was looking for.

Ethan Mollick, however, was. He is an assistant professor of management at Wharton Business School who has studied online crowdfunding on sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter. Professor Mollick explained that if I was looking at crowdfunding only as a means of raising money, I was missing the point.