Wednesday, May 21, 2008

a new model

I decided - after too many rejections for me to feel positive about getting published - that there's got to be a new way to do it. So I took a page from the music industry: self-promotion. Granted, there's a difference between recording your own cd and publishing your own book; the former makes you hip and cool and honest and the latter makes you a hack who couldn't cut it. And there aren't really blogs out there devoted to pimping new/unheard of authors the way the Stereogum and Music For Robots pimp musicians. And the few sites that are out there ultimately require you to pony up cash up front and then you wind up with bound copies that you have to market. Which is just as bad as trying to find an agent.

That being said, I'm putting my next novel online as it's written. It's call olliexcore (see link to the right) and it's told from the perspective of a 15 year old girl. Blog-style. When I'm finished, I can use one of the many many services out there to bind the blog in book form and if I want to pimp it, I can. I can also, after it's finished and bound - take the blog down so if people want to read it they have to pony up the cash to own it. But that's putting the cart before the horse because there's exactly ONE entry. Since it's blog form.

So what I'll do is write as I write and then publish it so that the dates work like "real time." I also adsensed it so that it can monitize.

At this point Steve and I figure that I'm going to write whether I make money or not - much the way I have been since before I could spell. Might as well put it out there and see what happens. And since I've always been a bit gun-shy about my writing I'm going to just say it now: pimp it. I'll do my best to make it something worth reading.

And now...you guessed it. Bathtime.

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