Bird By Bird

Here's what's happening. I've been participating in National Novel Writing Month for nine years now and since it's a non-profit organization I try to donate toward their operating costs when I can (they also run awesome things like the Young Writers' Program for kids and teens). Circumstances being what they are this year, I'm even poorer than usual and I'm not going to be able to make my usual donation.

So I'm going to see if I can kill several birds with one month.

Smashwords.com is going to be running a promotion for NaNoWriMo. Anyone who signs up will be able to "publish" their book as a work in progress as they write. Ordinarily I'd be running from this idea, screaming. Especially when it comes to self publishing, everything put out for the public consumption needs to be the best that it can be.

On the other hand, a freshly published author's worst enemy is obscurity. Marketing and book pitches aren't exactly my strong suit either; it's part of why I chose to self publish Keystone.

So, I decided to go for it and "publish" this year's Nano project as a sort of open beta read. It's going to be a "reader sets the price" option so if someone wants to contribute toward my Nano donation goal of $25 they can, otherwise they can read it for free. As a bonus for enduring the book's rough state, everyone who opts in for this experimental project will get the final, published work for the absolute bargain price of whatever they chose to pay for it.

However, being a work in progress, the Nano project may or may not contain things like this: [King Needsaname] [Dang, it's hard to type while eating][Why did I think this was a good idea?] [He needs to DIE]. Consider them bloopers. Behind the scenes commentary. The product of too much caffeine and sugar without adequate sleep. It happens a lot during NaNoWriMo.

I'd love for this to be an interactive experience, so readers can tell me what they'd like to see (or not see) as the book progresses, so to that end I'm going to be starting a Facebook author page, which I think is a little more easily accessible than Goodreads. Also I can post when there's a fresh updates without cluttering up this blog. I also have some cool bonus materials planned (Thanks Katrina Shelley for some great ideas!).

I'm really getting excited about this one, but I'm getting crazy nervous too. I've been getting perfectionistic in my old age, so the prospect of exposing my work before it's finished is very daunting. That's another bird I'm hoping to kill: the stark terror of showing my work to those outside my familiar circles.

Let's go bird hunting.

Coming next: project details and why this might be my best NaNoWriMo ever!