A guest blog from Dean Wesley Smith
This week Allyson, the wonderful publisher of WMG Publishing, turned her blog over to me to write a little about a really fun project I am doing. So let me start from the very beginning.
A couple years back Kickstarter started a promotion to get people to make one hundred of a certain object and have a limited to one-hundred copies award of the object. When I first heard that, I figured I could make 100 short story paperbacks, all never-before published short stories.
That’s right, the stories would be out in electronic form, but also in small, very short paperbacks. I have done a number of these before and the length runs from 24 pages to about 50 pages. Too thin for writing on the spine, so they sort of feel like chapbooks, only with real glossy paperback covers on them.
Everyone who holds one thinks they are really nifty.
Last two years I didn’t have time to even try this challenge, but this year, when Kickstarter offered the promotion again, I figured why not? I would do almost all the work. I would, of course, write the short stories. I would lay them out for print, create the covers myself, and even load them up.
Allyson and the wonderful crew at WMG Publishing convinced me that they could load them to the stores like Amazon (I would just mess up the works is what they were saying, basically) and that they would do all 100 short stories in 3 limited (and very large) collections.
So I went for it and started a Kickstarter campaign. You can get different forms of my stories or the three final collections. (If you support the campaign at all you get the three collections of all 100 stories in electronic form.)
Also, since I teach a lot of workshops for WMG Publishing, we decided to include discounts to all our writing and publishing workshops. So you can support the Make 100 Paperbacks Kickstarter Campaign by getting a discount on a workshop you’d like to take. Nifty, huh?
So I do hope you will take a look at this really crazy idea. I am going to have a great time doing this and I hope you would have a great time reading all the stories as well.
Thanks.