Making headway with some good stuff here at the moment. Rather a lot of work continues on Turn The Lamp Down Low which is looking good right now - I'm not sure whether to start some pre-release promo five months early though. I've been thinking about making the hardback available for those who pre-order and then kill the whole hardback run after that to make it worth something to supporters - with some tickets thrown in to some of the signing sessions I have planned for it (though these won't be at bookshops) it could turn out to be quite a nice package. Let's file this under pending while I figure out what exactly such a thing would entail to get off the ground outside of kickstarter or any of those other crowd-funding sites. Can it be done totally independently? Who knows for sure, but I think so... Working at doing all of this yourself is interesting that's for sure. I was looking at the work the guys over at unbound are doing where (in a kick-startery kind of way) you put details of your project up, people who like the idea of it throw in some pledges and then, when you reach critical mass the button is presses and everybody who pledged gets a copy and maybe some other stuff. But let me throw in a question here - is it really that simple for the 'non-name' person? There's no two ways about it, Amanda Palmer changed the rules for musicians taking control of their own careers but as she herself states in no uncertain terms, she worked very long and very hard to put herself in a position whereby it worked out how it has for her. That's kind of how I see myself here - only er, several rungs down the ladder. The concept of being an author a la John Locke and making a stack of cash from the kindle model is fine, but it's not changing anything for the better in the big scheme of things. It's just proving it can be done and if that's what you want, that's fine. It's not really leaving anything behind though is it? Apart from thousands of other people also trying to repeat the formula which will obviously instigate the 'law of diminishing returns' at some point...
Anyway, the next work going live online will be a short story called The Undoing of Charles Walker. That should be published on Saturday at some point - which this morning got me wondering how many stories is a good number to have in a published collection? As many as you've written I guess, but somewhere around the 24 mark sounds like a good collection to me. I'll more than likely make a start on designing some covers for that over the coming months. Knowing myself as I do, I'll get through at least half a dozen 'finished' versions before I'm happy with the result... and then, there's what to call it. I love this part of the process. I love being creative with my own material.
Finally, I've revamped the tumblr blog over the last few days. Take a look. It's pretty neat if you love book design. Not so neat if you don't but it still looks great regardless.