First, a big thanks to anyone who filled out a survey. It helped me out a great deal, both in terms of my class and in terms of my plans.
Second, if you haven’t by now watched the teaser video for Meets Girl in the previous post, go ahead and do so now.
I tweeted a picture of the cover, and then posted this video. A lot of questions came up, most of which boiled down to “All right, it’s pretty, and I’m excited, now how do I get the damned thing, Will? You’re killin’ me, Smalls!”
The answer is simple:
As the teaser indicates, Meets Girl should be available, barring outright catastrophe, over the holidays 2010. Now, my friend Ravvy noted he hoped that, by “holidays,” I meant Labor Day, which I think is pretty awesome people want the damned thing yesterday, but I’m going to tell you know: it’s not ready yet. I could push hard for an earlier, autumn release, but I want to do this right.
Because I’m doing it different.
Those of you who have followed my writing escapades know I’ve spent a good part of this year querying The Prodigal Hour. And yes, it’s been pretty universally rejected. I’ve had a couple of requests for fulls and several more besides for partials, and there are still a number of queries outstanding, with agents whom I had thought didn’t take a “If you don’t hear from me, it means ‘no'” position (a position I loathe, and which cuts an agent of my query list altogether).
You may be wondering to yourself, okay, well why aren’t you doing this with The Prodigal Hour?
There are a number of reasons, the most important of which is simple: they are very different stories with very different executions, and Meets Girl lends itself, as an experience, better to what I plan to do with it. A few agents have seen Meets Girl partials, but for the most part, my focus has been on The Prodigal Hour, at least in terms of seeking representation.
If The Prodigal Hour is a blockbuster time-travel techno-thriller, Meets Girl is a smaller, probably quirkier, sort of indie movie. If The Prodigal Hour is to Avatar or The Dark Knight, in that as a big-screen experience it would be huge and loud and blow everything, including your eardrums, up, Meets Girl is more to Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Those differences make Meets Girl more appropriate for what I want to do.
What do I want to do?
Well, that’s a little more complicated. Suffice to say, I’m announcing it now, for the holidays, because there are a number of things. I opened up a Kickstarter account not long ago and plan to use it.
What it comes down to, for you, as readers, though, is simple: availability and accessibility. Basically, I’m planning to post the great majority of the novel (and most likely all of it) here, serially, over a few months (Meets Girl Mondays, probably). At the same time, and rather early on, I’m going to make it available in digital form, for the low price of a few bucks; I figure the fact of having the whole file, for yourself, is the premium. I’m planning to make it available in pretty much all formats.
And, of course, for the digital reader of your choice. It’s definitely going on the Kindle. I thought about making it a Kindle exclusive, and I’ll tell you why: there’s no such thing. The Kindle works across enough platforms (PC, Android, iOS, Blackberry, etc.) that making it a Kindle book would make it available to you on pretty much any device you wanted (except the nook, I think). It would even be on the iPad, even if not in the iBookstore.
Finally, I’ll have paperbacks. Maybe hardcovers if interest seems great enough. I think the paper books, however, will be available solely through me, inscribed to readers. We’ll see how that works out. Obviously if there’s a huge demand that’ll be harder to fulfill, and I’m not saying I’m not expecting a huge demand, but Entrekin has sold a few hundred physical copies while being downloaded several thousand times, and the paperback I’ve been reading and editing and making sure it’s perfect looks flipping fantastic.
Why am I doing all this?
Because, to a guy with master’s degrees in writing and business, it fucking makes sense, in a way that publishing stopped making a while ago. Because I thought, well, maybe it’s time to start querying Meets Girl, and then I looked at the story and thought, wait a minute, maybe I can do something better with this. Maybe, if I stop worrying about advances and making the bestseller’s list and selling a go-jillion copies, I can create something even more exciting for readers.
So that’s what I’m trying to do. And I’m telling you now for the same reason I asked for help with those surveys: not just as homework, but to figure out what you want. Meets Girl is a story I like a lot, and now it’s time to figure out how best to tell it to you.
Cheers to that.