not falling down

I don’t like talking about money, but here goes!

I am considering self-publishing an Anacrusis book: 101 of the best standalone stories from the last two and a half years, plus one (completed!) bad penny story arc. I would purchase one copy for myself, one for Maria, one for my grandmother and one for my mom. That’s all the demand I anticipate, which is why I’d be going with a print-on-demand company (likely Lulu) rather than an offset press with some kind of hideous minimum print run. I am not going to sell a thousand copies.

It would come in two versions: a fancy dust-jacketed hardcover, which I’d limit to 101 copies at $24.95, and a “viral edition” cheap paperback at $9.95. That doesn’t include shipping cost. I’d make a couple bucks off either, which I would put back into web ads, review copies, etc. I probably would not break even in the end, but it would be a relatively cheap way to raise my profile as a writer. Anybody who took the trouble to ship me his or her copy would get it signed and shipped back for free.

The chief goal of this project, though, would be to give people who like reading Anacrusis something tangible to show their friends. You might be one of those people. Do you want something tangible? Which edition would you prefer? Would it interest you more if the book came with exclusive content (eg ten new stories) or would it make you feel jerked around? (Everything would be released under BY-SA, as usual, so anybody who wanted could just repost them somewhere.)

I’ll be reading the LJ comment feed on this entry, of course, or you can spam me any time.

John Joseph Adams asked what are your top ten SF-F books not written by white men? Actually, he asked it in two parts: a top-ten list of nonmen, followed by a top ten list of nonwhites. Like everyone else who’s responded so far, I can do a list of women easily; embarrassingly (and typically), of the SF-F authors whose race I actually know, almost all of them are white (the late Octavia Butler seems to be a common exception). I might be able to do a nonwhite list, but it’d be almost all comics creators.

Anyway, my top-ten-women list demonstrates a pretty strong pattern.

1. The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
2. Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
3. Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
4. Tehanu, Ursula Le Guin
5. The Homeward Bounders, Diana Wynne Jones
6. A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle
7. The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley
8. Lioness Rampant, Tamora Pierce
9. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
10. Tie: Deep Wizardry, Diane Duane, and The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

Is it usually this obvious that my literary development halted in middle school?