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Robin Sloan (author of Annabel Scheme) has a new multimedia short story up on his web site. The Truth About the East Wind involves words, sounds, and images, and is thoroughly awesome.

Slow progress is still progress

Robin Sloan launched his Kickstarter project on August 26 with 4,500 words. By November 18, 84 days later, he had a stack of boxes filled with the printed book.

Now, granted, Annabel Scheme is a 30,000-word novella and not the huge beast I’m working on. (I passed 40,000 words the other night.) On the other hand, 84 days from start to finish is pretty impressive. I’ve been working on this book for more than a year now — beginning in October 2008, when I first sat down and wrote the three paragraphs that now open what’s currently the book’s third chapter.

Read the rest at Frankly Nothing, my novel-writing blog →

Robin writes a book (and you get a copy) →

Robin Sloan is writing a novella. Rather than try to find a publisher for it — a difficult proposition for most writers, since few publishing houses will touch a novella from all but the most established authors — he’s turning to the Internet. Using Kickstarter, a crowd-sourcing web site for funding projects and endeavors, he’s hoping to raise enough money to self-publish the finished book.

Sloan has already published two short stories to his blog, accompanied by gorgeous cover art: Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store and The Writer & the Witch. They’re both available on Amazon for the Kindle, each for 99¢.

This definitely sounds like the coming new model of publishing. Sloan quickly surpassed his $3,500 goal and is (right now) approaching $6,000 with 214 backers. That’s quite a bit more than the average advance for a first novel, let alone 30,000-word novella.