Yesterday I did a blog post about my idea for a creative publishing cooperative. I got pretty excited, so did many people who generously left comments. (They're definitely worth reading through.) But, you know, talk is cheap. Ideas are cheap. It's the work that costs. Having said that, I think, in a small way, this could fly.
We need a proof-of-concept project. Does anyone have any ideas? Is anyone willing to just...begin? I think we would need 3 books from 3 different people/creative teams to test the cooperative aspect. Anyone have a book they want to experiment with?
I have ideas for three different books I could throw in the pot. I could probably make two of them happen pretty quickly. (The third would take longer and would require a lot of faith--a lot--on the part of a lot of people.) I hesitate to suggest them because I don't really want this to be a vanity publishing project; I don't want it to even smack of same. I'd rather others came up with other ideas but, in the spirit of adventure, my options are:
1. A collection of my short stories. (I've never published a full collection, just a Conversation Pieces volume from Aqueduct consisting of 2 stories and 1 novella.) Including one or two new ones (so it would take til, say, spring to produce).
2. A collection of my essays. (Never published a book of these, either--mainly because I can't imagine anyone but a completist, of whom there are probably only a 100 on the planet, being interested.)
3. An anthology. (Yes, I've been pondering this antho. for years. Yes, I've done it before. Yes, it would be awesome. Yes--oh yes--it would far, far more work than I really want to commit to right now but, hey, if it would get this thing off the ground then hell, maybe...)
How about you?
We would need to sort out half a hundred things, like operating funds, percentages, selection procedure (I'm so not interested in publishing, or being part of publishing, crap), organisational structure, distribution, blah blah blah, but it's not impossible. Probably very, very difficult though. As I say, talk is cheap; work costs a lot.
But it's also play, a game, a delight, an experiment. The worst thing that would happen is we'd all lost a bit of time, energy, money, sanity, trust in the world... But only a bit. And we might gain a lot, too.
So, bearing all that in mind, who wants to talk more, or donate (expertise, contacts, skills, time, money), or be part of the cooperative, or on the Advisory Board (we're going to need one)? Who wants to play?
