What do you guys think about this...

How about we get a bunch of our stories together, put them into a book of short stories and see about getting it published? Is that even feasible? Any interest?

ya ya ya ya I say Ya That's a hell of an idea Gene. The only flaw I see is that the burden of getting it published will fall all on one person. We could all come up with something to compensate that person for their time. I personally would be worthless at it.

tom

It wouldn't be too hard to do on Lulu. I've been looking at that to maybe do a book of the Eddie stories for my family and friends.

Formatting without any illustrations is relatively easy and nobody pays to put it up on Lulu. When somebody buys the book, then the buyer pays for the production costs plus shipping plus royalties. Royalties are determined by the author and Lulu takes 10% of the royalty amount (added on). I've priced a 100-page book and it's $4-$5 per book plus .02/page. So, a 250 page book would be about $9-$10 + royalty + shipping. Most people seem to be selling books for $13-$17. That's assuming single-copy price. If you sell more (say 100 copies) you get a nice discount.

It's certainly doable. I can see the book being put out by Pen & Ink Writers and each story with the real author's name and everybody's stories listed in a table of contents.

Why don't we set up some specifications on what kind, length of stories and see what we come up with? For a novel-length book, figure on 80K-100K words. Maybe everybody comes up with some longer stories (5-10K).

I think we should go for it. There's some very good writers here and I've read some outstanding stories from all of you. If we had ten writers with 10k each that's 100k. We could have twenty with 5k. Maybe two stories each or whatever? However folks would like to make it work. I think it would be a cool project.

However many from a writer to add up to 10K? That is, if we have 10 writers.

My longest story is just over 5K. I don't think I could write a 10K story (not yet, anyway).

Should we have a theme? Maybe throw out a challenge to write to a theme. Love, war, murder, losing (somebody, something)????

How about we use some of the same things we do here: Fiction, horror, sci-fi, hunor, etc as the catagories?

Well it does sound like fun and Lulu.com makes it all so easy.

Gayla

Gene. Does this book that your proposing pay the authors, or is it just to see our names in print. If it doesn't pay, I don't see the difference between what we do now and putting our stories on another site.

tom

Tom:

First off, it would be an actual paper book suitable for handing out to friends and relatives.

Second, we can add a royalty and if any books sell to anybody in the rest of the world, we'd get paid. Or even royalties for the books we purchase ourselves (to give as Christmas presents).

Does that answer your question?

Thanks Gene

What Marva said.

I doubt we'll ever get rich off it but hey, it's being published in a real live book too. I know I like the Christmas present idea. :)

I always look for books like that in airports. Something short and easy to read.

So, everybody start writing or dusting off that story you really like and toss them up here. Say you want evaluation for inclusion in the book and everybody do their best to give a good crit. Line by line if necessary.

I might want to put up one of my Sitara stories since they're running around 5000 words. I guess I'll post up Part II of Sitara #3 anyhow.

So, how many words apiece? Are we doing 5k and twenty writers...10k and ten writers? Multiple stories to use up the allotted amount of words?

I'd like to use Sanger and that's about 3700k right now. that would leave some space no matter what. Also, we need to list who is going to be in on this for sure. So far we have:

Mean Gene
Marva
Tomper
Gayla

Is that correct? Who else wants to be in on this adventure?

I have to be honest and say that I don't think I can contribute to this idea, for many reasons.

I've only been trying my hand at writing stuff for about 6-7 months. I am very slow at getting things written, what with work, and also find it very hard to let my stuff be seen until I'm happy with it myself. (which often means it never sees the light of day.)

If I do manage to write something I'm really happy about, my first goal would to try and get it published in an e-zine or literary mag. So that basically means if I write something good, I'll be subbing it. And I wouldn't want to contribute my half-assed, second-rate efforts to your book, it wouldn't be fair and nobody would want that.

I just ain't prolific enough!

Good luck to all though, it sounds like a nice idea. Hopefully I'll be kicking myself when ye're all on the bestsellers list. :)

Do I have to go through my stories, and edit all the bad words out? Most of them will be hurting without them, seeing they are in dialog.

I don't talk that way myself, but the people I write about are potty mouths.

tom

Wowsie! That Lulu is quite a thing. Haven't run across it before.

Except for the recent post at Wordsmiths, I haven't penned anything new in a while, and can see nothing down the line, what with other busynesses on my plate. However, if any of you feel a previous work or two of mine might be worthy for this project, I'd be happy to contribute.

While I'm very familiar with Lula and think this is a wonderful idea, I tend to write mostly nonfic stuff and romances - not the most poplular genres for short stories. If the group doesn't think these would be right for a collection of short stories, my feelings won't be hurt. Like Bren, I still consider myself quite the novice and write for fun. I've never felt any of my stuff was good enough to sub anywhere, except maybe "An Introduction." It was posted to EotW. I'll post it here and you can be the judge.

Gayla

I don't think we have to get this book ready by next month. Some people will have something already, some will want to write something new. Let's just see what people want to contribute.

Bren, I appreciate the desire to publish elsewhere, but when you're NOT the publisher (Gene will be I assume), then your story in this book would be a "sale" just as if it went to an ezine. You can claim credit for it as published since you didn't "self"-publish.

Will: A nice long one would be good. How about that one with the guy with the dead wife selling the art stuff. Shoot, repost it so we can read it again. Either here or Wordsmiths. I think it would be a goody.

Gayla: Will's story is a romance. Ha! See, romances work in nicely.

Gene: Sanger is a great romance, too.

Mmm. Do we have a theme? Romances in combination with other genres? Western/romance, occult/romance? Maybe?

I only have one romance, which was published in Lily, but I can put it wherever else I want. It's a tad off-beat, as well.

You must be talking about Summer and Tamarina, Marva. Good golly, that was 6900 words long. The only thing longer I've written is the start of a novel about the spirits of dead Indians reclaiming a part of Central California. That epic crashed and burned at around 16,000 words.

I'll post Summer and Tamarina here if you promise to read it again. lol.

Gayla: Nothing wrong with romances, and you've got the chops to write them.

Will: Yeah, that's the one. Yes, I'll read it again. As I recall, last time you put it up in parts, so it will be fun to slash at it in one big chunk.

Okay, you asked for it. What about Curse of the Apple Pie?
I thought that was kinda funky, and it was much shorter.

Oh, yeah! I loved that one, too! I also loved Borders Incident. That's the first one of yours I read. It made me a Rileyette right from the start. Careful, I could become a stalker. :o

Come on Gayla...you can do it! Anyone else? Be nice to get ten or so.

I've posted two of my stories that were already published. First, somebody thought they were good enough to publish. Second, they are now reprints.

If You Could See Her - Romance
The Thief - Little Eddie story

Certainly, if people have published something in an ezine, the electronic rights will be expired and since we're going to paper then it's wide open. Previously published stories give a stamp of approval to some extent. We would just need to give credit to the original publisher.

Still, I'm happy for any additional crits. Gayla might have some suggestions for the romance?

Gene. I got called back to work, I have to leave Monday at 10 oclock. The only way I would be able to participate in the book is to post old stories from Eotw. The problem is, is that when I saved them in htm, all the crap on the sides came with them.

If you want them as is, let me know as soon as you can and I will put some of the better ones up. Oherwise, see you guys about Christmas time.

tom

Ps. If you do want them, feel free to edit at will.

All: I have two possible stories here, "Family Man" and "Muckaround." If you think they are worthy, I'll polish them up. I would welcome any suggestions on either of them before I start.

Tom: I sure am going to miss you around here. I was always entertained by your stories. Yes, put your stories up. No computers where you're going? Glad you are back to work, though.

Gayla

Forget the HTML. Just put them up straight text. Sorry about the work. I know how you feel as I'm being sucked into that vortex as well for the next few months. Hopefully, not as long as Christmas and I won't be out of touch, just less time to do stuff.

I don't think we have any desparate timetables on this anyway. We do want to polish our stories, not just toss them into a bag.

Tom...loggers work? That's news to me! :lol: I don't think we're under a huge rush here. You don't have those stories in a Word file or some such thing? How did you post them originally? You can send them to me in any form and if I need to I can just retype them.

Gayla, I'm sure your stories will be just fine. I havn't had a ton of time to read/crit but I do think we can go a little slow on this and make it happen.

Everyone will work together and in the end I'll bet we can produce a pretty good product. I'd say we should shoot for a "ready to print" for sometime in September or October? That would give us time to make the Christmas present idea happen.

If this ain't happening till fall, I can retype them myself. As far as the Christmas present thing goes, I don't think that will work for me. If my mother finds out I'm a LOGGER, she will just shit. She always thinks logging is too dangerous. So I told her I was a hit man.

I do have my stories saved on disc, but not the edited versions. They are just like they were when I first subbed them to Eotw.

I do have a suggestion though.

We should come up with a point system for our stories. That way if a story doesn't get enough points, it will be eliminated from the book without a whole bunch of disscussion and hard feelings. Everyone Inc. in the book should only get so many points, so they won't be used friverously. If a story doesn't get high enough ratings it is dropped. I know we will have more submissions by then then we will know what to do with. We can help each other with the editing, and rate them just before they are to be submitted for the book.

tom

What kind of point system? Based on? Or just a subjective assignment of say 1 to 10 for a given story by everybody who's participating? Or, multiple categories e.g., technical and artistic, like in figure skating.

Tomper, I don't think we'll have to worry about room in the book. How about everybody submit at least two and more if they want, then winnow it to the two best stories per writer by vote of all.

Hey, Tom, I've got a program that strips HTML code from text. No big deal. If you'd like me to zap whatever you have, let me know. You can email me the files.

Marva-- Summer and Tamarina is too long, me thinks. The book might be better if it were comprised of shorter stories, making it easier to digest at the breakfast table. Just a thought.

It's up to you, Will. Duh. Obviously. How about Borders Incident?

Ah, yes. The Borders Incident. My most popular post at EotW. I'll look it over and post here or at WS for consideration.

In the meantime, where's the delete button? Summer and Tamarina is gathering dust here. Too tedious a read, I'll admit.

Thanks Will. I figured out how to do it. I posted an old one on your site to try it out, it worked ok.

tom

I think a book towards which everybody can contribute (intellectually I mean) is a great idea. I would love to be a part of it if I could be useful in any way.