What if... I did something with Varney the Vampire, the way y'all suggested?
This is why I'm asking for opinions. Put up one with a tip jar? Sell them on Lulu? (With that, you'd at least be able to buy it in hard copy.) What I'm thinking, in the latter case, is put up every hundred pages of recap/commentary. I might quote it a bit more extensively than I did on that LJ entry, but--honestly, I'm not going to annotate the whole thing sentence by sentence, because it's repetitive as hell and it's already 1500 pages in Word. But yeah. Every hundred pages of content, cut it off, bind it, sell it. Narrative recaps have always been easier than script-format parody for me, and as you can tell from previous comments on the subject, Varney is hysterically fun. I swore I wasn't going to tweet anymore, and I broke down last night when I got to the part where Varney and the villagers started throwing bricks at each other.
But would people keep buying it? Similarly, the problem with a tip jar is that everyone gets to read it, but eventually people stop tipping. I don't know. All I know is, I would love to write something like this, and I think it's both fun and advisable to post things for free. I just can't post everything for free, because I'm broke.
Also, the thought of Giving the Gift of Varney This Christmas to the Vampire Enthusiast Who Has Everything kind of gives me the giggles.
Thoughts?
Plus, Secret Life of Dolls got me through a very rough summer/autumn, so I owe you some sales for that.
I would totally buy it. In whatever format you put out. You give us so much free content already with the blog, I would love a way to repay you. I like supporting my internet peoples, and you are quite possibly my favorite Internet Person.
Put up one freebie chapter, then announce how much you need to receive in order for the next chapter to be posted. After it's posted, everyone can read it for free, but the chapter after that won't get posted until you receive enough money.
And so on.
It mostly works if the poster already has a following (Lawrence Watt-Evans used it successfully), but you seem to, so it might be worth a try.
I think part of the question for you to think about is, how many 100-page chunks do you think you'd wind up with? Obviously, I think that the more entertaining the previous installments are, the more likely people will be to stick with it -- to find out what happens, and for ongoing laughs. And I think it would also help if people understand from the outset that it's likely to be about 3-5 installments, rather than, say, 15. That lets people budget.
This is a good "Christmas gift to myself" kind of thing. How long do you estimate it will run page-wise?
Speaking of tipping, what if you just produced a general "Cleolinda Industries Tip Jar" that we could toss things into for any reason? So we could tip you for Varney, or for SLoD (since you can't SELL them, but accepting tips-for-anything isn't selling, is it?), or for anything you did that we found tipworthy?
I dunno if you've sold physical books through Lulu (or Createspace, which is Amazon's Lulu-alike) but I have. It's kind of a process.
Also, I'm a book designer. I design books. Like, regularly. A lot. I dunno if you have design-type experience or you know a guy or anything like that, but . . . I could help in that department. Gussy the book up and all that. I'm dead serious, I'll show you PDFs of books and covers I've designed. Not to mention that fiction is INCREDIBLY easy to lay out (much more so than poetry, which is my bread-and-butter). It's just master pages, whack the text in there, proof it quickly, bang, done. Frontmatter, backmatter, whack, whack, done. None of this title-every-other-page bullshit.
I think a physical book would be SMASHING, particularly if it is pretty. People would buy it. People LOVE books, particularly your fan base--having the physical book is really important and awesome.
edit: unless I'm incredibly thick and you're talking about ebooks, in which case, never mind.
Edited at 2010-11-30 05:59 pm (UTC)
Also, if I was going to spend $25 right now, I'd rather have one Lulu hard copy than a bunch of eBooks. So... maybe release one hard copy at the end? Then people like me can wait and budget and buy the whole thing.