Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Preparing to launch

Sometimes a project becomes a series of backwards steps. Case in point: there's been some [small] interest in my novel, "The Purple Doom" that I recently completed as part of the National Novel Writing Month competition.

I'd like to capitalize on that modest interest, but that desire has led me down a trail of prerequisites.

1) The novel needs to be edited and cleaned up a little (OK, a lot -- I did some crazy-mad typing there at the end). So I don't really want to post it raw, so that means it will be about a month before it's available -- at which time all interest will be gone. But wait! "The Purple Doom" is actually the fourth novel I've written about these characters. I should post the others.

2) The first novel, "Murder Squad" was written a few years ago. It's finished and edited, but it still needed another pass.

3) But before I could post it, I needed to decide on format. Should it go up as a text file? A PDF? A Word document? I think I might go with a PDF, which means I've got to convert it to that format.

4) But wait. What kind of copyright do I want? Well, I've already decided on using a Creative Commons license. Anyone can enjoy and share "Murder Squad" for free. If someone wants to make money of it, though, I'd like them to contact me. But I need to register the work with Creative Commons before finalizing the format, as the CC language needs to go into the document.

5) But the form asks for the author's URL and the work's URL. Well, I can have the "Murder Squad" download live on our FTP site, but I don't have my own website! Should I use my FaceBook page? Not the best first impression. Should I construct a new site for this? Probably not -- the whole idea is to get "Murder Squad" out as quickly as possible.

So once I get the infrastructure worked out, then it all should flow very quickly. But in the meantime, I feel like I'm starting not at Square One, but Square Negative Five!

- Ralph


Day 171 of the WJMA Web Watch. (Which will happen first? Will "Murder Squad" be posted, or will their website go live?)

2 comments:

  1. Now you've got a radio drama franchise, too! What if there was a place to air such things locally, and to grow a community that relearned the joys of radio drama? I think that would be fun to try to get together.

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  2. It would be a blast. Let me know what you think of the first story. It should be posted later on tonight.

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