crowdfunding | Serialised Novels, Engagement, and Extribulum (Reply)

Hi! I'm Sam. I'm here at the kind invitation of

ysabetwordsmith to talk a little bit about my experiences in combining crowdfunding, serialised web novels, and traditional bookselling.

There's a lot of talk in indy media circles about the importance of your audience, or in my case my readership, since most of my output is literary. Some of you have probably heard of The Technium's excellent article, One Thousand True Fans, about the power of "true fans" in your online community. But there's not a lot out there about how to build your audience -- not much more than there is about how to publicise a book and, believe me, there's not much of that at all. Publicity, donor relations, audience building, they're all pretty similar: you draw people in, engage with them, and convince them you're putting out a product worth their money.

Which is hard to do, 'cause we're mostly all broke these days.

I work in the not for profit sector, so I spend a lot of time around fundraisers. I also run a weekly blog post where I link to fundraising and activism efforts within "my" community, links which themselves are crowdsourced from my readership. Interacting with these causes, I've become familiar with the usual fundraising structure, which is to raise the money first and put the product out afterward (or, as the case may be, send the thank-you letters).

Because I can't do anything the right way round, I've ended up with a model which is totally backwards to this. But I'm making it work, and as a model for building an audience I believe it's pretty sound.

For the past three years I've been engaging in a process I call extribulum, which is terrible Latin for "out from the machine". It's also the name of the object it produces, a novel created digitally and edited by the internet. The easy breakdown is this:

1. I write a novel.
2. I post that novel sequentially online -- say, a chapter a day for two weeks. This is a basic serialised-novel format, only I don't ask for donations yet because...
3. I ask readers to critique the novel and get involved in the process of considered rewrites.
4. I then rewrite the novel and post a second draft for final changes, discussing my process with my readers.
5. The novel is typeset, sent to a print-on-demand publisher, and offered for sale.
6. Profit! (Sorry. I had to.)

I'm not making a living at this, which I'll be the first to admit. I'm not really sure I'd want to; that's an awful lot of pressure to put on a creative brain. But my first novel sold about five hundred copies, and my second about three hundred. When you think about the fact that the average vanity-press author sells fifty copies per edition, I think I'm doing pretty well. This past month, with no new novels released since last November and no publicity investment, I made about thirty dollars from book sales.

The advantages of this system are twofold.

One, I make a better product because I understand the people I'm selling to, and every time we go through the process -- which isn't without pains -- I learn a lot more about how people interact with their books. This isn't purely crowdfunding, but it takes advantage of the internet's vast intelligence asset. When I ask for honest opinions from readers, I learn a lot about how they interpret the text, what their expectations are, and what kinds of stories they want to hear. I learn about how prose affects the reader, and I learn how to differentiate which comments or parts of comments are going to be the most helpful to me in guiding the story.

This isn't confined to fiction; engaging any community in an effort teaches the moderator of that effort a great deal about their audience. One of the first rules of fundraising, as I've learned, is to make sure your prospective donor understands and cares about the cause. You can't help them care if you don't know who they are. This is true even in traditional fundraising: my bosses have a database entry for every donor and prospective donor they interact with, to track their involvement.

And this is perhaps the more important for those interested in crowdfunding: making the community care. When I ask for help, I engage my readers, so that they feel as if they're part of the process. Which, indeed, they are. When you're involved in something massive and successful you want to have a part of it to keep. When you have a physical reminder of something you were involved in, it means more to you than other, similar objects. Readers who contributed to the rewrites on my first two novels can buy either book off Lulu.com, open it up, and find a passage they told me to put in, or a place where they told me to take a passage out. That means something to them, and it makes me very proud.

To me the most vital part of crowdfunding is engaging your community not just with updates on your progress (blogging is important!) or repeated ads for your end-product, but with real interaction. People who are engaged stick around, they tell their friends, and they want to take an active role in helping you to get your product out there because there's a sense of mass ownership. I could talk for hours about the process of editing novels and the way in which I serialise them, but that's somewhat irrelevant here. The point is that a serial story draws the reader in -- but if they're participating in the editing and the direction of the story, they're going to stick around, and they're going to feel pride in the finished product. They're going to care.

A lot of crowdfunding advice starts with the assumption that your community already cares, but making them care is the most difficult part of any fundraising operation. It's where a lot of people fall down, either through an assumption that because they care, everyone should care, or because they don't know how to get people engaged when everyone has so many distractions waiting for them. It's a tough gig, and it's a slow build, but the community you build slowly is the one that's going to last.

Thanks for your time -- I hope this was helpful to everyone, and that it got some people thinking.

Obligatory publicity: if you'd like to see the process of extribulum in action, you can check out my first drafts at

theoriginalsam and some further essays on writing at my extribulum tag. My books are available on Lulu, in both hardcopy and .pdf format, and I have a new novel, Trace, coming out early this fall. Thanks all!