The Future Of Publishing?

After The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus's initial publication as a series of seven zines, the novel was collected in a book by Out Your Backdoor/Underground Literary Alliance Press. After serializing Blog Love Omega Glee, I want to collect it as well. Since it was serialized electronically, it's fitting to have the collection be an ebook. It'll be out in a few days, and I'll be releasing it myself. I'm just going through the novel and fixing a few typos and whatnot (one nice thing about electronic publishing is that even if I or a reader find a typo down the road, I can still fix it by updating the file). I hadn't planned on self-publishing the collected version (I do enough of that with the serialized versions of my novels, or so I had thought), but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

The way I'm doing it might be a bit unusual though. I've cut out all the middlemen between writer and reader (ok, there's still the alphabet, the English language, and the computer and its software, so it isn't a perfect mindmeld). I'm releasing .epub and .pdf versions of the novel as freeware. Anyone can download them and anyone can pass them on to others. If someone likes what they've read, then I do ask for a donation (see the PayPal Donate button on the sidebar for how). I also ask that the novel not be adapted or transformed without my permission. People can even print it out but I ask that no copies be sold. By doing this, I'm hoping that the novel remains in circulation as long as people are interested in it, and I don't have to deal with the hassle of filling publication orders or working with an outside publisher. Instead, I can focus on writing.

Remembering that most experiments fail, we'll see how this experiment goes.