No, no, I'm *looking* for feedback and suggestions. My own instincts are rarely reliable when it comes to social stuff like strategizing publicity. (What, you mean simply writing cool stuff isn't enough all by itself?)
To my mind, the only real advantage of Kickstarter would be a context of social permission for drumming up interest. The very real down side would be that it's the sort of context exactly designed to kick me in the "nobody loves me, nobody will ever read my books, nobody cares at all." It's a context where you say, "This is the exact number that measures my worth and value as a human being and I'm fairly certain I will fail."
But with regard to previously unpublished material in collections…20 years is a very long time in this industry. For all practical purposes (and for the majority of my potential readers), the older stories might as well be unpublished. And with sufficient revision, that will be true on a textual level as well. In the hypothetical fantasy world where I was doing this at a time when DAW was still publishing S&S and I had advocates there, the natural first choice would have been to see if they would be interested in the collection with the new novelette as the "new content". But that ship sailed long ago.
At the moment, I'm still in a position where I'm functionally invisible in the mainstream SFF world. The Podcastle story is a start, but still pretty small beans. And with the exception of your very wonderful reviews, my books haven't really picked up *any* critical attention from the SFF community. (I'm not counting individual readers here, wonderful as they are.) So, to my mind, the usefulness of selling "Hidebound" first is in being able to plant a flag and say, "Hi, I'm doing this Thing that I think you'd be interested in reading. See? *Recognized *Venue thinks you'd be interested." Without that, I'm a nobody (and worse than a nobody -- a LesFic author, horrors!) with a self-published collection.
There are many many venues that would be useful if I could get reviews or guest posts in them. I've been trying, believe me. I've been getting a small handful of "no"s and a much bigger bucket of utter silence. (I agree with you that--based on demonstrated tastes--Book Smugglers would probably like my books. But I've queried them both times and gotten no response. I rather think that someone other than me needs to convince them that they'd like my work.)
Between even the most optimistic lag time for publication of "Hidebount", a decent interval from that to collection release, and the time for working on revising the other stories and all the other related activities, I have a lot of time before any of this is going to become more than an academic exercise. So I have plenty of time to gather ideas (and convince myself that none of them will work).
no subject
To my mind, the only real advantage of Kickstarter would be a context of social permission for drumming up interest. The very real down side would be that it's the sort of context exactly designed to kick me in the "nobody loves me, nobody will ever read my books, nobody cares at all." It's a context where you say, "This is the exact number that measures my worth and value as a human being and I'm fairly certain I will fail."
But with regard to previously unpublished material in collections…20 years is a very long time in this industry. For all practical purposes (and for the majority of my potential readers), the older stories might as well be unpublished. And with sufficient revision, that will be true on a textual level as well. In the hypothetical fantasy world where I was doing this at a time when DAW was still publishing S&S and I had advocates there, the natural first choice would have been to see if they would be interested in the collection with the new novelette as the "new content". But that ship sailed long ago.
At the moment, I'm still in a position where I'm functionally invisible in the mainstream SFF world. The Podcastle story is a start, but still pretty small beans. And with the exception of your very wonderful reviews, my books haven't really picked up *any* critical attention from the SFF community. (I'm not counting individual readers here, wonderful as they are.) So, to my mind, the usefulness of selling "Hidebound" first is in being able to plant a flag and say, "Hi, I'm doing this Thing that I think you'd be interested in reading. See? *Recognized *Venue thinks you'd be interested." Without that, I'm a nobody (and worse than a nobody -- a LesFic author, horrors!) with a self-published collection.
There are many many venues that would be useful if I could get reviews or guest posts in them. I've been trying, believe me. I've been getting a small handful of "no"s and a much bigger bucket of utter silence. (I agree with you that--based on demonstrated tastes--Book Smugglers would probably like my books. But I've queried them both times and gotten no response. I rather think that someone other than me needs to convince them that they'd like my work.)
Between even the most optimistic lag time for publication of "Hidebount", a decent interval from that to collection release, and the time for working on revising the other stories and all the other related activities, I have a lot of time before any of this is going to become more than an academic exercise. So I have plenty of time to gather ideas (and convince myself that none of them will work).