Okay: change of plans. It's a wiki now.

2009-00-07

Yep ... this project had certainly been planned as a Joomla Community, which -- I know -- would have been a lot easier and less demanding on the end user (meaning, yourself). However, I pretty soon discovered that the work involved with setting it up as a Jooma entity involved a large financial investment (better than a grand), and MONTHS. Perhaps six months. And at the end of that time and investment, you're left with the Key Question, which only time can answer:

Will GLBT writers come onboard? Is there enough energy, vitality, determination, enthusiasm left in our writing and publishing community for us to be able to get together a Community of at least 100 writers and publishers, all of us independents, all of us determined to forge careers, all of us intrigued by the idea of collective advertising.

Collective what?

Works like this: If one writer has a website and markets the heck out of it, s/he will get about 100 visitors per day and be deliriously happy to get this many. If 100 writers collaborated on the same site -- a wiki, wouldn't you know? -- and we ALL market the hell out of the wiki as a whole, well, we stand to get many thousands of visitors. Per day. We're ALL highly visible to a major stream of reader/customer traffic. We ALL should sell books, due to the "fallout" of the communal advertising -- it gets better.

If there are 100 of us on the project, we can routinely "pass the hat around," and everyone throws in about a buck. A dollar. Loose change -- 50p a pop will do nicely. Call it "Kitty Night." The money raised in loose change is then invested in Campaigns. We can park the wiki's banners on sites where they'll be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. We can buy targeted visitors for 5c per visit. We can pool ideas and knowledge, hot tips and insider info, and make our advertising dollar go a long, long way.

Because this wiki is not just about distriibuting information and free samples.

It's about selling YOUR books. My affiliate links (Amazon, Smashwords, Payloads and so on) are pasted all over my pages. When someone buys a copy from Amazon, I not only get the sale, I get the affiliate fee, too. If your books are available through Amazon, B&N, Diesel and so forth ... and if you don't have an affiliate account ... set one up. Seriously. Sell your books here.

This is as much an experiment as a wiki. We can -- and should -- grow into the biggest GLBT bookstore on the web. Which means "in the world" these days.

However, it's all down to the participation of writers, publishers, artists, editors, reviewers, and readers. All Keegan can do is set it up (done), pick up the tab for the hosting and early-days advertising (in process), and invite, by stages, the writers and artists with whom I'm connected to come aboard and invite their connections.

The snowball effect. The acorn syndrome. This whole thing could be the biggest success story since Amazon -- as well as being a kind of "open source" project that flies in the face of Big Business. This is Indie private enterprise on the rampage. But Keegan can't do it alone. Best I can do is launch it, nurture and encourage it ... chant over it, perhaps.

Over to you.