Favorite authors: Rick Harsch

Many of you know my circumstances, the mixture of good and bad as a writer: some publications, no money, self-exile, difficulties overcome with exuberance, difficulties like rubble that i am still working my way out of.
Here is the best thing: I have two books translated into Slovene and published here and two novels on the way that will be published in one volume, The Skulls of Istria and Adriatica Deserta. Both fit the 'novella' category, though I viewed them as novels from the start. But as they ARE short, 100 to 150 pages, I asked my publisher if we could put them together as the first of my two 'Adriatic novels', and publish them with two covers--turn and flip and you get a different novel. He likes the idea. I also have a novel called Kramberger with Monkey published here to round out a trio that has never been available in English.
What I want to do as I am unemployed and have a family (I get some editing, my wife does too; we borrow, we do what we can and have never missed rent payment) (and we keep the kids supplied with pets, which I believe is important--my son just spent some of his birthday money on a leopard gecko, Khalid).
Well, my thought is that I need to act as I am shut out of US publishing for now but I am a US author. My idea is to offer word copies of these three novels to anyone interested and ask for donations of any size, based on anything. Though, for instance, if a reader hates a novel and thinks I should pay the reader, I will not. I will accept and absorb no payment and ringing unendorsement, yes. And a lover of my novel or novels may be in no condition to send one dollar and that would make me happy in an obvious and particular way.

I thought this up last week when the publisher agreed to my idea of the two in one and could not figure a good way to broach the topic. This is this. Please let me know what you think publicly or privately.
Under any circumstances that you want to view the novels, write me at rick.harsch@gmail.com.

If I have violated TOS I apologize to some degree.

Uživaj and Viva,

Rick

An idea: you could do a kickstarter, with different levels of support, and rewards of a copy of a novel for a $10 gift; both for a $20; both signed for $50; both signed with a personal message for $100, and both with a box of chocolates for $1000. Set a goal that will justify a run of printing for the books.

I would love to donate to a Kickstarter campaign. I think the model is kind of nifty and works well.

Who publishes the kickstarter?

Info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickstarter

It is a private company but is good for artistic / literary projects. A friend of mine used it to raise funds for his film.

Great, thanks.

For now, all three novels are PDF filed and ready to send to anyone who is interested. See email above.

Oh shit finally a kickstarter to which I would be proud, and not ashamed, to contribute! Are you thinking of doing that, Rick? I would help with the PDF thing as a second-best option. Talia too.

I got the pdf down. all three are in pdf. I glanced through and they seem to be all there. I'll look into Anna's kickstarter thing tomorrow and see if there is something in it that makes sense for me.

Rick I will definitely purchase one and of course Goddard would probably love one too. I do not think he is on the salon - but I trust you have already contacted him. I will private message you my email.

Oh, now I see it. Goddard will never get as much as he deserves, but we should all try.

If you do a kickstarter, you want to do it all as a kickstarter. The way those work is you put it up to raise a given amount of money (say, $5,000 or $10,000), and if people commit to it over the days it is up, you get all the money. So if you've done a bunch of pdfs first you've made it harder to raise the money. If you don't raise the full amount, nothing is released and the "project" is closed. I've been part of drives to raise about $12,000 or so for classical music recordings, and they've worked well - we've raised enough 3 out of 4 times we listed; the other one we didn't raise enough and had to find another way to fund, but it helped us identify some supporters who helped with that.

But what happens is you give us all an excuse to link to your kickstarter on facebook and other places and recommend your book to our friends, and hopefully that drives some of the sales, and you use it as an excuse to remind everyone you know they should buy your book.

Yikes, I have already sent PDFs. But this way, as a start, those with my financial condition get to read free and I like that. I WILL look into the kickstarter, though. But what do I publish? The complete works? That would be great.

Make yourself a budget for self publishing a print run or whatever your goal is, and set the kickstarter for enough to do that and also pay kickstarter and amazon their percentages, and you should be good... although I have not done this myself, I think this is how it works, right a_musing?

There is a glitch. Amazon requires a bank account in one of four countries: US, UK, Germany, maybe France, last I heard. And you have to be living there. That's what prevented the Arjun and the Good Snake sales in the US.

You can use my bank account. I'm not a deadbeat.

Oh oops, Canada is not part of the shitty amazon club for jerks.

In re Post 9. O, anna, how well you know me. Of-course I'll be on board. This is very good news about new writing by RH.

I prefer deadbeats, but since I know you personally I can ignore that, Martin. (Bucbuc lives...but where is she now?)

Anna has it right on what to do for a kickstarter. The goal of most of them is to finance the production and run of a novel or album or something like that, and to do it with some people paying a premium because they're good eggs and are willing to support the project.

If kickstarter only runs money through Amazon, there are some similar services, like Indigogo, that do pretty much the same thing.

I'm, to coin a phrase, musing on this...I don't like self-publishing, so I have to consider the goal beyond financial survival...Is it different, really, between prose and music? I suppose anyone can record and disseminate just like I can pdf and disseminate. What has been the long run outcome of the projects you were part of, Sam?

Part of what we're doing is trying to build a label focused on composers, so we've helped composers essentially finance their own recording, working from their lists and ours. I think it's the way a lot of things will get published in the future, the stuff that doesn't have a mass audience and advertising budget (I've been involved wholly in classical music, a lot of it with a "world" flavor). Here's one of the projects we did: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bmopsound/andrew-norman-play

I think publishing is publishing. The one's we've done aren't technically "self-published", since we have a label and they become part of our catalog, but most of them wouldn't see the light of day without something like this.

I see. A composer certainly seems to face a more difficult horstgraben than a fiction writer. What now with Norman? Sales, distribution, radio play, articles, momentum (financial--towards more work...)?

And of course orchestral music cannot SIMPLY be recorded...

Yes, someday, if the right person reads your books, you may suddently find your books selling like hotcakes, and having the right publisher can be important to that. The composer, on the other hand, hopes to either find the right academic job, the right patron, or the right spouse so that they can support themselves and keep writing music as a passionate hobby. There are a couple people who write for movies and a couple of others who actually make a living as a composer. Kind of like poets, for whom there also can almost never be a self-supporting market.

So there is something different between you and them.

I have five books that seem to me to rate publishing that never have been published in the US. Three are now about to be available in Slovenia, two are not right for here. But I am 200 plus pages into my best work, my last US book, and one that should be about 600 pages or so. That is the one that seems right for kickstarting. When I won the Michener/Copernicus award for my second novel I had to acknowledge the award, that was part of the agreement, and I did so satirically, my point being, among other things, that I wrote the book dead broke, scraping by in part by living illegally in a closet of an office building in downtown La Crosse, WI. The money came when I needed it much less. So the real benefit of kickstarting would be to allow me the financial freedom to finish this book. But I don't know if that is an acceptable plan. I can get critics to vouch for the book, I can offer the first 200 pages freely for review. But is that a possible kickstarting project? I could also get my publisher here to publish it, but it would be a sort of self-publishing project as for that book, entirely a US book, they would need to be covered. They would not normally be interested. And then I would have to arrange distribution and publication in the US so as to give them a chance to profit off it.