Guest post: Larry Kollar on publishing co-ops

I'm happy to have a guest post today by my pal Larry Kollar. He's got a double release right now, working with a team of writers, editors and artists. For this post, I sent him this question:

"I'd like to get some info on how your publishing co-op is going. These books are among the first books to come out of it, yes? Can you talk about the logistics of sharing skill sets within the co-op?"

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That’s something I can talk about! Yes, Accidental Sorcerers and The Crossover are two of the first books out of the gate with the Green Envy Press imprint. Learning on the job has been a lot of fun.

It’s even more fun when you’re trying to thrash out production issues while trying to build infrastructure. A common rejoinder when someone asks a fairly simple question is, “Google is your friend,” followed by a link. When you’re trying to start up something like Green Envy Press, Google is definitely your friend.

First off, services like Gtalk (or any other IM service) let you communicate with your fellows in real time. This is especially invaluable when thrashing out things like a title or cover art, or figuring out what we want to have on the website. Every once in a while, we'll use Skype for an audio-conference. Still, there's a lot of ad-hockery going on as we wing our way through these first few projects.

For things that don't have to be done in real-time, like sharing skills or just thrashing on a pitch or blurb, we have a Google Groups mailing list. That's where I expect a lot of the action to happen, once we really get under way.

One particular example might come out in a post toward the end of the blog tour. Stay tuned!

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Larry Kollar lives in north Georgia, surrounded by kudzu, trees, and in-laws. His day job involves writing user manuals—some of which may have been fiction, but not by intent. He has had short fictional works published in the Hogglepot Journal, the Were-Traveler, and the anthology Best of Friday Flash, Vol. 2. He is a regular contributor to #FridayFlash, and contributes to #TuesdaySerial as both a writer and staffer. His first novel, White Pickups, is available at most eBook outlets.

Larry can be found in various places around the net, including Twitter as @FARfetched58, on Amazon, on Goodreads and at his blog: http://farmanor.blogspot.com/, which he describe as "strange fiction, and even stranger reality".

He also gave me a link to the Rafflecopter giveaway associated with this book launch. Click on the link to join in.

===== Feel free to comment on this or any other post.

4 comments:

  1. Interesting post Larry - nice to get a behind the scenes look. ^_^

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  2. I never seen this type of publishing model. How do you determine what a fair exchange of services are? How much of the book royalties does the co-op keep? Thanks.

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  3. Hi all!

    Tony, thanks for having me — these blog tours are a lot of fun, exhaustion and all!

    Thanks, Helen.

    Sam, it's very likely that GEP is the first of its kind. The fair exchange is worked out between the individuals, and (depending on the people involved) doesn't have to be a strict 1:1 in terms of… well, anything. Currently, the co-op isn't keeping any of the royalties, but we've agreed that if we need $$$ for (say) hosting or a subscription to a royalty-free image site, we'll all chip in. Since we're just getting started, we're sort of feeling our way forward right now. Hope that helps!

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  4. Hope the launch works well for you, Larry! The internet has definitely made publishing co-ops easier to create.

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