@ jon – sorry – my subscription to comments failed me and I only just found this. Thank you! I hope you enjoy our toying with ideas that we’ve undertaken -and the next three books, out on December 1st

I should mention to people that so anyone who’s thinking of being part of a collective can learn from our mistakes, I’m posting all the facts and figures for my book on my blog on the first every month (www.agnieszkasshoes.blogspot.com).

you may regret asking questions :-) I’ve been known to ramble! To take your points in order

1. The anthology, Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair, is intended to showcase our work and offer people a sample so they know what’s coming in the months ahead – kind of like a business card (or, literally, a sampler in the way embroiderers used to use them to show off their skills). We’ve already had some interest through it – Heat magazine in Australia, who publish gigh quality literary fiction, directly approached two of us and asked us to submit work, and one of us (Julia) has a story due to be published by them later this year for which I belieev sh’ll be paid quite well by short fiction standards. As a collective, we’re about novels, though.

2. In terms of what we do for each other, we do have a range of experience that we’re happy to share (Sarah is an artist, and designed my cover for me), but we are first and foremost about what happens after we have the book in our (real or virtual) hands. We each got our books edited outside the group by people more expert than those inside. Marketing is the thing we can do effectively as a group. We come from 8 countries, so that’s a wide variety of local media (we’ve featured on Dubai television, for example, and the main newspaper in Hong Kong) – that’s what I mean by strategies that are replicable not duplicable (we can each publicise Year Zero locally to us and find a new audience each time, whereas, if we were all sending press releases to the same literary magazines, we would be duplicating effort). We each move in very different circles – Larry has introduced us to the US emo scene, Oli has been a regular in popular culture forums for a while, I write a column for an online music journal, Sarah is part of the US steampunk design scene, and Julia is very much involved in the arts – all essentially the same literary fiction readers, but hanging out in different places. And we are able to look for sites that host and review free efiction in different areas and let each other know what we find so that we can get as wide an audience as possible for our books.

In terms of what happens before the books coem out – we share our experiences with each other but we’re not prescriptive in saying you have to print with x, y or z. We DO insist the books look good, though – we want to demonstrate that quality can exist outside the mainstream, and that free can be perfectly compatible with excellence. We don’t insist on cuts, though – at 22, we have a good number to ensure diversity but not unmanageability, which means we’re not actively seeking new members – althouh if we find something truly amazing we’ll invite someone in, and people can leave at any time. So we know the quality we’re dealing with, and trust our writers to ask for the right amount of help for their book. thats’ what we mean by uncut prose.

@Demian – yeah, Cory’s on the money about obscurity. It’s especially hard to get people’s attention these days – our reasoning is that if our writing is fantastic we’ll get people to stay with us if they once come and look – but if we don’t start by making our work both free and an interesting hook, they won’t look in the first place.

Keep fighting the good fight!

Seriously, Richard Nash spoke of such innovatiove practices when he absconded from Soft Skull. I’m happy you and others in the collective have, well, collected. The excerpts I read were edgy and yes, not likely to be found on the front racks of B and N. Back racks, either.

I am a tad confused, however; short fiction def finds a home here, and there are several books, but are you serving as each other’s editors, publicists, etc? Describe the nuts and bolts please, so others can form similar, hard-hitting collectives. I am in formation with such a collective (Harbinger 33) which aims for a similar form of ‘unionization’.

Great post. My brain is awhirring…

Peace, Linda