# 3490
As a frustrated and unpublished (hence my frustration) novelist, with a 100,000 word novel languishing on my computer, I can appreciate when another writer finds a new way to market their book.
Writing a novel is far easier than getting it published.
Online publishing has been tried before, with varying degrees of success. John Wesley Rawls managed to parlay a cult survivalist novel online into a published book during the 1990s, some late 1990s Y2K fiction ended up in paperback form, and there are others I’m sure.
Writing fiction, alas, is kind of like deciding to become a buggy whip artisan. You can make the finest buggy whips in the world, but in this age of 500 TV channels, video games, and MTV it isn’t easy to find a market for them.
People just don’t read for pleasure like they used to.
One wonders how great and prolific writers like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, John D. McDonald, and James Michener would fare had they all been born 50 years later.
Would we ever had heard of them? I certainly hope so . . .but some days, I’m not too sure.
Gone are the magazines of my youth that offered to pay a nickel a word for good fiction. Magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, which I was fortunate enough to find a stack of in my grandmother’s attic in 1964, which went back more than a decade.
It was a glorious summer of reading. I wish somehow I’d found a way to keep them. That may explain my compulsion to collect, archive, and share old radio shows (and now late 1940’s-1950s TV shows) with family and friends.
There are signs of revival, however. The Internet may not have found a formula to pay most writers, but it does provide a venue for them to display their wares.
Who knows, maybe I’ll put my novel online someday.
Which brings me to the point of this post.
About a week ago I received an email from a gentleman named Peter Christian Hall, who is publishing – online – his novel about a future pandemic that strikes the globe: American Fever.
Last year, you may recall, I reviewed another pandemic novel written by Craig DeLouie entitled The Thin White Line: A History of the 2012 Avian Flu Pandemic in Canada. The author has now made a free version of the book available that you can read online here.
While there are other post-apocalyptic novels online, this one has several unique `hooks’ that separate it from a crowded field and is written by an author with more than a few professional credits.
In the first unique hook, the author has managed to interweave contemporary news accounts of the current swine flu outbreak into his narrative (as a pre-cursor to a later pandemic caused by a reassortment of swine-bird flu).
Second, Mr. Hall obvious has more than a passing knowledge of the subject of pandemics, and pan flu preparedness. He states that he has researched the subject for nearly 4 years, and it shows.
Written as a series of blog entries (fifty years ago, this would have been a diary discovered in an old trunk), there are hyper-links to real news stories, websites, and flu blogs along the way.
And in what may be a marketing masterstroke, he mentions – at least peripherally - several well known flu bloggers (at least in the small pond we call Flublogia).
I can’t wait to see if I survive, or am killed off in some deliciously ironic way. It probably depends on how Peter likes this review.
In any event, the book is called American Fever, and the first 5 entries are now online. Once the author has posted the entire book, he plans to publish it in that quaint old technique involving paper and printer’s ink.
The plans for this book, per the author’s words:
This live, linked, serial novel will flow online through the summer of 2009, a dramatic blueprint for survival as we all wait to find out what H1N1 swine flu will do to us.
American Fever will become available for purchase only after the entire work has been posted.
I certainly wish Peter luck with this experiment, and plan to stop back at his site every few days and catch up on the pandemic-after-next.
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