(This post and the one after it are crossposted from my facebook. Originally I was planning on just asking a question, but it turns out I have quite a few opinions on this whole topic so I decided that my blog really should start being a blog. After these two I will try to do it the other way around – link my RSS feed to my facebook in case anyone over there cares and post the rants themselves here. )

So I’ve been tossing around a little idea lately, and I thought I’d see if anybody has any feedback. The basic background, for anyone that doesn’t know, is that I love to write but haven’t quite had the energy/motivation/inspiration to write anything from start to finish for a while now for a number of reasons, including one that starts with “PhD” and ends with pain and suffering.
A few years back I wrote a novel. It’s quite hard for a first-time author to even get a manuscript onto the desk of a publisher, so I had to try to get an agent, and they had a different vision for the book than I did (based on what little they actually read). So I got disheartened, then distracted by uni workload ramping up and it all just fell by the wayside.

The thing is, sappiness and needing a good hard edit aside, I love that novel. Or, maybe more accurately, I love those characters. They want to be read, and they want the other two books of the trilogy to be written.

So here’s the idea: I am considering publishing my work for free online under a Creative Commons license. By-nc 3.0, to be exact

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

The basic idea with that is that it’s free and anyone can download it and send it to their friends, even do fan translations or similar projects, so long as they don’t make any money off it themselves. Furthermore, it doesn’t sign away my own commercial rights, so if a publisher did want to pick the book up eventually there would be no problem there.

I’m hoping that if it is actually good enough to read then word will get around a bit and people will comment and perhaps make suggestions, or even better demand that I write the other books. The bigger plan is that some kind of feedback may help to kickstart my writing again.

If I do decide to do this it won’t be instant, because like I say there are sections (mostly the beginning) that need a good hard edit. Not to mention the fact that I am trying to finish up my PhD here, so I spend the majority of my time either working on that, procrastinating from working on that, or recovering from working on that. But the characters want to be read, so I think I should probably do something about that.

Does anyone have any comments, suggestions, or demands for immediacy? I’d like to know if people think this is a good idea or not.