I’m writing a novel. But it won’t be Tor, Orion, or Bantam Press publishing my work; it’ll be me.

Chris Brogan just dropped a perfect opportunity for me to hold myself to account here. You see, I’ve missed my deadline for having the promotional site for the book up. It was supposed to be finished on February 2nd, with some content available to act as a teaser for the actual volume coming in summer. Nearly a month late, I still have 10 hours of work to do on the promo site, and no time budgeted to it.

Before you finish reading this, jump out and read/ watch Chris’ video post, The Future of Media.

Back? Good. Now I’ll explain.

The Dowager Shadow, which I’ve spoken of before here, is a fantasy fiction parallax that has been where I’ve put most of my energy for the last four years. It started making its way from ongoing roleplay to novel with 2008’s National Novel Writing Month – my co-author Leila and I smashed the 50k word barrier easily, and immediately had what amounts to a full first volume of book.

Last year, I began publishing the novel as a serial – you can still read some of it on dowagershadow.com until I get the new site up, but I warn you, the manuscript has seen a lot of editing since then.

Here’s what you’ll see once the new site is actually up, and I’ve got the manuscript finished and produced:

• The first volume will be available for purchase as an eBook, with built in interactivity like an appendix, maps, and other information.
• In addition to each volume, there will be a few rounds of shorter stories available for free through Pay With a Tweet. This will take care of some of the promotion of the book.
• Each subsequent volume will be released in two ways: stand-alone purchase, or bundled with the previous volumes, each of which will have been updated with information pertinent to the new volume.
• There will be a print version, produced through a self-publisher, which can be ordered alongside the eBook. I’m aiming to have two production runs per year for the physical artifact.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s really no more work than this blog.

Building interactivity into a book is a very new media thing. It’s the kind of thing that’s going on all over the place. Usually, though, it’s products like Digging Into WordPress. However, given the success of products like DigWP, and the many thousands of well produced eBooks out there, I can’t help but see this kind of thing as the future of media.

We’re going far beyond the entrepreneurial journalism that blogging has been for the last decade, and moving into an era of entrepreneurial publishing of all flavours. That, I believe, is the future of media.