 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. Where we cover a variety of topics of interest to libraries and librarians. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. Both our live show that we do here on Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. central time and our recordings. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. Always go to our website and see you have all of our archived recordings for all of our shows. Going back to the beginning in 2009, are available on our websites. You can go there and watch them. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, book reviews, many training sessions. Basically, if anything library related, we are happy to have it on the show. We sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff do present shows, episodes here. And we sometimes bring in guest speakers. And this morning we have guest speakers, as you can see from the slide there. From the Topeka and Shawty County Public Library. We have Lyssa Staley. Is that how you pronounce your last name? Yeah, you got it. And Miranda Erickson are going to talk about this really cool project that I discovered that they were doing. I can't remember. I saw somebody shared on Facebook or Twitter somewhere. And I tracked them down and got them on the show. A community novel project getting your users of your library to write a whole book together. So I'm just going to hand it over to you guys to take it over and do your presentation. As I said, if anyone has any questions or comments or thoughts throughout the show, go ahead and type them in. And we'll take them as they come in. So go ahead, Lyssa and Miranda. Thanks, Krista. Thanks for having us today. Yeah, no problem. Thank you for being here. All right. I think that one of the most important things that libraries can do as we move into a new age to remain relevant is to participate in content creation in our communities. And our community novel project is a great example of how we've engaged people in our community to use the library and utilize the library in a new way. As we know, our local writers are some of our best customers. They utilize library resources and connect with readers to prepare the library. So the library is in a great position to continue that traditional role of supporting writers with their research and providing resources by helping them take the next step to get their work out there to learn marketable skills. And as we've worked on our community library project, we have put everything out there on the web so that we have freely shared our experience and others can learn from our mistakes and successes. So far, our library has completed two community novel projects, two completed novels with 20 authors each who contributed a chapter to the novel, helped with editing, promoting, and were a part of a greater whole. Those works are available in print from Amazon.com and Smashworks.com, available as ebooks, and still available on our site as well. We have two additional projects underway this year by local writers, facilitated by our library, one of which has a juvenile novel. So we're breaking new ground this year. And as always, we are sharing the ups and downs as we go along our website. So you can check out our website for more information today at tscpl.org slash community novel. So our premise here is that taking risks is fun, and we definitely live and breathe that. And we always work in pilot project mode. We convinced our library to let us try this by calling it a pilot project. That's the magic word where we work. Oh, we're just going to pilot project this idea and evaluate it and see if it works. So in 2012, I was pulled into a brainstorming meeting about libraries and content creation. And out of that meeting came this idea of a novel that the community would write. And somebody in the meeting said, well, we could do a chapter a month. And I raised my hand and said, but that would take two years. No one's going to stay engaged in a project that spreads over two years. That's about writing a book. And I said, what about a chapter a week? Because I came from a library tradition of working with national novel writing people who were writing a novel first draft in 30 days. So I thought, well, if I know a bunch of people who can write a novel in a month, I think a chapter in a week, they're going to jump right on that. And so if you're the crazy person in the meeting who says people can write a chapter in a week and I could get them to do it, you become the lead on the project. So as I sort of took that role, because I knew the local writers, I wrote the first chapter that first year for capital city capers. And then I had to approach writers individually to invite their participation, particularly before we were online publishing, because all I had was the first chapter. And my credentials to say, and the library will get this book done in the next couple months. Trust me. Which I had the Collins and Favors. I had to really find the writers who did trust me, that if I said the library can publish a novel by September, and yeah, I know it's February or March, that they believed we could pull it off as a team. Library management certainly had our backs coming up with copyright release forms and the web graphics and of course a budget so that we could get printed copies of the books, a small budget. We just gave a copy to each author for participating that first year. That first year we did capital city capers. We did 20 chapters, one per week on the library's website. We had a printed book at the author launch party, and then we made that printed book available in the library collection and on Amazon. We did the design in Adobe InDesign, which we have since moved away from, but that first year we worked with our PR department who had never written a book before. So we kind of went with their software for that, and then we printed through CreateSpace. For our marketing, the main thing we did was the project organizers recorded a podcast to promote it. You can see the website screenshot for that first year. And that first year we immediately realized, oh, it's a pilot project. We need to pay attention to what to improve. So we realized, Liz's idea of a great premise, maybe we should get other people involved in that for next year, and I'm okay with admitting that that was needed. We realized we needed emergency weeks in the writing schedule. Every author could pretty much meet that, write your chapter in a week deadline, except that sometimes there were emergencies, and we hadn't built in places for emergencies to be able to happen. Because people are human. They're not machines. They're not magic. So things come up, and they need that time still to get their work done. We needed to add an online forum so that people could share chapters more easily. That first year it was just me sending people all the chapters. So it was all very secretive with no communication between the writers, and it was all very much through my email that it all happened, and we wanted to expand that out to make it more communication and collaboration. We needed more editing and sooner and for more people, and then we wanted to really model this project so that authors could do this on their own. We tried to model it for other libraries as well, but we want an author or a writer participating to be able to get the skills they need to write and edit their own book, which means we needed to get away from fancy design software and more into something like Microsoft Word that people could use on their own. The first year we simply put up an HTML version and a PDF version of each week so that people could print out their copy, because we recognized not everybody wants to read online and not everybody's grandmother wants to read their work online. And then we did have some unavoidable challenges, and I call them unavoidable challenges because these aren't ever going to get better as far as we know. Wrangling 20 authors to each meet a deadline, that's still going to be a thing no matter how much we improve this project. Encouraging authors to honor the chapters before them and leave space for the chapters to come is really, I think one of the crucial parts of this project in helping writers see how the chapters in the novel, in fiction all work together to advance the story and part of learning to work collaboratively and not steal the whole novel in your chapter. Valuing each person's contribution, going back to say, oh, in my chapter I need to make sure that those things that were introduced in chapters 5 and 7 still are included in the plot in advance. Encouraging readership, finding the readers for a serialized novel, we're not in Charles Dickens' time anymore and not everybody's used to reading something that's serialized. So growing that idea as a way to read and then increasing the interaction between the readers and the writers, and then our most exciting thing is you won't know for sure the delivery date of the printed books or the final price for printing until you have your manuscript ready for printing and actually order it, at least if you're using Create Space. Until then, you're just estimating and hoping and working quickly. So on our timeline to keep people interested in the project, there's definitely some risk-taking in the planning and the details. And then, of course, there'll be other unknowns and we can't tell you what that is. There'll be other unknowns and we can't tell you what they'll be for your project, which is really exciting. That first year, we did design and layout and InDesign. We used Create Space. You can go on Amazon and look at our novel. You can purchase a copy. You'll see the prices set at 526. That's as low as I could set it. The library's not out to make a profit. The library was in it for the process and we want to make this available to people who want to order it. So by the numbers, that first year in 2012, each book cost $3.37 a book plus $0.43 each in shipping for a total cost of $3.80. We sold it in advance for $5 and for $6 at the book launch. We sold out of all our print and copies that we had ordered at the book launch that year. And in general, it was a good enough experience that it was worth repeating the next year. The acknowledgment section I recommend going to read, if you want to see what this project takes, going on Amazon to read the free preview of our book shows you the acknowledgment pages. And you can see that variety of people who contributed and the roles they played. Even in that first year, when we weren't that great about getting help on the project, a lot of people contributed. And for me, this was the project that pulled me into the community novel. I was a part-time employee at the library at that time and saw the book going on week by week and enjoyed following the progress and knew that I wanted to get involved with this project the next year. And I think my favorite quote from that first year came from one of the fellow writers. And he wrote when I asked for feedback and said, I really enjoyed the reactions of those writers who'd never experienced having something they'd written published. Watching several of them clutch the novel to their bosoms was priceless. And I could picture the scene that he was talking about from that book launch party, and I agreed. Seeing people hold that book was just magical. So that first year was certainly adventurous. And as a pilot project went, we were glad we survived it. So our theme was, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger? And we expanded the pilot project in year two. In the second year, we did have a premise meeting. We had people come together to brainstorm the idea for the book. We again had about 20 writers contribute chapters. On the website, we added extras for the readers, including behind-the-scenes information that you'll benefit from later in this presentation to show how we did all this, and then interviews with the authors. The novel's still on our website, and it's also in print edition, audio book, and e-book format. And it's all freely available except the print edition, which is set at the lowest cost we could set it at. That second year, we had 129 copies of the book ordered. The book cost came out very similarly, but again, we didn't know until that last moment of submitting it for printing. And we again went with Create Space for our printer. In year two, we did make some positive changes. We used a collaborative wiki for editing so that people could interact and make changes. We could all see the edits. We could all work together and sort of discuss the edits. The only rule we've ever had to agree on, really, as a group and lay down the law, was that we do use the Oxford comma. Yes, Oxford comma, because we found people editing the Oxford comma in and out in a series. It was kind of an issue. But really, as arguments go for editors, that's not a horrible one to have. We used the free templates from Create Space in year two so that the project would be perfectly able to be replicated by other authors wanting to do this process on their home computer or even on a public computer at the library. We added an audiobook version, and we released that file every single week at the same time as the serialized chapter. We released that through Libsyn, which is a podcasting system. We also added author interviews with each chapter, and we put them in the printed book. Even though that added 40 pages to the book, it was well worth it. We promoted the weekly chapter and the author interview through our library's Facebook, and we branched out our marketing. We had a booth at the Kansas Book Festival and at our library's author fair, just to promote this project. And as a participant in this project, my personal experience was that as a writer, I was challenged to do something I'd never done before. Collaborating with other writers is not easy, and it really stretches a writer to new limits. And the collaborative Wiki and the collaboration that took place via e-mail to build chapters and write a premise together was something that built my confidence as a writer and connected me to other writers in the community so I can speak as a participant in this project to the value that it added to my writing life. So we did, for that second year with Speak Easy, try to document the behind the scenes. So we want to let you peek behind the curtain now and see some of what went on and what it looked like during the process. And all of this, I should go back and say, all of this is available on the library's website through Community Novel. We've put it all online so that you can get back to it directly as well. So to start with, we advertised and solicited writers. And additionally, you'll see the little form with the name e-mail telephone. How do you take someone you've never met before and ask whether they can write fiction? What questions do you ask? So we did an interest survey. Have you ever written fiction? Have you ever completed a draft of a novel? Can you meet deadlines? Have you ever edited a novel? Have you self-published a novel? We're trying to not say, yes, there are certain things you have to do to do this, but just feel people out as self-identify, are you actually a good candidate for this project? And that turned out to be very useful. At our organizational meeting, I know this doesn't look organized, so we use that term loosely. We had a brief agenda, and then that part on the right where it says Veronica Long in dry erase marker is the premise that we started with for Speak Easy. And it doesn't look like much. It looks like 30 random words and a bunch of numbers as we tried to figure out dates. But that really was our work facilitating a group of about 11 people into coming up with a premise that we could all agree on for this manuscript to get us started. And then the messy calendar with highlighter is how I sat down to make sure we could start writing and publishing and end up with a book in time for the book launch party. There's a neater version of that online as well. Oh, there's the neater version on the far right. We had an assignment of copyright form so that people could give their copyright permission to the library for their chapter. We had a pre-order form, so people could order a copy of the book in advance to be picked up at the book launch party. And then the calendar with a little more details written out including when each chapter should be edited, when we would post it online, when we would pass forward drafts in between each other. And that really helped keep everything on track for when we followed it. And when we did the online e-book publishing, on the left side of the screen you can see what the webpage looked like. You could download the PDF, the e-pub, the MOBI format or play the audiobook right there or download the MP3. We had that up for each week. And we also had the chapter you could read right there on the webpage as well as the author interview. And on the right side is a screenshot from the program called Calibre, which is an open source software that we used to publish our e-book versions and take a Word document and turn it into the e-pub and MOBI versions. The thing that I think was the biggest great thing we added last year was the author interviews. I overheard a reader say, I like reading the author interviews almost more than the chapter. And I think that's really revealing as to what kind of book you're writing. You're writing a book written by individuals in your community and you're playing up their author experience and how they interacted with contributing to this novel. So for each chapter the person's not just reading, the reader's not just reading the story. They're reading about a community member advancing the story and how that happened. And I think the author interviews helped feel that more strongly. This is just a picture of our actual cover art with the front and back and our cover was designed by Rich Cobbs who works here at our library in our marketing department and he was kind enough to really to listen to what our book was about and try to design a cover that was very captivating and evoked what our story was about. And the book launch was the culmination of this experience for all of us. And for me this was the moment when I got to meet other writers face to face that I had been working with online for months and meet readers who told us how much they enjoyed seeing our story as it appeared or how much they looked forward to reading it in print. So it was a celebration and also a feeling of celebrity that this was a moment for me like our quote from the first year where I was holding my published work in my hands clutching it to my glism fondly. And that lineup you see, we all had our moment to take questions from the audience and talk about our experience and then readers brought their books through and we all got to sign. So it was very exciting and a really great a really great outcome to this whole process to have that final product in our hands. And there's nothing like advertising a book launch to make sure that you have a completed book in hand for your book launch. So it's a very deadline driven project up to that last moment of here are the actual books. So in year three and I say this with some hesitation to put us out here like this but our theme is don't crash and burn. In year three which is the current year we've exploded our pilot project. Let me tell you what I mean by that. Oh look, we have two projects. We decided we had so many authors who wanted to come back and participate again. We had people who wanted to do a different focus with more writing a kid's story because they are active in writing for children as part of their writing careers that we listen to them and we said yes, we will help you. We'll have two projects and it turns out two projects takes a lot of time. So we will be honest about some of what's going on for us. We're still meeting all of our deadlines but in a creative way. It's a little crazy. It's a little crazy. So you can't do it all and we've tried. In previous years the library staff really took on the burden of making these projects succeed and introducing expanded features each year and pushing us farther and farther and we still are. But taking on two projects has forced us to really look at our priorities. What matters most to the readers? Are there tasks that have to be done by library staff? Which tasks will help the writers learn from this experience and benefit or build their resumes? Are there community participants who will step up and fill a gap if we leave it open? How can we strain line? We've actually done a really good job of those things and I think it's benefited the project overall and will certainly benefit all of you listening and us going forward. So this year the biggest change is that we added a second pilot project Juvenile Fiction which we had not done before. We decided to go with a 10 chapter book to make a shorter novel for younger readers. So 10 authors a new genre. We're doing natural fiction and because it's for kids we also wanted to include illustrations and work closely with kids to create content that would be appealing to our target audience. So as we recruited writers we put forth the idea that we welcomed collaboration with kids. Kids as co-writers, kids as illustrators as idea generators and as we moved forward in the year we decided that we had better publish our chapters and author interviews as one post. I think that's a change that's worked out really well this year again with having so much to do that forced us to prioritize and streamline the process. Now someone can read the chapter and go right into the interview after that. We also decided to wait and produce a complete audio book after the book was completely posted and edited which I think has many advantages. One of which is the time saving factor that posting two books plus two audio books in a week is just impossible and that we will have a final edited version that we'll be working with for our audio as another advantage. And in this case we've also found community novel participants who have been involved in this project all three years who have stepped up. They want to take more initiative and take part in the layout process. We have a final editor this year, a community person who is in charge of editing and sends on completed versions that will be posted online. And we have someone who's working on our print layout in advance. That's a great perk. Some good things have happened out of our chaos. So one of our projects this year is superimposed and we have a lot of new writers to this project, some returning writers. And one thing we're struggling with is this is our third annual Mystery Adventure story set in Topeka. Now the premise came out of another premise meeting but the writers are really struggling not to retell last year's story. We have another story with an older adult and a younger actually a younger woman working in Topeka and their relationship kind of. And so they're struggling to have a different story than we had last year which has been interesting as they kind of take the plot away from where it went last year. And another new challenge that came out in the previous meeting in January was to require flashbacks on the even numbered chapters and then a parallel present-day story. So on the odd numbered chapters it's a story about Holly working as a hospice worker here in Topeka and in the flashback chapters you get stories from many different time periods. The first three are set in World War II about someone who you believe is the person that Holly is working with in the present day. And I won't tell you more but people have been very challenged to get a parallel story to emerge from that because where it started isn't where it's going and superimposed to the graphic and the title refer to possibly some identity switching, things like that. And some improvements we've made. In addition of continuity notes on the wiki as things got more confusing we realized we needed to track all those details and a shout out to Roxy for going through and adding those notes at the top of each chapter. And then more plot and continuity editing. In previous years really if you turned in the chapter it just kind of went out as it was. And this year in order to make our story work we are going back and making small changes so that our overall plot will be satisfying to our readers. And then of course the importance of spelling grammar and punctuation cannot be stressed enough but your individual writers don't have to excel at that. Putting an editor at the end to catch those things has worked really well for us and gives us a real consistent published product because the same person is correcting. A little bit more about Spirits of Oz one of the great things about this project is that we are targeting a new audience in our community so we've already opened up communication with schools and with camp groups to try to get kids reading this book during the summer when they have time for fund reading and it's given us an opportunity to pitch a new way of summer reading that kids can get on the computer or get on their mom or dad's phone or tablet and read. I think that makes it new and exciting. And the images and illustrations that go along with this book I think give it another special feel that we have great cover art designed by one of our staffers Michael Perkins and here in a moment you'll see some examples of really fine community source art. I do think that we anticipated getting more illustrations from the community than we have and what we have decided in retrospect is that we had a network established for writers that was set through NaNoWriMo and through previous community novel projects had built up a network of writers to reach out to and we didn't have a similar network for art. Here are a couple of examples of great community sourced art. On the left you see the albino lady this is a community story urban legend and this artwork was contributed by a young lady who will be a college freshman next year. And on the right a 12 year old formatted the introduction list to chapter one in sort of a diary of a wimpy kid style and added the doodles on the side for a great way to really bring kids into this project right from the start. And I think that artwork also is lovely both because it helps illustrate the novel in the imaginations of your reader and because you face some interesting challenges with this being a paranormal story. The artwork on the right with the notebook paper the first thing you had to do if it's a ghost story is define ghosts. What do you mean by ghosts? What will the rules be for ghosts? Because every writer could take it a different direction and so they addressed it right off the bat with this you know the twins in the story come up with this list of you know here's what ghosts are. It helps your reader understand but subtly helps your other authors. Right and this target age group loves lists so that was another thing that our chapter one author very consciously incorporated into this at the demand of her children who are in our target rating age. So there are so many people involved in this project and as we talked about illustrations one of the things that didn't occur to me was we need to ask for illustrator biographies and credit illustrators in the same way that we are writers. When it did finally occur to me I couldn't realize I hadn't thought of it before so I can't stress enough that anyone who donates their time and invest themselves in your project deserves equal recognition and that when you're recognizing them online in print at the launch party that their contribution is just as valuable so your editors, your illustrators, those who work on layout, your sounding boards listen I both have our sounding boards on the staff who listen to ideas and answer our questions and just let us vent when we need to and all those people deserve credit for the help that they contribute. The acknowledgement of capital slithy capers the first 2012 project get into this some but I think when you look at a print book a real print book of your library shelf a traditional publishing print book they don't credit all the people who were a part of it but when your community people are volunteering their time to put in those rules you need to credit it and you need to acknowledge here's what it took to actually make this work because no one's getting paid the way they might be getting paid in the publishing industry it's not their job they're putting forth that effort and that talent to make this succeed so letting them get the credit letting them celebrate whatever they took away from it giving them that voice I think is a really important part. Absolutely it's a lot of work so the sky is the limit so if you're going to engage writers in your community how are you going to go about this and think about what role does that library play you've got library resources you've got books you've got research books you've got books in your 800s on writing you've got a lot of examples of fiction on your shelves you've got technology resources you've got computers and printers you've got internet connections and software you may have scanners things available to your public to do creation work but what are you doing to encourage them to do creation work you have strong facilitators and leadership in your library who can step up to lead people through this process to say we're going to do this you can be a part of it here's how and you can convene projects you can say we're going to do this project come together and join us you host events already this is another event you can host from the book launch to the organizational meeting and in this particular project the library is a publisher create space I refer to them as our printer because they say create space is not a publisher where your printer the print book is published by the library and so that's kind of a new role for a lot of libraries but not a role that should be that unfamiliar since so much of what we do is in the book industry and isn't helping people realize their their projects and their needs and their dreams this is just a new way to do it now collection development challenges for self-published authors is something lots of libraries already are thinking about worrying about freaked out about does this automatically mean we include all of these authors self-published works in our library are they in the end club no our library uses collection development policies and guidelines to decide what to put in our collection even in our Topeka room which is our local local author local history collection we don't automatically include people self-published works our library even if we love them for participating in this project but what can community novel project do help increase that communication between the author local authors and the selectors help the local authors understand your guidelines for selection and help the local authors find distribution outlets help make their work accessible to readers you know sitting on the dusty library shelf not getting checked out doesn't help them what can we do to actually help connect them to readers so for us our plan to move forward is to further develop a local author section of our website we see that as a way we could help you know collecting their book and hiding it in the libraries to peek a room is not helpful helping promote them help giving them the skills to promote themselves would be helpful we think so naturally out of this we have come up with a couple of other ways to support our local authors here in Topeka last year we had our first local author fair and this was a big event where we started with a novice writers forum we invited local authors who were successful in traditional publishing and in their own ventures to come in and take a panel and for 45 minutes they talked about their experience and took questions from the local authors who came to participate in the fair and that first fair was really successful and we held the event on a Sunday we had ice rain and snow that day it was awful it was that awful weather worrying for them and we still had something like 125 people from the community come through the authors who came were excited and they felt that they sold a lot of books comparable to other events they participated in so that first year it was about giving our authors a place to come in present their work to readers in the Topeka community spread word and sell some books and this year we've stepped it up we've also added a local author workshop in August we will have a morning of workshops we've brought in a lineup of 6 speakers who have publishing success including Harriet Lerner who has sold 3 million copies of one of her books we are bringing in a local author who is a successful freelance writer she's going to talk to these writers about how to pitch their work and how to support themselves through their writing aside from their creative writing ventures those are just a couple of examples of what this workshop will provide it will also help them to prepare for a local author fair we found last year that a lot of writers really don't know where to start with marketing promoting setting up their booth spreading the word that they're going to be at an author fair so this will give them a leg up a couple months in advance so that they can be have a successful event here at the library and elsewhere I'm very excited about what we're offering so I love that Miranda and her team for the author event didn't just look at their author fair and last year and say oh but people they just weren't professional they said oh people need help becoming more professional we can help with that we can do that I love that I just wanted to shout out for that and there's so much value to the community and what we're doing as a community novel project with the local author fair and workshop we are reinforcing marketable skills in writing editing layout publishing and marketing that writers can apply to their own projects and that they can build on for their personal success and for their community success and I think this is as we mentioned at the beginning a role that libraries have taken but it's reframing it and we're supporting our writers in a new way and we're facilitators here between community writers and community readers and we are encouraging creation and that is important as we remain relevant in the coming age so we're looking ahead at next year and thinking about how can we focus this project in a new direction and one thing we've decided is that we want to do one project at a time we've learned that from the series experience learning experiences so for next year we plan to decide ahead of time on a genre and a target audience and to source premise ideas for that specifically so we're thinking a YA futuristic novel set in Topeka for example and we're thinking that because when people have suggested it previously in premise meetings it's been shot down right away because it's been really specific so we're hoping by us saying we want to do a YA futuristic novel set in Topeka then people's premise ideas can be more focused as to what could we all get behind because you need 20 people to be able to say yeah I could write in that world and I'm excited about it and there are a lot of possibilities within those set parameters so it still gives plenty of room for creativity and for individuality but if you leave it up to YA futuristic set in Topeka or in nice and solid historical where we can all look up what happened already nobody's going to pick it so we want to challenge people by laying that out first and they don't know that yet so if you're listening to this for the first time yay this is a great idea sneak peek so we want to be able to continue to raise the bar for our writers and to provide for them an opportunity part to what we have offered so we will continue to expand this project but considering library staff and the time that this takes we want to expand the behind the scenes participation we want to offer more sooner in the project on layout on editing and give opportunities for community members to step up in areas where they feel expert and comfortable and want to contribute those talents we have a lot of talented folks and I've often said that my role in the behind the scenes as a writer taking their initial chapter passing on to the next person and being the feedback person for all of those writers has been so valuable and that I'm getting all that experience and there should be a way for someone else to get that experience not because I don't love doing it because it's awesome but because I feel like I'm hoarding all of the really great parts of this project by being the one to interact directly with each writer so we're trying to find ways to expand that out as well yes and as we're moving forward we can see the possibility for so much more that we can offer for our writers self publishing workshops hitting on what we're doing this year with the local author workshop we want to get more in depth we want someone to be able to take on the project of their dreams and make it happen and there are a lot of possibilities for that so here's our cheerleading you can pilot your own project you can fly you can do this in your community you can leverage local writers groups you could try it as a fundraiser you could use it as a classroom project with high school or college we have not really pulled in local celebrity writers but doing that could definitely get your project a boost we've been trying to encourage people who weren't really published yet in developing your library services and resources for writers around this project it's an easy way to focus in and so here's a hard thing why will writers trust you it's been a lot of favors to get that first project started and I quoted myself here because when I was going through my old email from the beginnings of this project I found something I'd written to a colleague that said it's hard to bleed your creativity on this kind of project just to watch other people mess it up and I wrote that about writing the first chapter and knowing I had to hand it off but I think keeping that in mind is important this is challenging work for the writers I mean it's challenging for you to organize letting someone else take what you created and possibly mess it up is challenging and it does take some encouragement to make that able to happen if you watch this whole webinar or participate and then thought yeah that's too much there's easier ways to plug in National Novel Writing Month is where we started 10 years ago and they now have come right in which is their initiative for libraries to encourage you to encourage writers and it's just in November so it's very focused and then certainly this project fits along all those traditional library approaches of supporting local authors Miranda mentioned our author fair previously we had monthly individual local author readings and book signings but they weren't successful based on attendance figures we were hosting the authors but we were not engaging the authors and this project is about engaging the authors in your community we see this as a natural progression to encourage fiction writing to support the writer's efforts to take that next step so as you look at everything we've done in three years and think wow that was a lot you can focus in on just what's most important to your community the serialized novel I like it because it promotes each individual author's contribution the wording we use informally is it's your week it's your week to write it's your week to be featured on the website it advertises your project over a longer period of time than a single event it builds readership it builds excitement and it increases that interaction the printed book everybody likes to hold a printed book it doesn't matter how awesome ebooks are having a book as a souvenir of this experience is important to people something on the library shelf because we do buy community novel even if we don't buy each individual author's works and then modeling those self publishing options for writers I think it's important for where publishing is at right now for writers and then the ebook makes it affordable affordable available widely in the ease of distribution can't be beat we put ours up for free as many places as we can and just let it go and that I would recommend strongly as a model adding an audio book adding illustrations using a lot of central media doing a lot of marketing interviews those are all extras but at the same time you may look at those and think but I would have to do X because it would be so important to my community and then things to think about for your library where does it fit into your library and whose work is this I think that's important as you take it on you know if it becomes your job because you already knew the writers that's great if you're trying to talk someone else into doing this figuring out how it fits into their job will be important and where does it fit into your community where are those groups of writers you want to engage do you know where they are how are you going to find them how much staff time does this really take we've carefully avoided that question and I say carefully avoided because it depends the first two years it took an awful lot of my time and this year it turns out when I just pulled back and let the writers work things out now that we've gotten this project to this point and put the tools in place for the wiki and things like that the writers worked a lot of things out if I could allow myself to leave that void that needed to be filled people mostly have stepped up to fill it and it's really scary to leave a void that needs to be filled so you may not be able to do that right away that's you know kind of your style as well technology and budget needs are really pretty low especially if you can get some pre-orders you can kind of cover the cost of your author copies and getting people you don't know to meet creative writing deadlines I wouldn't say it's an art or a talent I think it's I've just been lucky for the most part and building an emergency weeks and understanding that these are real life people writing and they have real life lives and I've had authors pull all-nighters for me and I've had authors call and sick to work for me and I've had authors who were moving that week or who were you know had somebody in the hospital that week you know who said yeah I need a different week yes this is a crisis find a substitute knowing that people are human and this is your deadline and you must meet it and hang up on them I mean that's you have to work with people and really facilitate the best work out of them by encouraging them and giving them the support they need how will you guarantee the writers are contributing quality work that reflects well on your community and the other writers this is impossible you can't you can't you can help it along you can support people and in extreme cases you can either publish what you actually got because you can't do anything different with it or help the person rewrite offer to rewrite or change things before you publish it and most of the time you won't have to do any of those things and that's the most important thing to know occasionally you will have to as project organizers say okay this is a problem and I'm going to have to be the one to fix it but for the most part the writers who want to be part of this project are going to give you their best work because it represents them and there's a picture of us and we took it intentionally for this at our staff party a couple months ago and then we are very open to idea sharing and questions and things you want to contribute to our project or things we can contribute to help you start a project I have to tell you we're excited about folks who haven't been immersed in this project hearing this presentation and we welcome your ideas with open arms okay great thanks Lisa and Miranda that was really cool I don't work at a library obviously I work here at the library commission I wish I could get involved in doing something like this not writing because I'm not really a fiction writer but it just seems like a very cool definitely cool community project if anyone does have any questions you can type them into your question section of the GoToWebinar interface and I will pass them on questions, comments, thoughts about doing this in your library I had a few questions you said you started this out by convincing the administration to do it as a pilot project are you still calling it that or are you pretty much a real I would say the main project superimposed is the traditional project and so this year we added a pilot project to the juvenile normal that said always working in pilot project mode yeah there's always something new every year it's going to be a different project in some ways now have you had different I don't remember if I mentioned different authors every single time or have some people repeated or yes we've definitely had authors who have returned and the experience they brought with them has been really valuable the three time authors are the ones who have really stepped up this time with editing and layout and with supporting new writers to the project they're all great for that they want to be mentors and so when we're talking about writers who might struggle with their chapter a little bit we see that our writers are stepping up they're offering tips, ideas going in and working with the continuity and that collaboration is one of the best aspects of this project that's cool yeah so you have the the experienced ones helping the newbies so to speak now I'm talking about the different authors and their different styles you didn't mention much about are there any reviews from any of the readers of the novel as a whole of having a different author write each chapter has that been as far as their styles been have you mentioned any issues of reading something there's lots of books that are not like this but I'm just wondering something from a community standpoint what do people think about that is it easy to read, hard to read how has the reception been from the people who've read the novels I think the most interesting part is I mean yes it can kind of be an issue but at the same time people reading the community novel realize a different author wrote each one so seeing what different authors add to it is so interesting you know if you're reading along in Capital City Capers and you get to the chapter I think it's chapter 12 but it's the chapter that Ray Carey-Stav wrote where suddenly the grandparents are introduced to the plot and you think oh this novel had nothing to do with older adults until this moment oops we were excluding this part of our readership but this writer realized that and added these other characters that become very important I think those are the things as you're reading through different people will insert things suddenly the characters go to church because in that author's world characters wouldn't not go to church so you see things like that happen but everybody always acknowledges what came before and when your characters have gone to church they're churchgoers they may not go back a lot the rest of the novel but that has happened in the world of the novel but it's part of their life to acknowledge that I think our writers are very respectful of what's come before and with each author going in they're looking back to see what has happened before which is why by the time you get to like chapter 18-19 you get pretty challenging and that's something to acknowledge too is that we have very consciously shifted experienced writers toward the end we try to pace some out throughout but you really don't want a new person to the project or an inexperienced writer taking on your chapter 19 that's a lot to ask yes definitely you want to be able to wrap it up on a strong a strong point at the end now you have the experience Lisa you you did the first chapter in the first book and you're an author in the other ones as well or just the very first one I authored chapter 1 and 15 and part of the ending of the first year because that was me stepping in for emergency purposes most of the time in Speak Easy Miranda and I basically co-wrote chapter 20 to end it we like to try to keep the last chapter in house to give it a really satisfying conclusion not just for the book but for the project to go back and honor all the other plot points people have brought up as much as possible plus I write really cheerleading happy endings so I like to put that on it so the books always have a happy ending exactly well mine do my goal is always to involve myself less and less over the writing and Miranda actually has a sad story about Spirits of Oz this year because she didn't get to write I wanted to write for this book it's such a great story and our writers have really brought it and yeah some kind of mournful that I don't get to write I decided to add on an epilogue so I could collaborate with a couple of the other authors and get a chance to write a little bit that's nice so what if someone who wanted to do one of these now you are both obviously authors yourself involved in it what if someone who wants to run on these programs is not a writer themselves someone at one of these libraries would that I think to be honest Krista you would be great at running one of these programs and I'll tell you why the skills I see in you organizing these weekly events those are the skills you need to run this project I'm not trying to pressure you to do it skills needed to run this project not writing it's a lot yeah a lot of what I do here is hurting hurting all my presenters and topics and making sure things are ready for every week yeah hurting creative people towards a deadline there you go those are the skills that the librarian would need and that's why I say librarians would be good at this for facilitating the best work out of people right you're really using your previous experience and what you are so good at as librarians to launch a new kind of project and I don't think you have to be a writer to succeed right so even though you guys happen to be that's not that the anybody could definitely do this it's you just got to be a good organizer get things on time together keep track of who's doing what when your wonderful calendar there with all your lists and things oh yeah I've got things like that too that encouragement and that teaching and imparting the skills somebody needs at the moment they need them which is what librarians do at reference desks anyway those are the skills needed to run this absolutely well so is anybody in the audience have any questions nothing has come in yet while you're talking if you have any questions use the questions section of your go-to webinar interface and I can grab them from there throughout the show while you guys are going through your website and the different things that you use I have been capturing all the URLs for everything into our delicious links we use delicious to cut to gather up any links related to any of our shows so I've got them together of link to your community novel project page where you can order both the books that are already out there capital city capers and smash words from Amazon that's mesh or speak easy from smash words and also create space you guys use yourself publishing and then of course calibre that I am no people use a lot for getting all the different e formats out there so if anybody needs excuse me any of those links they will be included afterwards and all the recording is ready it doesn't look like any other questions have come in and that was all the things that I was more interested in I actually wrote down other questions and you guys kept answering them in your presentation so I was wondering about who was doing all the artwork on all of them has all of them been that same person you said it was someone in your marketing department at the library the same person has done all of them now or have you got different? The first three adult books have all been rich cobs who is our marketing graphic designer but then the children's book this year is Michael Perkins who is actually our webmaster and he also does graphic design in his other work so he stepped up and volunteered to do that he expressed interest in doing that if you visit our library he's also the artist who painted our kids library with very impressive murals so you come visit us you want to sweep through there and check that out very talented artist yeah I like the cover of that one with the ghost down there yeah I was looking at it on the page alright well it doesn't look like if anybody had any other questions for you do you guys have anything else you want to say before we wrap it up for today? Yeah I'd encourage listeners to check out our library's hush podcast where you can hear more about the community novel we have several episodes dedicated to the community novel and also another topics of interest Kansas author Sylvia Plath graphic novels you name it so and we'd love to hear from you after this broadcast get in touch with us at any time yes everyone is on the line there's their email addresses there you guys will also be I think Lisa said you'll send me the presentation afterwards so we'll have the slides available for you and the recording will be up so and you guys have links also on the page for the community novel of getting in touch with you and the behind the scenes and how to start one of these yourself is also this more information about that on the website as well definitely so cool alright thank you so much this is really cool I was very interested and I've put on both the books there now on my wish list in Amazon the previous ones so I'll in sometime in the future will be getting those I like this mystery type book so I think for me at least and the one you're talking about for next year the futuristic definitely I'm going to keep my eyes open for that one as well excellent it would be something I definitely would be interested in reading cool alright thank you so much I'm going to pull back presenter control here to bring up my screen again see there we can yeah no problem okay and here's the website for the community novel project that I was just looking at here that I have bookmarked the two books they've got going this year and you can see the chapters here that we're up to so far so catch up on the reading there and here's where I did and like I said in our delicious account I've bookmarked everything on here for you guys so that will wrap it up for this week's edition of and compass live it is being recorded so it will be available on our our archive page which is this is our main page for the and compass live but down here as we have our links to our archive and compass live sessions over here on this page is where this one will be added to our list and you can see here's all of our previous ones if you want to go watch them I hope you join us next week when our topic is UNL University of Brassica Lincoln's extensions community vitality initiative opportunity collaboration and engagement so we're going to have some staff in the University of Brassica Lincoln here to talk about this new program that they're involved with so please you can register for that and for any of our other future shows that we have so and compass live is on Facebook so if you are a Facebook user definitely go there and like us on Facebook you'll see when we've got new shows coming up and the recordings are available I announced like right here join us right now on the fly for whatever session that was last week it will be available and you can track everything we're doing on and compass live if you are a big and compass live user other than that thank you very much and that will wrap it up for this week's show bye bye thank you