Kickstarting a Banging Press

Getting published: the ultimate goal for writers all over.

Whether you are scribbling away at the great American novel in your notebook every weekend or filling document after document with short stories on your laptop, the thing I would assume you want more than anything is to get your work out there and into the hands of the reading public.

Am I right?

I know that’s what drove me from paper journals to the online world where I found communities of other writers and readers as eager to grow and find new stories to appease their appetite as I was. Maybe, someday, we’d even be holding real bound versions of the characters we’d been developing for who knows how long.

There’s a great Kickstarter out there now trying to make that happen for one of the biggest and most vocal writing communities I have ever found online: Fandom. The company trying to get its feet underneath it is Big Bang Press and their catch phrase seems to be “fandom-friendly publishing”. If they are funded by December 22nd, the experienced editors behind the project will be publishing three new original novels from some of the best writers of fan fiction.

Here’s the catch: They are not publishing fan fiction. Everything will be original. But the original stuff will be from writers you may already know and love. What better way to celebrate your love of fandom than to read a little something by a friend when they’re ready to step out into the original fiction world?

The beauty of the fan fiction community is that it is a wonderful training ground for writers. You get to work with characters and stories you love while honing your own skills with the writing craft and with storytelling. If you publish in an online forum, you can get feedback — constructive and otherwise — from a huge community of readers.

The sad truth is that there are many strong and talented writers who have their own original fiction and can’t get any traction on- or offline when it comes to original characters and stories. They have huge followings for their fan fiction but nothing seems to be popping up otherwise.

That’s the hurdle Big Bang Press is going to jump. The editors have been hip deep in the fan fiction community for long enough to know genuine talent when they see it. They have the relationships established and know who is working on that scary first novel, that riveting YA romance and that great literary work that not enough people are reading.

I’m pretty excited to see what comes out of Big Bang Press when they get their funding. The kickstarter is going on my Christmas list, and I’ll be encouraging everyone I know to give a little or a lot. Let’s get some talented fresh writers into the world and see what they can do!

Feature Image via Shutterstock