Watch the video. Then you’ll know what’s at stake.
A renowned Internet celebrity recently challenged us to “become the culture” if we want to change things. Not as easy as it sounds, but when it’s important, you rise to the challenge. Our goal is to promote literacy and culture, and we have some powerful tools at our disposal.
The infrastructure I’ve built on this and other sites in my network give me the opportunity to rapidly publish at scale in universally accessible formats so anyone can follow my serialized fiction, book series, audiobook series and even collect paperbacks and hardcovers with no technological barriers, obstructive algorithms, screens clogged with ads, tracking, passwords, DRM, missing books and all the other nonsense you might encounter elsewhere.
You’re not going to find any of that here. As many of you know, I have been publishing on the Internet for more than 30 years. My sites pre-date virtually every currently recognizable platform. I launched my first site ten years before social media became popular. We don’t follow trends here. We have seen empires rise and fall through the windows of our little library. We are relentlessly independent and with your help we will stay that way. You certainly aren’t going to find what we do here anywhere else.
That’s why I’m putting my infrastructure to work in a program called The Action Faction.
What I’m offering you is regular access to new serialized chapters from my ongoing works. We had tremendous success with The Infamous 24, and we’ve seen steady growth ever since. Being able to grab a quick chapter of an exciting or thought-provoking story on a regular basis, text or audio, is very popular with my readers, and I expect it will only get more enjoyable as my stories progress.
There are roughly 40 titles on my store now that have sample chapters and/or sample audio on their home pages or on my web reader site. That represents approximately a quarter-million words of both fiction and non-fiction in many different genres: fantasy, romance, gamelit, science fiction and even comics. In addition to those sample works, I will regularly publish new chapters from ongoing works both here and on Bitbook, my electronic bookshelf service. I am also regularly releasing new public domain ebooks on the Library-Tron.
In exchange, we ask for your support in the form of an Action Faction sponsorship. These are one-time contributions that start at one dollar. They are not subscriptions. You can contribute as much as you like as often as you like. Think of it as a combination crowdfunding campaign and tip jar. But that’s not the limit of our vision.
For every $50 we receive in Action Faction sponsorships, we will put a brand new paperback or hardcover in an American school: elementary, middle school or high school. These books will be given to classrooms and libraries across the nation until we’ve placed at least one book on every campus in America. If we raise $100, that’s two books. $1000 is twenty books and so on. For a few thousand dollars, we can cover multiple school districts at a time.
It’s a value for value model. It gives all of us a way to make a positive impact on reading skills and literacy. There are students in this country who have never opened a brand new book in their life. We’re going to change that. One school at a time.
I’d like to invite you to bookmark my sites in your browser, and follow my RSS feed so you never miss a new chapter. I’d also like you to consider supporting our efforts to promote literacy, education and a more edifying culture for all of us.
Learn More about the Action Faction
— Shane