John Zeitler

Happy New Year, everyone.

I’ve spoken at length about my noveling, and to be honest for many of you it seems to be just an informed ability– I talk about it constantly but nobody’s ever read my work. That changes today.

Starting today, and running throughout 2009, you can read my (for real) first novel, A Civics Lesson, at Linguankery. The catch is, of course, that it’s not all up at once– you’ll get anywhere from 200-400 words of the novel per day. In short, if you have about three minutes to spare each day, you’ll have read the novel by the end of the year. I encourage you to bookmark the page and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

A business note: Linguankery’s RSS feed is going to be different from how I’ve done feeds in the past. Since it’s my primary “earning” site, I’ve put up a simple Google ad on the page. If I were to give away the entire novel via RSS, well, that would be nice, but unfortunately it would render the ad useless. (Not that I don’t expect everyone to have ad blocking anyway, but I’m being optimistic here.) Therefore, the feed for Linguankery will have only the first sentence or so of the day’s post, to encourage readers to drop by. I don’t like resorting to that, but short of embedding the ad in every post (which I don’t want to do), it’s the only way I can see it being even close to profitable. Keep in mind that it’s a tactic I’m promising you now I will never use for my personal blog.

Anyway, the novel’s just getting started now, so I hope you have the time each morning to take a look. New posts go up every day at 3:30a EST, or you can let the feed tell you when to go. I’d also appreciate it if you could spread the word about it– I’m doing some very minor marketing on Twitter, but beyond that I honestly don’t know how else to promote this.

Wish me luck, folks.