Some of you may already know that the month of June marks the two-year anniversary of Supraterranean. I launched the site on June 23, 2008, with seven of my own creations and one video by my brother David. Sadly I never got to hold a kick-off party… or even a one-year anniversary party. And since I’m currently living outside of the U.S., I’m not likely going to be hosting a two-year party either.

However, that doesn’t mean I can’t do something out of the ordinary. The time has come for Supraterranean to become a service for self-publishing e-books. I’ve decided to create and release a compilation of my work, containing various writings that I’ve self-published over the past four years. It’s tentatively called The Initiation Rites of a Self-Realist, and I plan to release it by early July. UPDATE 6/23/10: After realizing that the term “self-realist” doesn’t make any sense, I changed the title to Seeking the Upward Spiral. The exact release date is still TBD but will definitely be in early July.

The collection will run just longer than 290 pages and contain about 100,000 words of stories, essays and poems. I’ve written a foreword to explain what the collection means to me, so I won’t get into that here. Let me just say that I’m extremely excited to begin a new chapter at Supraterranean. I intend to provide resources to help contributors do the same.

No longer will we let the traditional book publishers and newspaper critics put self-publishing in a bad light. Their industries are failing because of all the flaws they were never willing to address. Now it’s our turn.

I’ll be offering my e-book for free as a PDF, TXT and other formats, all with Creative Commons licenses. I’ll use a “pay what you want” system so that people can make donations as they see fit. Then I’ll post it on e-book torrent sites and find out how to submit it to the iTunes store, Amazon.com and other online bookstores.

Someday maybe Supraterranean will also be a service for printing small batches of paper books, though I’m extremely tentative to even consider that since it inevitably leads to some unnecessary waste. We’ll see. For now, it’s time to develop new ways to distribute our creative work for people to use at their convenience, whether on an e-reader or a traditional computer screen. I hope you’ll be pleased with the results.

Similar Posts:

• Launching a Fourth Blog by Supraterranean Staff
• Creative Commons License and Contributor Accounts by Supraterranean Staff
• The New Open Submission Form by Supraterranean Staff
• ‘A Supraterranean Manifesto’ and the New Map View by Supraterranean Staff
• The New ‘Tryptophanatic Netvision’ Video Podcast by Supraterranean Staff