An idea

[cleolinda]

I am fairly broke, and trying to figure out what to do. I got bogged down in the next round of Annotated Fifteen Minutes, which I may still try to finish, but honestly, that seems like a next-year kind of thing. I'm making wonderful amounts of progress on Black Ribbon, but... yeah. I can't work at a NaNoWriMo pace, it doesn't work for me. NaNoWriHalfaYear, maybe. I can't sell The Secret Life of Dolls (though people have said they think I should) because of copyright/trademark issues. (The Tolkien estate, for one, comes down like a hammer on these things. I saw them go after a little one-woman BPAL knockoff enterprise for using character names. Even if I defend myself by saying it's parody/commentary, that's the thing--the Fair Use defense is just that, a defense, and you still have to go through the trouble of fighting in order to win.) I can't even get Deathly Hallows in Fifteen Minutes to work, so whipping up one of those to sell is out.

What if... I did something with Varney the Vampire, the way y'all suggested?

This is why I'm asking for opinions. Put up one with a tip jar? Sell them on Lulu? (With that, you'd at least be able to buy it in hard copy.) What I'm thinking, in the latter case, is put up every hundred pages of recap/commentary. I might quote it a bit more extensively than I did on that LJ entry, but--honestly, I'm not going to annotate the whole thing sentence by sentence, because it's repetitive as hell and it's already 1500 pages in Word. But yeah. Every hundred pages of content, cut it off, bind it, sell it. Narrative recaps have always been easier than script-format parody for me, and as you can tell from previous comments on the subject, Varney is hysterically fun. I swore I wasn't going to tweet anymore, and I broke down last night when I got to the part where Varney and the villagers started throwing bricks at each other.

But would people keep buying it? Similarly, the problem with a tip jar is that everyone gets to read it, but eventually people stop tipping. I don't know. All I know is, I would love to write something like this, and I think it's both fun and advisable to post things for free. I just can't post everything for free, because I'm broke.

Also, the thought of Giving the Gift of Varney This Christmas to the Vampire Enthusiast Who Has Everything kind of gives me the giggles.

Thoughts?

Comments

[paxpinnae]

Long-time reader, first-time commenter, dropping out of lurk mode to say that I would definitely buy Varney the Vampire recaps. Varney is my favorite 19th-century literary abomination that no one's ever heard of, and while I've only read excerpts, I'd love to read a commentary on the whole thing.

Also, you may have already read George Eliot's Silly Novels By Lady Novelists, but if you haven't, you really should. I recently had to read it for class, and it made me happy to realize that the tradition of smart women making fun of dippy books has been so well represented for so long.

[beachlass]

Dearheart, I would absolutely spend money on Varney the Vampire.

[wednesday]

Only concern is that the translation might be copyrighted, which could present issues for extensive excerpts.

[gigglingkat]

It's public domain in the US.

As are these and these. I would buy a cleolinda annotated version of any of them.

I would love a Kindle version too! *puppy eyes*

[wednesday]

In which case, awesome! I would buy such things.

(I'll take any digital format, DRM-free for preference.)