Y is for Yarnmen!

We've reached the penultimate post on the A to Z challenge. This month has been tremendous fun, and I will keep up with the blog in upcoming months but plan on getting off the one-post-a-day roller-coaster, as I'd like to keep some time for my fiction, some for reading, and some to just plain relax.

Remember way back at the letter 'N' I wrote about "Nightmare Fuel", Andrea Traske's daily photo-prompt exercise on Google+? I gave a shout-out to Matt Champine who e-published a collection - Cold Shivers, available on Amazon.com - of his Nightmare-fueled stories. Well, I seem to have posted too soon, as Andrea herself just published her own Nightmare Fuel collection over on Smashwords.

But Leonard, you ask, isn't this supposed to be the letter "Y"? And what areYarnmen? Yarnmen are, apparently, little men made of yarn. The particular yarnmen here are Andrea's other creation, and a promotion for the collection. If Andrea gets 100 sales by Monday night (two days from the writing of this post) she'll give one of these charmingly creepy figures to each of three randomly chosen customers. This is the kind of fun, grass-roots level creative marketing that makes small-scale independent book publishing so much fun. Is it scalable to larger marketing efforts without risking loss of authenticity? Probably not, but that doesn't much matter to me. I see the book, the process of daily prompts, and the giveaway all as a work of art. It's something that would have been inconceivable even a few years ago, but today we can each have our own publications, our own promotions which take advantage of our talents, and find our own audience. That's anything but a nightmare.

I'll see you Monday to wrap this up with the letter 'Z', in which I might cheat a tiny bit.