Imagine… ‘a novel with twelve chapters that can be shuffled into any order, yet will always present as a cohesive story arc.’

Imagine… ‘a print run where each individual copy contains chapters that have been arranged at random, each one a unique version of the story, created just for you.’

Imagine…’a story with nearly half a billion possible combinations, with each copy being one of a kind, yet all of them telling the same story.’

Imagine…Ex Libris, an extraordinary, innovative book project which can be supported right now in a crowdfunding campaign. The brainchild of writer and publishing professional Simon Groth, Ex Libris promises to be both a fascinating literary/publishing experiment and an intriguing reading experience.

I’m delighted to be bringing readers today a guest post by Simon about the experience of crowdfunding this innovative project. Enjoy–and consider supporting the campaign!

Talking to an imagined audience

by Simon Groth

It was late. It had been a long day at work, but now all was quiet. My family slept or futzed around on phones upstairs. I had set up the microphone and my phone on a tripod. I was ready to start talking to myself.

Well, not myself exactly. Talking to an imagined audience is something I am familiar with, after all it’s what I’m doing right now writing these words. I just don’t normally do it out loud. I had prepared a script that ran for about three and a half minutes that I more or less memorised. I just had to deliver it. Emote. Make it sound casual. Shoot it straight down the lens.

This wasn’t my first attempt. I’m not a natural in front of the camera and, a couple of weeks prior to this, I enlisted a friend to help me. She had an SLR camera and put together a nicely framed and lit version of an almost identical speech. The experience was crucial in helping me find my feet, but I wasn’t satisfied with the performance. I looked uncomfortable, aware that I was using up someone else’s time with take after take. I also wanted to tweak the text, now I heard it back in my own voice. So I made the decision to try again in my own time and keep going until I had something closer to what I needed.

I have gained a whole new appreciation for what actors do. I had to take breaks every now and then. After a while, I stopped counting takes. I repeated the same phrases over and over, trying desperately to make it sound like I was just talking off the top of my head. I don’t know if I succeeded in this, but the video that resulted seems to be doing its job.

All of which is a long-winded introduction to the crowdfunding campaign I have just launched. Wait, what? I haven’t told you about it yet? Let me correct that for you.

Ex Libris is a book containing chapters that randomly change their order with every copy made. Yeah, very much my kind of novel, right? It’s a story that has nearly half a billion possible combinations and the campaign is looking to launch a small print run where every copy is a unique artefact. Check out the campaign here.

Though I’ve supported a few, I’ve never attempted my own crowdfunding campaign before. Partly this is because I correctly anticipated the gut-wrenching fear of failure that now pervades my every waking moment. But it’s also because, until now, I never had a project that had quite the right fit for it. The relationship between reader and writer is always intimate, but the knowledge that your copy is a text that exists for you alone paradoxically makes you want to find other readers to compare your experience with. It builds a community around its story. What better project to bring to a platform dedicated to raising community support?

Distilling a story with a complicated structure and a lot of interweaving characters and events into a three-minute video is difficult enough, but in this case the story has to also make way for an explanation of how the book itself will be made. It’s a lot of information to cram in while at the same time making the message as intriguing and compelling as possible, the linguistic equivalent of an acrobatic routine. But the response to the project so far has been wonderful and generous, so I’ll take that as a good sign that the pitch communicates well. To push the metaphor, we’ll see in the next few weeks if I stick the landing.

But all this was in future on that late Tuesday night as I adopted my most confident voice, stared down my phone, and repeated myself for hours. At one point, my son came downstairs.

‘Who are you talking to?’ he said.

‘No one,’ I said. ‘And everyone.’

The crowdfunding campaign for Ex Libris is underway until 25 November 2019.

https://www.pozible.com/project/ex-libris

Simon Groth is a writer with books, stories, and articles published in Australia and internationally. His most recent book is Infinite Blue (with Darren Groth, Orca 2018). He has also created a series of experimental publishing projects including the 24-Hour Book and stories publishing to billboards.

simongroth.com