To the Prospective Reader

This book is being published serially, which means it’s not done yet, and that if you download it, you’ll be getting revisions and new parts of the book as I finish writing them.

Charles Dickens is the best and most obvious example of this kind of publishing: he published many of his stories one chapter at a time, creating the story and characters as he went. If you had lived then you would have read his stories by subscribing to them and receiving them a chapter at a time. We are already seeing a swing back to this kind of publishing as many writers who cover certain topics on their blogs later republish the same content in book form.

Normally the “sample” offered for download on Leanpub would contain some part of the main text of the book. At this point, I’m including only the book’s introduction.

There are some good reasons for this. One reason is that you can already get the book for free, if you’re really interested. You should read about the idea behind this book on its Leanpub web page (the address is with the copyright info further up) – if that doesn’t interest you, then a sample probably isn’t going be much help to you, not the way it might for a novel or a reference book. If it does interest you, then right now all I ask is that you download the actual book-in-progress – for free – as a formal statement of momentary interest, and in the process consider signing up for email updates as the writing progresses. You don’t have to enter your credit card number or get ads or anything; there’s no commitment beyond adding your notch to the tally of people who have downloaded the book.

That’s my side of the reasons behind not including a full sample. There’s another side that I believe has more to do with your interests as a reader.

In the past, there have been ambitious, long term projects on the Internet that I’ve kept my eye on. I’ve even had the good fortune to have started such a project myself: a podcast I’ve been writing and producing since 2008, which has a small but growing community of listeners. These projects, and the loose-knit group of interesting folks that followed them, became a sort of thread that popped up intermittently through stages in my life. We find the same effect in varying degrees with musicians and actors; they become a small part of the atmosphere, a bit-motif in the soundtrack to our lives.

I would like Noise of Creation to be one of those threads that can come back to you once a month or once a year.

The book will be free until the first one hundred headings are completed. At that point, I’ll gauge the interest, set some kind of minimum price for any future readers, and then this sample will include a good large chunk of the book. At that point, perhaps you and I will be the only ones left, or perhaps there will be a couple hundred of us.

– Joel Alexander