Johnny B. Truant - Fiction Unboxed

FICTION UNBOXED

How Two Authors Wrote and Published a Book in 30 Days, From Scratch, In Front of the World.

Sean Platt &

Johnny B. Truant

FICTION UNBOXED

How Two Authors Wrote and Published a Book in 30 Days, From Scratch, In Front of the World.

by Sean Platt &

Johnny B. Truant

Copyright 2014 by Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant. All rights reserved.

Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

The authors greatly appreciate you taking the time to read our work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about it, to help us spread the word.

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To our Unboxers, who watched the story youre about to read unfold live.

Welcome to The Smarter Artist

THE SMARTER ARTIST IS A core part of the passionate publishing house, Sterling & Stone. Dedicated to helping authors and artists discover the intelligent yet hidden intersections that will help them build a business around their creativity, and get it to thrive before an ever growing audience.

Our hands-on, always transparent articulation of what is and isnt working for our own quickly growing publishing house offers a unique yet invaluable guide to creative entrepreneurs wanting to alchemize their ambitions into a healthy profit.

From launching our serials a year before Amazons serial program, to hosting the rawest and most honest indie publishing podcast on the market, to writing a book live in 30 days, Sterling & Stones three principal storytellers are always pioneering and getting smarter by the day.

The Smarter Artist is where they invite smart artists to get smarter by their side.

To get an early alert for the next book in our Smarter Artist series, occasional freebies, and exclusive Q&As, please visit the links at the end of this book.

A Note About This Book's Point of View

THIS BOOK HAS THREE AUTHORS: Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant, and David Wright. Thats because the three of us, working as hosts of the Self-Publishing Podcast and on behalf of our company Sterling & Stone, are kind of like the Three Musketeers: All for one and one for all. But less agile than the original Musketeers, and not nearly as adept with swords.

Fiction Unboxed (the live project version, conducted in June of 2014) was a team effort even though two of us were its prime movers. Sean and Johnny conducted the project and wrote the book that became The Dream Engine, while Dave acted as support crew and art department. That makes this book the story of Fiction Unboxed and what any writer can learn from the experience a team effort as well.

Dave gets a with credit on this book because his role is support rather than nose-to-grindstone. Sean (whose large nose dominates any grindstone) and Johnny will tell you this tale.

Even so, we thought the idea of writing this book using a we voice to accommodate two points of view would be distracting and awkward. As with our indie publishing guide, Write. Publish. Repeat, we decided to tell this story from Johnnys POV.

(Side note: Simon Whistler, who will narrate the audiobook version, has a wonderful British accent. Johnny pushed to use his own POV because then everyone will continue to think he sounds like Simon.)

All I and me references in this book refer to Johnny but know that Sean is nearby, always half of the process (and forever ready to add his pair of pennies as he polishes the text after Johnny). Dave is in the background as well, mumbling from his hometown of [REDACTED] and telling us were idiots.

How This Book is Organized

THIS BOOK TELLS THE STORY of a real, live, thirty-day writing project conducted in June of 2014 a project called (you guessed it) Fiction Unboxed. During that live project, we decided that a cool way to add value for Fiction Unboxeds original supporters would be to create Fiction Unboxed: The Book Version, which we rather undramatically referred to half the time by the less sexy name of transcripts.

Because that was the plan, from the beginning: wed finish the live project (which contained a whole lot of us meeting and talking as we wrote a new, full-length novel from scratch in front of a live audience), then wed publish the transcripts as their own printed book.

It was a decent plan, and simultaneously the worst idea ever.

Sure, plenty of people prefer reading transcripts to watching video or listening to audio (and some people must, due to a hearing impairment), but they do so knowing theyre going to be reading transcripts of a live event. No one wants to buy a book off the shelf and end up muddling through our verbal diarrhea. When you get a book, you want a book. You expect (and deserve) a coherent narrative; you want to learn in a logical order; you want to walk away smarter or more entertained than you were on page 1.

We ditched the idea of just give them the transcripts almost immediately. Wehaveprovided the fullFiction Unboxedtranscripts in a convenient e-book format via links at the back of this book, but dumping the transcripts with nothing else would have been cheating you. We decided the best way to frame Fiction Unboxed: The Book the version youre reading now would be to do what we do best.

We decided to tell you a story.

We had a tricky line to walk. We wanted to tell the tale of the thirty-day journey we shared with our audience of one thousand Unboxers as they watched us write a novel live. But simply telling the story felt masturbatory. You, the reader, need to leave this book having learned what we learned during the project. Fiction Unboxed showed the world that stories can come from nowhere, and that fiction writing is something you do rather than any sort of magic, birthright, or innate talent. It is something earned, not inherited.

We want you to be entertained by the Fiction Unboxed story, but more importantly we want you to learn a ton of lessons that will improve your abilities as a writer. And we hope you wont be passive, but will be inspired to action, to go out and dig into your own fiction project something that happened constantly to Unboxers during the live version.

As such, weve arranged this book into what feels like the three most logical chunks:

SECTION 1: The Campaign, which follows the whys and whats that preceded Fiction Unboxed: how we got the idea to write a book live, how we shaped that idea, how we prepared, how we launched our successful crowdfunding campaign, and what we learned.

SECTION 2: Fiction Unboxed, which chronicles the events of June 1-30 of 2014, when we came up with our books idea from scratch, then wrote (and published) it in full. In order to give you the full scoop here, we cant avoid spoilers. So if you think youd like to read the book in question a young adult steampunk novel called The Dream Engine without spoilers, you may want to do so BEFORE reading this one.

SECTION 3: Building a World Together, which tells the story after the story: the rallying of a small group of insiders at our World Builder Summit just two months after the live project wrapped, each dedicated to writing canon books in the shared world that would intertwine with and complement our core series. The world wed created was (and remains) open for anyone to write and sell books in without asking permission, without paying us a cent or giving us copyright and the Summit heralded that open source fiction kickoff with a bang.