It wasn’t all that long ago when my friend Paul, whom Maureen and I met in The Netherlands last autumn, had this idea for a a short story collection with all the stories having the same premise – there had been a murder [or two] at a nudist colony. Of course, no one calls them nudist colonies anymore, but that didn’t matter as it is a term that most people still assume to be what any place where modern-day naturists gather and nudists gather.
Paul’s idea was bounced around by myself, Paul Z Walker, Will Forest, and Ted Bun for a while until we decided as a group to go ahead with the idea. A call out on Twitter resulted in another ten writers wanting to add their names to the project. I set up a Sync.Com collaborative folder and the project began in earnest. Will and Ted worked together to edit all the submitted stories. Paul did all the technical work of formatting the short stories into a master file. After editing was done, Paul prepared the ebook version for publishing while I prepared the print book for publishing. Using Retired Eagle Books as the publisher, I was able to assign ISBNs for both print and ebook versions of the book. Another person joined our group as the cover-design artist, Fabien Barabé. You can see his work on the cover above.
There was a short discussion of what to do with the royalties since there were fourteen authors involved. Consensus was soon reached that all profits needed to be donated to a worthy cause and Médecins Sans Frontières – Doctors Without Borders was the hands down favourite to be the charity of choice, a fitting charity during the Covid19 pandemic.
The book was published as an ebook on June 21st, and the print version was published July 1st. In an effort to spur sales of the book, a contest is being announced, today. Fabien Barabé is donating the original colour image used for the cover, a framed 8×10 work of art, as seen above. Fabien will send the framed picture to the winner. So how does one get to be the winner? That answer will be coming in my next post. Stay tuned.