COHORT POST # 3 : INTRODUCTION OF COHORT : PROCESS UP!
COHORT is a community-based publishing process anchored by a theme that will use the Red Lemonade interactive website towards the final goal of a collection of stories. This is a brief suggestive description and guidelines for how the process will take place.
The online community will take advantage of the features of the website and engage a wider community of writers and readers with their online presence and social media. Cohort team members will work in a more editorial capacity while polling or monitoring community feedback. The hope is to create an informed, manageable creative chaos which incorporates many viewpoints, tastes and creative goals, reading appreciation and writing approaches.
Writers can upload manuscripts to www.redlemona.de to share their manuscripts and make them immediately available for review. Community members and organizers, fellow writers and readers can comment, provide feedback and offer suggestions using the comment application available via the Red Lemonade community website. To facilitate this process COHORT team 'leads' will proactively engage works to help organize the group-based process, commit to making comments on uploaded works and assists in selection making process.
A Cohort Red Thread, or discussion forum, will track uploaded manuscripts as well as comments from the community. Further,Interaction and communication among the writers and readers will be fostered with online collaboration events as well as geographical meet-ups.
Based on reaction and engagement from the community, manuscripts which better reflect the encouraged theme of COHORT, will be selection to be featured on the Featured Books portion of the front page of the website. The author will be featured on the bottom portion of the front page. This might occur several times over the course of COHORT and it is hoped that selected works will create a clearer understanding of the overall reaction, comprehension and interest of the Red Lemonade community.
Writers who submit their work will be requested to and can choose to submit explanatory or supplemental articles to the Red Lemonade Blog, also available on the front page. These essays can explore such topics the writing process, the thematic approach, the related research or literary influences of the writer, all within the context and associated with the theme of cohort. Special attention will be placed on placing the writing within the current development of literary and independent fiction as well as classical or contemporary fiction.
A desired goal of the process is to engage the current independent press and literary fiction, scene, contributors. The community will be encouraged to seek out recent and relevant works by new authors and publishers. Writers who create essays that supplement their work or creative process will be encouraged to include not only classical and contemporary influences, but also recent works that inspire them.
Readers are encouraged to submit responses to the works in essay form, either citing individual works or several works together. Not particularly a review, but an attempt to provide insight and clarification to the reader's response to the writer's work.
Essays and selected works will be shared via Red Lemonade social media platforms. Writers are encouraged to explore and incorporate various media or other websites to expand and enhance the virtual context of their stories and essays.
A " last call" for uploading works related to the COHORT theme will take place near the end of the year 2012 and final or additional uploads will be based on the reaction of the organizers and the community.
The COHORT selections will be made available via www.PressBooks.com in a webbook, ePub, and PDF. In addition, Red Lemonade will distribute the works within channels such as Kindle using the PressBooks distribution service. This COHORT collection of stories will be made avaialble to a wider audience in early 2013.
Comments
I’m pretty optimistic about COHORT, the next evolution of the Red Lemonade aesthetic. It borrows from the Hybrid Beast model, but where that ultimately was left in the hands of one individual for the up or down, COHORT is designed to be truly more of a communal decision making process.
What does that mean? It depends on your level of involvement. For those willing to submit to the process, COHORT means a more focused feedback on his/her work from members of the community. The goal here isn’t to submit and wait to be plucked from the morass. We don’t necessarily want your most polished work, but by all means if you have something that is just gleaming and you think it fits within the etymology we’d love to see it. But the goal here is to create, destroy and recreate a process for editorial feedback, to empower community members to champion the voices they admire—while providing the opportunity to discuss why one piece makes the cut and another doesn’t.
For those looking to help guide the editorial tone of Red Lemonade and establish a touchpoint for RL’s take on alt-lit, COHORT is a chance to get involved and do the work. Shit, the whole thing’s been turned over and the selection process, the why of who, is in the hands of whoever grabs hold. We can use the five Red Lemonade published books out in the word, including a PEN/Robert Bingham Prize winner, and the HYBRID BEAST ePub, as the starting point. But the future direction of what Red Lemonade puts out is in the hands of the community.
The success of this next experiment in community involvement and micro-publishing, COHORT, will determine in a large part how Red Lemonade moves forward. The big ideas/the wish list/the if only we could dreams for Red Lemonade going forward are cross platform tie-ins with other lit journals, both online and paper, and showcasing on their pages work from the site; the walking of a manuscript through the community editorial process from first draft to commodity valued product; and ultimately creating a pipeline for publication that allows anyone who hews closely to our definition of alternative literature to plug in and see if their work makes the cut. But big ideas don’t matter as much if you can’t get people involved in making them happen, so I’m optimistic that the COHORT will start us off in a new direction and I really hope that people get involved in defining what Alternative Literature is and establishing Red Lemonade as a force in putting it out.