More BOSS business...

If you are just tuning in, or if you tuned in before but lost your short term memory due to an eggnog related mishap, I am currently writing a book called The Boss. It's my own entry into the contemporary erotic romance subgenre spawned by 50 Shades of Grey and the Crossfire series. But I'm pretty much just doing it for fun and to goof off, and to see if I can write a book in that genre without falling into the traps of misogyny and abuse we've seen in the 50 Shades series. Which is why I'm giving away The Boss for free, as a serial. You can get the rest of the details in this post.

I'm armed with beta readers who are diligently editing the ever-living fuck out of my manuscript, and a brand new blog where the chapters will be posted (so I can keep track of page views and search keywords and all that fun stuff, separate from this blog). Right now, it's just a post with a countdown and some unfinished pages that will later have stuff on them, but feel free to have a look and bookmark it in advance of the January 15th kickoff. I'll also be posting links to the chapters here, so don't panic if change makes you afeared.

There is one tiny detail that I'm still missing: legions of slavering, rabid fans who will make The Boss the most viewed free serialized novel of all time. Go big or go home, right? And everyone knows that word of mouth is what drives a book's success. That's where some of you come in.

Do you tweet? Do you Facebook? Do you have a livejournal or a blog? Occasionally, do other humans look at these things with their eyeballs or an assistive reading device? Fantastic! You're just the person I'm looking for.

I'm forming up a digital street team, dear readers. This is how it works. If you volunteer to be a part of my street team, your job will be to talk about The Boss on social media. Post links when new chapters go up, write a few lines about what you thought of the latest installment or just tell people, "Hey, there's this free book, have you heard of it?" If you wanted to start talking about The Boss like it's a new religion you just converted to, that works fine by me, of course. And in return for this, I will give you:

• Every chapter of The Boss in .pdf format, five days before it goes up on the blog. (You'd get chapter one on the tenth, instead of the fifteenth, for example)
• A nifty graphic to put where ever you want to proclaim that you're on the street team
• Access to a secret Pinterest board where I post visual inspiration for characters, settings, etc.
• Your name or pseudonym credited
• My eternal and undying gratitude

If you're interested, fill out the form and await further instruction. I didn't really have an idea of how many people one recruited for a street team, so I took to my twitter and asked. And the tweeple there gave pretty much the same answer, ten to fifteen people. And I was like, "That sounds sensible, so fuck that." I'm capping this street team at fifty. And if I can't find fifty, then we'll just go with whoever shows up by January 10th.   Holy crap, I did not anticipate that going that well. The street team is now closed for sign up. Expect an email in the near future, but not today, because I've got a birthday to wrangle.

I can't promise this will be a success. I can't promise that I know what I'm doing. But I can promise that grilling a peanut butter sandwich makes it ten times more delicious than usual, and that even if all of this fails miserably, I'm going to have a good time doing it.