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Like music, film, and to some extent fine art, the book publishing industry has been dominated by the big corporations in recent years, who are risk averse and demand much bigger profit margins than the publishers of old. They are squeezing out original, edgy fiction in favour of bland, inoffensive pap. Authors have been slow to react, but they are beginning to follow the example of indie bands and record labels. Together with 19 other authors, from Hong Kong, the USA, Europe and the Middle East, I've joined a collective, known as Year Zero Writers, which will publish our own books (www.yearzerowriters.wordpress.com). The group's first project, started in March 2009, was a novel, The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes, written in real time as a dialogue with readers, and given away for free on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49068587189).

This month, thirteen of us have provided samples of our work for the collection Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair, which we are giving away as a free pdf (download from www.songsfromtheothersideofthewall.co.uk and also available from www.yearzerowriters.wordpress.com). We don't have the marketing budgets of the big battalions, but we aim to make up for it by embracing new media such as the microblogging site Twitter, where we already have a devoted following of over 1000.

The first novels by members of the collective will be released on September 1st and will be available from Amazon. The first titles will include my novel about heroin use, Glimpses of a Floating World, described as an elegy to the lost underbelly of Sixties London; Benny Platonov, by Hong Kong resident Oli Johns, which tells of an exile from the former East Germany who believes he can save Hong Kong's homeless; and Songs From the Other Side of the Wall by Dan Holloway, the heartbreaking story of a teenage girl growing up in post-communist Hungary who dreams of following her mother to the West. Extracts from each of these stories, and others, are available for free in Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair, while the entire text of Songs From the Other Side of the Wall can be downloaded for free from www.songsfromtheothersideofthewall.co.uk
This site also has a link to the Free-e-day site, the biggest ever cultural electronic giveaway & celebration of the independent creative spirit. Free-e-day is for every singer, writer, artist, artisan, photographer, or film-maker, who believes that the most important part of culture is the fans. And it's for everyone who loves culture and wants to experience the very best of it, or just try out something new, for free.