Not wanting to appear all talk and no action, I’m unveiling Cyan Publishing’s first concrete project: a Best of Web Writing print anthology. [Nota bene: if you haven’t heard me mention Cyan Publishing, you should probably read the prior post first.]

The volume will be patterned after Houghton Mifflin’s great Best American Short Stories (or Best American Magazine Writing, etc.) series, collecting works in the body with a Contributors’ Notes section in the back (short biographies plus anything each writer feels compelled to add about included posts). Because blog posts tend to be shorter than stories, however, the current plan is to organize the body by topic (work, love, family, etc.) rather than only by author.

Each author will retain the copyright to their own work, and licensing will be non-exclusive, but authors will be compensated with a percentage of the book’s profits, in a way that’s closer to film’s model, and considerably more generous than publishing’s.

We’ll be selling the book directly through the soon-to-exist Cyan Publishing site, as well as through major online booksellers (Amazon, B&N, etc.) and (through a relationship with Ingram Book Distribution, the largest wholesale distributor) any real-world bookstores we can convince to wedge the book onto their shelves. To encourage stores to do so, we’ll also be putting together a series of readings, where any of the authors who are nearby and willing will have a chance to share their work in their own voice.

More generally, I’m hoping the book gets all of the writers in front of a host of new readers. Web writing has long been marginalized, and I think unfairly so; there’s a lot of great stuff posted regularly by talented individuals, and this should be a good chance to share that fact with the world.

By now, I have the first ten or so writers in mind, but I’m ideally looking for another fifteen more. If you have thoughts on talented bloggers I may not be reading, or on particularly good posts that warrant inclusion, shoot me an email or leave a comment pointing me in the right direction.