Guest Post and Giveaway: Richard Galbraith

Please join me in welcoming Richard Galbraith to Debbie's Book Bag today. Richard has written a guest blog for us and has provided a limited edition boxed set of his book Concrete Operational accompanied with the CD and Art Book for giveaway. Details at the end of the post.

Concrete Operational - Novel writing, art, music and independent publishing

Concrete Operational is my novel, it's an independent release by the Arts Council of England... that statement itself raises two quick questions, why indie, and how did you convince the English Arts Council to give you thousands of pounds to publish it? Well, this is where my journey into independent publishing, collaborative media, design, filmmaking, music production, art manufacturing and a host of other things came to being.

Let's take a step back to 2009, I had my novel manuscript complete, and I'd had it assessed by the most excellent Oxford Editors (http://www.theoxforeeditors.co.uk/). My assessor said that whilst it was a good manuscript, it was difficult in places and would have problems finding an agent or a publisher because of it's content, being at that time, the second chapter was a 4,000 word speech amongst other things.

I looked back on my manuscript and remembered that the reason I started writing it, wasn't to get published, but to explore my theories and beliefs on the human condition and Fatalism, and to an extent, it had done that. I also knew however, I would now like people to read it and that the 80,000 words that I had written were a jumbled mess of vast streams of consciousness, and surrealist writing.

I decided to compromise, I would make the novel, the manuscript that 'had legs' legible, I'd do everything I could to make it compelling, insightful and interesting read and tell a real story, but I also wanted to keep the keen look at humanity. I wanted to make sure the reader came away with something and in this regard, I decided on a collaborative media project, because well, I'm not Kurt Vonnegut.

I pulled my resources and crowed sourced five British bands and five British artists who were prepared to create original music and art around five emotionally driven extracts of my novel. The promise was an art book, music album and novel, all to be released at the same time through the Amazon print on demand service, CreateSpace. We would have a launch night, a seven-day exhibition and the support of marketing and promotion professionals.

And that is what Operation Concrete came to be. Only we achieved so much more along the road; we produced a 72 page art book, a five track album, a six minute short film, original designs and branding around all assets, 200 bespoke, hand-made boxes for 'boxed-sets' of all the products. The launch night had well over 200 attendees and the seven day art exhibition that was free to the public and ran in London saw over 1000 patrons pass through. The exhibition was an immersive experience that allowed the patron to read the extract to the art and listen to the music all at the same time. It was all a great success.

However, all in all, it's been a very difficult road, pulling it all together was hard, but trying to get people to find out what we did and understand what it was and is all about is proving the most difficult part.

Hopefully this post has sparked some interest though, so head over to Operation Concrete (http://www.operationconcrete.com) for samples of the art, music, and words, to view the short film and ultimately to purchase any of the items or all of them, in one of the box-sets. I hope you enjoy it and I hope that through it, you can discover something about yourself that you might not have known was there before.

If you would like to know more about the project that you can find online just email me at richard (at) rawstonemedia (dot) com

Richard Galbraith

GIVEAWAY DETAILS:

Richard has offered one limited edition Concrete Operational boxed set to one winner from Debbie's Book Bag! The rules are very simple:

- You must be a Google Friend Connect follower to participate
- You must leave a comment including your email address on this post
- This giveaway is international and the prize will be sent out by the author
- The giveaway deadline is Midnight EST, December 6th.