Diane Duane has written many of our favorite books, including her Star Trek novels and The Door Into Fire. But when she decided to take donations and subscriptions for a sixth book in her feline wizards series, she discovered what many other authors will probably learn in the coming years: a self-published, crowd-funded book project can easily go astray. Duane has put out a long and heartfelt apology for the long delays in completion of the novel, which “will doubtless be the strongest candidate in any possible contest for the worst-managed online novel publication project in history.” As Cory Doctorow points out over at BoingBoing, these sorts of delays happen to books all the time — but with a self-published, crowd-funded, serialized book, they’re much more apparent to readers. Something to bear in mind if you decide to go the crowd-funded route. [BoingBoing via Christian Science Monitor]
