About this project

What if you lived in a world where the line between angels and demons was blurred? Where the blood of these beings coursed through a select group of humans and gave them supernatural powers?

Silver Smoke takes place in Honolulu, Hawaii and follows siblings Pilot and Brie van Rossum in the aftermath of an accident that took their mother’s life. She died in a plane crash, supposedly; but as they learn more about her death, they find out that their mother kept secrets from them that put their lives in danger too. The paranormal elements revolve around angels, demons, and several other mythical--or maybe not so mythical--creatures that are explained by the beautiful yet haunting world of the Hallows and the Nephilim.

You can learn more about the book at http://monicaleonelle.com or read the first four chapters at http://sevenhalosseries.com. I also have a Facebook page at http://facebook.com/monicaleonelle where I update about the project often.

The Novel

A broken family, a deadly secret...

Siblings Pilot and Brie van Rossum are exiled to Honolulu after their mother's tragic death thrusts them into the paparazzi circus ring. It is there that Brie meets the Hallows, a superbeing race descended from archangels, who insist that everything Brie knows about her mother is a lie. Meanwhile, Pilot and his best friend Rykken research an ancient feud between two Hawaiian families and try to unlock the secrets of an emerald pendant with extraordinary powers.

In short, Silver Smoke has action, romance, mystery, and fantasy, all rolled into one. The best way to learn more is to head to http://sevenhalosseries.com to read a few chapters for yourself.

The Project

I believe that teenagers read and learn about books differently than the average adult. Because they multitask, they are reading, watching TV, and listening to music at the same time.

That's why I want to turn Silver Smoke into a series of simple, 3-5 minute mash-ups of text on screen, images, and video, with music layered over it. I want to release the entire book in this format completely free on video-sharing sites like Youtube and Vimeo for public consumption, to encourage teens to read and consume media in the way their brains have been hardwired to consume from a young age.

The project is relevant for a few reasons.

First, A lot of the work I’ve done on this blog revolves around studying Gen Y and their habits, and one of the most prevalent habits among Gen Y is that they multitask. I'm curious whether this new hardwiring of brains means that we (as a world) can improve literacy through multimedia and multitasking.

Second, it's a social experiment. The internet is disrupting every form of paid media on the planet. It started with music, moved to newspapers and magazines, then books, and now television and movies. Radio is the only thing I can think of that has survived, primarily because it was already free.

A lot of people are arguing about paper books vs. ereaders, but I question whether the true debate is if books will stay in their present form at all. This is not so far off when you think about how music, newspapers, books, TV, and hollywood thought they were safe. I want to experiment with the idea that reading text might be more popular when combined with images, video, and music, for a completely different reading experience. There are companies that are trying to make gains with this idea, but they are also trying to make money rather than run the experiment. That's why I want to put this new experience out there for free, on the web.

Finally, it's commercially viable. The young adult book market is hot, and angels have been officially dubbed as the new vampires. There are several successful angels series out there and they are just the beginning of a larger trend that will extend into movies and television over the next several years. The book has the ability to gain popularity among consumers, even if it's not picked up by a big publisher. (I've emailed over 2,500 book bloggers personally to share a few sample chapters of the book, and the response has been extremely positive.)

All three of these reasons are a great reason to support the book... and watch the experiment unfold in real-time :).

My Story

I always knew I wanted to write a novel, but I never thought my first novel would come from where it did.

The beginning of 2010 was a difficult time for me. I had just graduated from grad school and accepted a marketing job in Atlanta, away from my husband and family. My new job was supposed to be a dream, but ended up being a nightmare. Between the company culture, the work, and some of the coworkers, the job was a bad fit for me all around.

Worst of all, there was a bully in my life, and I wasn’t sure how to get away from him without retaliation. I am not the type of person who is intimidated easily--one look at my blog would prove that--but that is the purpose of a bully: to put people down, to intimidate them with tantrums, and to use scare tactics to control them. Because this bully had the ability to affect my career, my schedule, and my finances, he gave new meaning to the term “living hell” for me.

I have no respect for the bully, but I do owe him my thanks, because without him, this novel would never have happened. In March 2010, I went through a depressed period unlike anything I’d ever seen or felt in my life. I literally went to work, came home, slept, woke up to eat something and shower, and slept again. The next day I would start over.

This pattern continued for nearly two months before I even realized there was something wrong, and then, I only noticed because my family and several of my friends pointed to a difference in work ethic and mood. It was only in retrospect that I realized I had been depressed, and I needed to make big changes to my life. Fast.

So I did what I always do--I turned to writing. Thousands and thousands of words about my feelings during the depression poured out of me, from the perspective of a character named Brie van Rossum, who had just lost her mother in an accident she didn’t understand. These words formed the first few sections of my novel, Silver Smoke. Later, they were cut, because depression wasn’t the right way to start the novel, but they served their purpose--they started the 120,000 word story that became the beginning of a young adult urban fantasy series.

Like my character Brie, I was able to write my way out of sadness, get out of a bad situation, and get my life and career back on track. Now, I want to share my novel with the world.

FAQ

Here's a little section I've put together to answer some of the questions I've received.

How long is the book?

It's 120,000 words, or about the size of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. The page count will be 400+.

When does it come out?

The book is launching on February 8, 2011, which is my 27th birthday. I consider it a birthday present to myself.

Why not go with a large publisher?

To me, that's like asking the question, why didn't you hire a caterer for your 30-person dinner party? There are lots of reasons to hire someone to help you with a project and lots of reasons not to. I'm a business woman with an entrepreneurial mindset that has thought hard about the benefits a publisher can bring to my project, and I'm not sure I need their services.

I have nothing against traditional publishers. I see them as offering five things: editing, cover design+packaging, marketing, money (in advances), and credibility/distribution. In my case, I have two editors, one designer, I am a marketer, I can self-fund my project with Kickstarter's help, and (IMO) customers don't care about publisher credibility. (The reason you need credibility is to get into bookstores, and I personally find the distribution model for bookstores environmentally wasteful. Plus, in three to five years it is likely that the ebook market will disrupt the current bookstore model anyway.)

So I have no idea if a traditional publisher would be interested. What I do know is that I've personally emailed almost 2000 book reviewers with blogs, and about half of them read the first few chapters and wanted to read more. Each of them has agreed to review the book on Amazon, B&N, Goodreads, and their blogs around the publication date. So there is without a doubt a market for the book.

How does The Trevor Project factor in?

When I finished the first draft of this book, I knew I would keep writing more fiction books, and I vowed that for each book I wrote, I would choose a cause to donate to. For Silver Smoke, it only seems fair that I choose a cause that relates to teens and relates to bullying. That’s why for every book sold through traditional means--bookstores, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers--I will personally donate $1 from the profits of each book to The Trevor Project, which is a support hotline for LGBTQ teens who are considering suicide as the only viable option they have. Most of these kids get to this point because of bullying, and sadly, some of these bullies never grow out of it, even in their adult lives.

What will the money go towards?

I have self-funded the majority of my novel to this point (editing, copy editing, cover design, and more), and need help with the last leg to make the novel truly remarkable and not just another book or ebook. I want the book to come alive digitally.

The money raised will go towards hiring models, finding settings, costumes, and props, and purchasing any image or music rights needed. There are also software and design costs.

The goal I've set here is probably a quarter of what I need to complete the project, but the money is enough to get the project started and put out at least 5 chapters on video. Once the project gains some momentum I will either run another fundraiser or scrimp and save the money myself to finish the project. Either way, I'm dedicated to making the project happen and anything over the fundraising goal is insanely helpful to me!

Thank you.

I am open to any comments or reward suggestions to make the project better. Thank you so much for your support and for taking the time to read about my story, the novel, and the project!

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