It has been a couple of days since I announced The Cost of Freedom--a new community reading experience that I am launching in partnership with Bindery. And guess what I spent today doing? Writing five pages of commentary on the first chapter of our inaugural book, Tender is the Flesh.

Here's a little taste! (Skip the picture if you don't want to see early notes!)

When Bindery approached me about partnering together on this little experiment, their intention was really just to create more benefits for those of you who are investing into our work. As a start-up, we rely very heavily on the investments of the people who believe in what we are doing. Eventually, as we continue to grow, that will no longer be true. But for now, it very much is. Without the investment of this community, Left Unread would not be in the position that we are, able to publish a new book with each new publishing season. And we would be years off from being ready to publish even more quickly.

These investments matter. So Bindery was eager to find ways to thank you, and to make sure that we are consistently looking for more ways to make sure your investment is paying off for you as well.

And, as you have come to expect from me, I was also eager to bring you more benefit... while also eager to shift that goal into creating change.

That is who I am. I am always searching for ways to make sure everything I commit myself to ultimately points us toward my singular goal: TO DISRUPT THIS INDUSTRY.

And that is what I would like The Cost of Freedom to do. I would like it to be disruptive. And the way I am working toward that is by creating resources, and hopefully facilitating conversations, that help us to collectively approach literature in community, and with very focused intention.

I wrestled very hard with what books I wanted to include in this series. Partially because y'all know I am the indie guy. My first instinct was to bring you four books by Black and brown indie authors that you may have not heard of before. But then I realized that if I do that, I am putting books that aren't being widely circulated behind a paywall and limiting how far my content about them can go. So I decided to also start creating similar resources for less widely circulated books and to release those more widely, while focusing on more widely talked about books here. But I had to choose books that I felt had something incredibly important to say.

And I think I managed to do that.

For example, our first book--Tender is the Flesh-- is one of the most radical and haunting looks at capitalism I have ever seen explored in any media period. This book tackles greed, hatred, patriarchy, racism, systemic oppression and poverty, all through the lens of capitalism. And it does it while refusing to allow us to look away from the role people just like us play in sustaining systems of oppression.

This book is a haunting look at our own complicity in a world that has abandoned any sense of morality or justice.

And I don't know about you, but I think a book like that might have some conversations that we need to be having right about now.

My hope is that I can pull together about 100 people to jump into this experiment with me. Let's see what reading in community can do. I am committed to creating compelling and helpful resources, including chapter-by-chapter commentary, focused essays exploring some of the book's themes and conversations, and character breakdowns. We are going to have zoom meetings to discuss the book and ask bigger questions about the world we live in and the part we play in building a better one. And I intend to take all of the work I am doing in this private community and to push it out to everyone else through focused content, exploring some of the things I am seeing as I work out these resources for you.

Whether you have read these books before or not, I think there is a lot of value in what we are trying to accomplish here and I would LOVE for you to be a part of it.

If you want to check out what these resources will look like, HERE is a link to go download all five pages of my commentary just on chapter one of Tender is the Flesh.

Like I said, for me, this year of more intensive community reading is an experiment. I want to see what we can accomplish if we engage in this level of critical reading as a community. I think it will change the way we engage with other readers and potentially create a ripple in the impact stories like these have.

If you're interested in seeing if I'm right, come help me find out.

Subscribe at the Laborniacs tier ($25) by March 1st and Bindery's team will send out your first book in early June. Meanwhile, I will spend the next 90 days before the first book sends out creating a ton of resources, reading guides, essays and commentary for you so that we are ready to do this right.

I'm looking for 100 people to be a part of this experiment with me. I would love for you to be one of them!