I've added a Project Wonderful ad to the sidebar. I'm not doing this to make any kind of significant money. Most sites with my traffic might get a penny a day in advertising if they're lucky. I'm doing an experiment to see how Project Wonderful works, both as a publisher and as an advertiser. Advertising will come later. I have a few projects I'm working on that I'll advertise as they mature.

There are two main reasons I'm trying Project Wonderful: funds are usable, and the system is more community oriented than other advertising networks that I've looked at. 

I can spend any money in my account on advertising, so anything I earn as a publisher will contribute to any advertising I do. I have between $3 and $4 locked away at Google because I ran adwords a few years ago but never earned enough to get a payout. Now that they require $100 minimum before handing any money over, there's not much point in running adwords. I don't get enough traffic to get to $100 before they bump it up again.

Project Wonderful came out of the webcomics world. The list of publishers strikes me as fringe, which suites me rather well. Science fiction. Gay. Liberal. Those aren't descriptions of the Project Wonderful community, but I think anyone who identifies with those labels will find themselves among friendly company in that community, as I do. Liberal might not be fringe for many, but I grew up in Texas and spent quite a few years at Texas A&M University. Liberal is a fighting word at TAMU, at least among many undergraduates. By the way, Aggiecon 43 is coming up in a few weeks. Check it out if you're in the area. By adding a Project Wonderful ad box to my site, I can expose you, my reader, to the Project Wonderful community. I'll keep an eye on the ads and make sure they aren't too far out there. They should be safe for work and not use Flash or animation. I don't want them to distract you too much.

Thinking about projects, I'll mention a couple that I'm working on that aren't digital humanities: a novel and a tool to help self publishers. There's also Second Contract, a mud based on the world in my first novel, but I'm putting that under digital humanities for now.

I'll add a progress meter to the sidebar in a couple weeks to track my next novel. I still need to come up with a working title. I'm shooting for a July 1st finish for drafting the novel. So far, it's turning into a thriller with some supernatural-like elements. Think vampire or zombie meets natural disaster. I'll post a few times on my thought processes as I go along.

My second project is a website to help people typeset their book manuscripts. I've already written a post here about how to use LaTeX to create the interior of your print-on-demand book. Most people aren't going to want to learn LaTeX to do their own typesetting. It's almost worth the $100 it might cost to have someone else take your Word document and return a well-formatted PDF document. I'm going to try and take a lot of the mystery out of producing well-formatted PDFs by yourself without requiring that you learn LaTeX or the UNIX command line. I'll post on this also as I get it ready for testing.