“100 Stories for Haiti” ebook available now: Pay what you want.

Officially, 100 Stories for Haiti launches tomorrow, but the electronic edition is already available on Smashwords, and there’s just no reason in the world you shouldn’t give it a shot because, listen: You can pay whatever you want. (Okay, technically, you’re limited to the options of “I’ll take it for free” and “I’ll pay anything more than 99 cents” because that’s what it takes to cover money-handling fees.) As a reminder, this whole project has been done with donated time and stories and resources and all the proceeds go to the Red Cross disaster relief in Haiti. (Tons of information on the originator, Greg McQueen, and the authors and editors and all sorts of other stuff at the website – 100storiesforhaiti.org .)

It took me all of about three minutes this morning to sign up for Smashwords and download the book – also cool: it’ s in 10, count ’em TEN formats, and once you’ve bought it, you can download whichever ones you want over and over, so if you want a PDF for your desktop or a .mobi for your Kindle or a plain old .txt file , you go ahead and grab what you need.

This is an 80,000-word book and it’s chock full of a wildly-varied assortment of tales, and yes, having just finished The Gone-Away World, I did, in fact, open my e-copy of 100 Stories for Haiti and immediately treat myself to Nick Harkaway’s opening contribution, and let me tell you: guy can write.

As a contributing author, I can tell you it’s pretty cool to realize I’ve got some of my own words in the same collection as some awfully damn fine writers, in a project which has been overseen by some extremely talented and established editors. But I’m even more excited about what this book means, the possibilities it illustrates and the differences it can make.