As the publishing industry shrinks, the Library Writers Project provides writers a direct avenue for creative expression and intellectual freedom through self-publishing. The Library Writers Project creates an opportunity for writers struggling to share their work, and it innovates the way library staff and patrons view our e-book collection, which contains 38 local novels thanks to this project. One contributor said, "I am thrilled and honored to be recognized by librarians… I was having a hard time letting it go, afraid of being rejected by agents or editors, and used the MCL contest as my deadline. So happy."

In the fall of 2015, authors submitted e-books to the library, published through the online e-book portal Smashwords. Two library staff independently read each submission and scored titles based on technical (readability, punctuation and word choice) and artistic (plot and character development and originality) merits. Based on their evaluations, we added 38 local e-books to the library’s collection of more than 200,000 e-books that patrons can check out and read on a tablet, phone or computer. In conjunction with this project, we offered a series of writing and self-publishing workshops, the keynote led by Smashwords founder Mark Coker.

In the project’s first year we received 140 submissions and accepted 38. Our Facebook promotion reached almost 35,000 people with:

• 534 likes
• 49 comments
• 309 shares Checkouts:
• First four months: LWP titles checked out nearly 3,000 times.
• First month: The Gifts We Keep by Katie Grindeland more popular than Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See e-book. “The Library Writers Project helped me breathe life into [this project]” said Katie. “This platform is fantastic.”
• Last three months: Dyed in the Wool most checked-out title overall in OverDrive. The Library Writers Project will reopen for submissions this fall.