Founder’s Message.

At least once a month we will have one of our contributers post something on this page. For the first post we have a few words from our founder.

Jason Greenfield and contributour Andrea Rose Wood

Welcome to the One Million Project website. I’m Jason Greenfield and all this came about from an idea I had back in 2013. Now three years later, I’ve been asked to writethis first (of many) blogs, to explain a bit about the OMP and what we hope to achieve. It was actually two ideas and neither of them seemed workable on their own. The first came from my experience as a writer.

Up until 2013 I’d spent about 3 fruitful years writing novel after novel at a pretty good pace, but nobody can go on forever without feeling burnt out or bored. My solution was to think about doing a collection of short stories instead. My next thought was that if I did about ten, I could maybe get some creative friends of mine to contribute to make it up to twenty and that way we could all support each other when it came to putting the book for sale … but then I considered all the online competition and got a bit depressed that nothing would make the collection stand out.

At roughly the same time I was reading a lot about people on the streets and suffering.There were a spate of articles in newspapers – one I remember vividly about a guy who got cancer and lost his job and home, so his 17 year old daughter had to give up a bright future to look after him. There were reality TV programs like Benefit Street and a dozen more, animals being killed by rich hunters, poverty, suffering and too many tragic stories. I wanted to do something, but I had no idea what difference I could make or how I could help. This was a depressing thought as well.

Then I had the inspiration. If I married the idea of my collection with my desire to help,I could raise money for charity and maybe set up a platform to discuss and spread awareness of worthy causes. The OMP was born.

As my mother survived cancer, which was a harrowing time for us; I immediately decided on Cancer Research as one of the causes. I am also horrified that in 2016, we  still have people living on the streets, so that too was a no brainer. I set about building the network of writers and creative people (also media and promotions) the collection would need. Two and a half years later, I had 24 stories with 14 writers and we were starting to find artists to draw characters and scenes from the stories, for promotional purposes. I had also made contacts at Cancer Research UK and Emmaus and got some good advice and support for our project.

The collection is available on Amazon kindle right now, but I’ll be updating and adding artists when pieces are finished. In the last several months I’ve been busy massively expanding the network to over 80 talented people. We hope that success and sales will lead to more collections under the OMP brand and that we can continue raising money on behalf of our charities (and awareness of other worthy causes in general) indefinitely.

The £1,000,000 figure is aspirational but we could do it, given enough support and attention – at that point we’ll just keep going, doing what we set out to do – give ourprofits to charity and give a spotlight to the brilliant, generous and talented creatives whose stories and art you will shortly be enjoying.

Please go out and buy/download or even borrow this collection. For the latter, our fund gets paid out of Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library fund based on pages read.Reviews also help immensely – once a book tops 50 on a particular Amazon page, be it UK, dot com or AU, CA, IN or any of the global Amazon markets, algorithms onAmazon help more readers see the book and that helps with our continued sales.

Thank you for reading and watch out for more blogs – writer and artist profiles, blogs on worthy causes, news and updates and more.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016WLQTXW

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B016WLQTXW

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