The Good Men Project is a mul­ti­me­dia work explor­ing what it means to be a “good man.” A book of essays on man­hood and a dvd are set to be released this fall. But this isn’t just a book and it isn’t just a dvd–it is, and is striv­ing to be, a dis­cus­sion. Excerpts and a blog can be found on the web­site, which is part of what is described as “a com­pre­hen­sive social media net­work.” Read­ers are encour­aged to con­tribute their own two cents and one of the essay­ists was picked through a contest.

Unable to find a pub­lisher The Good Man Project seems to have found a place any­way through the Inter­net and social net­work­ing. I came across it because of a crit­i­cal tweet of an arti­cle writ­ten about the dis­in­ter­est the pub­lish­ing world showed the project. I was mildly inter­ested and a quick click of a link brought me to the web­site. The Good Men Project makes it easy to find out more, inter­act and keep up-to-date, which may just be the recipe to suc­cess inde­pen­dent of a major pub­lish­ing house.

Now, I’ve seen books with web­sites, Face­book pages and Twit­ter accounts before. They gen­er­ally link to arti­cles and reviews about the book and remind every­one where and when it will be for sale. The thing that seems to be dif­fer­ent about this is the wel­come and encour­aged interaction.

Check it out for your­self at www.goodmenbook.org.

Is this the wave of the future for inde­pen­dent work? Are we going to see more and more of this not-just-a-book sort of thing? Can you point me to some sim­i­lar projects? What do you think?