Five Years on Kiva!

I got an email notification this week telling me that I've been on Kiva for five years!

Kiva is a nonprofit organization that aims to help people around the world get small, low-interest loans that help them start businesses, attend school, make needed renovations, etc. You can see explanations on Kiva's website.

I first joined Kiva in conjunction with the publication of my novella, The Six Swans, through Coming Together. All books that Coming Together publishes go toward some sort of charity project. In this case, proceeds from novellas that come out through the Coming Together: Neat line go into Kiva accounts.

You can see my Kiva lender profile here. Over the years I've used royalties from The Six Swans, along with other money I've added to it at times to make 61 loans!

If you'd like to get involved, it's easy to make your own account on Kiva. Or you can pick up The Six Swans, Giselle Renarde's Tangled Roots, or any other book in the Coming Together: Neat line.

Neat Collection

I've just found out that Coming Together has collected the first five titles in the Coming Together: Neat series into an omnibus edition. This includes my novella, The Six Swans, as well as work by Jenna Byrnes, Wendy Stone, Giselle Renarde, and Rachel Green.

The omnibus is available in paperback or as an e-book. The five titles together come out to a hefty 324 pages, so it's a solid read for the money.

As with all Coming Together: Neat titles, all proceeds go to support entrepreneurs around the world on Kiva. If you'd like to see where mine have gone, check out my Kiva lending page here.

Giving Back With The Six Swans

The Six Swans, my book with Coming Together: Neat, pays royalties into the micro-lending service Kiva. I promised to post updates about where the royalties were going.

I've just made a loan to Kristine, a woman in the Philippines looking to stock her store with electric fans, rice cookers, and the like.

Kristine caught my eye because she's used Kiva to steadily improve her business. This looks like her third loan with Kiva, and if you click to go back to previous efforts, you can see that she started with a direct sales service, no store. I think it's cool to see her using the system so well.

If you'd like to see more about the Kiva loans I've made, you can check out my lender page here.

If you'd like to read more about why I decided to publish with Coming Together: Neat, you can do so here.

The line has also been pretty active this year. You can see all the books in the Coming Together: Neat line here.

Doing Good While Being Bad

When I decided to publish The Six Swans with Coming Together: Neat, I agreed to a pretty unusual payment plan. All proceeds for books from that particular line go to Kiva, a website that distributes microloans to entrepreneurs around the world. Think Kickstarter, except that the recipients have to pay the money back and you don't get stickers and tchotchkes for contributing.

Royalties from The Six Swans show up as Kiva gift cards, and I can lend them as I choose, along with other members of the Coming Together: Neat lending team.

The book came out in early April, so I'm just getting the chance to get in on this. I've written before that my participation in Coming Together has often surprised me -- I tend to show up for the erotica and the chance to work with the awesome people, and then later I realize I'm really happy about the "altruism" in the "erotic altruism" that Coming Together espouses.

This was definitely the case here. Only when I went to actually make my Kiva account did I realize how exciting this is.

Here's the deal: Writing is a dream come true for me. How cool is it that I get to help other people achieve their dreams as a byproduct of pursuing my own?

Kiva also allows a really cool sort of transparency. If you want to see where royalties for The Six Swans are going, you can check out my lender page and see who I'm supporting. I probably spent two hours picking out my first loan recipient, Leala. I picked her because I wanted to help a fellow Pacific Islander female.

I plan to periodically update this blog with information about what's going on with Kiva. And, as always, a big thank you to the folks at Coming Together, for helping me learn to do good while being bad.

If you'd like to contribute to this (and read hot stories in the process), you can pick up The Six Swans, or any of the other books in the Coming Together: Neat line.