After the outline for The Big Meow was written, its publishers passed on publishing it, citing low sales figures for the first two books. A number of years then passed while the outline sat in DD's file drawer and hard drive, doing nothing. Occasionally she received an inquiry from a fan as to where the third book was. Normally she just wrote back thanking the writer for his or her interest, and telling them that because of the first two books' relatively poor sales figures, there was no chance that a third one would be published.

In December 2005, one more such email from a fan arrived. DD started to write the usual response...and then stopped, beginning to wonder whether there might perhaps be another way to go. In her weblog, Out Of Ambit, she invited the Feline Wizardry novels' readers to email her and tell her whether they'd support a third book brought out by "publish-on-demand" (POD) methods. (Read a copy of the weblog posting here.)

DD's main concern was that such POD publishing is not usually as inexpensive as mass-market paperbacks can be. A perfect-bound paperback edition of a book the size of The Big Meow -- an estimated 100,000 words -- could cost USD $20-25 if enough markup was added to the basic price to finance the time and effort it would take to write the book. However, the more than five hundred readers who wrote to her between December and February overwhelmingly expressed a willingness to pay this kind of price.

So DD decided to go ahead and write the book. (Read the posting in which she commits to the project)

The first chapter of The Big Meow was published online on March 14th, 2006...and the experiment began.