Sunday, December 20, 2015

New Beginnings


Funny how things go. The novel, an afterthought for 40-some years, is suddenly front and center. It’s officially (self) published on line; this direct link will take you right to it. You can sample the first 20 percent of it there free, and for now you can download all 126 pages of it at whatever price you feel is appropriate, starting at “nothing.”
Pricing will have to change at some point, obviously, although I don’t mean that to sound like a late-night TV huckster's “Limited Time Offer!” The day of  “While Supplies Last” is over, too; the book exists only as a digital file and can be downloaded forever. And I can’t use the part about “Not Available in Stores” either, because it’s available at Amazon. They ask $2.99 for it, of which I believe I score about half.
The full effect goes quite a bit further, however. It’s caused me to rethink my whole “business model,” as they might say it at Harvard B-school.
Clearly, I’m out of step with today’s approach to what used to be my business -- an anachronism among the horde of “content marketing” practitioners. The reasons have been aired at length in earlier posts and won’t be repeated here, but in response I’m contemplating a two-edged approach. There will be a sea change to my LinkedIn presence, and a different tone to this blog. 
In the blog I shall leave the grubby world of business and ascend to the realm of “creative” writing. Not necessarily writing creatively; maybe just writing about it.
Actually I’ve wondered just what “creative” writing is supposed to be. Seems like almost any kind of writing would be creative. If you think advertising copywriting, for example, isn’t creative, you’re wrong. But I see “creative” listed by agents and publishers as another genre, and I’m taking my cue from that.   
It will be a hardship at first to give up being snarky and combative, rolling over to composing inoffensive fictions. To mitigate the shock I will keep one foot in the business world with a LinkedIn page, modified -- another story; but this web log will reek, hereafter, of  a more  refined, lit’ry ambience.