Q & R: Writers, aspiring writers …
I frequently receive emails like this …
As an avid fan and an aspiring writer, do you have advice for a peon like me about strategies for success in light of your post on 2/22/11 about the challenges of publishing in this economy? Thank you for your work and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Of course, first off, I feel like a peon too … and I’m just a beginner in grappling with the shift underway from a print to a media economy. So I can’t offer strategies for success – but I can pass on a couple things I’ve found interesting. I’ve written on this several times here on this site: here and here for starters. (If you’ve never tried searching keywords on my site … there’s a lot of useful stuff archived here!)
I’d encourage folks to learn everything they can from Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones and their Social Phonics bootcamps.
I’d pay attention to what smart writers like Frank Viola are saying about writing and publishing … I think Frank is spot on. Here are some other useful articles folks have passed on to me lately on the subject:
10 Awful Truths
On a pioneer e-book writer …
Finally, my friend Ed Chinn passed along this 22-year-old quote from Microcosm, from economist George Gilder:
“Throughout previous human history, the creation of wealth depended chiefly upon the extraction, transport, combination, and modification of heavy materials against the resistance of gravity, the constraints of entropy, and the constrictions of time and space. When things are large and approached outside-in, it is expensive to move and manipulate them. Their costs derive from the weight, rarity, entropy, and resistance of matter. But, small things, virtually devoid of matter, move less like weights than like thoughts. In the microcosm, the costs of fuel and materials decline drastically; the expense devolves from matter to mind. Just as quantum science overthrew Newtonian matter in the explanation of the universe, the quantum economy overthrows Newtonian matter in the creation of new wealth.” (page 30).
This video (thanks BC) is fascinating and really fun …
