What Kind of Stories to Write
What kind of stories should you write? In my present way of thinking, the kind that reach millions and change things.
That means knowing a few realities about the business.
Suppose we want to reach the next generation of young heroes in our society to instill long-forgotten virtues in him. What will he spend his own money on to learn the power and importance of masculine moral strength?
There are short-term and long term realities in character creation. Business realities and physical realities.
The true fascist knows a fool's errand when he sees it.
Instead of being a single lone creator of a lone character in a unique fictional universe, he teams up with others to win.
The true fascist recognizes the need to work together with others to reach a much larger audience than he can reach alone.
This fascist writes, but for an existing publishing house, so that he can focus on developing great stories.
Or to take it even further, maybe he guest-writes a story for an existing series. In a sense, I even had a "guest writer" for Terms of Fair Use. It's true. I shared a tweet stream in a podcast segment, but in the Terms of Fair Use format. In another segment, I just shared some cool-sounding Bible verses and called it a day.
Here's the realities as best as I can estimate them with the facts at hand.
Out of any 200,000 Americans, about 500 will write a finished novel. Of these, about 100 of them will out-perform all the others. Of those 100, about 20 will be the best of the best and these 20 will out-perform the top hundred put together.
These 20 (of the 200,000) will have created very publishable works. About 4 of these could be a breakout success, and maybe one of them will be a professional writer doing a series of novels, one per year for the rest of their life.
If you have 200,000 podcast listeners, and you encourage them to write and help them do it, become an incubator of talent and help them manage that project, suggest possible constraints and deadlines, you can expect to get 20 full-length novels or novel-length mini-series, all of which would be worthy to publish online, maybe as print-on-demand works or even as a mass-market press run.
Comic books are 32 pages a month of series fiction, for example. They've got deadlines to meet because the bookstores are waiting for the next installment. The readers know what day to show up to buy the next book.
If you're late to press, your book's not going to make it out this week. There's a hub-and-spoke delivery system to all the stores across the country to save on postage. But if you're a day late, you're paying retail for postage, and the postage eats up your profits, so you can't do it.
But what if you started with the end in mind? You know that design matters, and every penny counts.
The amount of ink, the coating of the paper, the medium length, size, the minimum and maximum number of illustrations readers will accept, the amount of advertising a book needs in order to hit the market.
And to fix some of those problems, what if from the start, the all the characters existed inside a single universe, like the Marvel or WarHammer 40k, to increase their cross-over and therefore commercial and therefore distribution potential in order to reach more fans to create a more integrated and immersive world?
If your distributor, your editor and publisher don't care about those numbers, then you don't break out from the web to create a physically published work which means your greatest talents reach hundreds of readers instead of millions.
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Thoughts on the Mighty Exodus Americanus Publishing Wing of the Houseboat.opus
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