Why am I doing this?
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
If you want to write a novel, it’s no longer a simple matter of devising setting, character, plot, and theme, building scene upon scene, with exposition, rising action, climax, and dénouement, never mind deep insight, knowledge of the human heart, passages of lyrical beauty and scenes of breathtaking suspense, all delivered in crisp, clear prose, with sentences of varying length, good grammar, and neat typing, let alone style, style, style. Now you must also do market research, construct a marketing plan, and build a platform.
A platform.
That’s supposed to mean people who are going to be interested in your book when it comes out, and even before it comes out, and whom you can list by category in your marketing plan, by group size, largest to smallest, so your agent and prospective publisher will consider taking a risk on you.
Can you imagine [fill in the name of any author you heard of more than ten years ago] doing this? Consider:
PUBLISHER: Who do you see as your audience?
CHARLES D.: Well, it’s about a penniless orphan who gets caught up with a gang of petty street thieves in London. There are a lot of those, and I think they’ll all buy a copy.
Or how about this:
PUBLISHER: Do you have a local angle?
MARK T.: There’s stuff about some towns on the Mississippi. Probably everybody along the river will want to read it in case I happen to mention somebody they recognize.
PUBLISHER: Can you stick in a few more names?
Of course, you can still write a novel without thinking about publication. But most of us who write things are dying to have somebody read them (and admire them). So if we ever want to get there, or at least get there prehumously: platform.
Hence blog.
The idea of a blog for someone like me, unknown, unpublished, more than likely destined to leave my precious manuscript in a computer folder that my heirs will never open, strikes me as pretentious at best and revolting at worst. But I am looking upon this as an experiment. If I wind up feeling ridiculous, I can take it all down. Certainly Dickens and Twain, Brontë and Austen and Alcott, Hardy and Hawthorne and Dostoevsky and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never had to do this. But what if they could have?
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