I launched the first of a proposed series of 15 books called Stories In Overdrive. They are re-packaged screenplay stories but not novelizations. They use the same vertical writing style, in a novella, as in a screenplay. It's an experiment to see if readers will respond to a new narrative approach. Since the stories already exist, my role is more as transforming geek than writer.
And marketing. I've barely begun but nothing brings out the worst in American culture than dipping into the waters of marketing. It's all hype and bullshit, I swear. I don't know how much of it I can stomach.
My greatest commercial hit was my screenwriting tutorial. When it came out in 1997 it quickly sold well and was reviewed well. Everybody loved it. (See for yourself.) /And I did nothing, absolutely noting, to promote it -- except pitch it at my website, The Screenwriters and Playwrights Home Page. No doubt this worked because I was the first on the net, I had no and then little competition, and I was getting over 500 unique visitors a day, all of them wannabe screenwriters. I was in the right place at the right time with the right product.
This is the luck and magic I hope for with this project. The notion of storytelling and vertical writing combining to create a narrative aimed at smart phones and tablets. I've had this idea for five years and no one has run with it. I finally decided to run with it myself. We'll see what happens.
But I don't think I can stomach much of the usual marketing dance. The hype and bullshit make me sick in my stomach, just as the first Screenwriters Expo in LA, where I was on the visiting faculty, upset me so much I resigned from doing it again. Marketing is America at its worst.
So we'll see if this idea, like the tutorial, is in the right place at the right time. And I may also benefit by its size and consistency, 15 stories to come reasonably quickly, allowing for a sense of a "brand." Well, we'll see. I certainly am not going to enter the fields of shit just to make a buck. No fucking way.
