As far as money goes, I've had plenty of ideas.
Every several months, I cull what I consider to be the Best of the Best of my writing. I then look it over and try to figure out if it's good enough to be turned into a book.
My general feeling is that - yeah, it's good enough - but many of the posts would require heavy modification.
I don't want to put out one of these books that's just a collection of my posts (like Wil Wheaton did (or however you spell his name - you know - Star Trek kid)). I want to have a collection of anecdotes - not posts.
So, I'd have to remove all the links. Then I'd have to remove references to blogs. Then I'd have to... then I'd have to...
The list goes on. But it might be worth it.
I also had the idea to put out some books under the "Neopoleon Guide To Life" heading. Each one would be a fairly short book (around 30,000 words), and each would cover some aspect of the world and my observations.
I wrote some outlines for those to see if it'd work. It would. I just don't have time to do the writing. I don't think people realize it, but my days are packed - every bloody one of 'em - with work/writing/researching/whatever. This blog is a full time job on its own, even though the frequency of my posts doesn't seem to indicate that.
As a last resort, I've considered going to a subscription model. I'd charge some nominal fee that would give people access to my blog. I'm sure that many would argue against this, pointing out that I'd lose a lot of readers. I'd just argue back that, yeah, I'd lose a lot of readers, but whatever I retained would be paying - and if I even have only one paying reader, that's still more money than I'm making from the blog now.
There are plenty of downsides, though. For example, I wouldn't allow search engines to index my site, which would make discovery of my site much more difficult (I get thousands of visitors each month thanks to the major search engines).
Yeah. It takes me back to the book idea.
I've also considered writing fiction and then using my blog to pimp the fiction. That might work, and I could probably negotiate one hell of a nice deal with a publisher given that I already have an established and active audience (that's something most beginning writers don't have, and it would be major leverage in a book deal).
I have a couple books outlined. They're stories I really want to tell - absolutely ridiculous stuff - but I really wanted to co-write them with Dave (he was going to become a Neopoleon author, but he's disappeared - my only contact with him now is when I send him checks for the PandaControl work he did). Having a co-writer made the process of fleshing out the stories a lot more fun than doing it by myself. I don't need all the glory and all the money that a solitary undertaking would bring - I'd rather share it with someone else who would get as much of a kick out of it as me.
But that seems to have fallen through.
I still have the outlines and sample chapters, though. Did a hell of a lot of work on that.
So, you never know. I'm in a bit of a hole right now thanks to medical bills and other expenses (none of which I've written about), and, for the first time in years, I'm quite in debt. Now's not the best time for me to try a major creative undertaking even though the result of that work could probably get me out of debt.
I don't want it to be for the money, though. I want it to be for the love of doing it. And, as long as I desperately need dough, I won't feel that I'm writing a book for the "right" reasons.
Basically, I'm an idiot. I have the resources and material to fix everything, but I also have all these reasons not to do it.
Yeah.
I'm an idiot...
- Rory
- Owner of Neopoleon
- Monster in the sack