A while back I had an interesting conversation over dinner with three other writers. One asked what Biggie Smalls would do if he was a writer. She went on to offer that he would look for and eventually control the vertical market around his work. What would that look like for an author?
The answer she proposed was to be a publisher. We assumed she meant ‘and not a writer.’ She argued ownership, not the day to day job. Hire professionals to run the publishing empire but control access and content.
This runs contrary to most writers who practice their craft alone, on purpose.
So did she mean self-publishing? No. Produce your product, the story, but include all the professional publishing elements. Don’t focus on the physical book, focus on the concept of the story. I specifically call it the story because the idea of a physical book is to concrete and an e-book is just a different method of delivering the exact same product.
I’ll take it one step further toward the B.I.G. picture. Control the story world: characters, place, history, future, rules. This may sound bizarre to writers with a single story in mind and familiar to authors where world building is common. Science fiction comes to mind.
On top of story world control, add distribution. This isn’t the book distibution system. That’s old school. I mean content distribution, not medium distribution. The best example I can think is George Lucas and the ‘Star Wars’ empire. It isn’t a movie, or a comic book, or an action figure. It is all of that and it doesn’t stop because it isn’t a story, it is a world.
Which authors do you think are on the B.I.G. track and what are they doing to get there?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by d berry, Bellingham Writer. Bellingham Writer said: If Biggie Smalls was an author … http://bit.ly/5igxeY [...]