Intellectual Property

March 31, 2011

Soon I will release a nonfiction e-book, FREELANCE WRITING FOR A LIVING. Part of it is revised and edited blog posts, although there is quite a bit of new content in it as well.

Like a lot of writers, I've been doing some e-book publishing and recently I've been taking a very hard look at my unpublished novels, incompleted novels and 7 or 8 years worth of blog posts, thinking, "Hmmm, there's a hell of a lot of intellectual property just laying around here that could be revitalized and marketed as e-books."

My friend Tobias S. Buckell, for example, has done something very interesting. It's called Nascence. What is Nascence? The subtitle is: 17 Stories That Failed and What They Taught me.

Basically he took 17 short stories that failed or failed to get published, picks a writing lesson to go with them, like "Write Compelling Characters" and then points out why the stories failed.

Veddy intervesting.

For a lot of writers like myself, I've got a lot of IP laying around going to waste. But not for long.

How about you?

p.s. I just spent the last hour or so skimming through blog posts from 2005, my first official year of blogging (egad), looking for blog posts that might, possibly, maybe, potentially, be of broad enough appeal they might end up in a book of essays in the future. And I did find some. And I found some that might have a paragraph in the middle that might make for an interesting start of an interesting essay. But tons of them were, well, the usual, which are fine the first time, but hardly worth re-publishing and have a fairly narrow appeal (if they have any at all). So I would like to perhaps suggest that an important addendum to this post is that just because you have IP laying around doesn't necessarily mean it's worth re-purposing.