Litkicks

I announced in April that I would be publishing one Kindle book a month for a year. I've now produced four books, and gained a fast education in electronic indie publishing along the way.

The main thing I learned is that, once I publish a book, the book won't sit still. It will cry for my attention. Friends will email me sugggestions and errors to fix. Potential customers will urge me to produce non-Kindle versions, or paperback editions. Marketing and publicity opportunities will beckon. My super-fast one-book-a-month pace was designed to keep my project moving, but I quickly began to realize I was defeating my own goals by obliging myself to be always working furiously on the next book to come, instead of nurturing and marketing the books that were already published to the maximum extent each one required.

My lesson has been learned, and I am now hitting the pause button on my one-book-a-month plan. I have two excellent new Kindle publications in progress, but the next one will not come out in August, and the following one will not come out in September. These two new books are the first stab at the second phase of the Literary Kicks publishing plan, which involves not only producing books from selected content originally published on this blog, but also producing new and innovative editions of classic public domain works related to some of the interest areas and obsessions featured here. The books I had planned for August and September are very exciting ones (I wish I could tell you more about them now, but it'll have to wait). I think both books will sell well if published properly, but they're less likely to reach their potential if I rush them out. This is why I've decided to cut the fast pace, put the new books on a slower track to launch, and devote my current efforts towards improving the four books that are currently out.

"Take what you have gathered from coincidence," Bob Dylan sang. Sometimes I'm not sure what to take, and what to leave behind.

Two mathematically improbable coincidences haunted me this Saturday, both related to current events and to this website, Literary Kicks. First, I woke up early Saturday morning and spent a calm hour sipping coffee, eating blueberry Special K and browsing through my complete Plato, intent on finding a kick-ass philosophical quote to put up as the day's blog post. I finally picked a choice snatch of dialogue from the Meno, an old favorite.

Just as this blog post was going up, a brainy, deluded and possibly schizophrenic 22-year-old creep from Tuscon, Arizona named Jared Lee Loughner was shooting six people in a shopping center. Later that day an online list of Loughner's favorite books was revealed. I was shocked to see on the list, along with titles like The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf, an excellent novel by Ken Kesey and two by Plato: the Republic and ... you guessed it, the Meno.