A Shift in the Creative Paradigm

From the latest installment of the Lefsetz Letter, tracing the changes that have occurred in our lifetime. As always, Bob Lefsetz is writing about the music industry, but if you’re a writer and you’re not reading this and mentally inserting “book” instead of “album”, it may be time to start paying a little more attention to what’s going on in the industry:

CREATION

Used to be expensive and we felt anybody who’d made a record deserved attention. Now anyone can record, even on their iPad, and we need a reason to pay attention.

As usual, the entire post is pure gold, but I find myself re-posting this fragment because I keep speaking to aspiring writers through work who mistake The Book as an end-goal. They’re all excited by the possibility of epub and self-publishing because it makes getting published achievable, but they haven’t figured out the counter-point of that.

What they want isn’t having the book out there, what they want is the attention. And they can’t understand why having The Book isn’t achieving that, ’cause they’re using new technology to try and achieve something attached to a very old paradigm.

The nature of creativity is changing. You need to think harder about what you really want from your creative life, ’cause there’s no one-true-path anymore (if, indeed, there ever was).

And I stand by my recent post that says if you’re a creative type and you’re not subscribed to the Lefsetz letter it’s really time to start.