You're Not Reading This

After some time off, I have been blogging more lately. One thing that’s different is that I’m not posting links to these posts on social media; at least, not at the moment. In the deluge of the attention economy, is no attention the new high-value asset? I’ve spent most of my career pulling revenue from two threads: more creative work and more commercial work. I was able to be successful doing commercial work because I understood how to monetize attention and how to grow it. I did that sort of work for companies ranging from Time Warner to Procter & Gamble. The age-old question is: Does commercial work kill creative work? I never found that to be the case. I felt they were Siamese twins: inextricably linked. Whatever I was doing commercially tended to inform whatever I was doing creatively and vice versa; the relationship was symbiotic. What happens if you stop paying attention to how many people are paying attention? Obviously, this site has traffic stats, but I haven’t looked at them. If you write like no one is reading, if you speak like no one is listening, if you act like no one is watching, what happens next?

Buy "The Tumor" — my short story that’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."