Writing Exercise - Your Publishing Firm

Another writing exercise with kind thanks to C. M. Mayo and her website.

January 23 "Your Publishing Firm"
Assume that you have both endless hours in every day and endless pots of money. Therefore, you could, with the snap of your fingers and no worries, start your own publishing firm. What would you call it? What sort of books would you publish? What sort of image would you project? What would your office look like? What kind of "culture" would your firm have? What sort of people would you have work for you? Who might be your customers? (By the way, you can also try this exercise for one of your characters.)

Here we go:

Here at Quirk Publishing, there's one rule that needs to be remembered - Jason gets final say. Mainstream political and military thrillers are a dime a dozen. So are biographies, franchise science fiction and fantasy. Don't even get us started on Young Adult stuff. Jason's tried to make a home here for things that other publishers wouldn't bat an eye at. If it tickles his fancy, you've made it. You may have to edit it a time or three, but you will be published.

We find that this takes a lot of pressure off the author, which helps them to produce better work. Of course, many writers have a lot of interesting quirks themselves, so along with editors we have licensed and certified counselors to help talk the writers down from their ledges... both literal and metaphorical.

Culture around the office... it's chaotic, but fun. The odds are that you can find a project that interests you. Fiction, histories, the odd biography... they're all here. We even have a small comic book publishing arm. That's Jason's personal pet-project. He vets all the artists and writers for that one himself. It's not big enough to catch the eye of the big comics distributor... yet. But he's worked out a deal with our book distribution to get those out there.

And done.

That one was pretty fun. It felt like a reflection of my personality, at any rate. (Though 'Quirk' might understate things a little in my case.) My tastes in everything are so across the board it's hard for me to keep up sometimes. The one thread that binds them together reliably is the fact that I tend to prefer things that tend to skew away from the mainstream. (Though I do have to confess a love of cop dramas. It seems like I'll watch anything with 'Law & Order' in the title. And Castle is probably my favorite show airing right now.)

I'm not going to do any story-work tonight. I've put down this writing exercise, and that'll have to be enough for now. I'm going to relax a bit more before bed. I return to work tonight, so I want to make the most of what I've got left.