Serial publishing is one of the oldest and newest forms of content strategy, particularly for fiction. Dickens did it. Dumas did it. Salman Rushdie and Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk are signing up with Substack to serialize their next projects. I’m doing the same. I am serializing my 8th-century historical novel, The Wistful and the Good, … Read More »
When I retired from content strategy and technical communication to focus on becoming a novelist, I imagined I was leaving content strategy behind. I could not have been more wrong. A novelist today has to be a content strategist. This was not clear to me in the first couple of years when I was mostly… Read More »
Last year I posted that this blog would be undergoing a sea change as I turned a page in my career to work on fiction rather than tech comm and content strategy. Rather than starting a new blog, I thought I would take the lazy way out and change the focus of this blog to… Read More »
This blog will be undergoing a sea change. For those not familiar with the term: Full fathom five thy father lies;Of his bones are coral made;Those are pearls that were his eyes;Nothing of him that doth fade,But doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange. Shakespeare, The Tempest The rich and strange part may be… Read More »
I am turning a page. An elderly metaphor, but still apt for a writer. My kids are grown. My mortgage is paid. My savings are adequate. I only need do the work I most want to do. I have said the things that I truly thought it important to say about technical communication and content… Read More »
If you let one of your houseplants completely dry out and then try to bring it back to life by dumping a large amount of water in the pot, you will end up with water all over the floor. Dry soil cannot absorb moisture quickly so the water you pour in will run through the… Read More »
Neil Perlin poses the question (and answers in the negative) in a response to my post “Time to Move to Multisourcing“. Perlin raises a number of points that deserve discussion. But first, a little clarification is needed. The term “single sourcing” is used to mean a number of different things in tech comm and content… Read More »
Personalized content has been the goal of many in the technical communication and content strategy communities for a long time now. And we encounter personalized content every day. Google “purple left handed widgets” and you will see ads for purple left handed widgets all over the web for months afterward. Visit Amazon and every page… Read More »