CREATESPACE IS BLOWING MY MIND

Paul Grand just told me that Amazon has this insanely great self-publishing operation called CREATESPACE. It allows ANYBODY to upload a PDF and have it PUBLISHED as a book on demand. No books are actually printed until somebody orders one. They offer the same service for DVD authoring. Audio CD’s. Video Downloads. I’m having a bit of a hard time grokking this one. It’s so huge. I’d heard about it. But I’m checking out the site right now. Seeing how easy it is. How tempting. Wow. Should I do it?

All those unsold screenplays sitting in this folder on my computer. I could make books out of them? That sounds cool. Why not? Maybe people would read that futuristic car racing script I wrote. Or how about the one where the guy crash lands on the space station. Or the wacky college comedy where those frat pals drive cross country with a donor heart in their convertible. How about the one where the terrorists take over the oil rig? Or the one about the super hero who retires? I could do it. With just a few clicks. But there probably isn’t anybody out there who would read any of that stuff. I mean, there’s a reason those scripts didn’t sell. Right? But what if there was even ONE person. Who read one of ‘em. And what if they like it! That would be so cool!

But what if they hated it… I’d feel so guilty. I would’ve taken their hard earned $4.95. Just because I was bored at the computer one night during the writer’s strike. And I thought it would be fun to upload a PDF file of an unsold screenplay. I know it would be fun to make the cover in PHOTOSHOP. It makes me think about something I take very seriously. As a content creator, I make an implicit pact with my audience. If you are willing to devote your valuable time. And hard earned money. To purchase, or watch, something that I’ve created. Then I have a responsibility to give you something worthy of that commitment. So are any of these scripts worthy of PDF’ing into a novel? I don’t know. Maybe in the description I can add the writers room mea culpa: “Here’s the worst idea ever!”. Maybe that would assuage my guilt. I’d be making it clear to the buyer that what they were about to purchase was terrible. Hmmm. I don’t know if I’m gonna do it.

But you should! I bet you’ve got something amazing sitting on your hard drive. That novel you never sold. Or screenplay. A student film perhaps. A prog rock opera. You should do it. And I’ll buy it. And if I think it sucks… too bad for me. Caveat emptor isn’t just for toasters. It goes for entertainment too.