tBooks and Me & You

Grasping a new new thing that's beyond your grasp

Vincent, the evil genius of our enterprise tells me that my stupidity is my greatest strength. I kinda know what he means. While he’s trying to fine-tune our publication efforts to expand our readership via blockchain technology and cryptocurrency in this era of Trumpian madness and mistrust as the American empire shaking itself crazy, I keep stealing fellow Bluesky folks’ marvelous insights, humor, and postings as well as adding my own so that we can reach the literate, intelligent, thoughtful, caring writers and readers for whom we are writing and publishing.

In all of this, we have invented the tBook which is a blend of electronic publications (think Kindle) and new school journalism. These are “books” that seem to have little or nothing to do with what we’ve always called “books,” being paid for by “digital $s” that we’ve never before thought about as money.

This is where my genius for stupidity fits in. I’m like the guy in the pic above not simply riding along as a sleepy passenger, despite that being a far more suitable role for me, but driving the vehicle.

What this picture doesn’t show is that Vincent is riding shotgun and saying “Brake!” “Gas!” “Brake again!” “A little to the left, no, too far, back to the right!”, etc. This newsletter was created a couple of years ago as a place for Vincent and me to post and publish our writings. We were doing this without having to go to NYC, without having to fit our work into a narrow genre for a major publisher to market us, and without having to deal constantly with their profit and loss bean counters, their handy sales force, and their even handier $150K advertising budget and foreign sales department and a kazillion other advantages that the HUGE NY publishing world possesses.

So far the tBook has been our best idea and plan, not for competing with Goliath, but for simply finding our own little corner of the playing field. I’ve had success with big NY publishers and enjoyed the reality of winning awards, traveling the world and being read by the hundreds of thousands. My hopes for our tBooks are high but not needed for me to feel good about my writing and my books. Still, I hope the work we’re doing will reach more readers who find & might enjoy our stories, ideas, and creations.

There is a giant light bulb, like a cartoon bubble-thought above a character’s head, representing his “idea,” on the home page of our effort to explain what we’re doing. This site explains why and how we’re doing it. tBooks — Decentralized Publishing. We hope to attract some of you brave souls into joining us in this new world of writing good stuff, finding good readers, and giving good writers an option to the frustrating “business” of bringing our work to life which can only happen when the work finds a home in readers, hearts and minds.

My first tBook, will soon join Vincent’s literary fiction, SCi-FY, memoir Memories of Emily available from here, in our newsletter. Both books have been presented in serial form already. Getting Weird is a sequel to my novel Inside Out which was published in 2002 and has continued to sell for the last 23 years. You can still purchase Inside Out from HarperCollins Children Books in paperback or e-book, or from numerous other places for much more money than Getting Weird our tBook sequel will cost you.

As the big stupid guy that everybody likes, I’m here to assure you that driving in heavy traffic while wearing a blindfold is indeed a bit nerve-wracking, but getting to our destination will make it all worthwhile. We hope you’ll agree and give our new invention, putting great reading materials in your hands, a chance.