Books are a business. Books are an art. And we’re all caught in the middle.
Developing a creative relationship with money will make you more aware of that underlying pattern and will also surface your values, what’s most important to you in life.
Surely, you’d say, this is the writing of one of our many personal-finance gurus, right? It must be the well-turned phrasing of that woman with the short blonde hair and the leather jackets. Or maybe it’s the fun guy who yells everything at you during his show — booyah! Or, those folks on public radio, the evening show about the markets that plays “Stormy Weather” when the Dow is down. Well, no. Guess again:
I do realise that, for many people, creative and commercial abide on opposite sides of a wide divide and yoking them together is an almost sacrilegious proposition. I understand that mindset well because it used to be my own.
This is Orna Ross, the founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi).
Long an author herself, and one who left traditional publishing to mine the widening fields of self-publishing, Ross is just out with a new book: Creating Money, Creating Meaning: Getting Into Financial Flow. And it’s not just for writers.
In her book, what Ross advocates is closing that “wide divide” that so many of us believe exists between our artistic impulses and our business platforms, between the creative and the commercial.
Ross is one of two speakers in the Master Class I’ve programmed and will chair on Saturday, 11th October, at Frankfurt Book Fair — a specially devised session we’ve put together with the ingenuity of Frankfurt Book Fair director of events and programmes Britta Friedrich and the help of my programming associate Matilde Sommain.
Is It All About Sales? is targeted most particularly to — but hardly limited to — junior publishing workers.
Anyone who has jumped into this business, flush with the joys of arts and letters — only to find the aesthetic rug yanked out from under them to reveal a cold, stony foundation of corporate reality — understands what we’re talking about.
And Ross might be the person folks would expect to walk in with the “warm and fuzzy” view that creativity should triumph, business has steamrolled inspiration, and that all is lost to the bean counters. Her new book, instead, shows a remarkably different perspective.
“Money is as good a material as any with which to practice its ways,” she counsels. “That you do money is how you do life.” She writes:
To go creative is to choose a way of living that is different to the conventional ways that are all around you and nowhere are those ways more convention-ridden, strongly held and powerfully practiced than in the worlds of money and high finance. We who choose the alternative, creative way travel together, support and help each other to hold the mindset where the magic happens.
And in the session at Frankfurt Book Fair, we’ll be exploring what it means to “go creative” and walk right into that wall of monetary expectation — “yes, but how do we monetize this?” — that can seem to take the original intent right out of some of the best-planned careers.
Read the Full Story at The FutureBook
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By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
The FutureBook: At Frankfurt Book Fair: Between creativity and commerce
Read the full post at: TheBookseller.com/futurebook
Join us for Frankfurt Book Fair’s first Business Club synthesis of conference events, networking opportunities and negotiation comfort, all in Halle 4:
