Saturday morning is the monthly meeting of the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association, and I’ll be there as usual checking in with the other independent publishers, aspiring authors, self-publishers, publishing services operators and assorted interested others on the state of play in indie publishing today.

Later on Saturday I’ll post from the Q & A session, always an interesting cross-section of questions about a variety of subjects that confuse newcomers to the field. Personally, I find the questions fascinating and revealing. There will be networking, and before our speaker, we’ll each have the chance to get up and give our “elevator speech” about who we are and what we do, good practice for many who are honing their presentations.

Our speaker will be marketing maven Carol White. Usually you would expect a pretty good turnout. No surprise that small publishers and self-publishers are avid to learn about marketing. However, there’s a competing event tomorrow at the sold out San Francisco Writer’s Conference. We’ll see.

But Before I Go…

One thing we all have in common is that we’re writers. As such, we rely to one degree or another on unknown processes and grace to come up with the words that become the books we publish, the stories we tell.

Different prompts stimulte different writers in their creativity. You might enjoy contemplating the work of Erik Baker, design director for The O Group in Manhattan. I found out about him through Chuck Green’s terrific design resource blog, PagePlane.

Baker is also an author and is on the faculty of The School of Visual Arts. He’s twice received National Endowment for the Arts Grants for independent design history projects. None of these impressive credentials, however, have anything to do with this fun experience.

Go to this link and check out Erik’s “Today” –> posts of images. Just scroll down, and try to see why he chose to put these images together. I find that when I look at them and try not to have any thoughts at the same time, amazing pictures, associations and leaps of logic just spontaneously happen in my mind. Puzzling, funny, amazing, poignant, … oh, just go look. And here’s a link to the whole –> list of posts if you want more.

See you later.