A reader named Jonathan (a different Jonathan than me) asks:<\/p>\n
“I had a question. Do you keep copies of various drafts rough darfts and stages your work has gone through? And if you do, how many of the discarded ideas are recycled into later books?”<\/em><\/p>\n Prior to 2011, I did that a lot. Back then there was no self-publishing, so if I wrote something and I was unable to sell it anywhere, I would sometimes rework it into a new form and try to sell it somewhere else. This is why the first few books of DEMONSOULED and THE GHOSTS have some concepts that carry over between each other. I would write a book, fail to place it with a traditional publisher, and think “we’ll, let’s recycle this concept elsewhere.”<\/p>\n After 2011, I stopped doing that entirely, because almost everything I wrote went into a self-published book. So there were no discarded ideas left to recycle.<\/p>\n These days, I have more ideas than I have time to turn into books. Like, I’ll be walking along and I’ll see something, and the idea for an entire nine book series pops into my head. Do I have time to write another nine book series right now? Not really! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n But, honestly, ideas matter much less than their implementation. A good example of this is the Apple iPod and the Microsoft Zune. Neither Apple nor Microsoft had the original idea for a digital music player, but they both tried to implement that idea.<\/p>\n How did the implementation work out? You can still buy the iPod Touch from Apple, but these days Microsoft Zune is mostly known as the punchline of a joke in one of the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY movies.<\/p>\n -JM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A reader named Jonathan (a different Jonathan than me) asks: “I had a question. Do you keep copies of various<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,9,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-administrata","category-ebooks","category-writing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pZ6ri-2ZZ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/GuardiansGalaxyZune.jpg?fit=1280%2C720&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11531"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11569,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11531\/revisions\/11569"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}