On Writing to an Audience of One

By David Macpherson

 

Can you write an entire book as one text a day? 

 

Sure. You are writing to one audience member at a time. You can create interesting thing. You can push yourself as a writer in this method. 

 

David Macpherson did six of these at once. He wrote to six different people, pieces of six different books a day. 

 

This is his strange, disjointed look at the process of sending a book out to an audience of one.  

 

It is an odd book, but it is an odd way to write a book. 

 

You might want to try it. It's a fun way and you can see what thoughts and ideas David came up while doing this project. 

 

And yes, this book was also sent out as a text to an audience of one. In case you were wondering.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Macpherson
• Release date: Mar 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215405314

Book preview

On Writing a Book to an Audience of One

Texting Five Books at Once (Wait. Make that Six Books)

1- Right now, December 4, 2022, I am writing five short books with each having an audience of one. For each of these, I am writing to just one person. I am sending the day’s writing as a text. Each of the five are getting a different book.

2- I was talking to one of them today. One of the ones who is getting a piece of a small book every day. He was surprised when I said the other four are getting their books. Wait, they aren’t getting the same thing I am getting? I explained that each of them are individual. He looked at me like I was crazy. "You are writing five?

3- My friend confessed that he hadn’t read everything that I wrote to him.  I told him that was more than fine. One of the people I send a small book to admitted that he kind of skims them. I think that is great. I love writing for no one.

4- Here are the books that I am writing. The first one is called, Hey, Gary: A Litany of Questionable Suggestions. It was the first one. It actually started as goofy emails to my friend Gary. He never responded to these dumb suggestions. I saw him one day and asked him if it was okay that he was getting these absurd suggestions. He said it was okay. It is kind of like a found poem. And with that, I realized I was going to compile all of them and put it out as an e-book.

5- That book is going to take forever to even get to 5000 words (a tiny zine of a book) because I only write one of the suggestion a day and they tend to be rather short. They are two or three sentences. None are over fifty words. That will take a few months to get to even a short length I will feel comfortable to release.

6- For my friend Jesse, I decided to expand the idea of texting a book. He has been one of the biggest supporters of my work. He buys them when he is interested in the topic and tells others about my work. He is also a great guy and he lives far away. Sending him a piece of writing a day was a way to stay in touch. I started sending him short texts that all started, Little Known Fact.

7- Little Known Facts has turned into something I really enjoy writing. Each one has a real random piece of history that I state and then I comment on that fact or piece of trivia. I do not know why, but I look forward to write (text on the phone) every morning. Each one is relatively short (50 to 100 words) and getting to a reasonable end point is also going to take a bit of time.

8- The third book I am writing is to my old high school friend, Foster. This is also to stay in touch with a friend who lives in a different state. This is different from the first two books. The first two books, I will write them as texts on my phone. With this one, Death Rides, I am writing it on Google Drive with a laptop and then cut and paste them on to the text feature.

9- These are short stories about the Grim Reaper riding a variety of vehicles. The idea of these stories started on October 29th (just over a month ago) when my wife, my son and I went into the North End of Boston and found a bookstore that focused on Italian books. I found used copies of Italian comics, one of them about a paranormal investigator named Dylan Dog.