Books Enter The Twilight Zone

This past New Year’s Eve celebration got started a day earlier with a SyFy Channel marathon:of 87 consecutive hours of The Twilight Zone.  Though I’ve seen every one of the 175 or so episodes, some many times, I always enjoy watching them.  This time I introduced the series to my daughter a week shy of her eighth birthday.  My son, almost 11, had seen a few episodes before but this year I felt like they started to click with him.  My wife doesn’t get the appeal of watching visionary shows about war, hate, fear, anger, greed and the corruption of mankind.  Show topics ranged from venturing into space before such travel was possible to going back in time to try to prevent President Lincoln’s assassination.  These morality tales reveal things about ourselves that many of us don’t often examine and they remain relevant today, more than 50 years after the show first aired.

What if The Twilight Zone dedicated a season to book-themed episodes?

There would be plenty of topics to cover:

·         A writer who turns into the book he’s writing.

·         A government that tries to ban the teaching of a book.

·         Writers that are forced to write without the aid of their addiction (alcohol, pot, other drugs).

·         What happens when a lost manuscript is discovered that will cause grave damage if it’s published?

·         Would a writer risk his life to get a book out?

·         Would a writer purposely commit suicide in hopes her book would then become famous?

·         How a writer of fiction gets discovered to have really written about his own life.

·         What happens to a writer who agrees to be bribed not to write a tell-all book.

·         What happens when a writer publishes a book based on a lie -- either knowingly or in another case, knowingly?

The Twilight Zone had a way of showing right from wrong and of revealing the dark side of the human condition.  It managed to entertain while sharing a moral.  I would love to see someone create new episodes or even better, a book version of them, where the stories have some connection to books, writers, and publishing.

Even though the book industry is dedicated to serving the needs of the reading public, it is an industry that is worthy of being the subject of books. Why not? It has great elements to work with – money, power, influence. Authors can be famous people or become them. They can write about any subject. Any industry that gets paid to reveal secrets and will have a few of its own.

Perhaps one day soon you’ll hear or read these words:  “The book industry is about to publish its next book that won’t appear anywhere but in a place called The Twilight Zone.”

2016 Book Marketing & Book Publicity Toolkit

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2016