Creative Bulletin n.121

In these past few days we worked on the editing of Mario3 because we want to launch it during the Turin Book Fair 🚀 Matteo finally decided to look at those last couple of changes that were left pending and he realized that the effort seemed insurmountable only on paper, instead it took him no more than a couple hours to get through it (amazing how one can drown in a glass of water 😂).

We also had the opportunity to reflect on the dogma / rebellion theme:

What’s customary, works. We often clash with what is usual. The hearsay. A book must have a compelling storyline. A product must be useful. Social media is essential. Brand awareness is important. These are not lies: they are things that have worked in the past and continue to work. The market has proved those statements right and the players (especially the big ones) have turned them into unshakable dogmas that are handed down to the new generations like the precepts of a religion. And we all know it's true, partly because what is customary works for real, and partly because everyone says so, hence it must be true.

The introjection of dogma. As with a mother's paradigms, we take dogmas and turn them into law. We confuse "you have to do it this way because it has already worked" with "you have to do it this way because this is how it has to be done". We begin to believe that it is right to work on brand awareness no matter what, to develop only products whose usefulness is undeniable, to take care of social media pages, to write novels with compelling plots. And we tell ourselves that it is absolutely wrong not to do it that way.

The intuition in rebellion. What if it wasn’t so? When we dare ask that question, the old world starts crumbling down and we begin to sense the misunderstanding of dogmas hiding between the cracks. There is almost a sense of misdeed: what if I don’t give a damn about brand awareness? What if I forget about social media? What if I wrote a book without a plot? Can I do it? But above all… do I want to do something new?

A victorious rebellion becomes a new dogma. In a world where no one wants to publish Italian fantasy novels because "Italian fantasy novels don't sell", if a brave publishing house decides to come out with one, and it becomes a publishing case, from the following month other publishers would try to put out in the market a book of that genre. A new dogma would be created: "Italian fantasy sells". Bottomline, even rebellion can be absorbed.

Interior and exterior dogmas. It is almost easy to rebel against the dogmas that come from the outside, but how can we rebel against the internal ones, built from our own previous rebellions? Look at us, we proved that "independent distribution works", that "Facebook ads are profitable" and in just three years we became 100% convinced that we must distribute independently and that advertising on FB is essential; it’s the right way to do it. And... What if it wasn’t true? 😅

🌈 The solution: to accept precariousness. The world is constantly changing, we are constantly changing. We must always look at things as if it were the first time. Whether it is paradigms that we endured or the ones we helped build (we can go from rebels to “old” in the blink of an eye). It worked yesterday, that’s true, but do we still like it today? How does it make us feel?

Everytime we think «That’s the way» and we say it in an excessively strict or traditional way, let’s ask ourselves: is it really so right?

With ❤️,
Matteo and Andrea

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