To:  Analog Sea Review

PO Box 11670, Austin, TX

 

Dear ASR,

It was with great delight that I discovered you last month in a quiet corner of an obscure bookshop in Sausalito, CA. I promptly devoured every morsel of your latest “offline journal” — poetry, essays, musings, and all.

Thank you for creating a rare unplugged oasis in the current desert of digital.

I’m inspired by your ethos, and this inspiration comes at an opportune moment as my husband and I ponder our own artbook-in-progress.

In today’s book publishing frenzy, it’s very tempting to obey all the latest directives before we even put pen to paper and brush to canvas: build a platform, amass social media followers, research the market, post religiously, leverage our network, toot own horn, submit query after query. Rinse, repeat.

But what if we didn’t?

What if, like ASR, our book were instead a unique vision, a thing of beauty, a work of art in its own right?

What if we had no website, no bar codes, no (gasp) Twitter handle?

What if we bypassed Amazon and instead became an off-grid nugget discoverable only in quiet bookshop corners, or given as a gift between friends?

Do these things diminish a book’s value or do they, in fact, make it kinda priceless?

Thank you for clarifying these questions by fact of your mere wondrous existence. We look forward to reading future Analog Sea editions.

Warmly,

Liz Norwood