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About Me

Hi, I'm Mike Popovic, author of the stories here and the Media Are Alive blog. More about me.

About the Stories

Getting a children's book published is easy. That is, if you are Madonna, Spike Lee, Jamie Lee Curtis or any other celebrity who decides to give writing for kids a try. For authors without connections and a body of previous work that consists mostly of bits floating around the Internet, it is a bit more difficult.

Browsing through the back shelves of a small-city library one day, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of stories gathering dust, mostly forgotten. For many, this was probably the end of the line.

I then thought about the stories I'd been working on - sitting on my hard drive in some cases, penciled in a skinny notebook in others - and their probable fate. Already passed on by several publishers, I didn't envision lavish book signing parties anytime soon. I pictured my notebooks eventually tossed away or lost in an attic somewhere, old hard drives rendered unreadable by the passage of time.

Thinking further, I realized my goal should not be getting the stories published, but keeping them alive. Sure, a nice dust-jacketed hardcover book spread throughout the mega-bookstores would help with this, but it was not completely necessary.

Obviously, digital distribution is the fast track to spreading stories (and music, movies, etc.). Mixing in the Creative Commons license allows author's rights to be protected, but doesn't get in the way of the rapid spread of the story.

I've seen similar models work for indie music and webcomics. Hopefully this site will help bring the same sort of momentum to children's literature.

About the blog

Once I started thinking about all of the above, I was more tuned into interesting stories about media and the spread of ideas. I was blogging them on my personal site, but decided they fit in here nicely.