Description
My Writing, Your Book: Topics That Probably Interest You Too – By Rabbi Pinchas Winston
HI! ALTHOUGH I have been aware of your presence during my entire writing career, I never openly acknowledged it. I just figured that whether you came to read my book on purpose or accidentally, you wanted to hear what I had to say. If you liked it, you’d continue reading. If you didn’t, you would put down the book.
What do I have to say? Things that I want to share with people. Things that I find fascinating or life-altering. Things that I believe need to get out there, with the hope that you would be happy that I wrote the book, at least by the end of it. Was I right? I really don’t know.
Most of us Torah-based authors don’t know how our readers react. When I scan the shelves of Jewish book stores, I often see titles of books that make me wonder why the authors wrote about those particular subjects. Then I realize it was likely the same considerations that inspire me to choose my own topics.
It’s not that we don’t want tons of people to read our books. We DO. And it’s not that we wouldn’t like to make a good parnassah from book sales. If ONLY! It’s just that, unlike for many authors in the non-Torah world, readers and sales are not the driving forces behind writing and publishing. The Torah itself is the inspiration, with the desire to present familiar ideas or even new ones in a somewhat unique way.
But now I have a question to ask: What do YOU want to know about? What kind of books do YOU want to read? Ask not what your readers can do for you, but rather what you can do for your readers! Or something like that.
The only problem is that by the time you can answer my question, this book will already be in your hands or on your tablet, completed. The topic will already have been chosen and written in a way that I guessed might interest you.
Nevertheless, this book is different. My approach to previous books was basically to write what I wanted to say in a way that the reader could understand and relate to. My approach for this book is instead to write what I think might interest the readers in a way that will enable them to say, “This is pretty much what I wanted or needed to know!”
Gimmicky?
Perhaps.
But I’m willing to give it a try anyhow, and hope that you, dear reader, will feel that this approach was worthwhile. Who knows? Maybe it will inspire some of you to actually send me ideas BEFORE I sit down to write the next book, God willing. Then it will truly be a book “for the people, by the people.”
