Be sure to follow @bondinspiration on Instagram
BONUS Question!
You have been doing some writing of your own. Tell us a little more about that. What’s it about? What prompted you to write?
I think you must be referring to the original James Bond story I'm serialising on Instagram. It's an account called @bondinspiration. I know you've been following, and thanks again for your ongoing support and very positive feedback. But more about that in a second.
Rowan Gibson
What most of my followers on Instagram don't realise is that in my 'other life' I'm the bestselling author of three fairly influential business books that are published in a total of 25 languages. These are 'Rethinking the Future' (Nicholas Brealey, 1996), 'Innovation to the Core' (Harvard Business School Press, 2008) and 'The 4 Lenses of Innovation' (Wiley, 2015). The truth is, I've been writing - professionally or otherwise - for most of my life.
So, let me come back to the reason I started writing @bondinspiration. As you've probably noted already, I have been ingesting Ian Fleming's novels quite obsessively over the past decade or so, and I needed an outlet for that Bond obsession. The last couple of Bond films have been disappointing, and I think EON is trying too hard to reinvent or modernise or sanitise James Bond in order to pander to many of today's activist groups. The same thing is now happening with the Bond continuation novels. The latest ones don't even have James Bond in them! I'm not a fan of the comics either. So I felt there was quite a vacuum in the Bond franchise in recent years, and that prompted me to take the ‘bull by the horns’ and start creating my own content. I wanted to capture and champion what I call 'the true spirit of Bond' in my own original writing - very much maintaining the style of the master, Ian Fleming.
Instead of reinventing Bond, it's more of a return to the character Fleming created in the first place. The only thing that is new and original is the story itself. What I'm doing on Instagram is serialising that story in weekly episodes on the feed. I wanted to know if Instagram could function as a storytelling medium, based on the mobile phone, which is quite an innovation, really. And the overwhelming evidence is that this concept really can work! I see @bondinspiration as a kind of hybrid form of storytelling - somewhere between a book, a graphic novel, and even a weekly TV series. I'm so glad you and so many other followers are enjoying the story in this way. There's much more to come!
*Learn more about Rowan Gibson at imaginationbridge.com
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