"Art of Conversation" is Dead — Long Live "Volumes."
I'm rebranding this project — here's what will change and what remains the same.
Hi readers,
After almost ten years, the name of this publication is finally going to change. Art of Conversation is being retired, and I’m now publishing under a new title: Volumes. It might seem like a small change, but I’m inordinately happy about it. Let me explain.
Why Not Art of Conversation?
When I first began this project in early 2017, it was little more than a blog intended for a handful of friends across the world. I’d moved to Mexico, and writing about books allowed me to continue my half of the conversations I used to have back home. A number of people told me they enjoyed what I wrote, and that number grew, and that blog became a much bigger publication.
The name Art of Conversation, therefore, wasn’t the product of very much deliberation. I thought it was sort of clever because I was writing about how we can engage in “conversation” with the art we consume, and that’s about all I thought of it. By the time I gave it serious consideration, the title was attached to the domain name I’d purchased and about a hundred published essays.
I’ve wanted to change the name for a while now, but I worried about the impact it would have on new readers discovering my work, SEO, breaking the links to past essays, a bunch of boring things I worried about way more than I should have. The time has come to be brave, make the change, and hope for the best.
Which brings us to
Why Volumes?
Well, there’s a thoughtful reason and a gut reason for this new name.
The considered reason: it denotes large collections of books, and the various contents within a single book, and the idea of something that has a lot you can take from it — in all these ways, it’s true to say that books contain volumes. It’s also more suggestive of what I write about than the previous name. Art of Conversation sounds like a self-help book about communication; Volumes, on the other hand, doesn’t require a ton of explanation: volumes — books — literature — the connections make themselves.
The gut reason: I like the mix of the exotic in its V and the ordinary in the word’s familiarity. It’s also far fewer syllables than Art of Conversation, which never rolled off my tongue but tripped over it clumsily.
Why the Full Stop?
Simply this: I like how it looks. It appeals to my aesthetic sensibilities, and given that I’ve put up with a publication name I didn’t like for as long as I have, I decided to indulge myself here. Also, it’s a little bit pretentious, and I’m a little bit pretentious. So there’s that.1
This is important:
The URL for the site is going to change very soon. The old address will simply redirect to you to the new one, so that should be seamless from your point of view. However, it will mean that the email address from which my essays are sent out to you will also be different, and your spam filter might decide to earn its keep by snatching my posts away from your inbox.
So, if you notice you haven’t received anything from me over the next few weeks, double check your junk folder and please do mark my essays as “not spam”.
I will continue to publish weekly, so expect something from me every Friday.
The house style on the full stop will be that it only appears in headers and branding; I won’t be using it when I write about Volumes in a paragraph, which would be obnoxious and unsightly.
Looking forward to the next evolution, Matt. One of the beauties of creating independently is the freedom to be inventive and change, especially if you have a durable audience that will hang with you because they believe in what you do. I was reading William Zinsser's "On Writing Well" on a flight from Newark this week and he says in an early chapter:
“Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.”
It's easy in our culture to brand everything because we've been accustomed as consumers to see product and not art. I love what you do, and look forward to whatever you've got cooking up next for us.