In 2007, the editors of Creative Nonfiction asked some writers, including me, to make predictions about what publishing would look like in 2025. We’re a little less than a year away from 2025, but I think that I can state with certainty which of my predictions came true and which didn’t. I’ll admit upfront that I was wary of the assignment, largely because I don’t put much faith in predictions. They’re almost always wrong. So, among my predictions, I speculated that in 2025, “A race of despotic winged alligators that love to read will descend upon the earth and institute mandatory, daily Study Hall for all humans.” That would make an intriguing but pointless dystopia. The despotic alligators would easily be defeated by American anti-intellectualism, and sent packing back to their snobby (probably Communist) home planet. The scenario is not believable for that reason.
On the more serious side, I completely botched the future of print on demand books. I saw no future for them in 2007. The laugh is on me as print on demand has only boomed, and my last book, in fact is a print on demand book.
In the win column, I predicted that web-based literary magazines would be flourishing by 2025, and this is certainly the case.
But what I find most surprising are my predictions about Donald Trump. I thought I was merely being silly when I suggested that Donald Trump would be at the forefront of our cultural consciousness in 2025. What triggered this was a 2006 feud between Trump and comedian Rosie O’Donnell. In 2007, I had no idea that Trump would have such a stranglehold on America in 2025. My prediction was as absurd as the winged alligators, but somehow directly on target in a zeitgeisty way. I suggested that Trump would introduce a line of books made of beef jerky known as Trump Jerky Books. Perhaps this idea has occurred to him and he set it aside in favor of his recent enterprise of selling Bibles (a book that you can easily find for free) for $60. I don’t expect these expensive Bibles to catch on without an extra gimmick. Would a beef jerky Bible be too far-fetched for Donald Trump? Maybe not. Or maybe he could add some edible spirituality in another form to boost sales of his Bibles. Why not cheese-flavored communion discs marketed as “Cheesus wafers?”
My best prediction – true in spirit if not in observable reality – was that Trump would be crowned the world’s greatest love poet of all time after publishing a collection of Petrarchan sonnets titled, Trump!
Outlandish, I know, but our entire era seems outlandish to me in ways I could not have foreseen but somehow felt in 2007.
For more of my Nostradamus-worthy predictions, you can read the original article here:
https://creativenonfiction.org/writing/introducing-trump-jerky-books/