Robert Reincke
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Robert Reincke has long supported himself as a writer of freelance business plans for artists, entrepreneurs and immigrants. In addition to twenty years of professional business writing, Robert has taught artists business principles at Otis College of Art and Design and has published two scholarly articles concerning business plan writing as it applies to immigration attorneys.
Several years ago, Robert found himself dissatisfied by the lack of creative expression in business writing. Feeling called to tell the story of his family's flight from Stalinist Russia, he began the process of researching a work of historical fiction based on the stories of his grandmother, grandfather and mother. The resulting book, Death of a Past Life, recounts how three generations of women faced the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century—the turmoil of the Russian revolution, the vicious arbitrariness of Stalin's purges, mass famine during the siege of Leningrad, the bombing of Berlin during the Nazi's final days—and how these women relentlessly fought to insure the survival of their family. Salvation finally arrives through emigration to the United States.
Ultimately, Death of a Past Life became a means for Robert to unify his training in business and his need for artistic expression: he took over the rights to the novel from its original publisher and published a second edition under the aegis of his own publishing company, Spunky Books. Robert believes deeply that accepting the challenges of starting ones own business empowers artists rather than diminishing their gifts. As the publishing industry crumbles beneath the newfound freedoms of modern technology, writers must join their artist brethren in implementing the means, methods and modalities that successful entrepreneurs have long embraced. Independent publishing can be looked upon as freedom from the artistic limitations that the more formal publishing systems have imposed.