Writing Books
April 24, 2024
Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
Listening: Change Shapes by Lauren Mayberry(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status via email or in the comments)
Note: I’ve moved the release date for my upcoming book, How To Turn 39, forward to April 30—two weeks after my 39th birthday instead of a full month.
Writing Books
I’ve been writing and publishing books professionally since 2010.
A lot has changed in the publishing world since I started sharing my work and authoring at a level that allowed me to earn an income from my efforts.
Waves of consolidation and bankruptcies have left us with fewer, larger entities that control more bookstore shelves (physical and digital), and while they still publish a lot of books—tens of thousands each year—the majority of those books sell fewer than 1,000 copies in their first 52 weeks, while a spare few (about 0.4%) sell more than 100,000 copies annually.
Consequently, big publishers are more likely to prioritize working with people who have large social media followings, and those who have proven track-records of selling just a silly number of books (this is similar to what’s happening in the film industry, where studios are less likely to take bets on unknowns, and more likely to focus on sequels and reboots of existing, proven intellectual property).
That dynamic shapes a lot of what happens in the book publishing and adjacent industries, but it’s also amplified a sort of counter-trend elsewhere in the publishing ecosystem.
More people from more backgrounds who have had a larger diversity of experiences, and who thus bring a lot more perspectives to the culture-wide, conversational table, are suddenly adding their voices to the cacophony. This has resulted in an impressive uptick in variety and novelty throughout every conceivable medium.
That said, this same tide of (often quite valuable and enriching) linguistic and positional transmission has amplified another disseminatory trend: that of consumption overwhelm by folks on the receiving end of the deluge.
The tools that have made publishing and distributing one’s work so easy, today (compared to how things worked back when I started writing books), have smoothed so many frictions and removed so many gatekeepers that we’re now living through a moment of crushing abundance.
There are so many options, so many products and platforms and people competing for our finite time and attention and resources, that breaking through in any meaningful way has arguably replaced all those previous (mostly technical and industry-implemented) barriers as the primary challenge a nascent author faces.
There’s always a chance you’ll write a book and someone, somewhere, will discover it, share it with others, and a grassroots groundswell will carry the hard-grown fruits of your labor to the pop cultural and economic altitudes it deserves.
Far more likely, though—and this is more likely in the same way it’s more likely you won’t win a billion dollars playing the lottery than the opposite—your wonderful book will languish in relative obscurity.
As I mentioned before, even the majority of the books produced and pushed by big-name publishers that wield large marketing budgets and a vast rolodex of sales-channel relationships sell relatively few copies; far short of what they require to cover the monetary investments made by the publisher, not to mention all the time and effort plowed into the book by the author.
The tools available to indie and small-press publishers, today, are miraculous compared to what came before, and the access to markets and distribution options we now enjoy are likewise astonishing.
Writing and selling a book is still an uphill slog in many ways, though, and that’s true whether you’re going through a publisher or approaching it solo.
When people ask me about how to get started writing a book, one of the first things I tell them is to make sure they set their expectations appropriately, and to ensure they’re doing it for reasons beyond the potential for monetary profit.
That’s not because I think people should work for free, but rather because book-writing and publishing is an unwieldy, at times quite brutal and tedious process, and the likely economic outcomes, alone, won’t be worth the time and energy invested for most people.
I do think writing a book is an exercise that can be valuable unto itself, though, as it can help us flesh-out our thinking, explore worlds and concepts that would be difficult to consider at that granularity in any other fashion, and it can help us connect with other people who already share our passions, and those who might feel compelled to cultivate similar enthusiasms after engaging with our (arduously produced) work.
Interesting Links
“Dear Listeners, “Stream of a stream” is an ongoing gathering of streams. Each stream sound is captured with an underwater microphone and uploaded to the cloud. There, the sounds of the streams — the natural flow of water — metamorphose into a steady, continuous flow of data transmitted over the internet.”
Live video feeds of cats eating, shot from within their food containers.
There’s No Such Thing as a Tree (Phylogenetically)
““Trees” are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees. This means that, for instance, either: The common ancestor of a maple and a mulberry tree was not a tree. The common ancestor of a stinging nettle and a strawberry plant was a tree. And this is true for most trees or non-trees that you can think of. I thought I had a pretty good guess at this, but the situation is far worse than I could have imagined.”
Outro
As I mentioned above, I tweaked the official release day for How To Turn 39, moving it back from May 16 to April 30.
A few of the publishing platforms I use to distribute my work have forced my hand on this, as several of them decided not to honor (or acknowledge) the pre-order and release dates I gave them, and one prominent platform for audiobooks (Audible) doesn’t allow you to set a release date unless you commit to only selling on their platform (and you have to send them an email requesting one if you choose to do so).
So you submit your audio files to Audible for review, and then sometime in the next few days to a month (it took 6 days for me this time around, though in the past it’s taken longer) they make your audiobook available for sale on their platform—and there’s a chance your book won’t be approved due to some kind of technical detail, which means you’ll have to then fix it and resubmit the book for approval, going through the whole opaque process over again.
I’m still blown away by how easy many aspects of writing and publishing a book have become, but the intermediary services, which are generally necessary if you want to get a book out to the largest number of people (and on the marketplaces folks are most familiar and comfortable with) still leave a lot to be desired.
Though most of these services provide additional benefits and services to bigger publishers that aren’t available to indie authors (womp womp), so experiences will vary in this regard.
It’s almost May. Of 2024. What. What? How’s your partially-done year going? And what are you working on / looking forward to at the moment? Take a moment to introduce yourself if you haven’t said hello before (or if you already have and want to say hi again)—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
Prefer stamps and paper? Send me a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication at: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211
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