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Question for people who have written a book (qua book, not blog compilations etc): What was your book, and what opportunities and activities did it open up for you? How did it change your life? If you wrote more than 1, pick the one that changed your life the most.
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In my case, my only book qua book, Tempo, had following external effects: 1. Non-trivial initial $ spike and ongoing passive income 2. Getting connected to Boydian crowd 3. A few *really* dedicated readers 4. A couple of interesting talks 5. Road-trip excuse (biggest value)
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Very minor effect: it's something older not-very-online people latch on to as a way to peg me in their own minds and introduce me. Effectively a glorified business card. In this role, I doubt it actually gets read much. More a passport.
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I have strong internal reasons for wanting to write a second book that are enough to keep me at it, but frankly the external reasons are weak to non-existent for the kind of book I want to write. So wondering what I could do to make it have more interesting+unexpected impact.
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While I'd be very pleased with huge bestseller status etc. as an accidental side effect, it is not something that can motivate me, and not an objective I'm capable of solving for even if it did (for Halloween, I mocked up a "bestseller" type table of contents and scared myself)
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I'm re-reading the pre-reads for my writing course to try and refactor my motivations for trying to write a 2nd book. I have this sense that while my motivation is at the right level as scalar potential energy, it's not vectored right, as kinetic energy
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Good pre-reads for courses should be so well-chosen that for someone who hasn't read them, they constitute 90% of the value of the course. Looking back, I think we actually hit that with the pre-reads for the longform course (the pre-reads page is open) ribbonfarm.teachable.com/courses/the-ar
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The null hypothesis ("why not just tweet it all out/write it as a blog series/capture it as a series of video lectures") is actually surprisingly strong, and it's going to take work to properly commit to the alt hypothesis ("this is demanding to be a book").
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It doesn't help that a couple of Very Famous and Important People I know, when I described the project to them, wondered why I didn't just write it as a series of blog posts or videos. Good question. I don't yet have a good answer. I need one.
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Hence the OP question. I genuinely want to know what sorts of interesting+unexpected external effects might result specifically from a book form factor. No, not media coverage, hobnobbing with glitterati etc (based on small tastes I've had, those are active demotivators for me)
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One of the effects of being an internet-native writer, with enough success to foster a degree of arrogance, is that "book" motivations that work for trad writers don't work for you. You already know that many of the rewards of book-writing are better realized through blogs etc.
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Almost any specific external effect or outcome of a book I can bring myself to care about, I can immediately think of like 6 better ways to achieve through much easier and more fun ways through blog posts etc. A book is usually the worst medium for most kinds of actual impact.
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The biggest internal reason to try and write a book is to challenge yourself to hunt down a much larger idea than social media allows. Books allow you to aim for intellectual outer space. At the moment, social media only allows you to achieve low-altitude atmospheric flight.
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It's the minimum viable scale of writing at which I can hope to address and perhaps partially resolve some intellectual problems that current interest me.