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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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao
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 energyhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1187878278222077953 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
Venkatesh Rao @vgrGood 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) https://ribbonfarm.teachable.com/courses/the-art-of-longform/lectures/2780745 …Show this thread1 reply 0 retweets 2 likesShow this thread -
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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Replying to @vgr
How about approaching it as something akin to sending a friend (literally) or smallish list a letter on the topic(s) once a week (whatever cadence makes sense) as a low-risk means of testing formats/soliciting feedback and nurturing a project specific audience?
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That would actually increase the kind of risk I care to mitigate. The tight/agile iterative feedback loops of social media writing are very bad for book-scale writing. If you use them you end up writing what reads like a series of blog posts/essays, begging the question.
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