One reason I don't write proper "real books", besides having more of a taste for the essay length, is it's simply hard to work on longer projects in the middle of the boom/bust feast/starve indie hustle. Steady income is much more conducive to longer works.
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My first book took ~3y while at a fairly comfy Xerox job... and working off material I'd developed during postdoc just before. This one's at 7 years and counting (I started research/developing it around 2013, soon after the first one)
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... not counting the first couple of years where it was too ill-formed, but I think I made up the first outline for a potential book type thing in 2015
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What's actually making slow progress possible now is that I'm serializing it on my substack, now at 5 chapters in. The steadiness of substack revenue creates something of the stability necessary to keep at it. I'm now guessing an ETA of 2025.
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None of these mechanisms is entirely ideal for me tbf. I'm probably too old and oddly enough "too useful" in some sense... my normal money-making methods are almost too pragmatic and effective for me to compete with more economically hapless subspecies of humanity.
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If I were (say) a fine artist or avant-garde novelist trying to wrap those talents into a consulting package ("art for culture change!", "narrative leadership workshop!") it would be a different story. But my stock-in-trade is very pragmatic meat-and-potatoes consulting
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I joke about mansions because that's actually the only logical endgame...
2x2: useful to useless, impoverished to independently wealthy... I'm somewhere just north-west of the origin. Submansion class in both uselessness and wealth.
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ie, I have to become somewhat more useless and somewhat more wealthy to hit the enmansioned leisure class
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If some of my current bets work out, that's where I'll land. I'll turn 48 later this year, so goal is to be a privileged, entitled, useless burden on society by age 50, in time to ride out climate change securely in my mansion
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lol... no. ebook at most, and that seems increasingly unlikely. Will probably just throw up unedited ebooks as free things on a webpage
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Reedsy + Amazon printed is pretty easy these days. Not sure if you’ve looked at it recently.
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The last mile mechanics are not hard, I've done it a dozen times
It's the re-reading, clean-up and editing. Just don't care enough about the material to put in that effort tbh
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I don't suppose there's a chance now to get the unedited AoG ebook?
In all honesty, was not a subscriber when it was out, but interested in reading it now / purchasing
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