Horrifying to think about my 2026 opinion of what I’m writing now. If I’m alive then.
Conversation
I think that's inevitable whether you write to a plan or not
1
maybe even more inevitable if you write a plan -- less opportunity for organic evolution as you work
1
It depends on whether your subject matter can be divided into near-stand-alone essays or not.
1
Blogging has resurrected the art of the essay in a wonderful way; but the web is killing books.
1
1
Some material does need a book. We don’t have good web tech for that, >
1
2
> and also people are forgetting how to read and write them.
1
1
I don't think books are dying or that people are forgetting how to read/write them at all
1
Oh. Maybe it’s just me :-) Did you have something particular in mind here, or just no evidence of decline?
1
revenues are declining but that's unit-cost effects. Iirc # of new titles up yoy since kindle
1
1
what's happening I think is good essays showing people how crappy/unnecessary 90% of books are
1
1
Real books (40k+ top-down words on something that needs 40k+) will go back up if $ problem solved
1
Show replies
combined with a $ problem. Writing something actually worth book-level effort requires $, time
1
when economic model was strong enough due to paper tech, paying authors a livable advance was easy
a crowdsourced mapping of books to essays would be awesome.



