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Peanut Buttering

You should write and publish a crappy book

Writing a book is an accomplishment of some regard in society. Status symbol, life goal, etc.

An underutilized trick is to write and (self-)publish a sloppy, quick, unfocused book. Don't hold yourself to a high standard, just get it out there. Agile hack it.

Why? Because going from an average Joe to a published author is a large step. So large, in fact, that almost everyone you'll meet will never publish a book. The small percentage (0.2%?) who do are a rounding error. Suddenly you have a go-to answer to all those "fun fact about you" questions.

If you say "I am a published author" -- dang you're cool. "It's really bad, I just pieced it together to say I could" -- you're STILL cool. This does not diminish the accomplishment as much as it ought to, unless someone actually picks up and reads your book, which they won't. It will sound to most people like false humility, even if indeed you published a total piece of garbage.

But this isn't all just for status. It's also because the only way to get better at something is experience. So he who gets stuck at the monumental leap to publish ANY book will certainly never be able to publish a good book. But if you force yourself to publish a hot steamy pile, you're now on the path to being better. And writing a book, even a bad one, requires work -- work that will make your writing skills improve. Maybe you'll discover you LOVED it, and feel like writing another. Probably you won't, and that's okay too.

If you're not sure what to write, try a memoir. You already have plenty of material to draw upon. You can send it to your mom when you're done. She'll be delighted. Some people publish books that are just a collection of their own tweets.

A book will require so much writing, you'll never finish? Nonsense! The average nonfiction book is 50,000 words -- that's only one hundred 500-word essays.

Perhaps you're held back from this hacker step by the illusion of consequences. If you publish a shitty book, then... what? Everyone will read it and see what a dunce you are? No one's going to read it. There's really no judgment, no social pain, and more than likely you'll reap the sneaky reward of being able to say "I'm a published author" without anyone checking your work.

Do it. Just once, to say you did. Why not?


Post script: A mere three days after writing I happened across gwern's "Why To Not Write A Book", where he even cites the same article that inspired me to write this post. I don't think we're much in disagreement though. gwern's advice is to treat writing a book like dealing with heroin, as it might spiral out of control and ruin your life. My advice is to just set out to write a shitty book from the get-go, because it's the best cost-benefit ratio for book writing. Implicitly, shitty bookwriting avoids the perfectionist trap described in gwern's post.

gwern's post is excellent, and I recommend reading it if this post at all tickled your fancy.