Speaking into the Wilderness

I spent last week in a cabin outside Ellijay, Georgia, a couple of hours north of here. I’d thought about doing something more epic with my one week away, driving out to Chaco Canyon or somewhere like it, and then realized I’d spend most of the week driving and arrive exhausted. So, a cabin. I went to work on the nonfiction book I’ve been close to finishing and then taking apart again more times than I care to admit. I brought a lot of music gear with me too, just in case the writing didn’t go. Turns out that having only so much time is its own kind of help. I didn’t play much. This week’s episode came out of that. I want to talk to two people. The first has never written a book and can’t get past the question of who am I to do this. No platform. A few hundred people on Facebook, half of them from high school. Write the thing and you’re speaking into the wilderness. The second already wrote the book. It came out, it did fine or it didn’t, and now they’re quietly wondering whether it was worth what they gave it. Here’s the honest part, and I think the honest version is more useful than the pitch. Books don’t make people famous anymore. Even really good ones. That’s most of the reason the Big Five look for authors who already have an audience, because they aren’t in the platform-building business so much as the fire-to-it business. But a book is still a different form of distribution, and it reaches people who will never find you in a feed. Somebody they trust hands them a copy and says you should read this. That’s a door your other work doesn’t open. So the question I’ve landed on isn’t whether you should write a book. It’s whether you want to inhabit the identity of someone who writes. If you want somebody to read your one book, shouldn’t they be able to see that you’re a person who writes? I also get into why three-year and five-year plans have never worked for me, what David Perell’s 250,000 subscribers actually took in years, why a book that doesn’t sell in its first year is the moment most people quit and the wrong moment to do it, and my own fairly fragmented record of sticking with anything. The difficulty in life is the choice. If you’re sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can’t shake loose, Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. Editorial, design, print, ebook, audio, distribution. Take a look at crossroadspublishing.group and see what you think. If you decide it isn’t for you, that’s a real answer and a fine one. I also coach writers toward the harder part, which is hearing yourself into committing to the thing you actually want to do. That’s a conversation, not a purchase. And I’m taking on a handful of new projects this fall. If you know someone with a book they keep almost writing, or a story you know is worth telling, send them my way or just send me their name. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com