What we’ll cover:
Hone Your Idea (Write Your Book’s Business Plan)
Find Your Structure (What’s The Best Way To Arrange This Idea)
Research (Take Notes on Everything You Read and See)
Start Writing (Break The Book Up In Small Pieces)
Get Outside Perspective (You Need A Professional Editor)
Perfect The Package (Nail Your Title, Subtitle, Cover)
Lots of people want to write books, but very few people know how. For starters, when someone says they want to write a book, what they’re really saying is they want to publish a book. In order to publish a book in a traditional sense you’ve got to impress a gatekeeper of some kind and that gatekeeper is an agent or an editor at a publishing house. And even the publishing house, when they give you a book deal, just assume you know how to actually write the thing.
But books are long. George Orwell said that writing a book “is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” Most published books end up being somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 words in length. How on earth does one manage to string so many words together in any coherent fashion? It’s not exactly something a writer can simply wing.
The author and poet Austin Kleon has done the creative world an enormous favor with his concept of showing your work. Part of the mystique of the artistic brand is to make it look easy, effortless. The result is that creativity seems like a black box. In fact, we should show how we make what we make. To help others, to understand our own process, to practice humility. To show people that it’s not impossible to turn their ideas into work.
There was once an exchange between the painter Edgar Degas and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Degas was having trouble trying his hand at poetry and so he complained to his friend about his trouble writing, “I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I’m full of ideas.” Mallarmé’s response: “It’s not with ideas, my dear Degas, that one makes verse. It’s with words.”
But still, how? I can’t answer generally, but I can show how I learned how to string words together and turn them into a book. At my wedding in early 2015, my editor made a suggestion about an idea for a book she thought I might like to kick around. Now, roughly three years later, that book has been out for half a year and sold very well. Books, like poems, are a matter of words. And a hell of a lot of work. What I thought I would do in this article is show almost step by step, what that work is and how it happened in the creation of Perennial Seller. Given the book’s subject matter — creating artistic work that stands the test of time — I’m excited to share how I tried to accomplish that with my own writing. Enjoy.
As Mallarmé was saying, ideas are cheap. Lot of people have them. Even smart people have lots of bad ones. But the truth is every project starts with an idea. They can’t start anywhere else. There would never be any creative work without an idea that came before it.
Some people struggle even just coming up with ideas in the first place, but this is more a question of technique than an actual dearth of ideas.
One of the best techniques for always having ideas on hand comes from Inc.’s top columnist and author Jeff Haden, who says:
“Often people ask how I keep coming up with ideas. If I feel stuck, all I have to do is think about something I don’t do well, or a mistake I once made, or a failing I have…and then I try to figure out how I can do better. That approach means I have an endless source of ideas, because I suck at an endless number of things.”
Often, a book starts with an incredibly vague idea. The original suggestion from my editor had been a book about book marketing. That is, after all, my day job. And so the project began with that idea and a short one page proposal.
As it happens, the book Perennial Seller is not a book about book marketing, but in 2015 I sure thought it would be. Doing so made a ton of sense — at that time, my company Brass Check had five different clients on the New York Times Bestseller list. I began to write the book proposal for what would become Perennial Seller in March of 2015. In fact, here is the original title (a suggestion from my agent) and subtitle I used in the book proposal:
THE NEW RULES OF BOOK PROMOTION:
Why Content and Strategy Trump Tactics Every Time or How to Succeed with Content and Strategy When All the Old Tactics No Longer Work
As you can see, that’s a much different book than what Perennial Seller would become. Why the drastic change? Because it’s important to test your idea early and often to see if it has staying power. Here’s an example to illustrate how that can work: When I sold a previous book proposal, the one that would become Ego Is the Enemy, I thought it was going to be about the topic of humility. But that book didn’t survive my attempt to write even one chapter. Honestly, it had trouble surviving anything much longer than dinner conversations with friends. Thankfully, I listened to the feedback from these early attempts, these tests of the material. The message was clear: The idea needed to be taken in a different direction before I could proceed much further. (I pivoted to a book against ego instead of writing a defense of humility.)
Lots of authors test their book ideas in similar ways, gauging their relative merit via other mediums before settling in to actually write the idea up as a book. Todd Henry has used the podcast he created, “Accidental Creative,” as an incubator for his book ideas. Henry said in an interview, “Many of the ideas that end up in my books begin as a podcast episode in which I’m exploring a hunch. In some ways, the podcast has become a test tube for ideas that I might want to elaborate on or research in greater detail later.”
Author and World Poker Champion Annie Duke approaches her book ideas in a similar manner, only she workshops them in front of live audiences at her speaking engagements:
“I am always trying out different ways into the material, new narratives to bolster the concepts, fresh ways to organize the material. Doing this in front of an audience, piecemeal, as I’m giving different speeches, makes generating new ideas much less daunting than having to develop an entire book’s worth of material in one fell swoop. Trying out new ideas and approaches to material through the speaking process acts like a workshop for those ideas. In terms of Thinking in Bets, I certainly had developed a lot of these ideas over the course of many years through my speaking.”
Taking a step back to the proposal stage for a second, if you’re wondering what a book proposal even is, you’re not alone. In the world of nonfiction traditional publishing, most authors don’t get to simply wake up one day and sit down to write a manuscript (even when it’s their sixth book). Before an author writes a single word of the book itself he or she will write down what the idea for the book will be and why people will read (i.e. buy) it — and they have to sell that to someone. It’s like writing a business plan for a book. Proposals can contain an outline, sample chapters, endorsements from relevant tastemakers, and anything else that may attract the attention of an editor at a publishing house, with the goal usually being to secure as high of an advance as possible. A publisher essentially buys the rights to publish a future book by you based on your book proposal.
In my case, my publisher bought the rights to my book about book promotion based on the proposal I’d written. It ended up selling that same month, in March 2015.
It’s important to stress that the iterative phase of the book idea doesn’t necessarily stop once the book proposal sells. Authors frequently (maybe even usually) deliver a book that is substantially different that the book that was laid out in the original proposal. I usually tell authors that the proposal is for the publisher — the book is for themselves. So what is even the point of a proposal anyway? That’s another article for another time, but suffice it to say that even though I’d sold a book about book promotion, by May of 2015 the idea still wasn’t sitting right with me.
Around that time I happened to be reading book called Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly. He explored contemporary literature (from 1939) and the timeless challenges of making great art. It was also an honest self-examination of why Connolly, himself a talented writer, hadn’t broken through commercially with his previous work. In the book, Connolly throws down an ambitious gauntlet for authors: Making something that lasts for ten years.
I loved the book. Though it was clear to me that because of my track record as an author and because of my company Brass Check I could do quite well with a book marketing book (and monetize it with courses, consulting, etc), the idea just didn’t excite me. It wasn’t an idea that I thought would last. I mean, if I filled it a bunch of strategies that were working right now…who is to say they would still hold true even a year later?
I began to ask, was there enough there for something good? Would the content last? Who was even the audience for this book? Just authors? Was that a big enough, diverse enough audience? I realized something: writing a book about book marketing violated a lot my own advice about book marketing and marketing it general! I’d even written on the subject a few months before in a post titled “6 Reasons Your Book Will Fail” in which I wrote specifically about the rules I found myself on the verge of violating:
“Too many books fail because it was written in a vacuum, without ever considering anything beyond your own immediate tastes and needs. You wrote without ever thinking: How the hell are people going to hear about this and why would they care if they do? You thought about why you wanted to write it, but not why anyone else needed it….Your book will fail because of your inflated self-importance. Do you know how many people are eagerly anticipating your book? Unless your last name is King, Lewis, Evanovich, Gladwell, Patterson, Kingsolver, Child, or R.R. Martin, the answer is next to nobody.”
Such a book about book marketing would be unlikely to last — the tactics change too often, the audience was too small and I’m not sure the world actually needed another book marketing book.
As I kicked around the book some more, I remember very vividly a conversation with my writing and business partner Nils Parker. I was speaking at a conference in Puerto Rico to business executives and entrepreneurs from all over the Caribbean. It occurred to me that a book about book marketing would be too niche to ever get in front of an audience like this. Not everyone wants to write a book, after all. In the conversation, I told Nils about the Cyril Connolly quote — about lasting for ten years. His response: Now that is a better idea for a book. As we chatted, it became clear that authors were not the only people interested in making something that lasts. It’s the universal dream.
From this breakthrough, the book pivoted. Instead of being for authors it would be about authors and for everyone engaged in a creative field. It’s obvious when you think about it: Who doesn’t want to make something that sells and sells for years? Who doesn’t want to be responsible for a classic? Thus, Perennial Seller was born.
As I said, book proposals are really just the entry point to an idea. Almost every single one of my books has become something very different in the research and the writing process.
With the idea for the book beginning to form, the next question I had to address was how to present such a book. Think about it like this: A lawyer has their case and then they must structure their argument. Or, if you remember 9th grade, you outline your 5 paragraph essay before you start writing — not while you’re in the middle of it. A book is the same way. You have to figure out the best way to arrange and organize the information you are going to give to the reader. I always lay this out before I have written a word. I think you need to know the structure while you are researching — so you can find the material needed to best make your case.
With structure, sometimes tried and true methods can be useful, but it’s also important not to get tied to a structure just because you think it’s what you’re supposed to do. Bestselling author Chris Brogan has his own strong feelings on the structure of nonfiction books, saying:
“There’s this old rule with nonfiction: tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them that, then tell them what you just told them. God I hate that rule. To me, the idea is that you’ll explain the promise of where you’re going, but don’t get all mechanical. No one wants to read a book, nonfiction or otherwise, where there are no surprises.”
Sometimes it is helpful to physically lay out the structure of your book idea. As Andrea Wulf explained about her writing process, “When I work on structure and narrative pace, I need to do everything on paper. I end up with bits of paper scattered all over the floor. For days, I tiptoe through the chaos and move the papers around to plot structure.”
For my third book, The Obstacle Is the Way, I structured the book in three segments, each segment dedicated to a discipline: Perception, Action, and Will. I chose that structure because, when it comes to obstacles, how we see them (perception), how we act when confronted with them (action) and what we depend on when our agency to act is out of our hands (will), are the framework for understanding how to benefit from those obstacles. Within each of the three parts are 10 chapters each that contain examples and stories that illustrate those disciplines. Essentially 30 chapters in total—30 great stories I needed to find via research.
Structural brainstorming is one of the best ways to really define what your book is going to be about. For Perennial Seller, I chose four sections: 1) The Creative Process, 2) Positioning, 3) Marketing, 4) Platform.
“As for research, I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.” —Shelby Foote
As I explained in a video on how I wrote Ego Is the Enemy, once you have the structure, now the real research starts. I read books, articles, research papers, listen to podcasts and talks, watch documentaries and anything else I can get my hands on. (An Imgur album outlining that process can be found here.)
And I take notes on everything I read and see. I already had many hundreds of notecards about writing and creativity assembled from my research over the years. I’ve written about exactly how this notecard system works elsewhere, but at its core it’s a method taught to me by my mentor and bestselling author Robert Greene for organizing and using all of the information I read or hear, and all of the thoughts that I have. Every book I write has a dedicated box that holds every notecard that will eventually be written into the book. But I don’t only take from my books. I jot down things I like from podcasts, documentaries, conversations, and random thoughts I have.
All of the notecards get filed into a box for when it’s time to being writing.
I do this so that I don’t ever not know what to write about. I’ve never really had “writer’s block” on a book — because I have so much material already there in the form of ideas and notes, organized in accordance with the structure. My job each morning is just expanding it into prose.
During the research phase each story, anecdote and example that will appear in the book is transferred onto a notecard and then filed away for safekeeping until it’s time to write.
For Perennial Seller, I also conducted dozens of interviews with the very people who know the most about achieving longevity in their chosen creative endeavors. The vast majority of these interviews were conducted over email so that I could turn them into bonus materials to promote the book during the week of the launch — a lesson I learned while writing Growth Hacker Marketing. And that’s exactly what I did — you can read numerous interviews I did as research for the book as well as case studies if you email the address listed in the book.
With most of these interviews, research materials, etc. I print them out, which will have tremendous advantages for editing. It makes moving them around much easier and more efficient.
One key to remember is that, with research, not everything is going to make it into the finished manuscript. In fact, a good chunk of it may eventually be edited out, but as the old saying goes, it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Author, blogger and professor of journalism Deborah Blum takes this pragmatic approach when researching her books:
“My goal is a story that flows forward. Sometimes I’ll discover these amazingly cool facts or stories while I’m doing the research and I’ll want to include them but, sigh, I’ll realise that they are a side-trip from that main journey. And you really have to decide as a writer how many side-trips your reader is willing to take before they just give up on your point.”
At the risk of being obvious again, writing starts at the beginning — with the intro. I write in order, breaking the book up into small pieces. Writing a book is a long hard slog that can be incredibly discouraging. Progress is in short supply — the end seeming very far away. By breaking the book up in small pieces you create the illusion of progress, a sense that I am crossing stuff off the list.
Of course, I’m not the only one who feels the pain of the lengthy, repetitive writing process. Nobel-prize winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro developed something called a “Crash” period to speed up the writing process (and filter out distractions):
“I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a “Crash”. During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house…In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitatively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one.”
The novel Ishiguro produced during the Crash described here is his most celebrated novel, The Remains of the Day.
Other authors prefer to set a daily word count goal and stop once they’ve hit that number. Author Jeff Goins uses this method, setting a relatively low word count goal to make the number seem more attainable: “I try to write at least 500 words a day. When I’m on deadline, I may produce 5000 words, but the minimum output is always 500. It’s a small enough amount that I don’t have an excuse to avoid it, which is crucial for me. I have to feel motivated to write, which means breaking up a huge task like a book into small, achievable chunks.” Another novelist, Nicole Dieker, wrote two novels in a year and half by setting word count goals, chapter count goals, and structuring her time around a daily writing routine. Bestselling author Tim Ferriss has said that the goal for a productive writing life is “two crappy pages a day.” Just enough to make progress, not too ambitious to be intimidating.
Like many writers, I am also prone to strange rituals. As I said, my books tend to be broken up in many small sections (I tend to have lots of short chapters instead of a few long ones). When writing these short chapters, I use separate Google Docs for each one but there comes an important inflection point in my progress, where I begin to combine these independent chapters into one Word Document. I basically go from online writing to offline editing and rewriting. (Each day I resave this Word Document in Dropbox with the acronym of the title, the phrase “working draft” and the date — so TOITW-Working-Draft-5–22.) One of the first times I start to feel optimistic about a book — Hey, this is starting to become something — is that transition from Google to Microsoft. I love looking at the filenames tick the days off in Dropbox. All that is immensely pleasurable — almost as much as whatever I am saying. I am obsessed with that symmetry and progress.
Music is another ritual. I need it in the background while I write. I use the music not only to shut out outside noise but to shut off parts of my conscious mind. I’ve found that picking one song — usually something I am not proud to say I am listening to — and listening to it on repeat, over and over and over again is the best way to get into a rhythm and flow. Basically I treat the music as sort of disposable, instant flow tool. I use it until it stops working, and then I move on to the next song. I use the same song that I am writing to when I run later, or if I go for a walk. It’s just creating a continuity to the creative process.
John Avlon, an author and the editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast, finds his inspiration in music and has an interesting theory that explains why he swears by listening while he writes:
“I’ve got a theory that most writers are either frustrated musicians or painters—and which of them you are depends on whether you write for the ear or the eye. As a former musician and former speechwriter, I definitely write for the ear. I listen to music all the time for inspiration and energy. I tend to make playlists as the soundtrack for writing different books. They serve as snapshots in time. So, I’ve got one for Wingnuts—lots of The National, Drive-By-Truckers, Radiohead and Randy Newman—and one for Washington’s Farewell that’s more classical, jazz, the Americana series by Chris Thile, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer and the soundtrack to Hamilton.”
Another important piece of the writing phase is where to write. I do most of my writing while I sit at my desk in my office either at my place in the city or on my farm, mostly. I tend to work better at my place at the city — it has all my books and these floor to ceiling bookcases filled with them, it just feels right.
It’s equally important to consider the investment of time you’re about to make. Writing a book is a mammoth task that takes months or years of writing.
While writing can seem like magic, like every magic trick there is a method behind it. A timeless creation like a book will not simply appear. No matter how much we’d like to believe otherwise, history does not bear out the idea of inspiration flowing unheeded from the muses. Any claims otherwise—as you find out when you actually do the research—turn out to be apocryphal, exaggerated, or just flat-out wrong. Are there some exceptions? Sure, Rocky was supposedly written by Sylvester Stallone in three and a half days, but this is the kind of exception that proves the rule.
Yet it’s tempting to think that great work appears ex nihilo. That it simply emerges, in full form, from divine sources. As Hemingway supposedly said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
This is a wonderful, seductive line as we consider sitting down at our own proverbial typewriters. The problem is that it is preposterous and untrue. It is directly contradicted by Hemingway’s own meticulously edited, often handwritten manuscript pages. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library has some forty-seven alternative endings for Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. He rewrote the first part of the book, by his own count, more than fifty times. He wrote all of them, trying them like pieces of a puzzle until one finally fit.
Indeed, many studies have confirmed that creativity isn’t like a lightning strike. A creative work usually starts with an idea that seems to have potential and then evolves with work and interaction into something more. We must be active. We must methodically write our books into existence.
If writing a book is the most difficult, the editing process is the most grueling. Young aspiring writers like to point to Jack Kerouac, who supposedly wrote On the Road in a three-week drug-fueled blitz. What they leave out is the six years he spent editing and refining it until it was finally ready. As one Kerouac scholar told NPR on the book’s fiftieth anniversary:
“Kerouac cultivated this myth that he was this spontaneous prose man, and that everything that he ever put down was never changed, and that’s not true. He was really a supreme craftsman, and devoted to writing and the writing process.”
The truth is, writers should be editing their own work in some way, revising and polishing their words. There are many ways to do this. Some writers prefer to edit while they write, some prefer to wait until their first draft is complete before they go over the whole thing themselves, and some others are hybrid types who write and edit in batches. But before you can edit your own work, you need to be in the right frame of mind. Sabaa Tahir, is the bestselling author of the YA fantasy series that began with the smash debut hit An Ember in the Ashes and editor at the Washington Post, described her mindset for editing her own work:
“I go from being kind to myself to being brutal. Every word is suspect, every sentence a potential embarrassment. Every idea has to be interrogated, every bit of dialogue examined, every scene put the to the test of “What does this contribute to the story? Why? Do I need this scene? What does it add?” It is a very different mindset, much more punishing. I’m way grumpier when I’m editing because I’m reminded daily of how crap I am at my job until I start editing.”
As for the process of how to edit itself, bestselling author, “deep work” pioneer and Georgetown professor Cal Newport lays out his tried and true method:
“For book chapters, I actually use the same editing process that I wrote about a decade ago as an undergraduate in my book on student study habits. It rests on three passes. The first pass is when you write the best chapter you can. The second pass comes later once the whole book (or whole part of the book containing the chapter) is done. During this pass, I come back to the chapter on my computer and cut and tighten. The final pass is when I read through a printed version of the chapter on paper. Reading on paper is necessary if you’re going to root out odd constructions or minor errors.”
George Mason professor and author of The Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen is less structured in his approach to editing his own work, but he’s no less deliberate about the outcome he seeks:
“I repeatedly edit it many times, at least ten. I just keep on doing it, until I can’t think of further improvements. I can’t say that is a process in any formal sense, simply a recognition that the “process” to date hasn’t worked very well and so it must continue. I don’t pretend this is efficient.”
What is the important thing that writers do when they’ve written and exhaustively self-edited their first draft? They hand it to an editor. An actual editor. Not themselves. Also not: They send it to some friends for some thoughts. Although they may get great help from friends, it’s ultimately the editor with whom writers collaborate. The industry term is illustrative: A writer submits a manuscript to an editor.
Why? Because when people are close to their own projects or their own talents, they can lose the ability to see objectively. They might think they’ve taken a project or their talent as far as it can go, and, strictly speaking, given an individual’s limitations and inexperience, this may be true. But ultimately, to take a project where it needs to go, you’ll need to rely on an editor to help you get there. This is the most counterintuitive part of any creative process — just when you think you’re “done,” you’ll often find you’re not even close to being finished.
With my manuscript for Perennial Seller, I first had Nils Parker — who is a sensationally talented (and professional) writer and editor — edit it. Then I had another writer by trade edit the whole manuscript after Nils. Only then did the manuscript get sent to my editor at Portfolio, Niki Papadopoulos. I am not exactly sure how many times I submitted a draft of Perennial Seller to Niki, but it was so many that I even included a footnote about it in the book itself:
“I am adding this footnote to mark what is my fifth submission of the manuscript for this book. How many passes and rounds of editing that constitutes is impossible to track, but it means I’ve heard the ‘not there yet’ response at least four times.”
Title, Subtitle, Cover Design
Nobody just hands you the perfect title, subtitle, cover, and artwork. Anyone can pick a cover for a book or throw together a safe title, but who can know the best choice for either of those decisions? Only the author.
On his books, Tim Ferriss spends hundreds of hours rigorously testing everything from his title to his cover ideas to his chapter titles. This process produced the title for his first book — the runaway mega-bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek — and set him up with perfect branding for an entire franchise (The 4-Hour Body, The 4- Hour Chef). You get a sense of what generates a response and what doesn’t by creating multiple cover options and bringing in a sample of friends with good taste and expertise to vote on them (tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Docs make this quite easy). Another client, Neil Strauss, spent nearly a year agonizing over whether to title one of his books Game Over or The Truth — both titles had advantages and disadvantages, and he knew it would take time and brainpower to gure out which was best. I remember shouting in exasperation at one point, “Neil, just choose!” But he’s the multimillion-bestselling author for a reason.
Most of the time, however, the opposite is true. I see creators who have had their design work done on Fiverr.com (for five dollars) or had a friend (or some person they knew) make their website for a few dollars. I cringe when I see these projects. It’s clear the creators have taken a shortcut or settled. “Why’d you choose that name?” “My daughter liked it.” “How do you like your cover?” “It’s good enough.” “The design of this feature is confusing.” “I know, but we’ll fix it later.” Obviously, these are choices anyone is free to make, but they are more in line with a side project than a career-defining would-be perennial seller. It’s certainly not how professionals would treat their work.
It’s important to actually think about what the purpose of a book cover is. It’s a way to communicate a story about your book. Brooke Warner explains it well:
“A book cover’s job is to create a feeling inside its potential reader, and while it can and should tell a story about your book, it should not tell the story of your whole book. It simply can’t. It’s a representation, an emotional hit, an impression, and a work of art…what matters most is not that it tell the story of your whole book, but that it evoke an emotion that’s pure and on point with your message or story.”
In the case of Perennial Seller, I weighed all of my options for title, subtitle, and design against each other, talked to people whose opinions I respect, and made decisions on what I believe are the strongest possible options for the book.
The cover is such a gut feel. You know it when you see it. But I knew the book should:
Have a unique or unusual design to signal that it’s not like other books
It should look weathered and old to symbolize that it has itself stood the test of time
It should be subdued and classic.
Finishing the cover design is a satisfying piece of the creative process, but in keeping with one of the motifs in the book, this process seemingly does not end. I still needed to make decisions about the inside flaps of the book jacket. The publisher initially suggested flat black interior flaps and while I was okay with the color change, I was not okay abandoning the old book theme. I wanted to make sure there was some transition from old look to new.
***
There are a few variations to this structure on how a book gets written (it may need to undergo legal review in the editing phase, for instance), but eventually one day copies of your own book arrive. You remember when it was just an idea. You remember the times you thought about quitting, but now it exists. It’s one of the coolest feelings ever. And, of course, you still find errors. There will be things on the cover that you need to tweak (*cough* errors introduced by your publisher) and you’ll catch them and be distracted by them.
But really there won’t be time for that because then the marketing begins. And then by the time that ends, the next race will begin. A lot of people sit down to write a book. Many don’t make it past that point. Plenty get something finished, but are intimidated by the maze that is publishing, promoting, selling. Of the relative few that make it through there, only some have the stamina to start the next one.
As Craig Newmark told me when I interviewed him for Perennial Seller, and asked him what it was like to create something like Craigslist which has become such an institution, he said “It feels nice for a moment, then surreal, then back to work.”
The same goes for books.
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