Why to Not Write a Book

I can't stop thinking about this throwaway parenthetical at the start of the blog post:

> [...] for many writers, writing a book is about the last thing they should do (unless they feel a book bursting out of them, much like a facehugger).

Now, as we all know, the aliens that burst out of people in the Aliens franchise are called 'chestbursters'. "Facehuggers", by comparison, are hatched from alien eggs.

So in this metaphor, since we're told that novels are facehuggers, the writers must be the eggs. And by process of elimination, we can deduce that the innocent starship crewmembers being attacked by facehuggers (novels) are innocent readers.

The metaphor actually contradicts the author's main thesis, since every egg (writer) does in fact contain a facehugger (novel). But contrariwise, all the human characters (the rest of us) would be much better off if those novels just stayed inside the writers and didn't insist on being written or read.

Metaphors are like scissors; they're twice as much fun when you run with them!

I've once talked to a semi-successful author. His day job was Mechanical Engineering at the local university. He eventually quit once he had his formula worked out.

He writes crime novels. Doesn't even like them, but if you want to sell, you either write smut (big gamble) or crime novels (less crowded). Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel. You also have to keep your protagonists whether you like them or not, or else every book will be your first one.

He also found that he had to write local novels that take place around the local tourist sights. He couldn't write about his actual hometown of course, but there is a touristy spot an hour's drive from him, so that's where the detective had to be based for every single adventure. The touristy area must also be a city. That way you have half a million inhabitants, and the same amount of tourists whose relatives are looking for gifts.

He was basically playing bookstore SEO.

Unsurprisingly, being an ME, he had a product lifecycle. He was working on several books at once in a pipelined fashion. One was being drafted, the next one was being written, the third one was in early proof reading, the fourth one was being finalized. That way he had a good balance between creative and menial work at all times. He also explained how he was careful to use few proofreaders in the early stages, because apparently, his work is a dire read before any corrections. He has a process where he rotates through his early stage proofreaders, and mostly gives them later stage work that is more readable.

Being a successful author is no more romantic than being a successful programmer. Or painter. Or mathematician. Any romanticism is at odds with professionalism, e.g. what works. And that's the same across all these professions.

If you’re not completely driven to write a book, and there isn’t a book inside you that you just have to get out, then do not bother writing a book. Agents and publishers have nothing to do with it - you don’t need to ask for permission to write your book, it’s a piece of art. Agents and publishing come afterwards - and nobody is going to be interested really anyway, at least in the early stages. So if that is enough to make you confused about writing your book or makes you not want to bother, then don’t write your book. If you still have to write a book, you’ll love doing it despite the difficulty and futility, because the person who enjoys it the most will be you anyway.

On the flip side, converting my tutorials to ebooks saved me from having to look for a job again. Been selling them for 6 years (with the last two years spent just to update them to newer software versions, improve examples, new cover images, etc). Of course, I have the advantage of living in a developing country but selling to an international audience (just $200/month to pay my bills).

The main reason not to write a book is that the topic doesn't need a book-length treatment, and would be better as an article. Fiction of course is one thing, but even then, some fictional ideas and personality combinations are better as short stories. Personally, as a reader, I find a lot of book ideas interesting (especially in the realm of popular science), but I can stomach very few of them because they are excessively wordy and often full of overly long (IMO) personal experiences.

I haven't blogged in a while, so i decided to write a blog post about my experience building a chatbot that was actually generating revenue and helping people. There is a lot of noise in this field, but at the same time no real information. The more I wrote the more i realized that I had a lot more to say than a 900 words article.

Next thing you know, I shared what I am doing in an HN comment and I was asked to provide a way for people to follow. I dumped what I had so far on github and it's now gonna be a book written in public. I'll probably turn it into a physical book eventually, but for now I got information to share and I'll type away until I'm done Sharing.

That's one reason to write.

>I suspect that if many writers took seriously writing a book as a real project, rather than an aspirational cultural ideal of ‘being an author’ along the lines of ‘being a foreign language speaker’ or ‘being a PhD’, they would realize that it is a serious risk which can backfire.

Ha, I feel called out. I'm in the latter camp, I was always terrible at languages as a kid and it was part of the reason I decided to move to Finland and learn Finnish as an adult. 1000+ hours in and I"m still nowhere close to my goals.

I wouldn't recommend it for most halfway sane cost-benefit analyses - my ballpark number is I've forgone some $200,000 and counting in opportunity cost. (I still feel like I'm coming out on net is because it also allowed me to marry the world's greatest woman, and to heal a bunch of deep psychological issues. Assuming you don't have those, stay far away!)

I found a families, great grandfather’s memoirs while doing their estate. I realized with the family all gone and there were few in his class with the education to speak of early American life so I published it and illustrated the e-book. https://books2read.com/A-young-Mans-Adventures-In-19th-Centu...

In the collection of Rilke's letters "Briefe an einem jungen Dichter", he writes what I think one of the best advice about writing a book or not:

"This above all: Ask yourself, in your night’s quietest moment, Do I have to write? Dig deep down into yourself for the answer. And if it is yes, if you can meet this solemn question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life around that necessity."

It's harsh, but I think the necessity aspect is important: if you feel like a spring from which the urge of writing naturally flows and you could not repress it, then write. Else, don't.

I would write a technical book for the challenge and learning rather than the "I published a book". It would also learn me a ... haskell or whatever.

But not for the money and probably not the opportunities as anything there would be a bonus.

I am more like that 1hr a day cranker. As you can see I am not natural at it... I would grind out and rewrite, get edits until it looks OK.

I’ve self published three books now, with another in the works. Amazon print on demand makes it incredibly easy. They’re about my adventures around the world, with some lessons I learned and observations about whatever part of the world I’m in sprinkled throughout.

The process was immensely satisfying, and I’ll never forget the feeling the first time I held the printed book in my hands. “Holy shit, I wrote a book!” My name was on the spine and everything.

I write them in LaTeX to have ultimate control over the layout and formatting, then run it through Pandoc to get a compliant epub file. Details here [1].

I have them for sale on Amazon printed and book, and kobo and apple as ebooks. I’ll never get rich, but ~$500 a month forever is really nice when I’m on the road in a foreign country where costs are not high.

If you have the desire, I highly recommend it. The learning and immense satisfaction are great. It doesn’t cost a cent, and you will have it forever.

[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-published-a-professiona...

Maybe there’s a similar post to be written about whether to start a blog and write essays? It works for some people, but for me, writing an an article that I think is good enough to publish (even on my obscure blog) takes all day and the extra effort doesn’t seem worthwhile, compared to writing comments and sharing links.

I always find it very interesting when smart people mistakenly exaggerate how difficult it is to achieve something.

Pro bodybuilder is hard to become but it's very likely that with once to once every 10 days in the gym is going to transform the average person into a monster.

Funny how we can make assumptions about life which are totally wrong. I did this as well by believing.

1) Making money is hard

2) Your startup needs to be brand new and doing somethign no else has done before

3) Exaggerating dangers of failure

and by FAR the most dangerous

4) Feeling behind in life and rushing

Good grief, Gwern is a treasure. Every time I stumble across a link to something they've written, it's chock-full of side quest links to things that are _absolutely amazing_. I happened to leave my mouse briefly over one of the drop-caps, and it turns out there's an entire page dedicated to _generating drop-caps_ with AI, as well as showcasing all sorts of stuff.

"Thank you for making such awesome stuff" seems so pedestrian of a reaction. This is like looking at a fractal cathedral made by one person, where every time I look at it it's a hologram of something amazing and beautiful that I didn't even know was possible.

Great read and you could totally translate it to “Why to Not Write an App” almost verbatim. The following passage is I think the most interesting:

> Now of course, there is a second kind of author: authors who write books with little discernible impact on their newsletter or blog. They sit down for an hour (statistically, in the morning), pound out their quota, and turn to the next task. The book does not weigh on their minds, and they are confident that they will have it out, as usual, in 12 months. More power to them—but I also think that most would-be book authors already know if they are one of that latter kind of writers, or if they are the former kind I’ve been discussing.

If you want to write a book, go for it! I wrote a book "Amazing CTO", I earned quite some money and I got great feedback from people whom the book helped. I'm very happy I did it, even if I didn't become famous :-)

I'm mid-career in security, and having written a book is probably worth 3-6 decent certifications at this point. I should probably coauthor one with ChatGPT before common knowledge of how easy that is gets any more widespread.

I have several books I want to write - I'm definitely bursting with idea, intent and motivation, and not just idea as a concept, but rather fully fleshed out. The hardest part is fighting ADHD or whatever and actually doing the work.

These days if I were to publish I'd probably setup an LLC as a publishing company, do a little work to make the company look a lot bigger than it is and try to find some bookstores to sell to directly - in addition to selling online of course.

Oh boy.

I can relate so much to this article and everything said here. I published a book last year and it has been a long journey. It took me one year and a half to write it. But then when you think it's done, it's just a second challenge coming up. I wanted to write a book that was as straight-to-the-point as possible. The publisher I signed with didn't really understand my approach and wanted me to turn it into a random book ("less rough") where you would get the usual long and useless introductions that I hate. Took me a while to realise that if I signed with a publisher it was just to get this "I'm an author" recognition this article talks about. I realised I didn't even buy "regular" programming books and most of my library are self published books. I didn't want to publish a book I would have not read.

Ended up cancelling my contract and publishing it myself. I talk a bit about it in this article: https://www.einenlum.com/articles/my-book-from-php-to-python...

I sold like 50 of them but got great feedback. To anyone wondering if it's worth it financially, definitely NOT. Is it still worth it for other reasons? I would say I don't regret it but you first have to realise you'll go into a rabbit hole and experience the levels of stress the author of the article talks about.

Maybe it doesn't have to be complex. Gwern could just have a restructured text feature to their articles that auto-builds to a PDF that you can buy as an on-demand book or get it on kindle. I don't think it has to be on a single subject. Gwerns essays are interesting in their own right and would still make a fine book. Wasn't 'Hackers and Painters' in the same spirit?

I completely agree with the author and yet I have taken up the profession of writing books.

There are, as we know, two different kinds of books: fiction and non-fiction. There's actually only two flavors of books as well: polemic and exploratory. With a polemic, you're expected to have your own internal theme song and the produced work will conform to it. With exploratory books, you're on an adventure with the reader and the only bullshitting you add is the minimum amount necessary to make the exploration fun for both of you.

Polemics have become quite popular lately, and I suspect anybody taking a set of blogs or essays and "sticking them together into a book" would only have this avenue available. I took a lot of essays and material I'd collected over the years and wrote some non-fiction books on programming. They were exploratory: the theme emerged as I condensed the work together. (My guess is that exploratory fiction and non-fiction is very tough to do and sell; people like a book that they already know the gist of and are familiar with the author much more than they feel like spending many hours on a lark)

After I finished a few non-fiction books on coding and performative teams, I was done. It was fun, I learned stuff, I think it's critically important stuff, nobody cares, and I'm okay with that. Because it wasn't a polemic, I felt no need to rant or self-promote. There was no movement I wanted to lead. Time to move on to something else.

Books suck. Books change the way you think. All writing does that. Books especially change you because they draw you into some sort of self-created cosmology that you've now adopted.

I write because I'm a writer. I've always been a writer. I simply got honest about it as I grew older. I don't think you choose whether to write or not. I think you choose the fashion in which your writing interacts with your subconscious. A book is just a deployment bundle. It's not the point.

I never wrote a book.

But we all live in the age of e-books and self-published books, so the money involved may be limited to 2-3 digits at most all you need is a strong online presence to be successful.

Moreover, finding an audience is also not as difficult as it used to be in the past if you have a large active following base such as https://x.com/levelsio has self-published his book (https://readmake.com) and he outperformed (sold 25000+ copies at 100% profit) many good writers, agents and publishers marketing channels.

If you want to write a book wrote one (out two or three). It has never been easier. Just be aware that it is a marathon not a sprint. I have a bunch of anecdotes about folks who have done well publishing their books.

If you don't want to don't.

"Book about ideas for a book" was entertaining and very economical. I wish more authors would do that and stop wasting our precious time.

https://fi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Aiheita?_x_tr...

Maybe just me, but authors gravitate towards certain formats that fit them. Oscar Wilde did great with Dorian Grey but it was nothing compared to his plays. Imagining J.K. Rowling writing a blog feels wrong. I get Gwern's perspective, I'm not sure if I would read a gwern.net book... but on the flip side Randall Munroe (XKCD) has a couple of great books. So who knows?

Sad. I did $403k last month as an independent writer. All analog publishing. None of it from KDP. Be careful what advice you listen to.

Would most of the arguments apply for videogames? "Why to Not Write a Game"?

Well, most PhDs are obtained by writing a book, so there is that.

I didn't get into this article too much, but it took me an embarrassing amount of amount of time to figure out that the drop cap at the beginning was an "A".

Gwern's site feels like the "old web" in all the best ways to me. I think the writing would actually lose something if transposed into book form

So curious who the anonymous example is

gwern thinks we shouldn't be writing any more books anyway: https://gwern.net/culture-is-not-about-esthetics

Why not just make an EPUB version of your website?

See, I am torn on this article. On the one hand, I am probably the target audience. I have much better things to focus on, but I cannot get the idea of having a novel(la) written out of my head. On the other, I have no stories to tell which would not be rather told in a short story/poem form. In short, yes but no but yes.

Wow, I really love this site design, and the features like the floating annotations / footnotes.

> same way one might want to have ‘learned to read Mandarin’ or ‘become a bodybuilder’, but not to actually sweat through memorizing (and then forgetting) endless arbitrary characters or hours in the gym (followed by gluttony as cruel as the starvation).

Having done both of these things to some degree, I wonder where the impression is coming from that they're super hard. Certainly a certain kind of bodybuilding body is absurdly difficult to achieve and I simply don't recommend it to anyone - and every single person I know that's achieved it has body dysmporphia and is driven by it. Not worth. But achieving something "like" a bodybuilder's body is, imo, achievable for most people with the same amount of effort as most of the things people dream about - learning a language, learning to code, having an active blog, reading a book a month, etc. A few hours effort a week consistently and you'll likely have great results after a year, and the journey never ends from there!

Mandarin as well is a more than achievable goal that can be achieved with a great degree of skill with a few years of consistent effort.

I think this article is right though - a book will kill other goals and activities if you don't maintain a balance. I have many different thoughts about this that one day I'll organize, hah, into a blog post. But my thinking is basically along these lines:

1. The 40 hour workweek is the wrong way to approach maximizing human productivity

2. Humans are inconsistently productive

3. Guardrails are necessary to achieve productivity

4. Consistency is probably the most important guardrail

5. The hardest part of doing a thing isn't doing it, it's scheduling it accurately, and sticking to the schedule

If a person maintains a fun blog incidentally alongside their work, blitzing out an article here and there as the whim strikes them, they might appear quite productive. However in an office setting, a corporation would find their productivity schedule infuriating - when will the thing be done? Idk, when I feel like it? When the mood strikes me? Leave me alone, I'm reading hacker news until the mood strikes me. Hence the inconsistently productive.

I'm not making a naturalist argument though - I want to be more productive than "when the mood strikes me," and I don't mean for just capitalist endeavors, I mean for all the various activist activities I want to do as well. However I think the modern trap is thinking that the way to be productive is to set hours for activities - 40 hours for work, 9-5. Lots of work done then, right?

Instead I think it's better to combine scheduling time with an understanding of human motivation as something flexible and malleable. Most workout advocates will advise things like going to the gym every day 8am, and achieving this by making putting on your gym shorts the first thing you do when you get out of bed, engaging a Habit process, and I think this is effective. But for me what's been more effective is, the night before, determining what time I'm going to bed, and then setting my alarm 8 hours after that, and then noticing - oh wait, I have a meeting 20 minutes after I wake up, ok, in that case, I put my gym shorts next to my computer chair, and immediately after the meeting put them on and then go to the gym, because 2 hours after that I have another call. Or, it's 2am and I'm drunk, there's no way I'm going to do anything but puke my guts out if I try to go on a run in 8 hours, I'll schedule a nighttime run instead - or fuck it, it's the weekend, I'll relax instead and acknowledge it's just not happening tomorrow, but that's ok because I have another go scheduled on Monday morning.

There's another side to that which is accurate scheduling. Writing a book takes a long time and I think if it was slotted into a life correctly it would take years to write the book, when most want it done within a year or at most 2. But to achieve that they'd need to spend all their free time on it which would kill their blog hobby or whatever else. If I accurately measure out all the things I want to do in life - blogging, language study, reading, working out, riding my motorcycle, making videos showing off how beautiful taiwan is, fighting car capitalism, continuing to develop myself as an engineer, making enough money to retire - boy do I get depressed... I can do maybe 4 of those things before a week's time is spent already. It's hard to schedule things across the months, year, years, and not feel sad imo.

Also total sidenote but I think most non fiction books are way too long anyway and would work better as blogs and blog posts, and I think the market dynamics of bookselling pushes this tendency - excluding fields like academia where people are writing to include as much supporting material as possible and with the expectation of being quoted and cited extensively in future works by themselves or other authors, which with the merging of popular culture and academia is causing issues. See: "Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" as an example. A really incredible new view of history and anthropology that's imo inaccessible to most readers because it's also at least partially written for academia.

"Less fiction, more science" Karl Marx.

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