Out Of Print
In April 2015, I self-published a book called No Missing Tools: Creativity in an Age of Abundance. My idea was to take the best writing from the first 10 years of this blog and put together a little e-book. The project grew, and what came out of it was a 65,000-word book that, in the end, very few people bought or read.
At the time I was enamoured with the idea of self-publishing. Some people I knew were managing to do it well. It felt like a natural extension of blogging. Like the obvious move for a small creative studio. I assumed the reach that social media gave me would magically help market the book.
But I decided that path without really knowing or understanding how the publishing world worked. I thought that if I tried to publish conventionally, I would give up out of frustration. Maybe that was true. My anxiety was undiagnosed at the time. Self-publishing was a form of self-protection.
If I knew then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have self-published. I had a vibrant social media following and an active audience for this blog. Or, as agents and publishers call it, a platform. It was big enough and focussed enough to support pitching a narrative non-fiction book like that.
But I didn’t know any of that at the time.
I still carried the wounds from not finishing my PhD. Inside that story lives another book, another set of conversations with publishers, which were progressing, but on the assumption that I finished the PhD. I will probably always suffer from self-doubt. But it was very bad back then.
Not that I regret bringing No Missing Tools to the world. It was a big project. Not just a lot of words. But hiring a cover designer, a layout designer, working through various rounds of editing, and getting ready for sale, including a beautiful limited-edition run printed in Tokyo, was a massive experience. It taught me about how books are made, from the technology of bookbinding to the process of editing and compiling.
I also learnt there is so much I don’t know about how to market a product beyond my immediate audience. I could sell a book to someone who had been reading my blog for years. But getting books to people who hadn’t heard of me, into bookstores, or the wider reading world, was a mystery.
When I was writing the book, I was still working towards a specific vision of how I wanted to work. Most would call it content creation now. But I thought of it more in terms of a studio life. In Singapore and Tokyo, from 2011 to 2013, I built spaces that were made for work at the intersection of visuals and sound. I was podcasting and making videos. I was making music and photographs. And blogging about the experience of that creative work.
Some friends have suggested I came to that too early. That I was ahead of the curve. Maybe. It could also be that I gave up too soon. Or I wasn’t unrelenting about making time to grow that online empire. It’s clear to me now a lot of the people I tried to emulate back then were guys who didn’t take on the parenting responsibilities I had.
Or maybe I needed time to heal. To find a less frantic way to create. To approach writing in a different way.
I still have a studio-centric view of my creativity. But “making things for the Internet” doesn’t feel like a priority anymore. Social media has become a zombie technology. I have no interest in joining the cult of substack, which will of course become the inevitable substack exodus in a year or two.
And my writing has changed. I’ve worked on a memoir. I’ve published in some literary journals and hope to do more of that. I’m querying agents. I’m recreating this blog in a simpler format. I’m moving on.
The post Out Of Print appeared first on Fernando Gros.
