I am am a modestly successful writer. I’ve managed to make a career out of my one talent. I worked for the most important newspaper in the country, I’ve published three books with my fourth coming in three months, I’ve managed to support a family. Success seems like a good-enough word to describe it. So why don’t I feel very successful?
The Almightier publishes July 22. A few weeks ago I received the physical galleys (the advanced copies printed up for marketing purposes). Now’s a time to be excited. But by now the excited feeling of holding a physical copy of your book in your hand is a little familiar. If I’m being honest, it’s a lot familiar. And if I’m being brutally honest, the feeling was so familiar it brought up an unfamiliar feeling: anxiety. What I’m thinking about now is not, hey, I wrote a book! I’m thinking about selling it. Or, more precisely, not selling it.
I’m worried about the marketing plan, and publicity, and trying to get people to review it, and interview me about it, and getting podcasters to talk about it and share it and get other people interested in it. And lining up events to talk about the book. And its rating on Amazon. And the three people on Goodreads that I know haven’t read the book because we didn’t give it to them but they gave it lousy ratings anyway (am I already being review bombed?) And I can’t shake the unease that this thing is going to land and everybody’s going to hate it or ignore it. Maybe when pub day hits I’ll feel good. Right now all I feel is anxiety.
I have a spreadsheet with the names of at least a hundred people to contact; friends and old colleagues and people I don’t even know at newspapers, blogs, podcasts, cable channels, TV, newsletters, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, even Twitch. Anyplace where I can plausibly get people talking about the book. When you’re selling a book, you’re competing against every other book, the 2 million published annually as well as the 130 million that are in existence. I’m competing against Mike Ayers’ Sharing in the Groove (also coming out July 22) as well as The Iliad.
But you’re not just competing against other books.
You’re competing against the Yankees-Blue Jays game (three-game series starts July 21), the remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer (July 18), against newspapers and blogs, against whatever incendiary thing Donald Trump says, against the new season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (July 9), against whatever else happens to be streaming, against podcasts, against Hasan Abi going live on Twitch, against somebody who decides they just want to sit quietly and contemplate the world for a change. You are competing against anything and everything that vies for people’s attention. My original publication date was July 8, which would’ve meant I’d be competing with James Gunn’s Superman remake (July 11). How is anybody supposed to compete with that?
Look, I’m not dumb. I realize that worrying about how well my book sells isn’t even a proverbial First World problem. It’s like the First World of First World problems. I am not looking for sympathy. And I recognize the pointed irony of writing about that is all about how money isn’t real and we’ve made ourselves slaves to a myth about it, and then selling that book for…money. But that’s just the crazy madcap world we live in.
The worst thing about money and success and is that once you have just a little taste of them you realize how little of them you actually have. Money is alluring, yes, but it is also necessary and the necessary part is what drives most people. The vast, vast majority of us do not have enough money. I’m not talking about White Lotus-like vacations or caviar dreams, but just to live. If I lose my job, if my book doesn’t sell, my family will lose everything, and we are not alone in that circumstance. The total debt of US households was about 85% of total income in 2021, according to Pew Research. Most of us are barely keeping our heads above water. What does getting ahead look like? What does having enough look like? I don’t know. I do know those things are so far in front of me I can’t see them while the specter of losing it all feels about one calamity behind me. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel successful.
Just because I wrote a book about money myths doesn’t mean that I’ve somehow escaped the system. I still have a family to support. And ultimately that’s kind of why I wrote the book. We are all running on hamster wheels chasing some thing we can’t catch because we’ve built our entire world around myths about money that just are not true.
“Our retrograde ideas about money are preventing us from pursuing a better world that is right in front of us,” I write in the introduction. I want us to start building that better world, I want to help people off that hamster wheel, but we have to confront our mistaken beliefs about money first.
yo, Dude
you need to come down here in September like we’ve talked about
Texas has plenty of money