Writing a Book is Hard. We Now Get to See Exactly How Hard.
Listening to the MediaHacks podcast last night got me thinking about how fans are exposed to the process of getting a book to market. We see blogging and the daily act of writing happen all over the web. We also see the end result of book marketing and author publicity, but we rarely see the long soft-middle of the book writing process or the post-publication author malaise. Social media, to no surprise, is changing that.
Merlin Mann posted two videos on 43folders.com that are kind of shocking. Mann is in the middle of writing the Inbox Zero book for Harper Studio and he is clearly in the throes of the doubt and the struggle that go into making a book great. I am sure every writer has these moments but they don’t normally surface on the web in such a raw and immediate form. Mann starts off with a frenetic reaction to a post on Lifehacker.com and then works that into a sublime meditation on identity and expertise. Together the videos are about 40 minutes long. I imagine many writers will nod along with Merlin’s ramblings, and I recommend all creative-types to check it out but be warned it is not safe for work.
The guys on MediaHacks are both already published. Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation and Julien Smith’s Trust Agents both landed in the fall and the conversation on episode #19 is of the two of them talking about what it feels like after the fact. Again the talk is not safe for work and again it gets personal and raw. You can hear Joel in particular work through his feelings regarding the peer and critical reaction to his work. It is the kind of authenticity here until now only known in closed writers circles or that is otherwise perverted in the flaming of critics.
My takeaway from this, aside from the acknowledged power of the web, is that as a non-writer I knew writing a book was difficult. Now I get to see approximately how difficult. That seems new. I think it is a good thing.
And as an aside, during the podcast Mitch talks about his agency TwistImage being recognized as the best digital agency in Canada. He didn’t mention that TwistImage also won a Gold at the 2009 Digital Marketing awards. Congratulations to Mitch and the TwistImage team. Being great is reward all its own.
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