A publisher will never pay you enough to justify writing a book if you're looking at it myopically.

As my therapist likes to say, "A book is a really thick business card."

It's an investment with long-term dividends in the form of job offers and promos and speaking gigs.

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Unless your last name is Obama or Kardashian or Clinton, you will make pennies an hour writing a book.

I mean that. Honestly I probably lost money writing DevOps for Dummies.

I went to the bar downstairs to write. That's a lot of cheese plates and wine on the credit card.

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I also let a lot of shit fall through the cracks because you're not a robot. I didn't pay my taxes for a year. I forgot to renew my plates. I paid late fees on all sorts of shit.

But! I got through it. And now I have my name on a book. Forever.

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That shit is in the Library of Congress.

This results in all sorts of things:

- People think I'm an expert without me having to do anything.
- I get more speaking gigs because people read my book.
- I have more name recognition.
- Getting jobs got a lot easier.

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On top of all that, other publishers want to work with me because they know I can deliver.

It's a massive accomplishment and I feel proud of it.

And perhaps more romantically, there exists an artifact of my life. My daughter will be able to read that even after I'm gone.

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tl;dr — Don't write books for the money.

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