What I’m building instead
A road less travelled
Last weekend, I told you I had seventeen browser tabs open.
I still have tabs open. Different ones now.
Something shifted this week. I stopped reading advice from people who have opinions about publishing and started talking to people who have actually done the thing I’m considering. Authors who have moved away from Amazon entirely. Creatives who have walked away from social media and built something else in its place — audience, community, sales — without handing the work over to an algorithm that doesn’t care about any of it.
It turns out real experience sounds quite different from researched certainty. Quieter. More specific. Less tidy. Truer.
What I’m hearing isn’t “this is easy and here’s why you should do it.” It’s more like: this is what we did, this is what it cost, this is what it gave us back. Here’s what we’d do differently. Here’s what we wouldn’t change.
That’s the kind of information I can actually use. These aren’t quick fixes. They’re sustainable options born from experience.
What I’m slowly understanding is that the publishing question I’ve been wrestling with isn’t solely a publishing question. It’s an ecosystem question. How do I want to operate? What do I want to be connected to, and what do I want to build some distance from? Which tools actually serve the work, and which ones just feel inevitable because everyone uses them?
These are uncomfortable questions because they don’t have clean answers. And because the path that comes out of them is not the easier one.
But here’s what I know this week that I didn’t know last week: easier and better are not always the same thing. I’ve spent enough time in this writing life to know the difference between the choice that feels right and the choice that just feels familiar.
I’m not building something familiar.
I’m sharing more of the detail — the actual conversations, the specific platforms, the tech stack question — in the Working Draft Lab post I’m publishing tomorrow. And it’s a good one. Come and think it through with me.
That's what I want to hear about too. I have people around me that say you need to write a book and I think I don't know how. Where would I start. The online stuff is filled with NOT what I want to hear about. Thank you because now I don't feel quite as restricted in my thought.