This week we’re taking a look at books, from a short discussion on banning books, to how people take notes for future you, and wrapping up with the question “should you write a book”?

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Banning Books

This is an excellent, if short, article on banning books. The big takeaway for me was the statement around banning subjectively “dangerous” books is about surpressing the cultural education of youth so that they don’t develop their own ideas about how the world operates. This seems like exactly what the people banning books want. They want their children to hold the exact ideas held by the parents without wavering. They don’t want them to be more inclusive.

I’ve already said that we’re not banning books to keep kids safe, we’re banning books to keep afloat a view of the world that seemed to be dying.

I say good riddance to a judgemental view of the world.

Taking Notes for Different People

Ryan Holiday recently talked about travelling through time with his notes on books. His realization that 20 years ago he took a note that was now coming back to him to bear fruit is one big reason I read widely between both non-fiction and fiction. It’s why I slow my reading down to take notes on the books I read, because the number of times that some old note on a book or some article I read, comes back to be meaningful years later is beyond count.

Knowing this, is why I spend so much time working my Obsidian vault. There is interesting stuff here that I didn’t capture the first time because I was a different person.

In fact, if you’re not a different person with changing beliefs that you continue to make your own, are you reading the right things?

Don’t Write a Book

After reading this insightful summary of a book about the book industry (wow that’s recursive) you can only come to one conclusion for 99.9999% of authors.

Don’t write a book to make money.

Both Book Wars and Everything and Less echo many of the sentiments found at the link above. About 20 – 25% of customers account for 80% of the revenue for books because they’re the mega-readers. If there was a “Netflix” for books, publishing would die because those consumers would purchase less and they support the industry.

So, why did I write a bunch of books? Mostly because I had something to say and felt like a book was the right constraint to get me going on the writing.

If you want to make it as a writer today, books probably aren’t the way to go. You should have a site and write there. Have a newsletter so that you own the relationship with readers. Most importantly, don’t expect to be the one that makes out like a bandit and gets to write fulltime. You may hear about this all the time, but that’s survivorship bias in action. We never hear about the 10,000 other people that did the same thing and had good writing skills but didn’t hit the right niche at the right moment and didn’t get the eye of the right influencer.

They may still be writing, but few people have heard of them and they’re writing because they have something to say.

I write because it helps me work out what I think. I’m far less concerned with any money I make or if anyone likes it. Sure the nice emails and members are a great validator, but I get paid well at my job and I don’t see me quitting that to write anytime soon.

Unless I happen to hit that random lottery of sudden success.