Writing a book is a labor of love

You can preorder ours today

Shortly before Sasha and I signed our book contract with Harper, I had a crisis of confidence about the project. So I went around asking people who’d written books before: Should we write one? Should we work with a major publisher? Does anyone even read anymore?

Almost to a person, they responded: No, no, and hell no. And that is how I discovered that I really wanted to write a book — because I just didn’t care.

There’s a funny thing that happens when you ask people for advice about something like this — the same thing that happens in Yelp reviews, comp discussions between friends, anywhere comparative wealth is an important but unacknowledged part of the context of the conversation. Although they are the single most relevant piece of information, people hate to speak in terms of concrete numbers. I suspect this is because it opens them up to judgment: “You think it’s okay to spend how much on a skin care treatment?” “Wow, I could never live on that salary in the Bay Area.” “Oh, does that feel like ‘a lot’ to you? Interesting.”

But a lot of the arguments about why you shouldn’t bother to write a book really seem to boil down to this: You won’t make money doing it.

As far as I can tell, this is true! The exceptions are rare enough that they’re a rounding error. But let us not perpetuate the sins of our forebears.

Drumroll, please

If, hypothetically, you wanted to make a bunch of money by writing a book, you would need to sell a lot of books. But selling a lot of books requires investing more money in the book’s creation, distribution, and marketing, costs you can only cover by selling even more books — you see the problem. It’s hard to make the math work.

We received a $100,000 advance from Harper — which is quite good for a first-time lead author. (There’s actually pretty good data on this, thanks to the #publishingpaidme hashtag that circulated around the DEI high-water mark in 2020.) Here’s how that money gets divvied up:

• $15,000 to our agent: It’s hard to sell a book without one.

• $8,000 to our “developmental editor”: This is the editor we worked with before submitting our manuscript to Harper. You’re not required to do this, but everyone told us that we’d end up with a better book in less time if we did.

• $8,000 for websites and site design: We could have done this for half the price if I hadn’t decided to buy youcanjustdothings.com.

• $8,000 for an illustrator for my Substack: Totally optional expense, one I wanted to incur for the sake of supporting human-generated art — but in the end it became unworkable because of turnaround times, so I switched to Midjourney.

• $51,000 for a PR firm: We were advised not to expect our publisher to do much in this vein since it isn’t guaranteed a good ROI. So we hired the same firm that all the nonfiction bestsellers use. Time will tell whether this was a brilliant move or a waste of money.

• ~$10,000 in additional pre-launch expenses: Launch parties, some PA work in the months leading up, etc.

This is the optimistic version. In reality, we will probably spend more, and lose money on the book. Of course, we hope to sell more than the ~23,000-30,000 copies (depending on mix) that would earn out our advance and start generating royalties, but 90% of authors in our position don’t. And that’s just to break even on cash in / cash out, to say nothing of the opportunity cost in time and sanity.

Okay, so … why?

We’d figured all of this out by the time we signed our deal with Harper. So why do the book anyway?

The best way I can describe it is that the book wanted to exist. You may have noticed that agency content — here, on Twitter, wherever — is all the rage right now, to a degree that is sometimes irritating even to me. Yes, agency is great, now please shut up about it. That was not yet the case when I published my first Substack post, How to be more agentic, two years ago, but the latent demand was immediately obvious: Although I had fewer than 10 followers at the time, the post was read hundreds of thousands of times, and I had two editors reach out about doing a book — including Eric Nelson, who eventually became our editor at Harper.

I think people are so hyped up about agency because they are looking for an answer to the loss of control they feel spreading across their lives — economic, political, technological, professional. People are trying to get a handle on how to adapt to a rapidly changing world, how to respond to metastatic uncertainty about the future, and they think that agency holds the key.

And I think they’re right about that, because my own life was transformed by increasing my personal agency.

That’s why most of the capital-D Discourse about agency is terrible, in my humble opinion. Everyone’s talking about how it’s so over and we’re so cooked and you’re ngmi if you’re not an agent of, um, agency … but people treat it like it’s something you’re meted out at birth, like IQ or height.

To the contrary, agency is a skill set, and it’s one anyone can learn. And I want people to learn it. Because agency is freedom and freedom is good. Because I love people deeply, even the ones I can’t stand. Because I made a solemn vow to liberate all beings, but I can’t even make myself meditate. Because the sociopaths who’ve seized “you can just do things” as a rallying cry shouldn’t get to have all the fun.

Why you should read it

Although basically no one is ever rewarded for pride, and history and myth are both littered with counterexamples, I will defy God and tell you: It’s a good book. It’s a book that was written with the goal of actually being worth reading, not to produce a book-shaped personal achievement. It only took us three months to draft it (because most of the content was already in my head), but we spent the next six months editing it down to 55,000 words — three Dwarkesh podcasts — as tight as my most popular Substack content.

And so it’s a book that I fate-temptingly believe people will like even if they do most of their reading on Substack these days. (If you want a more specific answer about what you in particular will get out of reading it, I’d suggest taking this quiz, which will attempt to offer you a more personalized answer.)

But don’t take my word for it — have some social proof:

• “Without realizing it, many of us are living within a prison of our own making — one whose bars are made of delusional assumptions about what is and isn’t possible. You Can Just Do Things is a prison break instruction manual — a wildly empowering how-to guide for getting out of your own way so you can realize your true potential.” Tim Urban, creator of Wait But Why

• “A vivid reminder that a meaningful life isn’t something that happens to you — it’s something you author. You Can Just Do Things is more than just a title; it’s a radical shift in perspective that challenges us to take full responsibility for our own potential. A must-read for anyone tired of their own ‘stuckness.’” Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

• “Cate Hall ruined my life. With her clear language and what I only can describe as earned wisdom, she forced me to look at the hot, radiating sphere of avoidant behavior that was making me miserable. Only to then empower me to actually take action and radically improve my life — it turns out you really can just do things.” Philipp Dettmer, founder & head writer of Kurzgesagt

(More from Arthur C. Brooks, Charles Duhigg, Ali Abdaal, and Eric Ries on the book website.)

Let’s talk about preorders (in which I resort to bribery)

Let’s be real: No one wants to preorder a book. Delayed gratification is not just out, it’s borderline offensive. “You want me to pay today for a hamburger on Tuesday?” I have bailed out of Amazon orders upon realizing they will not arrive for 36 hours. And the book doesn’t ship until July.

So it is with a heavy heart that I must report there are good reasons why authors are always begging you to preorder their books. Two, specifically:

1. All presales count as first-week sales for bestseller lists, so most books that make bestseller lists do it in their first week. Making a bestseller list obviously means you are cool as shit, but more relevantly it also significantly increases total sales over the lifetime of the book, especially for a first-time author. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 1.6x to 8x, depending on the circumstances. I gather this is partly a product of consumer behavior (see “social proof,” above), partly the activity of retailers (which prioritize bestsellers on shelves), and partly because being on a list gets you more earned media.

2. Early preorders (months before release) affect how many copies the publisher prints in its first run, which likewise affects shelf placement by retailers and — I have to believe, though no one has said it — how much hustle the publisher feels around marketing the book. Since publishers and bestseller lists look at different data sources, my best guess is that if you buy the book soon, it’s ideal to do it through Amazon, whereas later sales are better through indie booksellers like these shops since bestseller lists seem to oversample from them.

As a result of these factors, finger to the wind, I’d guess early preorders are 2x-5x better for authors than day-of-release sales.

That’s what’s in it for me, and what will also help other people find the book. If you are the saintly type, you may find that sufficient motivation to preorder the book now. (If you are the super-saintly type, consider perusing this list of ways to help with the launch — it can be something as small as leaving an Amazon review, or as large as convincing your organization to make a bulk purchase or introducing me to a big podcaster.)

For the rest of you heathens, there are “preorder extras,” a.k.a. bribes. The basic proposition here is that, in exchange for a preorder, I will send you (on book release day) exclusive, valuable, totally free content that hopefully does not take me a month to generate. In this particular case, this will take the form of:

• A follow-along app containing exercises keyed to the book’s content (yes, it will be Claude-coded, and yes, it will be spectacular)

• A guide to raising more agentic children (the number one thing I get asked for, you can bet I will be relying on parent friends in putting this together)

• An invite to some kind of ultra-exclusive release-week Q&A or office hours

So basically, you are paying today for several hamburgers in July.

A final note

Remember how I said this book wanted to exist? This raises an intriguing question. In the future, will more books want to exist? Anyone who knows me and Sasha can report (perhaps ruefully) that we have many opinions to share. It’s possible that this could be the first of multiple books, or many creative works in different media. If that’s the future that wants to emerge, then there are probably stirrings of that eventuality in this moment. If we’re destined to produce more creative work, then you might feel an itch in your finger, the itch of someone wanting to click an “order” button that will set fateful events in motion. You, right now, are the one causing that world to take shape — or steering away from it. I hope you enjoy that power.