Idea Stage: Theory (what does this mean? Click here.)
Read time: 10 minutes
Author’s note: this is an adapted version of an email to a list of editors for a book I was writing about my time building Andrew Yang’s campaign for president in 2020.
For context: I was the second person hired on Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign. I worked as the Director of Marketing. In the book, I intended to tell the story of the movement as well as a roadmap for young people to make big impacts at a young age. Ultimately, as is outlined below, I chose to not finish that book, but I share below insights and wisdom on how to write and publish a book.
Hi book readers and editors,
It is your friend, Andrew. I am writing in with a sad book-related update — I won’t be continuing with the project. It’s been very difficult for me to accept this/write this, but it seems to make the most sense.
Below I have included a short essay I about the experience. At the end, I include links to my book proposal, query letter, and chapters. Please use these for any author endeavors you all may have in the future.
BEGINNING:
I first imagined this book in September 2017, before the Yang campaign even began. Through the whole campaign, I thought of this book, and in May 2020 when it was over, I set out to write it. It first took me three and a half months to finish the book proposal which is a bitch of a document. Think of a 50-page single-spaced business plan for your book, including audience analysis, a marketing plan, competitive analysis, chapter summaries, and 1-3 chapters completed. When I finished this, I emailed you all saying that I was going to begin writing. This is what I thought I was going to do.
After that email, I needed to send my book proposal to book agents (this process is called querying). In theory, a book agent would sign me, then sell my book to a publisher. This is the only way to get published — even Barack Obama has to get a book agent.
I had a lot of confidence in my book. I believed I would get signed in the first week of querying (for context, this is absurd for a new author, as it usually takes two months for them to read your shit). But, I felt that I had a strong proposal and marketing plan. I built a movement. I have legitimate secrets no one knows about how we did it. I traveled with Yang and met famous people. And I have the only thing publisher really cares about: a market that will buy the book (Yang had committed to a foreword and promotion to his six million followers).
On my first day querying, ten minutes after sending my first five queries, I was proven right when I received a response from Ronald Goldfarb. Ronald Goldfarb is one of the top six most influential political book agents in the country and notably represents Bernie Sanders. I felt like a stud, to say the least.
I had a few calls with “The Farb,” as I called him privately, and he really liked the book (and me) and wanted to immediately put it up for auction. But, over time, I felt that he came off as aggressive, a dick, and somewhat out of touch (in one call, he thought I was CVS calling him about a prescription — no, this is Patrick!). So I walked away from our conversations. A book agent is supposed to be a career mentor, and he seemed like he hardly cared who I was. I viewed his interest as confirmation that my book was hot shit, so I figured I could hold out for all the daddy of all agents.
Then, as I sent out my next 25 queries I heard nothing but silence (which in publishing means "I’m too busy to tell you no"). You could say I was confused. I then contacted about 40 authors or publishing professionals (people with 10mm+ books sold) who I knew via Yang for feedback. I heard resounding positivity: “this is an amazing book proposal,” “you will have no problem getting a deal,” etc. I left these conversations optimistic.
I carried on, sleuthing for more agents to query, which, to be clear, is a terrible time. Finding and querying agents is the second stage of mega crap that new authors need to wade through (after making the proposal). As a new author, you know nothing so you end up wandering through the sea of agents one by one learning where they work, what they like, other books they’ve done, and stupid quirks about them to determine if they’d like your book. After finding a bunch, you have to write them each a personalized one-page letter to introduce your book proposal. It has to be perfect or they won't read it. Plus, most of them ask for their own little formatting twist to show you actually did your homework. Examples include: paste your letter and your proposal directly into the body of the email but only up to 3000 words. It seems easy enough, but most authors query 50-100 agents so it becomes insane and obscenely time-consuming.
This is what I did for almost the entire fall, until nearly November, instead of actually writing. Ultimately, I queried around 70 book agents that I deemed reputable but resolved to self-publish if I didn’t get a deal from a major publishing house. I refused to do a deal with a shit publisher because traditional publishing is already a big shit-sandwich. This is how traditional publishing works: you write the whole book, they give you moderate editing, they pick the name of the book, they pick the cover of the book, they do zero marketing (unless you’re like Malcolm Gladwell), they take the rights to the book (and movie rights), and then they take 85% of revenue. The only reason anyone does it is for prestige, which was one of my major incentives but if I am stuck with a shit publisher, there’s no reason in giving everything up to not even get prestige.
WRITING:
I had been doing some light writing through the fall, but as I said, I didn’t begin to go whole hog until November after the 70 queries were sent. One of the issues I had been struggling with was how to format the actual book. I effectively tried to write two things: the story of an insurgent campaign, and a marketing playbook for movements. I ultimately, found a model that felt like it worked. I structured it similar to Shoe Dog, The Truth, or Eat, Pray, Love — a fun narrative but filled with wisdom, theories, and frameworks. This made the book descriptive rather than prescriptive of what I had learned, which was a mistake, and where things began to fall apart (but I didn’t know it for months).
Now a bit about the writing process. Book writing is an okay grind on the best of days, but most days it is not a fun time. There is a fallacy out there that writers are just riding a wave of euphoria all day long. This is not the case. Good writers write because they feel called to do it. There is an urgency in the soul to say something (and this is what makes their writing good). Writing is similar to parenting. Parents are often surveyed as having the highest meaning of all people in society, but some of the lowest levels of happiness. As David Foster Wallace once said, writing is “10% writing and 90% worrying about writing.” In other words, there is much agony because making what you want to say work on paper often becomes a literal jigsaw puzzle. I figured ideas would intertwine as easily as they do in an essay, but because books weave in so many themes, it becomes a real cluster fuck. Nothing works and you have to invent random themes to tie it all together. On top of this, writing is entirely solitary which gets depressing if you’ve spent the last 7 months getting rejected by book agents.
My central point is that writing is difficult even when you don’t account for the mountain of bureaucratic shit that gets heaped on new authors. I knew all of this going in, so don't worry I’m not delusional in this category, but I miscalculated something critical.
Psychology argues that the antidote to a tough process is grit, defined as extremely high self-discipline. Grit originates inherently within your character in all things you do (we can call this True-Grit), or you spawn it when you feel called to a particular task (we can call this Calling). This provides two sources of grit: true-grit or calling.
Now, most of you know from my obscene work ethic in college or San Francisco or the campaign that I have a fairly unusual level of True-Grit. So, you would think that that would make the task of finishing a book not so difficult for me. This is true. I could finish the book. However, the thing is that when it comes to artistic creations, you must have the calling for your work if you want to create something magnificent. And if you don’t want that, you’re wasting your time.
We can lay out my argument in mathematical terms. Take this equation below where your book's outcome is determined by two variables: True-Grit and Calling. Suppose all other coefficients are held equal (skill, topic, talent, timing, audience etc.). It follows that if both True-Grit and Calling are present, you will do better.
(True-Grit + Calling) x Book = Great Book
(0 + Calling) x Book = Okay book
(True-Grit + 0) x Book = Okay book
(0 + 0) x Book = No Book
Your book's quality matters a lot on the worthiness of creating it, or in this case, finishing it. Writing a book sounds good but it’s nothing but a vanity metric (makes you feel good but accomplishes nothing) unless you write a great book. For reference, somewhere around 90% of book sales go to the top 1% of books, and the average book sells 300 copies in its lifetime and never nets a profit. This ultimately means that if you write a book while lacking one of the variables (True-Grit or Calling), it will only be an average book and no one will read it. This is because books take long to read, so someone can live their life reading just the greatest books ever. If your book is okay and only moderately informative, no one cares and it dies out of the gate after 300 people buy it. This begs the question — what are we writing for? Most well-intentioned authors not only want to say something, but they want to be heard. If an author wants to be heard, spending one year to write an okay book no one will read does not align with the goal of writing.
So, how does this relate to me? If anything, many of you are probably thinking:
Well, Andrew, you have plenty of True-Grit.
And you seem like you work on your calling.
So, what gives?
If you were saying these things. You’d be right. I was called to write this book for years. And I have the inherent character grit to crush it. All things considered, I should have no problem enduring bad days, and writing something great, exactly the way I want to say it.
Except, I fucked up in three big ways (among many other small fuck-ups).
FUCK UP NUMBER ONE:
When I structured the book as a narrative, I kneecapped my calling. For better or for worse, my calling is to write instructively — to share what I learned, to share the truth, to share the path to the promised land. Unfortunately, instruction and narrative writing only have limited compatibility. The result of this choice meant that I spent my waking author hours describing scenes, characters, colors and stupid shit I hated. Worse, a narrative structure only vaguely alludes to what you learned which is a nightmare for someone whose calling is to write about what they learned. Long story short, I had the calling, but I set up the book in a way I was not saying what I wanted the way I wanted to say it.
FUCK UP NUMBER TWO:
Because the book was a narrative structure, my life became the main part of the story. This is fine, except to make me less sad about writing in narrative form, I unconsciously began overwriting on my life's stages of development. I then began trying to instruct on self-development. My desire to instruct was leeching. This was agonizing for me because the book is about a political campaign which caused my dear coming of age story to (obviously) be cropped through its relationship to politics. This was weird and obviously not how my childhood went. I spent a lot of time merging these threads, and it worked on paper, but I knew deep down this isn't how I wanted to talk about politics OR my life.
FUCK UP NUMBER THREE:
I had so much confidence in this book and writing it that I thought I would be mostly done with it by December 2020. This doesn't seem inherently bad, but my already low motivation completely bottomed out as the calendar whirled past December 2020. After an investigation, I realized my expectation setting was a big problem. This is because my whole life's meaning and motivation are to work on mental health and well-being in society. I had expected I'd be working on my dream again by Spring 2021. For these reasons, my brain was freaking out in January that I was wasting my time. There is a lot to be learned here about timeline expectations and the content we choose to write about. Clearly, if I was writing about mental health, I would feel as anxious. And by some measures, you could say I was never even writing about my calling, which, referring to my equation, set me up for failure from the get-go.
RESULT:
Because my calling was so hamstrung, I began to struggle to put words down. Many days I would sit to write and immediately have no energy. My arms began to feel like lead. I put in the hours (the grit) at the computer, refusing to give up, but my arms prevented quality words from showing up (no calling). Over time, the Google Search “when should you quit writing a book,” became a weekly visit for me. I kept pushing myself and writing until after I spent three days with lead arms unable to write, I realized this was more than the struggle of “the ol' grindstone.”
THE DECISION TO HANG IT UP:
I ultimately realized that I fucked up in how I structured the book and majorly by the expectations I placed around writing it. This is where many authors would start over and keep on it. That is, after all, what you do when something is your calling. However, continuing in book format does not seem to make sense. The decision factors are included here:
The Yang window has passed. Yang will be mayor of New York City by the time this would-be book would publish if I restarted now. A book about his failed presidential campaign is obviously a bad idea at that point.
I didn’t get a deal before, I probably won’t now, so that seems pretty unwise to double-down on a book you have questionable desire to write, and a limited market for.
As mentioned, politics and marketing are not even my truest calling. My true calling is mental health, self-development, psychology, and improving human well-being. This may have contributed much more to my struggles in writing this book than I think. I will surely know with time.
All things considered, it doesn't make sense to write this book. It's a lot of time and money to write a story that isn't my true calling, dwells on past glory, and has no path to big money or prestige. Worst of all, the Yang2020 campaign hook will not be sexy by the time I publish. This means no one will read it, which is the whole point. I also recognize that I already built one movement at age 24. Logic would say whatever I do next I will do better (except this book I guess). In the end, I have bigger fish to fry.
A NEW WAY FORWARD
Because I still have a lot of shit I want to say about Yang and politics, I will write a bunch of instructive essays on my website over the next 6 months. This will appease the publishing gods for my next book, whenever or whatever that is, because publishers really like an independent writer with a mailing list.
If you’re a new author, feel free to reach out to me for advice. I have a particular passion for democratizing access to overly complicated clubs, so I am happy to help. Additionally, I am including three resources of documents from my book below. As I know first-hand, these are digital gold.
One — My book proposal. While I didn’t land a publisher, many best-selling authors said this was well-made.
Two — here is a query letter template that had good reviews.