Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - Holiday Message 2019: On Publishing Books

Episode Date: December 22, 2019

Welcome to the second annual Mindscape Holiday Message! No substantive content or deep ideas, just me talking a bit about the state of the podcast and what's on my mind. Since the big event for me in 2019 was the publication of Something Deeply Hidden, I thought it would be fun to talk about the process of writing and selling a popular book. Might be of interest to some of you out there! Mindscape takes off for the holidays, so the next regular episode will be published on Monday January 6. It's a good one — maybe my favorite episode thus far.

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Hello everyone, welcome to the occasional holiday special episode of the Mindscape podcast. Not really a holiday special so much as a year-end message. For those of you who are not here last year, the basic idea is that I try to do a podcast every week, except I take a couple of weeks off for the holidays. And in one of those holiday weeks, I'll try to at least put something out there just to say, thank you for everyone listening. No real substance, no real interview with that. anyone, no real deep thoughts, but I'll chat a little bit about the year, things that happened,

the state of the podcast, that kind of stuff. So that's what this is. Here we are, holiday message. I'm not promising there'll be a holiday message every year, but this year I seem to have the time for it, so let's go. 2019 was the first full calendar year of existence for the Mindscape podcast, just started last year in 2018. So overall, I think it's going really, really well. I'm happy with both, uh, the guests, especially, most happy about those, happy with the audience listening, fairly happy with my own performance, although I do think I could do better, you know. I mean, people say good and bad things about one's performance as a podcast host,

but I really want to try to get better in moving beyond just asking questions that are the obvious questions and try to get better at asking questions that bring something new out in each podcast. The weird sort of dilemma here is that I usually have people on the podcast who have many, many interesting things to say, and I feel like I got to get to them, right? You know, there's so many things that I don't want to just completely miss out on, so bringing up something completely out of the blue might be counterproductive. It takes us off of the path that I had in mind, but I think I got to let go with that a little bit. I think I have to breathe a little bit and let it be okay to have a conversation that just rolls wherever it goes. Anyway, I do think it was a good year. I think that we had good guests, and people are always asking me, what is my favorite episode?

And of course, that's like asking what your favorite child is or your favorite pet. You can't talk about that. You can't really give an answer to that. Even if it were true, you would never admit that you had a favorite. I do have a soft spot in my heart for the less obvious podcasts. I mean, when you have Kip Thorne or Roger Penrose or Leonard's Huskin on, that's, you know, the target audience for Mindscape, many of whom came from knowing about me and knowing about my books and knowing about physics. But my favorite ones as a genre are the ones that are the least

physics. I mean, the physicsy ones are great. I'm not going to stop doing those. Physics is my one true love. But really, I probably wouldn't be doing the podcast at all if it was going to be just physics. I have a lot of physics in my life already. The podcast is a way for me to get other things into my life. and it's been very, very stimulating for me personally, intellectually. Sometimes I will have people on as guests who I don't really know much about before I look them up to invite them. I do always want to know something about them before I invite them, but I may never have heard of them before someone suggests, oh, you should invite this person on. And, you know, it's always going to be a risk, right?

I do like to do experiments. I do like to try different things. So there's absolutely no guarantee that every episode is going to be a hit. And I think that if that were a guarantee, then you're not experimenting enough, then you're not trying hard enough, then you're not getting out there and doing things that are a little bit outside the comfort zone enough. So just to mention, to highlight some of the episodes that I really enjoyed, there were a little bit outside the beaten path. The second episode of 2019 was Ray Berks on the Chemistry of Murder, which I thought was just a lot of fun to get really into the mind of someone

who was actually doing CSI-type stuff. It's a weird mix of science and, you know, real world high stakes TV show kind of issues. Jessica Yellen, talking about the changing ways that we get our news, was definitely a departure because it's much more current eventsy. But it has to do with, you know, this thing that I care about a lot, which is how technology and the Internet and things like that are changing the way we live our lives. Getting the news is one thing that we do, but I think of that episode was a wonderful example of how things that have been happening in a certain way. for decades are changing in radical ways. So the point is not necessarily the specifics of what's happening to the news, although that's also interesting,

but as a paradigm as an example for how technology is changing our lives. Adrian Mayor, Mayor, I keep saying Mayor, but she says her name is pronounced like the political official. So Mayor, Adrian Mayer talked about gods and Roman and robots in ancient mythology, which I had never heard of her or even the topic before she came to give a talk here in L.A. and that was just fascinating, you know, to think about how people 2,000, 3,000 years ago were thinking about technology and robots and things like that. Also, back in the ancient world, Edward Watts talked about the end of the Roman Republic

and the lessons for democracy today. We learned about the Grokey brothers, who on the one hand, you know, maybe you could argue they were trying to be good guys, trying to, you know, make things better for the lesser well-off in their culture. but they did so in a way that kind of broke the rules, and that breaking of the rules enabled other people to break the rules, and that enabled the fall of the Roman Republic, which is kind of a big deal.

As usual, lessons from history are not straightforward for our present day, but they're definitely there. The episode with Mark De Villiers on hell, the nature of hell and where it came from and how different traditions think about hell, that was definitely one of my favorites. I will even admit that. That's something that I didn't really,

know how it's going to be going in, but just it's, you know, as someone who does not believe that hell really exists, when you talk about hell and the stories behind it and how it came to be, you're talking about human nature, right? You're talking about human beings and how they think, how they conceptualize their place in the world. And even when they, that's not what they say they're doing, they're revealing something very, very interesting and important about who they are. one of the less listened to two episodes, which I predicted, was Matthew Lutzi on the pleasures of wine. And I completely get it. If you just don't drink wine at all, then you're not interested in that episode. But there's an intellectual issue here, which is always why I am interested in these topics, right?

Why do certain things taste differently than others? What are the factors that go into it? Why do some people like wine and why do some people not? So we tried in that episode to give useful pointers about what kinds of wine to buy and so forth. But again, much more interesting for me was the story, the knowledge, the intellectual background, the framework in which all of that comes out. Astra Taylor talking about democracy. You know, Astra is sort of someone who could have become an academic in a different life, but instead became a movie maker and a documentarian and an activist. So that's a different angle than we usually get on the nature of democracy, which is something I'm very interested in.

We're going to have more episodes about democracy coming up. So don't get tired of that or don't be surprised when that happens. Frank Lance talking about games as a game designer, so not game theory from the math point of view, but the literal games you play on your computer or even board games or things like that. What makes something a game? What makes a game good or less good? These are, again, things that elubes.

the way human beings think. Lynn Kelly talking about memory palaces in the ancient world, that was definitely one I was skeptical about, whether or not that would be interesting. But it is fascinating. You know, both for, again, an individual kind of thought, how do you put something together that makes you remember things in a slightly better way, but also what did ancient cultures do

when they were trying to remember things? Could they have built massive structures, which worked for them as memory palaces? Those of you who listen to the episode know that Lynn thinks that Stonehenge might be an example of an ancient memory palace. And then more recently, we had fun episodes with a bunch of people, Will Wilkinson on partisan polarization and the urban rural divide. That's a good, that's a wonderful episode as a example of a certain thing that happens, because Will is a libertarian by political nature.

He's voted for Republicans more often than Democrats. We talked a little bit about modern politics, but most of it was not about, you know, who is right, who is wrong. It was about how people with different political inclinations have sorted themselves geographically. What is the reason for that? What are the implications for that? Again, a very straightforward intellectual exercise in understanding how people behave. Yet, obviously, you're going to get a bunch of people quetching because it's politics

and they don't like the implicit rejection of their political view, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So sorry about that, but that's not going away either. We're going to have episodes. We're not going to have, you know, political candidates on, or we're not going to talk about pieces of legislation or anything like that. But I'm absolutely going to be talking about intellectual issues that have a bearing on politics. This idea that, you know, politics is something that is inherently contaminating and we should stay away from it. I think this is a terrible idea.

I think that politics is just absolutely crucial to everything. It's a challenge. Doing politics well is very, very, very much a challenge because it becomes so emotional, so personal, so tribal, right? You instantly want to know, is this person on my side or are they against my side? But that's not a reason to not talk about the important scholarly and intellectual questions behind politics. That is a reason to talk about them more, to talk about them carefully, to try to do as good a job as you can in trying to figure out what's really going on when we put aside the emotions, the tribes, my side versus your side kind of point of view. And then recently we had two fun episodes, one with

Grimes talking about music and creativity, which was much less academic than most of our episodes, as you would guess, and one with Stephen Greenblatt talking about stories, Shakespeare, Lucretius, Adam and Eve. And again, that's, that was an episode where, you know, just listening to Stephen Greenblatt talk is inherently educational because he's one of the world's super experts on Shakespeare and the Renaissance and literary criticism. But I think that I, as the interviewer, didn't do as good a job there as I could have. You know, I wanted to hit certain points and we got there, but I didn't go to as many, we didn't go to as many surprising places as I really wanted to. It's not Stephen's fault in any way, but that's the kind of thing I want to get better at as an

interviewer. So, upcoming year, 2020, I have a bunch of podcasts either already recorded or, scheduled to be recorded. I mean, I could probably, with the ones that I have on the schedule, we could probably go through the first three months, no problem. And I'm not telling you who they're going to be, but I have some, a wonderful, I think it's exactly the kind of mix that I want of well-known names you will have heard of, some names you will have heard of, but be surprised they're on this podcast, and a bunch of people who you have never heard of. So, of course, we'll see how it goes. Most of them have not yet been recorded, but I'm looking forward to that.

Otherwise, sort of end of the year news, I wish I had more science news for you. It's still, you know, what I spend most of my time on is trying to move science forward with my students and so forth. But not so much because of the podcast, but because of the book writing and talking about, et cetera, this was a slow year for science. Also just because of random timing things. You know, I did a lot of science, but it didn't quite turn into publishable papers. So at the beginning of next year, there'll be what looks like a burst of product. but it's actually just paying off from all the work that got done this year in cosmology, in quantum mechanics, of course, and I'm really finally trying to make good on the promise I made to myself to do more work, to think more carefully outside quantum mechanics and cosmology and general relativity and field theory, and in areas like statistical mechanics, complexity theory, philosophical issues of causation and things like that. This is something I've threatened to work on. I have opinions about it. I've written about it a lot. I have one paper with Scott Aronson on the growth of complexity, but I haven't really dived into it very seriously. So as personally, my intellectual

goal for 2020 is to make that a lot more serious, to get some papers written about that, to make some contributions. It's always, this is the problem I have with my own research stuff. is that I always change my field a little bit. And mostly, you know, I have not been changing my field dramatically, right? You know, I started writing papers when I was a kid 20 years ago or 30 years ago, whatever it is, in the areas of field theory and gravity and cosmology. But within those areas, I moved around a little bit. These days, I'm doing the opposite of what everyone else does is that as I get older,

I move around more. So rather than sort of falling into a certain comfortable, zone where I just do kind of the same thing and try to be the world's expert at that. I'm trying to work on things that I've never worked on before, which anyone will tell you is a little bit tough. It's fun, right? It's exciting. You learn new things. I feel like a student a little bit, and that's always interesting and exciting, but also fraught with danger because you can you can say stupid things because you're not an expert. You know, I don't have an advisor telling me what is right and what's wrong about these. I do at least have friends who know a lot about these things,

So that's good. So I'm hoping, I think that the story of 2018 for me, if I had, you know, one thing that was the big news in my life that year was starting the podcast. The big news 2019 was writing the book, something deeply hidden. And I think the big news of 2020 is going to be some science results. That's my ambition. Anyway, that's my fingers crossed for exactly that. Ask me, again, a year from now when we do our 2020 holiday message. So the big thing that I did was write this book, something deeply hidden, quantum worlds and the emergence of space time.

So I thought that in the brief holiday message here, I would just dig in a little bit to the story behind that. I know that there's a lot of people out there who are asking me not only about quantum mechanics, but about how do you write a book? What is the process of that? How do you get it published? Should you write a book? Things like that. So maybe I can just take this opportunity to say some. things about that. You know, I think the book itself, again, was pretty good. You know,

no one who has ever written a book thinks it's perfect by any stretch of the imagination. For those of you who've read it, you know, the first third of the book, roughly, is an intro to quantum mechanics. The second third is a deep dive into issues around many worlds as an interpretation and also some of its alternatives. And then the third third, the final third, is speculations about the emergence of space time and the role of quantum gravity and how many worlds might help us with that. So probably that last third is the least satisfying,

but it was almost inevitably going to be the least satisfying because it's not finished, right? I mean, this is just the difference between writing about things we understand and things we don't. Even though not everyone agrees that many worlds is the correct theory, nor should they,

it's certainly true that we've thought about the theory quite a bit, and we have a lot of knowledge, and the basic idea of what the theory says is crystal clear. There's still a lot of questions to be answered about connecting many worlds to the real world, and so there's still open research there. People like myself and others are still doing, but it's easy to explain at the popular book level what the issues are, what we've said, what the theory says. Whereas for quantum gravity in immersion space time, the approach that I'm advocating where you take a quantum mechanics first approach, starting in Hilbert space, not quantizing some pre-existing classical theory and seeing what happens, this is especially new

and understudied approach that even though I can say what we want to do and I can give some hints as to how it would come about, it's much less settled and mature than the other areas. So I thought it was important to put that in the book to give and to let people know, to give them the impression that all this discussion about the foundations of quantum mechanics is not just musty old history. It's relevant to the physics that is going on right now. But at the same time, it's not quite as satisfying a conclusion, right? You know, it's like, stay tuned for more stuff going on.

And also, you know, even the stuff that is going on is kind of chaotic, and we're not sure what the basic ideas that will survive into the future are. So thanks to everyone who bought the book, there's still a couple days left, you want to buy it as a holiday present for the people on your list. But I certainly enjoyed writing, and I'm very glad that I wrote it. It did, for one brief shining moment, make an appearance on the New York Times bestseller list. So even though it was like literally the last book on the list and it was only there for one week,

nevertheless, we get to say forever that it was a New York Times best seller, it's a tough sell because, you know, a lot of science books are released in the spread. or the winter, and one reason for that is that you're not up against the heavy hitters, the Malcolm Gladwell's and Stephen Kings of the world, who all released their books in the fall because they want that sweet, sweet Christmas business. So my publisher thought that we could do this one in September, in the fall. I literally had my book come out the same day as Margaret Atwood's new book, the same week as Malcolm Gladwell's new book. So there's tough competition in the airports and for bookshelf space. But we got on that list at least that one time. So thanks to everyone who actually read the book.

So how do you write a book like that? I think that this is, I haven't seen a lot of really useful explications of this kind of thing. When you say how do you write a book like that, there's two parts to it. How do you, as an author, sit down and actually write it, and then how do you get it published? And I actually want to talk more about the publishing thing.

The writing thing, you know, everyone's different. And I know that that's an unsatisfying thing to say. but it's nevertheless true. I've said this a million times before, and I'll say it again, I have plenty of friends who are professional writers who hate writing books.

What they want to do is be reporters and journalists and write features and short articles and things like that, and then they can move on to something else that's a certain style, right?

Whereas I am happiest writing books, and so I'm really, really lucky that way when it comes to writing books because, you know, I feel like I need 100,000 words to really get my point across. to really say things in exactly the way I want to say them. And partly that's, you know, the kinds of books that I write are, in part, my own ideas,

not just reporting on ideas from other people. But in part it's because, you know, I do have that predisposition to be an explainer of things, to try to understand things really, really well, to spend time thinking about them before I write them. So when it comes to my style of writing, it's very much deliberative, and thinking ahead, right? You know, I think ahead. I have the idea for the book.

Almost always, I start with the title and work my way down, you know? Jennifer, my wife, who is a professional writer, has written just as many books as me. She'll start by writing chapter seven. And, you know, not know what the title of the book is until much later. And it's just a very different style,

and that style also works very well. But I got the title first. Then I'm going to get an outline just into chapters, and then I'm going to fill in what's in the individual chapters and sort of bullet point form. and then I will just tackle the chapters from chapter one to chapter the end, right?

And that's very, that's a certain style, and it works well for me. And what it means is that when I am writing chapter five, I at least know exactly what was in the first four chapters, because they're already written. And that's very, very helpful because I have an argument that builds cumulatively. And that makes it difficult when it comes to having the book be publicized. You know, a lot of people say we want to excerpt from your book. and my books are difficult to excerpt from exactly because chapter five kind of depends on chapter four, right? There's not a lot of individual little stories there.

We did it a little bit. We did it this book. I'll talk about that a little bit. But that's just how my books are so far. Anyway, I have ambitions to write all sorts of different books. I'm going to get in trouble because, you know, the publishing industry, once you've established that you can publish things, write things, sell things in a certain mode, they would like you to work in that mode over and over again. And so I'm going to be ornery about that and say, nope, I'm going to write different kinds of books over and over again. One, parenthetically, I've threatened to do this before. It's becoming more serious. I want to write a textbook for undergraduate physics majors on quantum mechanics. I think that that is something for which the time has come.

And every time I think about it, I get excited. So I think that's a sign I should just sit down and do it. That's going to be a multi-year project, probably. But it's a little bit tricky because in the one hand, I want to be new. I want to, you know, the whole reason to write a textbook on something where there's already 100 textbooks written is you have an angle, right? You're doing something a little bit different. My angle is we need to talk about entanglement and measurement and decoherence and all the things I talk about in my popular book. But we don't talk about them in most of our popular quantum mechanics textbooks. And these issues of entanglement and things like that are crucially important for modern quantum mechanics. So it's not just me. It's not just crazy people who care about the foundations of quantum mechanics. It's people who build quantum computers or work on quantum cryptography or quantum complexity or things like that. These are all fundamentally based in the world of entanglement and cubits and stuff like that.

So not covering that in undergraduate quantum books is terrible. On the other hand, you have to have the instructors for courses actually choose your book. So if you put a bunch of words in the table of contents to your book that the potential instructors don't recognize, they will never choose your book. So you have to write a book that keeps the old guard happy, but still introduces new ideas at the same time. I think that can be done in this case, and so that's something I want to do.

Anyway, very, very different process than writing a popular book. So what do you do when you write a popular book? Now, these days, you can, of course, just self-publish whatever you want. and I'm a huge believer in the benefit of self-publishing something, but not necessarily a book-length thing. You know, what I mean is write on a blog or a journal or for a magazine or something. There's nothing like writing to make yourself a better writer. That should be obvious.

Maybe it's not obvious, but I think it's absolutely true. You do have a style, but styles don't just get imprinted from birth. They develop over time through actually writing and seeing what works and seeing what doesn't work and so forth. Not to mention the fact that that's one way to get people to read what you write and to go, huh, I'd be interested in a book that that person should write. But writing an entire book and then self-publishing it is a trickier thing. You know, writing a book, if you're going to do at all a good job writing a book,

it's an enormous amount of work. And so when people want to sell books, when people want to be on the bestseller list, when people want others to read their books. That's not selfish or weird. That's just, you know, they think that they've done something that is worth reading, and they want as many people to read it as possible. I mean, of course, it's also nice to get people reading your book

and to get paid for it and all that stuff. But self-publishing these days is just a big old casino, right? You can hit it big. You can be huge in self-published books, but also most of them, you know, there's a long tale, right? Most self-published books, nobody reads at all. And it can be frustrating to try to get a publisher, a standard trade press to publish your book.

There's a lot more rejections than there are acceptances, but I absolutely think it's worth the effort. And if that's what you're going to do, I've been lucky enough to work with one publisher, Dutton, the entire time. In fact, one editor, Stephen Morrow, who's a great guy, and I'm very, very glad to be associated with him. So that's sort of the goal that you should have if you want to be a popular book writer. If you could possibly get a publisher and an editor that actually knows you and cares about you and sticks with you, then that's good.

You know, the downside is you're not sort of reselling your book as a competition between many different publishers every time you write one, but being at a place that you're comfortable with is probably worth it. So anyway, I keep trying to get to the following point. most, most, most important thing you need, if you want to write a popular book is you need an agent. You need someone who is the intermediary between you and the actual publishers. And as soon as you say this, a lot of people like, you know, their shoulders droop and they become sad because that sounds like an extra layer of work and they just want to get their stuff out there and they don't want to worry about all this business and crap. But it's true. The agent is enormously important here. The

agent is the one who makes your book a reality. So you shouldn't discount their importance. And, you know, there's a lot of reasons why this is true. The publishing houses won't even listen to you. Like the grown-up publishing houses, the Simon Instusters and penguins and random houses of the world, don't want to hear. There's no pile of unsolicited manuscripts sitting in the offices of publishing houses. Publishing houses only talk to to agents. Now, the exception there is university presses, right? Princeton University Press, Cambridge University Press, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, all these places have their own presses. They publish books. And there it's a different model. They don't only publish technical books

or textbooks. Many of these presses will publish popular-level books, trade books, as they're called in the trade, right? They don't want to say popular level. So trade books. And you can do that without an agent. They will actually talk to you, right? They will actually take a proposal from you and look at it and read it. But the whole model, as I understand it, because I've never actually done that, except for my textbook, which is yet another model, but the whole model there is very different. They will sort of offer you royalties on the book. So you will write a book, they will publish it, and then they will give you a certain percentage of every book they sell. Whereas a trade publisher will give you an advance. They'll give you a pile of money, and then they will count how many

books you sell and there'll be sort of virtual royalties. So you'll sell a number of books and they will count how much your royalties would have been for that book, for that many copies. And then once you get to a certain point where the amount that you would have gotten equals your advance, then they actually start adding more money into your pockets when you get more than your advance. Now, in fact, here's a secret. That almost never happens, or at least that rarely happens. Most books do not earn back their The publishers know this. This is all priced into the system. And this is why getting advance is a big deal. And advance is a big deal because the publishers have a vested interest in selling enough books to make the money back from the advance that they gave you. Okay. If you want to know how big in advance is, that's an impossible question to answer. You're like, as a regular first time author, it will be a five-figure advance, is my guess, right? So that's a That's just a coy way of saying between $10,000 and $99,99, that's my guess. But again, you know, if you become famous for something, it could be bigger than that, right?

So that's, there's, it's not a very rational, algorithmic, public, transparent business in any way. It's very hard to find out how much other people get for their books or how much money people, the, the, the whole industry is making or what the best way making money is or any of that. The lesson, though, is the point of me going into these details is, you want as big of an advance as you possibly can. Even if you're just a wonderfully selfless person who doesn't care about making money at all and is only doing it because your ideas and your thoughts and your words are so important, you want as many people as possible to listen and to read them, you still want a big advance because it's the big advances that incentivize the publishing houses to sell your book. And now the footnote there is that the publishing houses aren't necessarily good at selling your book. And again, this is why I say that it's a kind of irrational, not very algorithmic business, because we think of Hollywood movies as crapshoots, right? We think, you know, there's a big budget movie, maybe it makes money, maybe it doesn't.

But I actually looked at this. Mark Wise, who is one of my colleagues at Caltech, he and I and a graduate student actually sat down to look at this. We were thinking of writing a paper about it. We never quite got around to it. But do Hollywood movies make money? And is there a way, you know, if you want to make money making Hollywood movies, should you make big blockbusters, should make $100 million movie, or you should make tiny movies?

Should you make $1 million movies or $10 million movies if you have $100 million to spend? And the answer was, it doesn't matter. The answer was that the current arrangement seems completely rational, completely sensible and efficient from an economic point of view for Hollywood movies. The amount you make per dollar you spend on making a movie is about the same, at least it was when we did this five or ten years ago, for $100 million movies as it is for $1 million movies. Now, the

variance is much bigger for the tiny movies. A tiny movie, you spend a million dollars making a movie. You might make $0, you might make $100 million and profit back. But you also are making a lot more of them, right? So you might think, well, maybe if you make one big movie, you make more money, but the risk is bigger because you're only making one. And, you know, so we studied that as well, and the answer is no. The risk is not that much bigger. Not only do bigger budget movies make more money, but they do so more predictably than the small budget movies.

The small budget movies make up for that by you can do a lot of them, and hopefully you hit the lottery with one of them. And so the theory that we came up with for why this is true is that a lot of what makes people go see a movie is the marketing. Hollywood studios, especially the big ones, can actually pretty well know how many people are going to go see their movie ahead of time and they will market it appropriately. So roughly speaking, it's not that much of a crapshoot. There's always very famous celebrated bombs or success stories, but roughly speaking, they know. what they're doing and they know what they're going to, how much money they're going to make doing it. I don't think the publishing industry is that way. They often seem surprised at books either doing well or not doing well and so forth. So by all means, try to get the biggest advance as you can.

And that means getting an agent. So how do you get an agent? The agents, unlike the publishing houses, they actually want you to solicit them, right? That's why they're there. They're there to be the intermediaries between you and the publishing houses. So they will listen to your pitches. For a popular-level non-fiction book, they do not want to see a whole book. A lot of people, especially academics, they don't want other people touching their stuff. So they want to write the whole book first and then just plop it on the desk of somebody and say, here, publish this. So no one in the industry, in the publishing industry, actually wants to work that way. They want to see a proposal. and the proposal will be, you know, a few pages of, here's what my book is.

It will mention what the other books are that compete with it while trying to make the case that is nevertheless unique and special. It will say, you know, how many pages it will be, all that crap. And also the proposal might be an outline of the book. It might even be sample chapters. But it won't be the whole book. And the reason why is because the agents and the publishers and the editors who work at the publishing houses think that they have an idea of what, what makes a good book, and that idea might not be quite the same as yours.

So in this case, it's kind of like a little baby Hollywood. I always use Hollywood as my analogies because I live in L.A. and my friends work in Hollywood. But in real Hollywood, you know, directors and screenwriters have, you know, it's very hard to even pinpoint where their power is because there's so many other fingers stirring the pot. Studio executives and producers and financiers and so forth and special effects teams and makeup artists and whatever. for writing a book, there's a little bit of that. You're not alone. Not only are you writing it, but you have an agent, you have an editor, and the editor has other people at their publishing house,

the marketing department, etc. There's a team that cares about your book. So the agents don't actually want to see a finished manuscript. They want to see a proposal, a well-fleshed-out proposal that shows that you can write and that you have a good idea, and then that they will try to work with you to make it a sellable proposal. So cards on the table time here. I went to the Internet and found all this out and knew about it, you know, what was it 10 years ago or more by now?

And I wanted to write a book, so in the early 2000s. And at the time, I figured, you know, what is the most important thing that I know something about that is really interesting scientifically? And the answer I came up with was dark energy and the accelerating universe, right? So if we're thinking circa 2005, that was certainly a big deal. The acceleration of the universe had only been discovered in 1998. And there hadn't been a really good book written about it. There have been some books that mentioned it, but not really central, very good explanations for what was going on. So I thought that was the perfect thing.

So I wrote up a proposal, and I sent it around to, I don't know, a dozen different agents. And every single one rejected me. There you go. if that makes you feel any better. And roughly speaking, I probably repressed a lot of what they actually said, but the basic idea was, yeah, this is kind of boring. I don't really see what the excitement here is. You know, they knew that dark energy or the accelerating universe was exciting,

but even though there hadn't been a lot of very popular books about it, it had been in the news so much that it was hard for them to quite perceive what was going to be new and interesting about my book. So eventually I talked to Ketinkamatsin, at the Brockman Agency, who is my current agent, and she said, you know, maybe this isn't the right topic. Like, what are you actually passionate about right now? Forget about trying to guess what the rest of the world needs or wants.

What do you care about? And so I said, well, you know, I just wrote this paper on the Arrow of Time that I think is really, really interesting. And I think that's an important issue that people should care about, both cosmologists with PhDs and people on the street. And so she said, that sounds interesting to me. me, why don't you write a proposal about that? And so I said, okay, you know, I didn't take much convincing because I did think it was interesting. And that's how my first trade book, from eternity

to here, got written. And I'm sure every public, every agent does it differently. The way that mine does it is, you know, there's a lot of whipping into shape of the proposal. So you want to make it clear that you can write again, but you want to make it clear that you're speaking, a language that people can understand and then you're talking about issues that people care about, right? You know, a lot of people, and I notice that's even when it comes to writing science papers, people like want to write something. And I ask, if someone else wrote that, would you read it? And they say, well, I don't know, maybe not. So why in the world would you spend time writing it and hope that other people read it if you wouldn't read it yourself?

So the importance of making it clear that this is somehow not just true stuff that you're writing into your book, but interesting and maybe even vitally important for people to read about is very, very important. So there's a period of time where you're just honing the proposal and trying to make it as good as possible. And during that time, your agent might, you know, spread the word, right? This is where the agents actually earn their keep. You know, being an agent is, it's a weird thing. And if you're already a successful author, you will, you can become resentful of your agent because you're like, they're making, you know, 15% of what I make.

And they're doing way less than 15% of my work. But the point is that without them, you wouldn't be making what you make. You wouldn't be making anywhere near the advances that you are once you're a successful author without a really good agent. So the agent, if they accept you, oh, by the way, how do you find an agent? Well, you look on the internet and you just, you just, type in literary agent and look people up. It's, again, a crapshoot.

Some people are accepting new clients. Some people are not. You never know. It's kind of like applying for jobs or applying to grad schools. You just got to keep trying and you have to get used to rejection. And maybe eventually you hit on the right person. Again, the relationship you have with your agent is very, very important because you want to have a vision.

You don't need to like be buddies with them necessarily, but your vision for what your work is going to be better match. your agents, right? If you want to write a serious scholarly tome and they want you to write a weight loss guide, then you're not going to be happy. But probably they wouldn't take you in the first place anyway. So yeah, look online, just Google literary agents. There are lists. You know, they don't want to be hiding from you. They want you to propose to them. So they shouldn't be hard to find. The other thing to do, if you think that, well, I want an agent of a certain kind who really understands me, the other thing to do is to look at other books that in some way resemble your book that were recent books and turn to the acknowledgments where everyone

always thanks their agent. So you can find out who people's agents actually are pretty easily and then just Google them individually. But again, everyone's need for an agent is different. So my agent shouldn't be your agent, shouldn't be somebody else's agent. You need someone who can work with you successfully. So then how do they sell the book? Well, they're going to whisper into the ear of the publishers, right? They're going to say, well, I don't have the, the proposal ready yet, but I have this author who has a really exciting new idea. So even before your proposal is finished, they might hook you up with conversations with publishers, with editors, whether the publishers and editors, even though they don't want to look at your manuscripts

other than through an agent, they do know that there are authors out there. You know, publishers and editors will often knock on doors and say, hey, you should write a book. And then when the person says, okay, I'll write a book. The publisher and editors will say, now, go get an agent, and then they'll talk to me about your book. So the agent that you have will try to make people interested in your book even before the idea for the book is really fully fleshed out. And then once it is, once that proposal is out, then the proposal gets sent out and different agencies do it differently. But, you know, the most straightforward thing is there's just an auction. So there's literally, you know, at 9 a.m. Eastern time on this day, we are going to start taking this big.

for this book. And, you know, just by email or by phone, they get bids saying, you know, we want to give you a $50,000 advance or, you know, we want to give you a $40,000 advance, but we guarantee there'll be a paperback and a hardback, right? So there's all these little variations on the theme, or we want to give you a three-book deal. Who knows what it will be? So the negotiations go on, and then they declare a winner. And you do have a say in that, right? You as the author, if you have a good agent, your agent will say, okay, I think these are the top two bids and Maybe you want to choose between them. Of course, you might not get a bit at all.

Like, let's be, I don't want to be unrealistic here. This is a tough gig. Getting a Pompey of the book published at all is something where, as I already illustrated, rejection is the name of the game, more often than not. So success is not necessarily quick or easy, but it can happen. So for the rest of the discussion, I'm going to assume that you've succeeded in that. So your agent has helped you write the proposal. they've spread it around, they've taken bids, you've chosen a publisher,

and then you can start talking about the nitty-gritty of like, what's the deadline, how many pages or how many words is it going to be? You know, everyone works in words here, right? Not in pages. So as a reader, you notice pages, but publishers notice the number of words. And in fact, like for my first book, from Eternity Here, which honestly now I know was too big, it was too bloated, I should have made it shorter, it doesn't look overly long if you look at it on the bookshelf, but if you open it up,

the font is kind of tiny, and the margins are kind of tiny. So they fit a lot of words into that number of pages. So a typical book, you know, my books are roughly 100,000 words. The big ones from eternity to here and the big picture were closer to 150. The other two were more like between 80 and 100. So that's a typical amount. I think, you know, my big books are pretty big. So an 80,000 or 100,000 word book is perfectly standard, I think, for a popular-level science book. And then you can start talking with your new publisher about what the title is going to be, what the deadline is, et cetera. So, again, publishers are very different, just like agents are very different.

So your agents, roughly speaking, their work is done now, right? They got you the contract. The one exception to that is that sometimes you and your publisher, roughly speaking, the publisher is the company and the editor, is the person at the company you're working with. Oh, I forgot something. Sorry, I got to go back. When your proposal goes out there into the world

and you want different publishers to bid on it, it really is a publisher that is bidding on it. It's a company that is bidding on it. So I skipped a step because I said you might meet or chat with individual editors, but then they need to go back to the publisher where they work and convince their buddies there at the corporation that you are worth spending money on,

that you are worth joining their author list. So in some sense, your personal editor, the person is going to be editing your book, is actually an advocate for you within that company. And so what that means, among other things, is that you have to not only sell it to them, but you have to sell it to them in a way that they can sell it to the other people at the publishing house.

And so that's yet another little hurdle. You have to be able to jump over. Anyway, so once you're not. that is in motion, the only other time when your agent should step in is that if you have a difficulty, a disagreement with your editor. So, for example, the title, right, technically speaking, I'm not quite sure about the legal status here, but this is what people have told me. You know, once you sign that contract and you give them the book, they can put any title and any cover on it they want. Like, that's not really your right to pick your own book cover

book title. You can say I want the title to be this, but it's a negotiation. You want to work with your publisher to make sure that they get a title that everyone is happy with. But I think that they have the ultimate power. So your agent can be your advocate in that negotiation. If your editor or your publisher is giving you a hard time, either about deadlines or style or title or book cover, anything like that, your agent's kind of like your lawyer and they will go in or your enforcer and say like, you know, especially if it's an agent which has other clients that this publishing house might want to keep happy, they will be on your side. But hopefully you don't have that. You know, with Stephen at Dutton, my own editor, he's very, very good. He has his ideas. You know, he's not a

doorman. He said, oh, I think this should be a good title and so forth. And unlike many modern editors, he actually edits the book pretty carefully. So let's skip ahead to, you know, again, I said I was not going to talk that much about actually writing the book. That's a whole thing. Use Scrivener is my only advice. Scrivener is a wonderful little piece of software that helps you organize book length projects. But you will have a deadline. Hopefully you will get things written. Hopefully you will send individual chapters to your friends or even your enemies to read over and offer suggestions. Often they will catch things that you might not have caught. But eventually you're going to have a manuscript that is shaping up. So there is a deadline and that's when you hand up. And that's when you

in the final thing, but the final thing isn't anywhere near the final thing. This is the bad news, right? You have a deadline, and you're like, okay, now I get to go have a Pinie Calado on the beach or something like that. Your editor will read through your book. Hopefully you've gotten other comments, like I said, from friends and relatives, et cetera, and you've thought about, carefully about every word and every sentence. You've read it out loud, make sure that it sounds okay, and so forth. And then your editor will read it, and your editor will come back with comments. And again, this is very different from editor to editor. Some people take this responsibility very seriously and are very helpful.

Some people are a little slapdash about it. But in principle, they will come back and say, well, you know, the second half of chapter two is a little slow, maybe cut some things, maybe reorganize things. How about this new chapter title? There's another negotiation, and it might be at the level of them going through the manuscript page by page with individual notes in Microsoft Word.

Everything has to be in Microsoft Word, by the way. Sorry about that. You can use Scrivener to write the thing, but then you output everything into a word file before you give it to your publisher. That's just the industry. There's really nothing you can do about that. And then, you know, you're going to decide

what to do with those comments that you get. But the point is that you don't have a lot of free time. You don't have a lot of downtime. Even though you've been working very hard to write the book, you know, my graduate students know that, you know, a book takes between a year and two years to write, very roughly speaking. And for most of that,

it doesn't impact my day job much at all. I'm still going to the office being a scientist, et cetera. But for the two or three months before the deadline, it begins to affect it a lot. And those last two months, a month and a half, my grad students know not to expect me in the office at all. I mean, I'm happy to talk to them. I'm happy to, you know, move science forward.

But roughly speaking, my focuses on finishing that book. And then it doesn't end because your editor comes back with comments and you have to respond to those comments. They might have another round of comments or they might not. And then it gets sent to a copy editor, right? You might think that there should be a step in there where there's a fact checker, but there are no fact checkers for nonfiction books. Articles that appear in magazines are way more fact-checked than books are.

Roughly speaking, you can say whatever you want in the book. No one's checking your facts. Your editor and your copy editor will check your grammar, and if they see something they think is factually wrong, they might note it, but it's not their job to find things that are factually wrong. It's certainly not their job to check that factual claims you make are actually true. So this is a weird thing. If as a reader, you're saying, well, I see this particular claim made in the New York Times or the New Yorker or the Atlantic, but I see this other claim being made in this book, weirdly, the magazine articles are more reliable than the books are.

You can really say whatever you want in the book. And this is why, there's always stories about publishing houses being embarrassed by having to recall books by authors that said things that turn out to be either untrue or libelous or stuff like that. So the overwhelming majority, the responsibility for making sure that your book is factually correct is yours. It's not your publishers. Your publisher will send it to a copy editor to try to get the grammar right. And different houses have their different styles. my publisher has a weird rule where like after colon's they recapitalize the letter

sometimes. I don't know why that happens, but I don't fight it. You know, at this point you're exhausted, and there's only so much fighting you can do. So the copy editor goes through it, you get to reread it again. Hopefully, and at this point, you're not supposed to be making major changes. You're not supposed to get the copy edited manuscript back and say, oh, I want to delete chapter 8. That would kind of be a disaster, but you could do it. And then after the copyated manuscript is okay, it goes to the typesetter, right? And they make it look pretty.

They make sure that, you know, the chapters are laid out well. And then you get to read it and correct it one more time. You get the page proofs for your book. And if you, you know, you can catch small mistakes. If there's a sentence that is wrong, you can fix it. If there's a number that is wrong, you can fix it. But there's certainly no large scale moving around of chapters or even paragraphs, really, at that stage.

And by the way, if you have figures in your book, here's the bad news. You are responsible for those too. Like really, it's mostly your job. This is a weird thing. I think many people don't realize about writing books is how much of the responsibility for what actually appears in the book

is totally the job of the author. So for figures, either you make the figures yourself or you get them, which means either you pay someone to make good scientific illustrations, which can be very good, or you get public domain images,

or you get images that have licenses on them and you get and pay for the licenses. And that can be incredibly hard. You know, I've tried to do it. I've done it a couple times. But, you know, for the particle at the end of the universe, almost everything I did either I drew myself or was public domain, there was one picture of Glashow, Weinberg, and Salam that is like a getty image that I had to pay $1,000 just to get the license to use that thing. And it wasn't that important, but, you know, you need the picture of the people who invented

the Electro Week theory in your book about the Higgs boson, so you pay for that. So yeah, the figures, the footnotes, all of that stuff is your responsibility to get right. And you'll finally see sort of where it is when you actually see those page proofs. So for the most recent book on quantum mechanics, you know, Hugh Everett plays a small role in the book. And there's this one picture of Hugh Everett that you always see, one photograph of him. It looks kind of, you know, conservative and repressed and nerdy, but it's the one public domain image that is out there. And, in fact, Everett was not in any way conservative or repressed or nerdy. He lived kind of a libertine lifestyle, and he drank and smoked and died young in the whole bit.

And so we found another photograph of him that was much more representative. He's sort of leaning back in his chair with his button untied and, you know, martini on the desk next to him. And we couldn't get the rights for it. Like they wanted to give us the rights for it, but figuring out who exactly had the rights was something we did not get done in time. So we have the boring image in our book. So I could have gotten the right image

if I had started earlier on that process, but this is just one of those things when you're writing a book that is just such, you know, doesn't seem important at the time. You want to get it right when you're explaining how the wave function branches and decoherence,

not worry about rights for that particular image. But there you go. And then finally, okay, It's been proofread and copy edited and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And your work, you're beginning to think your work is done. Like, what more could they want of you? You know, the book is ready to be published. But in fact, it's still a long way from being published.

You know, just to get you the timeline right. I said writing a book can be between one and two years. But the time between when you hand it in and when it appears in print is roughly another year. They don't move quickly here. Like, they moved really, really quickly for the particle of the end of the universe. because the Higgs boson had been discovered. And that was discovered in July. And I started writing the book in January or February.

So I wrote the book in enormous rush. And then they really rushed to get it out. So we got it out by November, even though I handed it in in July. So that was like a world record, at least locally here, for getting a book out. More often, it will be a year between when you hand it in and when they edit it and then copy edited it and then proofread it and then typeset it. And then they're going to want you to do little bits of publicity. They're going to want you to go on podcasts, obviously, but also things like write excerpts or write articles. And again, this is a rich get richer kind of thing, right?

If you want to know how to write a book that gets on the bestseller list, first be a famous celebrity. That's really the way to do it. Working your way up just by writing books and nothing else is really, really, really hard. It's not impossible. people do it, but it's very, very hard. And I mean, I am not a famous celebrity, but I do get out there. I have the podcast. I have the social media and everything, and the publishers love that stuff. These days, people include their Twitter follower counts when they have, write their proposal for their book, right?

Or, you know, their number of YouTube subscribers, whatever it is. If you can convince the publisher that you already have a public profile, maybe it's an old-fashioned public profile where you've written for scientific American and Sky and Telescope a whole bunch of times. But whatever it is, at this point in that sort of lull between the proofreading stage and the book actually coming out, they're going to want you to pitch articles to magazines, to newspapers, whatever. And again, you might get rejected. You might say, I want to be on your podcast or whatever, and people say, no. I said no. Like, I feel very bad about this. You know, I want people to volunteer themselves to be on the podcast. Even better when they volunteer somebody else. I might have.

more willing to believe that it's a sincere suggestion when people says, oh, you need to have this other person on your podcast. But even if someone says, I would like to be on your podcast, I want to encourage that because I can discover people that I might not have found or even people who I know, I might not have thought that they would be the right podcast guest, and maybe that puts the idea into my mind. But the flip side of that is that they need to be okay with me saying no. I actually am way over-subscribed with people who want to be on the podcast. That's the weird thing. You might have thought that there is a worry when you start a podcast that you run out of guests. But, oh, guests are volunteering themselves all the time. And especially, you know,

because I'm a physicist, I get physicists volunteering themselves. And I've had to say no to some really, really good physicists, so I think would be good podcast guests. But I've had enough physics, you're enough certain kind of physics, quantum mechanics, etc. So I want to sprinkle the physicists within the broader things. That's my particular choice. Anyway, you will once again, as a book author, be faced with rejection because you're going to want to get yourself out there, and sometimes it will work, and sometimes it will not. And it's also very stressful because you want to time everything, right? Like, it's actually really good to get people to pre-order your book. And that sounds weird because, you know, it does,

if people buy your book on Amazon, let's say, before it comes out, before the release date, that does affect where you are on the Amazon.com bestseller list. So you can see, go to Amazon, there'll be a page for your book that appears like a few months before it actually is released, and it will have a number there, where you are on the bestseller ranking list. And it might be two millionth to start, and you work your way up to 200,000th, and you're very happy before the book has even come out. So those are pre-orders that are moving you up the bestseller list before the book comes out, and then they won't count as actual sales until that first week. So once the book actually gets sold, all the pre-orders are suddenly sales.

And what that means is you can, if all goes well, get a lot of sales that count towards your first week by getting a lot of pre-orders. And that is what can potentially get you noticed, maybe get you on the bestseller list if things are going really, really well, but also get you noticed by books You know, bookstores have to decide what books to put in the front of the store. A lot of that is kind of corrupt. A lot of deciding what books goes on the table in the front of the bookstore is because publishers pay them to do that. But not all of it. It depends on the bookstore.

Some bookstores really do have people working there who have their favorite books. And there's a lot of books that come out. So they need to notice books somehow also. So getting a lot of sales right away is an important thing. But you want all of that publicity that you're doing to sort of, magically appear that first week when your book comes out. So that can be tiring, even if they don't send you on a book tour. So the idea of sending people on book tours has become less popular lately. You know, the internet is a much better way. Like I've been to places, you know, I've been to

bookstores in the Midwest and gotten literally five people to listen to me to talk about my books. And what is the reason why I'm there? It doesn't seem very cost effective. Being on a radio show or being on a podcast is a much cheaper way to reach a lot of people. So I'm at a level where they will send me on a few talks that first week. So basically the first week when my book appears, I zoom around the country giving talks, again, to get as much buzz as can be delivered in that first week of selling books. But that's it, just at the one week. Then if you get invited to give popular talks or whatever, you can always plug your book. And very often, what you do is if you give a talk that is accessible to the public, you tell the person organizing the talk to

coordinate with a local bookstore, and the bookstore will bring copies of your book, and that's how you get to sign them at the end of the gig. So again, this is also very exhausting. I mean, I know there are people out there who are extroverts who like it, who, you know, being up there on stage is exhilarating, and then talking to people afterward really gets them fired up. That is not my personal experience. I get exhausted by doing this. I mean, I, I, you know, enjoy doing it and get exhausted by him. I think that's the right way of saying it. But then your book is out. And you have something, a physical artifact in your hand, right? Oh, there's also like getting blurbs and things like that. That's kind of a mess. And again, there's no algorithm for doing that. So who knows. There's a weird thing where the publishers think that the best blurbs necessarily come from other authors who have recently been on the bestseller list. I don't think that at all. I would much rather have a blurb from a who no one has ever heard of, but, you know, has some credentials, right, professor of this Nobel Prize winner or whatever, who says really good things about your book. You can tell when

you get the blurbs coming in, who read the book and who didn't? Not every blurb is created equal. I think it's much more important in my mind to have a blurb that is sincere and truly enthusiastic about your book than one that is by a person who was briefly on the New York Times bestseller list a few weeks ago. But anyway, now your book is out. You had the artifact in your hand. can give it to your mom and dad or your friends and you can give it away. You can have a book party at your house. Again, the publisher is not going to pay for a book party, but you can invite your friends over and have some wine or martinis or whatever is your favorite concoction, and you can sign books for them, and it's really a lot of fun. And then by the time it's two or three

weeks after the book is published, it's like a movie, right? It's like now it's gone. All that work and people bought it and now it's more or less disappeared. There's much less talk about the book a month after it appears, then there is the day it appears. It's kind of interesting. Of course, there still is talk about it. You know, I'm very lucky, very fortunate, that people have cared about my books a little bit and still do talk about them for better or for worse, right? You really have to bite your tongue when it comes to saying, just read my book. There's something where it's really, really hard once you put all that work into writing a book and explaining something as clearly as possible. And then someone, you know, in a public forum on

Twitter or whatever, asks you a question, which you've clearly answered in the book. You want to say, just read my book, but that's not a good thing to say. Because think about if someone said that to you. You're like, I just asked you a question. Let's give me the answer to the question. So, but after that, you're going to be a published author. You know, you know some of the lines that will appear in your obituary, author of this and this book. I mean, hopefully you'll be, or potentially, you'll be the author of 50 books. And then you can't predict which ones are going to be the most famous ones that will appear in your obituary. But the fact, that you've written them cannot be taken away from you.

And I think it's an amazing, you know, I really do enjoy it. I think you can probably get that impression, even though there's a lot of mess and craziness that goes along with the process. There is something about the job well done, about getting a book written that other people enjoy. And then, you know, 10 years later, you'll get an email from someone who said, you know, I read your book when I was a kid and I got inspired and now I'm about to enter my PhD

program to become a PhD physicist. And you realized that that little thing you did that you were sweating over where to put the semicolons in Scrivener or, you know, arguing with the proofreader about an M-Dash, it changed someone's life, right? You know, it really had an impact. It really inspired someone. Or you get hate mail. Who knows? I get hate mail too, but I'm very good at ignoring the hate mail. And I'm very good at ignoring the hate mail. touched by the genuine expressions of support and expressions that people really liked it. And you never know. You just never know. You sell books, and most of the people who buy and read your book, you will never meet. You will never talk to. You will never hear. They might not have

liked it. Some of them might have liked it. You might never know. So it's those little bits, those little tiny communications that give you a hint that maybe you really did have an impact. And I hope that something deeply hidden has an impact like that. It certainly has a point of view about quantum mechanics and the many worlds interpretation. Maybe 20 years from now when a bunch of people who are now in high school have read that book and suddenly these people are young assistant professors in physics departments, maybe there'll be a different attitude toward quantum mechanics, foundations of quantum mechanics, many worlds, even if we discover, you know, 10 years from now that many worlds doesn't work,

when you do something else, the idea that trying very hard to understand quantum mechanics is a respectable one that should be done in physics departments, I think maybe, you know, who knows? That would be the best possible outcome of me writing this book. But at the end, you know, you've written a book. They can't take that away from you. You know, they can't say you've wasted your time. You've put in some thought, put in the effort, done the best job you can, put some words on paper that now other people can share. And that's a really good feeling. Just as it is a really good feeling sharing these words over the air,

these words said out loud. So with that, happy holidays. Thank you so much for listening to Minescape. As you know, you can become a Patreon supporter. You know, sometimes people say, well, I have these questions. Patreon supporters get Ask Me Anything episodes once a month, except during the holiday break. But Patreon supporters get to ask me questions.

and I answer almost every question these days. I think that might, I don't know whether that's going to last. The AMA episodes are pushing three hours sometimes now, and it's pushing the limits of my ability to talk, if not my patience. But, you know, that's one way to express support. But again, as I've said, over and over again, who cares if you're a Patreon supporter? I love you anyway.

I love everyone who listens to the podcast. I think it's been a great adventure. We're going to go to some new places next year, and I'm excited for what's going to come. So look forward to it. Have a good holiday. Happy 2019 and happy beginning of 2020, and I'll see you next year. Deadline shift. Plans change. And sometimes you just need promo products fast. Turn to 4 Imprint. Four Imprint has hundreds of promotional items available with 24-hour turnaround. From custom apparel and drinkware to trade show gear, writing tools, and more.

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