Off to the printer

Yesterday at 7 PM EST, Amazon “locked” Framed: A Villain’s Perspective on Social Media. That means we’re within 72 hours of the launch and Amazon has forbid further changes to the manuscript.

The last two weeks have been about as gratifying as any first-time author could hope. Friends showed support, I sold copies organically, and my tiny advertising budget converted into a few sales. Perhaps most of all, there’s some media interest—professionals have been responding positively to my cold emails.

Before I go any further, why are you reading this if you haven’t bought the book yet? It’s $0.99! If you preorder and send me proof I’ll send you a secret chapter that I was forced to remove.

There have been a few common questions over the last few weeks and now that there’s a little bit of a lull, I’d like to answer those questions.

Amazon doesn’t allow presales for paperbacks, only scheduled releases. Amazon can’t print books until the precise page count is known because adding or removing pages changes the required dimensions of the book cover.

Now is the time to admit that the manuscript submitted today isn’t the “final” manuscript. There is still a bit of feedback that I’m working through with my editor between now and Saturday. The difference in quality will be small, but I want to make sure the physical book is a perfect product. I can push updates to the ebook whenever I want. There’s no “update” button on a paperback. Anyway, the changes are being made to content that appears close to the end of the book. The speediest readers won’t reach those parts until after about eight hours of reading.

Don’t worry, there’s no alternative ending. The paperback should be released by the end of next week. I received proof copies on Sunday and they look great! (I can say that I’ve cut at least five pages off since I sent the proof file for printing.)

I dislike this question and I mocked it in chapter 2. People want to know, though, and as I find myself explaining my book to shopkeepers and other NPCs, I just don’t know. It’s a book that I wrote for my friends and I. It’s the “Big Tech” book I wish I could have read when I was in college looking for cool, smart, edgy books.

There’s not enough of a narrative to make for a bestseller. There’s not a coherent enough argument to make it a policy wedge. In the introduction, I declared, “Framed is a book that I am compelled to write.”

If I wanted to write a potential bestseller or to make the largest amount of money possible, I would have traversed a different path.

At this point, I could be lying about everything aside from the sales rank. Everyone saw that it was #1. But…is it 5/5? Does Framed get a gold star? Is it worth reading?

I don’t know! I know that my editor pointed out every logical fallacy and painful transition and I fixed them. A professional has been paid to review every single word. Many others (including some of you) have been “beta readers” for select chapters. However, some chapters are being published without having been read by anyone aside from my editor, me, and possibly my mom.

My pitch to people who “know” me but don’t know my writing is that it’s way better than anything you could ever imagine.

My pitch to people who are familiar with my writing is that the voice is identical to what you’re used to but the structure is refined and elevated.

My pitch to the layman is that Framed is as good or better than Zucked: Waking Up to The Facebook Catastrophe and how I narrate the story is as good or better than Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley.

The critiques will probably be that the book is seventy pages too long, a few essays are too technical or buried in references, I make awkward transitions and comparisons, and that I don’t spend any time criticizing the U.S. government.

Once the paperback is published, I doubt I’ll be pinging this list more than a few times per month. It depends where I take it from here. The goal isn’t to convert as many subscribers from my blog as possible, it’s just to get my debut book out there. For future projects, I’ll probably have different goals.

If I wake up on April 1st with a thousand subscribers, things will be different. As I consider ways to carve out meaningful income from writing, I’ll surely be using this mailing list. But, the promotion for the book goes much deeper than this, and my main focus now is optimizing my ad strategy while pitching media personalities. The former is expensive, the latter is discouraging and exhausting. Writing to all of you is free, and I enjoy it quite a lot.

I hope you enjoy the ebook enough to buy the paperback next week. Thanks for reading.