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Sam, 1/ 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' - Which is to say that we all have faced, at some point in time, signifi
by adg001 5y ago
Sam,
1/ 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' - Which is to say that we all have faced, at some point in time, significant challenges... (I will refrain to tell you about my own ones). Having read your three part Ask HN, the first thing I want to tell you is 'please go straight to the point when posting here, or only a few folks will give proper consideration to what you write;
2/ Secondly, think strategically. You have the ambition to write a long form essay about self-help, psychology, sociology, and semiotics. This is excellent! At the same time though be sure to first position yourself as somebody that is not only knowledgeable – I am sure you are – but also recognised as being as such, and, therefore, authoritative and well known enough to publish in that field. Or, getting published will turn to be very hard, and, in the event you get your work out there, only a limited a few will pay attention, again;
3/ I am not knowledgeable enough to tell you if the proposed structuring makes sense. If it does for you, fine! However dozen of books get published in the more general self-help section every year. Be sure to contrast your proposed structure to what already exists, and to make it digestible by your target audience. Not many people are well versed in multiple discipline, be sure to guide your target audience gently in your interdisciplinary analyses.
Much love,
alfonso
- samh748 5y agoThank you so much alfonso for the thorough and honest feedback! > position yourself as somebody that is not only knowledgeable ... but also recognised as being as such Do you mind expanding on that? I think I get the point, but I don't understand concretely how it could be done.
- adg001 5y agoAbsolutely. There is no one fits all solution, because everything is context dependent a non trivial. Set aside (a) the contents to be published, the publication of a long form essay requires both (b) a readership and (c) marketing. There are multiple strategies that can provide you with the required readership and marketing; it is important to be inventive. But those strategies typically resemble one of the following. You either 1/ have gained in your career the kind of reputation in your field of choice (e.g., doing research and publishing papers) that allows you to approach a publishing house and reassure them that a large enough number of readers will be purchasing the book you have the ambition to write – in such case the marketing will result from the combination of your personal efforts, some marketing done by the publishing house, viral marketing, and the support of the network of distributors - or, 2/ you are such a powerhouse of marketing (I'll get back to this in a second), that you can publish essentially everything, even suboptimal contents. When it comes to (1) there are endless examples I could make; but let's consider for instance the excellent 'The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity' by David Graeber and David Wengrow – a work situated at the interstitial space that exist between comparative archaeology and anthropology. For an example of (2) think Tony Robbins and the various self-help blockbusters he published. He provides some massive training events and he leverages those events to market all kind of additional materials and contents to his clients. Now Tony Robbins offers a digested form the results in (applied) psychology obtained by academic scholars; it is more a vulgarisation work equipped with top marketing, then first hand research. I hope I provided you some entry points to dig further. All the best!
- samh748 5y agoThis is all really great stuff! Thank you so much for all the help! I really appreciate it :))