Writing a book

`0:13:01`

Um what we did was we took a collection of short essays and cut the short collection of short essays down by half Our contract was like you have to produce 40,000 words or something like Cuz the book has to be this thick, you know in the book world it's like it's thickness. It's not even it's just thickness which is the weirdest So they're going to put in drawings, yeah. Yeah, yeah so that's what we ended up doing but we we had we had these essays we're like you know what there's a really damn good half book here but this book as it is is too repetitive, it's not right. So we went and shaved it down by half and we handed it in and our editor was kind of horrified. Our editor was wonderful, he was incredible but he was we said 40,000 words, this is going to be too thin. We said just will you please read the book?

`0:13:46`

You know and and he read it and he said this is really good. I'm really proud of this. It's too short though. And we said okay, so is this just about length or is it about subject matter? It was just about length. Okay, so we're going to add pictures. We're going to tighten the margins. We're going to increase the font size ever so slightly. Like let's work within the system. Let's satisfy the demands and the requirements that you have but let's kind of add other things to the book and it turned out I think it really made the book better to have a picture with you with each book with each essay. Especially in business books you never ever see that. So it was kind of a happy accident to have all that in there but we were not happy with the 40,000 words. Even though I think the essays individually were good but the collection of them was the If they were all spread out on the table or they were all published over 10 years

`0:14:31`

individually I think we'd be happy with all the 40,000 words. But when you look at a book it's a collection. It's not a single essay, it's a collection of things and the collection didn't feel right. I often think of writers they sort of have their zone. It's sort of like sprinters where you know or like runners. There's some people who sprint, there's some people who run marathons, some people do 800 meters and I think that one thing that you've always done is you've never at least that I've caught tried to depart from the length that you do well. So even going back to Getting Real it's like 90 short pieces and that's the same thing in Rework and Remote and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. It's all that same sort of format and that format you've then developed with all blog posts that you've written and you haven't tried to say hey I'm going to