Nobody ever met the same author twice

I have written forty-six books. If you have read one of them, you almost certainly don't know my name.

For ten years I thought that meant I hadn't written enough.

The books are real. I wrote them at night, mostly, after everything else was done. Children's books. Fiction. Political cartoons. Business guides. A long series working out a theory of light that I still believe in. Some of them are good. One or two I would still defend line by line.

The books were never the failure.

The failure was the plan I wrapped around them, and I ran that plan for ten years without ever checking it.

The plan was: write the next one.

That was all of it. If I published enough good work, someone would eventually find it. And until they did, the answer to a bad month was another book.

I'd like to defend that for a second, because I don't think it was stupid.

When you work alone, volume is the only thing you actually control. I couldn't make anyone buy a book. I could make sure there was another one finished by Christmas. And finishing something is a real feeling. It's countable. One more title. One more cover. One more thing in the world that wasn't there in October.

Ten years of that is a lot of evenings.

Seven strangers

Here's the part I never looked at.

I published under seven different names.

There's a box you type the author name into. It takes about four seconds. You don't feel like you're making a decision. You feel like you're filling in a form.

And every time, the reason was good. You don't put children's picture books and political cartoons under the same name. Everybody in publishing tells you that. Keep the genres clean. I thought I was being professional.

Seven times, over ten years, four seconds at a time.

I never once stood back and looked at the whole thing.

When I finally did — I sat down one day to add up a decade, which I'd recommend doing earlier than I did — the arithmetic took about a minute.

Forty-six books across seven pen names is not one body of work. It is seven strangers who each published a handful of books and then vanished.

Every reader I earned under one name was invisible to the next one. Somebody finishes a children's book of mine, likes it, goes looking for another — and finds four more by an author who then apparently stopped writing. The other forty-one were sitting right there, under names that meant nothing to them.

Nothing added up. Ten years, and nothing compounded.

Amazon needs one signal it can push. I gave it seven faint ones, and then spent years deciding the answer was to make the faint ones slightly more numerous.

I want to be careful here, because I can't prove the thing you'd expect me to prove.

I can't tell you the pen names are why the books didn't sell. I don't have that experiment. Plenty of books fail under one perfectly good name.

What I can tell you is smaller, and worse. Whatever readers I did earn had nowhere to collect. There was nobody for them to follow.

And look at the shape of it. Every one of those seven decisions was sensible on its own. Not one of them was wrong on the day I made it.

Seven sensible decisions added up to a system that made no sense.

I optimised every book and never designed the thing they all belonged to. Nobody was going to catch that for me, because from inside any one of those four-second choices, there is nothing to catch.

The number

46 books. 7 names.

Ten years. No real money.

That last part is doing a lot of work and I'm going to leave it doing it, because the exact figure isn't the point and I'd rather not dress it up.

Then it got worse, because I recognised it

Here's the part that cost me something to write.

Sitting there with that arithmetic in front of me, I recognised it. I'd been running the same failure somewhere else, in a completely different part of my life, for thirty-two years.

Twenty-three granted U.S. patents. Not one of them ever licensed.

Same plan. File it, and wait.

I used to check my email in a particular way. Anyone who has waited on something like that knows the way I mean.

Do good work. Put it somewhere technically public. Assume that being good is the same as being found.

It isn't. It never was.

Both were output with no mechanism by which anyone would ever find it. And both times, when nothing came, I did more of it — because more was the part I knew how to do, and because being busy is a very good way to avoid a question you can't answer.

Two domains. Two decades apiece. The same missing piece, filed in separate parts of my life so I never saw it was one mistake.

Which half was ordinary

I want to be exact about this, because I had it backwards for years.

Publishing forty-six books is not what everybody does. Neither is holding twenty-three patents with nobody's name on them but mine. The work was strange. The work was never the problem.

The output wasn't ordinary. The strategy around it was.

Write it and wait. File it and wait. That part I shared with everybody.

And the difficulty of the work is what fooled me. It took years. It was hard. It needed things most people can't do. So it felt like a plan. It wasn't a plan. It was just hard — and hard is not the same as different.

I mistook effort for strategy. From the inside they feel identical. Effort is exhausting, so it feels like it must be working.

What survived

The diagnosis, which took longer than the books did.

And one rule, which is the only reason you're reading this.

Everything I write now goes out under one name, on a fixed schedule, to people who asked for it.

That's the correction I'm testing.

Not the correction. The one I'm testing.

I'm three issues in. If I sat here and told you I'd solved distribution, I'd be doing the exact thing this newsletter exists to catch — taking an early result and calling it a finding, the way I did with a number that held to seven decimal places.

Ask me at Issue 26. I'll publish that number too, whichever way it goes.

It isn't clever, either. It took ten years and forty-six books to get to something somebody could have told me in a sentence.

One name, so the work piles up in one place instead of scattering. A fixed schedule, so it's a habit and not a surprise. And people who asked for it — because that's the whole difference between an audience and a warehouse.

This newsletter isn't something I started alongside that failure. It's the repair.

If you've been making a lot of something and wondering why nobody came, here's the question I didn't ask myself for ten years.

If someone likes one thing you made, what exactly is supposed to happen next?

If you can't answer that in one sentence, more is not going to help.