Housekeeping

And a few notes about this and that

The good news is that How Big Things Get Done has really taken off. Sales were strong from the outset but they took off after the book was shortlisted for the FT Best Business Book Award, which is the Oscars for business books. And just this week, Bent and I signed a deal for a Hungarian edition. By my count, that brings the total number of foreign language publication deals to nineteen.

The success of the book also spurred a surge in speaking demand, so in the past month I’ve been in St. Louis, Reykjavik, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. I’m writing this in a hotel in Bogota. Next week is Vancouver. The week after Miami. It’s a grind, but one must make hay while the sun shines.

All this hay-making leaves little time for much else. And as you may know, if you read these tedious updates, I’m also currently co-writing a new book. (It’s an urgently needed book, I believe, and I can’t wait for the big reveal. But that has to wait.)

This explains why my already modest output on PastPresentFuture, this little Substack newsletter, has slowed to a trickle.

It is also why I paused all payments on subscriptions. In fact, I did that two weeks ago. It has taken me that long to write this little note. Because I’m busy. Really busy.

I expect I will keep that pause in place for six months. Maybe longer. I will still deliver the occasional post when mood and opportunity combine, but how often I will post, at what length, I cannot say. If someone pays you to sing, I feel, you’d better sing. Or stop taking the coin.

That’s particularly important because my paid subscribers have been ridiculously generous. All my posts have long been free to all. Despite that, a bewilderingly large number of you took out paid subscriptions. I am grateful. And I must not abuse the privilege.

I’m a bit conflicted about Substack and subscriptions, to be honest. On the one hand, there are many writers who work full-time on this platform and they do serious work that many people may feel is worth the cost of a subscription. Good for them. Good for their subscribers. And good for Substack, which has created a superb platform and ecosystem.

On the other hand, I don’t get it.

The cost of even a few of the cheapest paid subscriptions is in the ballpark of the cost to subscribe to a good magazine or newspaper written, edited, and distributed by large teams of full-time professionals. You can get a digital-only subscription to The New Yorker for about US$200. The New Yorker publishes wonderfully researched, written, edited, and fact-checked essays weekly. And with a subscription, you also get access to the entire New Yorker archive, dating back to 1925, on an app which allows you to see the magazine exactly as it was published, ads and all, and flip through the pages just as if you were sitting down with pristine copies of the original. Old magazines are the closest we have to time machines. Lying on a hammock, perusing old issues of The New Yorker on an iPad, is my ideal vacation.

Maybe that’s not to your taste. So name any magazine or newspaper that is and compare the cost of a subscription to Substack subscriptions. You can get The New York Times for $4 a month for the first six months, and $25 a month thereafter. The story is the same for any other storied publication. So how on earth can a subscription to a writer or two or three on Substack be of equivalent value, however good those particular writers may be? Even if I were devoting every waking moment to writing here, I would suggest that anyone who subscribed to my work but not The New Yorker displays — shall we say — questionable judgement.

That is a statement against interest, as the lawyers say, so you can take it to the bank.

So what gives? I suspect that some portion of the paid subscriptions on Substack are not simple judgments about the relative value of the writing, meaning a reader who subscribes to Matt Yglesias (to use a prominent Substack example) but not The New York Times may not have concluded that the former delivers greater utility and enjoyment than the entire newsroom of The New York Times. Instead, it’s patronage. People like a writer, for whatever reason. They want to say thanks. They want to encourage him or her to keep going.

So as Billy Joel sang on Piano Man, they put bread in my jar.

Now, if I’m right about that, Substack’s design is flawed. That’s because Substack sets a minimum price — US$5 a month — that writers who accept paid subscriptions may not lower. For Scrooge McDuck, a handful of the cheapest Substack subscriptions may be nothing. But for most people, it is definitely something. And that something is a lot more than the tip you might stuff in the jar of the piano player. As noted above, you can get six months of The New York Times for that. Or — this is very much a statement in line with interest — you can buy several books that took years and the labour of dozens to publish. That isn’t, “hey, man, good song” money.

I really wish Substack had something like a Patreon option, where a reader can, on a whim, toss in a dollar bill or two. Or barring that, permit writers to lower the price of a paid subscription to a buck a month, with higher options for the Scrooge McDucks who want to do more to support the writer.

I’m sure there are business considerations I’m not aware of. Substack needs its cash flow. So does Stripe, the payment processor. But I have a sneaking suspicion that getting rid of that high minimum would actually result in many more readers contributing and, potentially, a net increase in support for writers. I know I would love to kick in a little to thank the many Substack writers I read and respect, but there’s no way I can do that for any but a select few when the cost is $60 a pop and up. My wife would kill me.

How about it, Substack? And readers, let me know what you think in the comments.

In the meantime, vaya con Dios.

Wait! Forgot something else.

I mentioned Reykjavik above. I’d never been there before but I full expected Iceland to be gobsmacking. Land of fire and ice, and all that. But still it astonished me, repeatedly, in many different ways. It’s an incredible country.

And even the flight back home was dazzling. Following is a photo I took with a thought I shared about technology that I shared a few weeks ago on LinkedIn.

The other day, I flew from Iceland back to Canada. The pilot said, “if you look to the right, you’ll see we’re about to fly over Greenland.” I sipped a gin and tonic while watching this gobsmacking landscape roll beneath me.

In Norse mythology, Thor travels the skies in a chariot pulled by the goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjostr. My chariot flew higher and faster. And it was far more comfortable.

Inurement is basic and essential human wiring. If exposed to something new, the new thing grabs and holds our attention; if we are exposed to that thing repeatedly, without harm, the hold that thing has on our attention slowly fades to the point where we pay no attention to it at all.

This is fundamental to our relationship with technology. The thought of wires streaming electricity within the home once alarmed and thrilled, but after sufficient exposure, electricity faded from consciousness, to the point where we only think of the electricity we use constantly — you’re using it now — on the rare occasions when it isn’t available. Technologies don’t cease to be wonders because they change; they cease to be wonders because we do.

To appreciate our blessings, it is essential, now and then, to stand back and recall the world before the technology — a world in which people imagined gods doing what we now do routinely. And much less comfortably.