Are Books Worth Writing?
Quite a lot of my current fiction reading is on Glowfic, a web site for amateur fiction, most of it fanfic, works using backgrounds and characters drawn in part from other works. The average quality is pretty low but the best material is very good, comparable, in my judgement, to the best published fiction. I have suggested to one or two of my favorite Glowfic authors that they convert some of their best work to published books, commercially published if a publisher is interested, self published otherwise. They do not seem interested in the project, in part because it would take time and effort they would prefer to spend in other ways, in part, I think, because they like the moderate obscurity of writing for a limited audience consisting in part of fellow authors.
I have been myself making the same choice in a different context. The last book I wrote, Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, was published almost six years ago. Since then I have written almost 300 Substack posts, totaling (estimate) over 300,000 words, plus another hundred thousand or more on my old blog, written before I started my Substack. I have considered the possibility of turning them into one or more books but so far have not done it. Should I?
Legal Systems, my most recent book, has sold about five thousand copies. This Substack has about four thousand subscribers; my two most recent posts got about 3300 views each.1 It looks from those figures as though publishing a book might end up getting more people to read what I write than posting here.
Of course I could do both. Time spent turning posts into book chapters is time I am not spending producing or improving posts; the activities to some extent trade off against each other. But in a different sense they support each other; starting with a post, a thousand plus word essay, is easier than starting with a blank page. Converting a bunch of posts into a book is editing more than writing.
My previous nonfiction books did not start as blank pages either; I did not have a Substack fifty years ago but a good deal of my first book was based on earlier published essays2. Each of my later books, with one exception, was based on accumulated lecture notes for a class I had taught repeatedly. The exception, Hidden Order, was a rewrite of my Price Theory, converting a textbook into a book aimed at the intelligent layman interested in learning economics for fun.
My Objective
Having people read my writing is not an end but a means. My objective is to spread ideas. For that purpose a book might be better than posts because more structured. Parts of the book depend on other parts; someone reading the book has all of it. Someone reading a post might be able to find and read other posts it depends on — there are links to all of them on my page, sorted by topic — but it isn’t as easy. I make it easier by including links in one post to earlier ones, but that does not work for a post made later, after I came across relevant facts or additional ideas occurred to me.
Since the reader of one post on the subject may not have read earlier ones, the same idea sometimes gets explained in multiple posts. That is less necessary in a book, since someone who reads one chapter has probably read all the preceding chapters.
There is a real advantage to presenting a collection of related ideas in an organized fashion rather than as a collection of independent essays.
Possible Books
Topics on which I have enough posts to convert to at least a short book are:
Climate: 25 Posts
I do not have much to say about what changes in climate can be expected or their causes, beyond pointing out that much of the popular talk on the subject badly exaggerates the changes predicted by current climate science. My main topic is the effects of those changes. I argue that while some predictable effects are negative others are positive and that the size of both positive and negative effects is sufficiently uncertain that we do not know the size, or even the sign, of the net effect of climate change on humans. It might make us worse off, might make us better off, is unlikely, in my view, to make us enormously worse (or better) off. The changes that are occurring, after after all, are small relative to the variations in climate from one part of the inhabited world to another at present.
That is a heterodox opinion, as was my similar opinion about the effects of population growth fifty years ago. That leads to my secondary topic, the claim that the current climate orthodoxy is based on badly biased work and so not to be trusted. I offer as evidence an article in a top scientific journal, an elementary climate science textbook, and the much quoted (and misquoted) conclusion of a literature survey, each of which I believe I can show to be indefensibly bad, either dishonest or incompetent. That work that bad is treated as a respectable part of the field I take as evidence of a field whose conclusions can not be relied on.
Politics and Law 48 Posts
Some posts deal with current political issues, such as J.D. Vance’s attempt to reshape the Republican party and the conservative movement or my thoughts on Donald Trump, more with legal and political issues relevant to many times and places, often raised by and discussed in the context of recent controversies.
Economics: 33 Posts
My posts, and the book I might create from them, cover a wide variety of topics, some concepts such as utility, rationality and economic efficiency, some applications of economics both conventional (tariffs, tax burden, public choice theory) and less conventional (gifts and gift economies, property rights in space, household public good problems and how to solve them, the economics of vice and virtue). I spent much of my life teaching economics and writing about it, have posts discussing past colleagues and why economics is fun, also the relation between economics as I teach it (Marshallian) and other schools (Austrian) and other approaches to answering the same questions (evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics).
Libertarianism: 20 Posts
I have been active in the libertarian movement, as a writer and speaker, for most of my life; my first book was published more than fifty years ago and its third edition is still in print. Posts cover the history of the movement, philosophical problems such as justifying initial appropriation, divisions within the movement, and libertarian approaches to current issues such as immigration, income redistribution, and foreign policy. They are written primarily for libertarians but may be of interest to others as well.
Discovering Truth: 18 Posts
We have access to enormous amounts of information, much of it false. I discuss a variety of ways of filtering and analyzing it in an attempt to get at the truth, and their difficulties. Approaches range from believing what (purported) experts tell you to trying to work out answers yourself, at least approximate answers, from facts you believe to be reliable, with a variety of intermediate approaches. All have difficulties. The puzzle of how to discover truth is relevant to many of the other posts, most obviously those on climate.
Smaller collections of posts cover Covid (4 posts), Education (12), History (5), Household Matters (4), Love, Marriage, Sex and Evolution (16), Poetry and literature (20), Religion and Philosophy (14)
Book Options
I see three alternative approaches to converting this material to a book or books. One is to turn each of the larger collection into a very short book, perhaps twenty to thirty thousand words. A second is to combine two or three related collections into a somewhat longer book. The third is to put all of it, at least all that I think worth including, into a single book, with sections on the different topics. For the first two options, some posts in other categories might be relevant and worth including.
Readers are invited to offer opinions on whether any of these is worth doing.
Past posts, sorted by topic
A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing
I mirror my posts to FaceBook, X, and LinkedIn so get some additional views there, but I don’t know how many.
Largely the columns I wrote for The New Guard where I was the libertarian columnist on a conservative student magazine.
One of the big advantages of writing a book is that they're an excuse to go on podcasts and talk shows and stuff. You could write a minimum effort book that's just a collection of posts, but leverage that into a media tour that spreads your ideas farther than they would otherwise.
I would say definitely keep writing books. The main benefit would be to organize your posts into narrative and print them on paper, even if the narrative is just collecting your favorite posts of a certain type and ordering them as you feel is best. I suggest a few smaller books like Bryan Caplan is doing. For $10 I can read all of Bryan’s self-help themed posts. This exposed me to a dozen posts of his I had apparently missed over the years. It allows me to make notes and highlight my favorite parts. My kids might find such book one day and see my highlights. Books still hold prestige. They can be used in classrooms and book clubs. They can be given as gifts or loaned out. They give you a chance to put a pretty picture on the front. They will likely bring about interview opportunities and I hope an Econtalk episode.
In summary a book can make for very convenient and fast reading. Paper is still the best medium for reading in terms of beauty. It’s also hard to forget about a book that you own. Posts on the other hand are more easily forgotten. Yes, there is more to read now than ever before, but your job is to move your work to the top of a reader’s list of things to read next. A book will help move your ideas up a few significant increments on reading lists for thousands of people.
Can I make one more suggestion? I think that you should try for a book or two aimed at middle schoolers. It could be something like Animal Farm. Or it could be in the future; imagining a society with certain freedoms that don’t currently exist. When I ask people how they came to be libertarian the responses are often surprising to me. Many people have not read any of the books I’ve read and know nothing of the libertarians that I know. The most common entry into libertarianism seems to be Rand. We need to target younger readers.