Joanna Penn
host: Joanna Frances Penn
independent publishing, AI in creative writing, decentralization in publishing, personal growth through writing
listen: (download)
Transcript:
Joanna
Welcome to the show, Derek.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Joanna.
Joanna
I’m excited to talk to you today. My first question is, you are a multi passionate creator and your bio says “I’m ambitiously focused on creating”. What part does writing play in your creative life and your business these days?
Derek Sivers
I feel like I should preface this to say that your listeners should know that I’m not doing any of this for the money. My current cost of living is paid for by things I’ve done in the past. All of the writing and everything I’m doing in relation to everything we’re talking about today is not for the money. Filter my answers accordingly. If you’re listening to this, wondering how to get rich or something, I will not be giving a formula for how to get rich because I’m doing this for other reasons. What part does it play in my life? Mostly I’m trying to better understand the world. I want to figure out life. I want to be smarter, I want to learn. I want insights into life. I want to work and live more effectively. When I learn or invent an insight that feels useful to other people, not just me, then I feel like I should share it with the world for a few reasons. One is generosity. It would be easier to just write my thoughts in my journal and keep it to myself. Making it public can help other people, so it’s for the greater good. It also helps retention.
Derek Sivers
I found that writing and editing your thoughts for public consumption makes you hone and clarify every idea. Then whatever makes an idea easy to spread also makes it easier to remember. The easier it is to remember, the more likely you are to internalize it and let it guide your daily actions out in the real world. I write for my own retention and I post things publicly because I find that people’s feedback can improve my thinking. When I post an idea, I say idea because I try to post things in little byte sizes so that we can shine a spotlight on each idea. I’d be happy to talk more about that later. I try to post one idea at a time. When I post an idea, people often reply with improvements. They sometimes will disagree and show me where I’m wrong or they agree, but point out an angle that I hadn’t considered. That improves my own thinking of my own ideas. Sometimes I feel like an idea is finished and I post it to the world and people go and I realize it’s not finished. I also write publicly as an ego boost.
Joanna
No. Absolutely.
Derek Sivers
We say ego boost like it’s a bad thing. Guess what? It’s fuel. That motivation helps push you through the harder times. I don’t mean hard times, like laying in a gutter drunk. I mean harder times like struggling to squeeze out an idea that’s half formed. It takes work, right? The ego boost of doing it when it’s done, people going, “oh my God, you’re amazing”. You write better if you think that many people are going to read this. Posting publicly helps you push through some of the harder aspects of thinking things through. Whether that’s creatively or even diligent thinking through a life situation. Lastly, I think writing is networking for introverts. Did I get that quote from you? I feel like that’s a very Joanna thing to say.
Joanna
I think lots of people might have said that, but that sounds exactly right.
Derek Sivers
Writing is networking for introverts. Publishing your ideas instead of keeping them to yourself can help you meet other smart, thoughtful people, or at least people interested in the same things you are. Ideally you earn respect from the people you respect. I’d rather earn the respect of ten people I admire than a million people I don’t. When I’m posting things publicly or my public writing, I’m really doing it for the people I admire, even if they don’t read it. That’s my target audience. I want the people I admire to admire what I’ve written. I used to feel bad about that, then I realized that’s that’s a worthy thing, earning the respect of people you admire.
Joanna
Pulls you on
Derek Sivers
Exactly. It’s a worthy drive, worthy the goal. For all of these reasons, I’ve just pretty recently decided to take my writing more seriously. You and I met in Oxford two years ago was it?
Joanna
It must have been 2019 pre-pandemic.
Derek Sivers
You and I met at Oxford two and a half years ago. I think even at that time I wasn’t too sure. I was still kind of one foot in, one foot out. I was calling myself an entrepreneur, programmer, sometimes I would write and share my thoughts. I was considering writing to be on the side. It was on the periphery of what I was really doing. Since then, I’ve just given it more thought. For the reasons I just said, I’ve realized that it’s the most worthy pursuit for me. I’ve decided to take it more seriously, which really just means giving it more time. Turning off other things and just doing this for a few hours each day.
Joanna
I love that, it’s so funny because of course you had these previous careers, which I will have talked about before the introduction. I came to you through your writing, through Seth Godin, through Anything You Want. That’s how I came to you, so as you said, sort of connecting with introverts, I connected with your mind through your writing. That’s almost how I think about it, it’s almost telepathy. It’s like this is my thoughts and it connects with you through time, through space. We’re never going to talk about all the things that we write about, but it’s magic. I love that you mentioned ego too, because writing in your journal is one thing. We publish because we want other people to read our work and publishing is a fascinating thing. You’ve got a really interesting publishing history because you’ve worked with publishing companies then you’ve got the rights back for Anything You Want, and you are doing some really interesting stuff. What are your thoughts on publishing these days, having tried different methods, although I think you’re pretty much unemployable by anyone else probably shapes your your decisions.
Derek Sivers
I often think in terms of what’s best for the world, for the greater good. I think decentralization is good. Amazon should not be the only bookstore. Decentralization will always be an uphill battle. To me, that’s a battle that is worth fighting for me. For some people they don’t feel it’s worth fighting, for me, I’m willing to fight the decentralization battle. If you’re an author that has fans, you should send your fans anywhere but Amazon. Whether that’s a small independent bookshop or selling directly. You can help be the change, to help show people that there are other ways to buy books besides Amazon and Audible. In the late nineties there was this revolution in the music business when musicians were enabled to sell and communicate directly with their fans. In the late nineties, that was a revolution that musicians had been screwed over by the music industry for decades that it was so empowering and liberating to bypass the music industry and go directly from musician to fan. It unleashed this huge revolution style energy. Here we are 25 years later, and the independent spirit seems to be gone, especially in the book world to me. Any talk of how to be an independent author seems to focus mostly on how to kiss Amazon’s ass. That saddens me.
Derek Sivers
I don’t take part in that. I defiantly like I said, I’m willing to fight the uphill battle of decentralization. I think it’s a smarter long term strategy to deal directly with your 1000 true fans instead of blindly selling more units through some platform that captures most of the profits and doesn’t let you communicate directly with your customers. When I used to run CD Baby, I had some clients that were formerly rock stars and they told me that it meant more to them emotionally to sell 1000 albums through me. A thousand CD’s sold through me and get the direct contact information for their fans because that’s how my old company CD Baby used to work. Every time you would sell something through CD Baby, I’d say, “hey, here’s here’s who bought your CD today”. Here’s Joanna Penn in Bath and here’s her email address. For each person, I’d say, here’s their name and email address. The fans knew this, too. They knew that when you bought through CD baby, that I’m going to ship you the CD’s or give you the MP3s, I’m going to put you directly in contact with the musician, and the musicians would have the direct contact information for all these fans. tThese former rock stars would tell me that it was emotionally more rewarding to be in touch with 1000 people than it was to get some kind of sales report saying that they had sold a million copies.
Derek Sivers
I really took that to heart. I really will just do everything to have direct contact with my fans or readers. So all that being said, my first book was written as a favor to Seth Godin. I never intended to write a book. People had been asking me for years, “hey, you should write a book”. I was like, “no interest, I don’t want to”. Then Seth Godin literally called me, my phone rang one day and it said, “Seth Godin”. I picked up, I said, “hi, Seth”. He said, “hi Derek, I’m starting a new publishing company and I want you to be my first author”. I said, “okay”. What can you say to that but okay. Sure okay Seth, whatever you say. I wrote him a book literally in ten days. He published it a week later. That was my first book, Anything You Want. He published that on his company in 2011 called Domino. Four years later, he sold that publishing company to Penguin. That’s why my first book is on Penguin. I like Penguin, they’re cool company, they’ve got a great history and my main contact at Penguin is really sweet. We went out to dinner once, she’s wonderful. I like all of the people I’ve encountered there and they paid me fairly and always well. They were even really happy with the sales of my first book and they said they’d be happy to publish any of my future books.
Derek Sivers
I really wanted to sell directly to my fans and it felt weird that I wasn’t allowed to do that. In my gut, I didn’t like not owning the publishing rights to my own words. I decided that I would self publish all of my future books. Then that felt weird that it’s like all my books for all future time will be self published except that one. I contacted Penguin and bought back the rights or I’m just in the process right now. They say it’s going to be done in ten days, buying back the rights to my first book so that I will have the right to sell absolutely all of my books directly. The reason was I really wanted to do some fun things that regular sellers can’t do. Things that Amazon can’t do. I really like to personalize my ebooks and audio books. I like to sell at a weird price. I have this pricing strategy that I like, even though it’s weird. Which is $19 for the first book, but $4 for each additional book after that.
Joanna
It’s like a loyalty thing.
Derek Sivers
Yeah. I like that encourages people to buy ten or 20 or 30 copies. I like selling my digital files for a flat $15. For 15 bucks you get access to all digital formats for all future time, even formats that haven’t been invented yet. You got them. You pay me 15 bucks now, all digital files are yours forever. I like to sell autographed books, which is an idea I got from you. I had never considered that, but sitting at a table on a sidewalk in Oxford, you said I should autograph them. I think I sneered. I thought that sounded horrible. Then I thought about it and thought, “okay, Jo is right, I should do that”. I like to say yes to translations. I like to own the translations, but mostly the decision comes from thinking very long term. I want the rights to adapt my past books to new technologies to do whatever I want with them for all future time. That to me, at its core was why self publishing was just mandatory.
Joanna
I think we both prefer the term independent publishing because again, you said before maybe the independent spirit is dying a bit, I don’t think it is. This show is definitely long term thinking, it is wide and all of these things. I feel like those of us who really care about what independence actually means, what you’re talking about is is so true. What I would say though, is that you are a programmer and obviously I bought your books and I log on into your website and there’s all the books I’ve bought. You’ve basically hand coded this whole thing and that most authors are not like you. We’re not programmers. There are tools that are emerging. I use pay help for ebooks and there are other things like Shopify that can be used. Any tips for selling direct? If people are not programmers, just any tips really for people who might want to spin into this as well as selling on the other stores?
Derek Sivers
Let’s just do one more reason why I think it’s so important to try to capture every penny you can from the sale of your book. I’m not a very money focused person, I’m not saying this as like in any kind of greedy way, I think fundamentally, morally, if you’re in direct contact with a fan who already wants to buy your book and you are already in direct contact with this person. Then it seems fundamentally wrong to send them to Amazon to take a huge cut of that sale for somebody who’s already your fan. I have a reason for this is because I priced my digital books at $15, like I said. I’ve made a little over half a million dollars selling them directly to fans on my site. If I would have sold those same books through Amazon. Instead of $500,000, it would have been $100,000. Now I give all of my profits to charity, the charity that I use is called the Against Malaria Foundation. It costs them about $2,000 to literally save a life. They have found that for every $2,000 donated, one person will not die of malaria that would have died if they were not doing what they do. That means each $2,000 you make can save someone’s life. Since I donate all my profits, that means selling directly through my site instead of selling through Amazon means that 200 people will live instead of die because I sold my books.
Joanna
That’s a good reason.
Derek Sivers
Whenever I would consider that it would be so much easier to do KDP and be done with it. I think, “come on, even if I’m giving it all away, $2,000 is a life that somebody who dies if you don’t donate $2,000”. That in itself is enough of a reason to ask your fans to buy from you directly instead of on Amazon to even tell them that’s why if you’re going to be donating your profits, just say please.
Joanna
I think that’s amazing. For most of us, that $2,000 might pay the mortgage or our kids school. What we’re saying is making the money yourself is completely valid. However you choose to spend that money and you’ve chosen that direction, which is amazing. We’re not saying that you have to donate your royalties.
Derek Sivers
I think maybe I’m being a little extra defensive because I know how it can sound. I’ve heard people just sound really greedy when they’re like, “why should I share?”. There’s this core idea of why should I? It’s kind of almost like those people that don’t want to pay any taxes. Have you not thought this through? In the bigger picture, there’s reasons to pay taxes. I don’t mean to sound like nobody can take any piece of my transaction. I think for all these reasons I’ve said decentralization and all that. It’s morally the right thing to do to try to keep as much of the profits from your sales directly from your fans as possible. I had to kind get that off my back. Tips on selling directly. When you and I talked in Oxford, you kind of tried to scare me away from selling directly because of the customer support. Like the tech support. You’re like “Derek, you don’t want to be answering tech support from people that don’t know how to get a file onto their phone or don’t know how to put a thing onto their Kindle. You don’t want to deal with this. You don’t want to spend your life with it”. I really want you to know how seriously I took your warning. I thought about that for months and really considered that and really let it shape some of my decisions. I look up to you a lot and you’ve been there, done that way more than I have , you’re way more experienced in this field. I really was kind of deferring to your judgment. I decided for me it was worth the uphill battle again. I ended up writing a form letter telling people directly, like “how to get a mobi file onto their Kindle, here’s the three ways to do it”. It took an hour and I wrote that form letter once so that any time somebody says, “hey, just bought your book, but how do I read it on my Kindle?”. I just hit cut and paste, here is the well written form letter telling them exactly how to do it. Same thing with people who buy my audiobook in the M4B audio format and they don’t know how to get it to play in their phone or their tablet or their computer. I have a form letter for that it took an hour to write. I have this feeling that every time I’m sending somebody that form letter, I’m actually doing a little bit of greater good for the world because this is a person that hopefully knows how to do this for future use and one of your other listeners one day will benefit from this, as that same person now feels a little bit more comfortable buying something directly from an author using PayPal or Gumroad . To me that was worth the uphill battle. I’ve been saying that phrase way too many times today.
Joanna
You’re right, because selling direct is an uphill battle. It is easier to just go on KDP. I must have mentioned book funnel, which kind of does that. You prefer to control all of your technology, don’t you? You actually prefer coding it that way than using a third party service.
Derek Sivers
It’s kind of my favorite hobby, I really enjoy programming. I’ve already got a really big infrastructure. Basically, I wrote all of the software that built and ran CD Baby When I sold the company, I got to keep the back end software for my own use because I had written it myself. I wrote every line by hand. I’ve got this amazing back end infrastructure that already has the full contact information for a quarter million people that I’ve emailed over the past 25 years. Everybody that’s ever left a comment on my site or emailed me or signed up for one of my things online, it all ties back into this one central database, so it just made sense for me to also tie in a bookstore into that same database. So that I could say “hi Tracy, I’ve noticed you’ve bought my first two books, but not my newest two books”. I know who has bought what, it helps me talk to people. To say, “in the past you said that you really liked this post of mine, and that post of mine turned into this book and I noticed you haven’t bought the book based on this post that you said you liked”. I’m able to communicate with people in a very personal way like that, because I’ve kept everything in one central place. To me it was worth doing that.
Joanna
I think the lesson there for everyone is not that you need to hand code everything but that long term view. What you did with all of that is think about future. You designed a system that could be used for the long term because you were thinking like that. That’s kind of your programmer’s brain kind of broke it down that way. My husband’s a programmer so I get that mindset of structuring things so you can do things in different ways. I did want to ask, I feel like in a way, the e-book problem, was easier than the print problem. What about selling the print books direct because you’re also doing special hardbacks and all kinds of things?
Derek Sivers
Luckily one of my best friends is a paper book nerd. Her name is Saeah Lee Wood, and she is brilliant. I’m going to straight up give a plug. She is really like an independent book producer now. Her first name is Korean, so it’s spelled strangely. If you go to saeah.com is Saeah’s website and she took care of everything of producing my paper book. She nerds out on binding on edge pages, about the fabric on the hardcovers, about like the spine all of that stuff fascinates her. She spent so many months talking to so many different book printers, getting samples, printing samples with them, sending it back, saying not good enough yet. After months and months and months of back and forth, she produced the beautiful hardcovers that you can get through me. She has her own warehouse in North Carolina, USA, where she ships all of the books from. She has all of my books in a big barn in on the East Coast of the US. Anybody who orders a paper book through me, it gets a little message sent to Saeah to send them to where. That was worth the effort to me because I really wanted beautiful linen hardcover books.
Joanna
They’re fantastic. Again, I think it’s about systems, but also people. You’ve found the right person to work with. I’m kind of going this way now. Also there is dropshipping. You can now sell direct, but then dropship a print on demand book. This is really emerging now. You can still sell direct but you don’t have to have a warehouse full. Ofcourse the upfront printing costs is often a problem. This is what I’m looking at now, I can sell direct print and dropship at the same time, which is fantastic. Time moves on companies emerge and people emerge to solve these problems, don’t they, because people want to do this. When people need to do something, the answer emerges somehow.
Derek Sivers
I agree. Sometimes it’s worth doing a step backwards. I ended up just doing a good old fashioned like upfront printing 20,000 copies of my hardcover book because I kind of estimated that’s how much I think I’ll sell. I had to kind of guess, the more efficient thing would have been to just do them all print on demand. I found that I could get a higher quality by printing offset. They’re offset instead of computer printed or instead of digital. It was a slightly higher quality. To me that was worth the upfront investment. I had to take a gamble, pay them a few dollars per book for 20,000 copies upfront and warehouse them. A lot of people might not want to do that or might not care so much about the, the nerding out on the paper quality and font quality and things like that.
Joanna
I love that you’ve done that because again, you’re known as a sort of digital guy, but you also now have these wonderful print books that your company has done. You mentioned earlier decentralization is good and looking at what’s happening in the music industry now we’ve got interesting decentralized options with blockchain and NFTs to split royalties. Then we’ve got changes like Spotify getting into audiobooks. There’s a lot happening right now in the music and audio space that we’re starting to see emerge. For authors like royalty fractionalization thing is very interesting to me and many authors. Wow this is kind of potentially the future of crowdfunding and there’s lots of options. What do you think about some of these emerging opportunities and challenges?
Derek Sivers
Great question. I can’t emphasize this enough that nobody knows the future. Focus on what doesn’t change. I’ve been in the music business since 1987. I’ve seen a ton of change since that time. And what I’ve seen in music is that people always love a memorable melody, but you can’t know what instrumentation or production style will be in fashion. It’s best to focus on the craft of making great melodies. People will always want an emotional connection. You can’t know which technology will carry that communication that will create an emotional connection with somebody, the technology that carries it from one place to another will always change. The emotional connection is always the real point. It’s best to focus the core of your efforts on the essence of how to connect with an audience and writing lots of songs increases your chances of writing a hit. Even within a songwriter’s career, you can’t know which song will be a hit. It’s often a surprise, songwriters are very often surprised which of their songs ends up becoming a hit. If you read almost any interview with songwriters the song that became a hit was a little thing that they slapped off in 5 minutes. Whereas the songs that they worked so hard on that they believed in the most didn’t hit right. The best strategy is to write as many songs as you can. The core idea here is that instead of trying to predict the future, you should focus your time and energy on the fundamentals, the unpredictable changes around them, or details.
Derek Sivers
The best investment of your time is always on the timeless aspects of your craft. I think that even though it’s newsworthy to talk about NFTs, Blockchain and whatever is going on right now. It’s interesting to the media because it’s new. I think that it’s actually driving a minority of the sales. I think the majority of the sales you’re ever going to get will come from the fundamental aspects of what you’re doing. How great is your story? How memorable are your characters? How insightful is your writing? Yes, there’s activity on the ever trendy fringe of things and it might be worth a bit of your effort, I’d say to proportionate appropriately small. All of that being said, whatever fascinates you, you should go do it. If somebody is listening to this feeling like Blockchain/NFTs, I should be doing this, but I don’t want to. Then I guess that’s who I’m speaking to. If this doesn’t fascinate you, then you could just skip it. It doesn’t matter that much, it’s the edge of things. Some people are fascinated by it. If you’re fascinated with it, then go for it. The most strategic use of your time is to focus on the fundamentals that don’t change.
Joanna
I totally agree with you. Most people listening will be rolling their eyes at me asking that question because I am fascinated with it. I’m thinking about business models of writing. For 15 years now I’ve been in publishing not as long as you’ve been in music, but writing and publishing for 15 years. How the business model has changed in 15 years is kind of crazy. I’m looking at another 15 years ahead and thinking, what is my business model going to look like in the next 15 years into my sixties? How can I position myself so that I’m ready and I’m often early in adopting new ways of publishing and I think the smart contracts that are emerging with NFTs are really interesting for the future of intellectual property. Coming back to what you said earlier, which is, when you sell direct you’re going to make sure you include the format of the future. The problem at the moment is that authors are signing contracts that have a clause in that say something like “all formats existing now and to be created for the life of copyright”. Authors are signing that and essentially it means they can’t take advantage of a new opportunity. I’m completely with you, right now is not the time to do NFT books as we record this in April 2022, but maybe by 2025, if it’s now the new thing, the thing that we’re doing. If you’ve signed a contract that means you can’t do it, then you’re going to be screwed. I guess that’s what I’m thinking of is, yes, it’s edge case now, but what if.
Derek Sivers
That’s a great argument to keep your own rights now, even if it means that you’re giving up some sales. By the way, I should give some kind of caveat that everything I’m saying is just one point of view. A few of my good friends have gone against everything I’ve said here and done astonishingly well selling millions of books.
Joanna
Mark Manson just did the NFT drop as well, didn’t he?
Derek Sivers
Yeah. Everything I’m describing, you’re asking me to talk about the way that I’ve personally chosen to do it, I know that it’s not the way for everybody. I’m not prescribing it to everybody, but for my temperament and my situation in life. I’m not doing any of this for the money. If I was to say, what’s the best way to make a ton of money selling books. Then I wouldn’t say you should be hand coding your own website. I do think that trying as much as possible to hold on to your own rights, even if it means losing some sales in the present, is a smarter long term strategy for the future of whatever’s happening next.
Joanna
Absolutely. Staying on the technology side of things, I think we talked about AI translation when we talked in Oxford. I’m really fascinated with GPT 3 and GPT 4 is due out this year and the tools that we can potentially use as writers with AI. I wondered what are your thoughts on how creatives can work with AI rather than fight against it. As a tool rather than “it will write a book for me” type of thing.
Derek Sivers
This technology interested me. I looked deeply into Blockchain and NFTs. As a programmer, I nerd it out on them for like two weeks and then decided it doesn’t interest me that much, but GPT 3 I also really nerd it out on. I contacted the company that makes it Open AI. I got an account with him and now I have an API account, I can do anything I want using GPT 3. I wrote some programs to use their API and I got interested enough that I paid a consultant that was a hard core expert of GPT 3 in particular. I worked with him for two weeks to help understand it even better. He showed me how to do even more than I realized was possible. After all that, I can say that I know it quite well. I don’t think it’s a threat at all. Nobody listening to this show should feel that GPT anything or AI anything is going to be taking your job away from you. I found that GPT 3 can wonderfully complete a sentence for you. It can complete a paragraph for you, but more words was never the point. To be a great writer, we need more insights, more emotional connection. We need more wow, not more words. I found that you can use GPT three to finish sentences when you don’t know how to finish it.
Derek Sivers
This was one of my favorite usages of it, when I was coming up with ideas when I wasn’t quite sure how to complete a thought. I had the beginning of a thought but I didn’t know where to take it. I would plug it into GPT three and I’d say, “give me 20 different endings to this sentence or paragraph”. I’d say, “go”. It would return 20 different replies and I would read through them for inspiration. Most of them were worthless but occasionally I would get an idea from GPT 3’s strange completion of my sentence. It’s not that different from asking strangers on the street like, “how would you finish this thought?”. Ideas can come from anywhere, you can get an idea from a song or an advertisement on a bus or a overheard snippet of conversation. You can get great ideas from GPT 3’s auto generated stuff. I would highly recommend it for that. If you can get an account with GPT 3 or find some way to use their API to let it complete your sentences or paragraphs that you are stuck on. It’s wonderful, but I think anyone listening to your show has nothing to fear from it. It already has replaced people that were churning out crap fodder to fill search engine results. Those people do not listen to this show.
Joanna
How funny. Marketing copy, Jasper, I think is now using that to put out marketing and add text and things like that, which is an interesting use case. Before we talk about the translation on GPT 3 people listening, I’ve had it from pseudo right and it’s like a front end on GPT 3. Again, to use the API you have to be quite technical, but pseudo right is like a front end. When you said strange, I was like, “that’s exactly why I feel that my pseudo right is like a strange co-pilot that comes up with things actually make me laugh sometimes”. I don’t laugh, well sometimes I do sitting on my own writing, but mainly this just comes up with stuff that makes me think in a different way. I know it’s not a mind, but it comes up with things that are like different than what I would have come up with. That’s why I like to use it too. I completely agree with you. It’s a massively powerful tool, but you have to drive it, you have to prompt it. That’s the key. It doesn’t just do it on its own.
Derek Sivers
When I first heard of it, I was more excited for its potential. As I actually used it, I thought, “okay, this isn’t this isn’t as interesting as I thought”. Sorry, we didn’t even talk about translation at all. I think for translation, it’s amazing. That’s a perfect use because that is something where there can be something close to a right answer. What was the the Picasso quote?” Computers are boring. They can only give you answers”. I like that a lot. I think translation is a wonderful use of it, at least for the first draft. What I’ve done for a lot of my books is, I have this new service I created, once again me making my own tools. I created something called inchword.com that I’ve been using, it’s basically just my tools I’ve been using to translate my books. I break down all of my books into per sentence. Every single sentence has its own entry in the database and then they get merged together into the the template to make the layout of the article or the book. I used a service called deepl.com to translate each one of those sentences at a time and return to me the translated sentence. I would store the translated sentence in the database. Then I would always hire a human translator to use that as their starting point and improve it from there. They just found that it saved them some time that say like a quarter of the time deepl.com. I could just leave that one and then they can focus on tweaking the ones that could be better. I love that use of AI.
Joanna
Again, tools that we can use to achieve our creative goal. That’s what it comes down to. On your now page, I want to look forward now. You say that How to Live is your best book ever and I love that. I love that you’re so proud of it. You were writing it when we spoke in Oxford, I remember then you said, “this is the challenge”. Your face would sort of light up when you talked about it. You say after four years it’s done and it’s clearly been special and challenging. I know that you don’t necessarily sit around going, “hey, look at my amazing book and I’m done.I’m finished now. That’s perfect”. What are you doing next? What are you excited about creating next, or are you just going to rest on your laurels for a while?
Derek Sivers
So sorry listeners, I’m not trying to sell you my book, but How to Live is my book that I think a lot of new parents I’ve heard have this feeling like when they have a kid, they think, “God, I really want to put everything I’ve ever learned into a book for my kids. If I die before my kid is old enough, somebody can just give him this book and I can say, this is everything I ever would have told you”. My book called How to Live is kind of like that. I compressed everything I’ve ever learned into one book, and the first draft of it was like 1300 pages. My challenge is I spent the next two years editing it down to only 114 pages. I did that by reducing almost everything down to a single sentence, each idea was reduced to its essence in a single sentence. The problem is I wrote this 114 page book that feels like I’ve now said everything I have to say on Earth. Even though I haven’t, because most of my ideas are just represented with this single sentence, it’s put me into a weird position where everything I think of saying now, I already talked about that in How to Live.
Derek Sivers
I did it in only a sentence, but I already did it. Stand up comedians usually reuse their old material and slowly introduce some new material. They keep the old laughs as they keep touring. If you go see them over the years, you’ll hear them tell a lot of the same jokes, but some new ones. A few of the most brilliant stand up comedians challenge themselves to come up with all new material every year. It’s a massive challenge and only a few have ever done it. I want to challenge myself now to say, “okay, I just put everything I know into How to live, so I’m starting from scratch now”. It’s time for me to generate new thoughts, lateral thinking, discovery, learning more, sharing more, not just new material for books. The book is not the point. It’s really more about new insights into life to say, “okay, that’s everything I’ve learned before How to Live”, got put into my book called How to Live. Now everything I do next will only be the stuff that I learned after that. So it’s really about challenging myself to to learn more.
Joanna
Didn’t you just say that you’re now in a hardcore reading phase?
Derek Sivers
I wouldn’t say hardcore as much as I kind of stopped reading for a few years of How to Live, because of the nature of that book where I was putting everything I’d learned into one book. I was like, “I don’t want to learn something new right now, otherwise I’m going to have to add it to the book”. I had stopped reading for a few years. Now I’m reading this backlog, I’ve got like 120 books queued up on my Kindle books that I’d bought from the last few years but hadn’t read yet. I’m reading them all now. I’m putting aside a few hours a day to just to reading.
Joanna
That to me is the way to get excited about the next thing I’ve been listening to a book called The Genesis Machine it’s about synthetic biology. I have no background in biology, this book is it’s a nonfiction book, but it’s like science fiction because it’s a topic I know nothing about. I’m listening to it going, “oh my goodness, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. That’s amazing”. It’s so funny and that just sets off all these fireworks. That’s how I feel when I’m excited about a topic, it’s like fireworks in my brain and then you never know how it’s going to pop up again. I imagine that’s kind of where you’re going is, where do the fireworks come up next for me?
Derek Sivers
Yes. I actually just last night started reading the essays and aphorisms of Arnold Schopenhauer. This German philosopher that I’ve heard of for years never read his stuff. I’m only ten pages in and I’m like, “oh, this is good”. Today I’m still thinking about the ten pages I read last night. As for what’s next to me, my challenge is to learn a lot more so I will have more insights into life and maybe have something new to share with the world.
Joanna
Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books and your blog and everything you do online?
Derek Sivers
Oh, just go to Amazon. Ha. Sorry no, my website is sive.rs. It’s my last name, but with a dot in it. Sive.rs is my website and everything’s there. Part of the reason that I do interviews like this instead of you and I talking at a cafe is because I really like the kind of people that listen to your show. If you’re somebody that listened all the way to the end of this interview, my email address is in a big font on my website. Send me an email, say hello and introduce yourself. I actually really, really love meeting other writers, especially from around the world. You know, there’s a reason you’re doing this podcast too, meeting other writers you have so much in common. It’s such a great kindred feeling to talk about writing with people. Any other writers, please send me an email, say hello, let’s connect.
Joanna
Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Derek. That was great.
Derek Sivers
Thanks, Joanna.