title: On Writing in Public When You Have No Book date: 2026-05-10 slug: on-writing-in-public-when-you-have-no-book tags: [craft, notes] excerpt: The conventional wisdom says to wait until you have something to sell. The conventional wisdom is wrong. description: A meta-essay on writing in public when there is nothing yet to sell.
The conventional wisdom, repeated in nearly every author-platform guide I have read, is that you should not start a newsletter until you have a book. The reasoning is faintly logical: a newsletter is a marketing instrument, marketing instruments require a product, and a writer without a product is a kind of category error.
I have come to think the conventional wisdom is exactly backward.
A newsletter is not a marketing instrument. It is a way of writing in public — of being slightly less alone in front of the page — and the writers I admire most have almost all kept some version of one for years before they had anything to sell.1Robin Sloan wrote a newsletter for years before Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Craig Mod still does, between books. Jenny Offill kept notebooks the public never sees, but the principle is the same: the practice precedes the product. They were not, in any meaningful sense, marketing. They were practicing.
There is a particular failure mode that the "wait until you have a book" advice produces. The writer waits. The book takes seven years, because books do. By the time the book exists, the writer has no readers, no platform, no habit of writing for an audience — and is suddenly expected to acquire all three in the six months between deal and pub date. It is a setup for a particular kind of misery.
The alternative is to start now. To write the essays you would have written anyway, and put them somewhere a small number of people can find them. To build the habit — not the audience, the habit — of finishing things and sending them.
You will hear this advice and find a hundred reasons it does not apply to you. I have heard them all from myself: my voice is not ready, my topics are too inside-baseball, I will sound pretentious, I will sound naive, I will commit too early to a thing I will later want to revise. These objections all share a single shape: they are reasons not to be visible. And the work of being a writer is, eventually, the work of being visible. You can delay it or you can begin.
I do not have a book. I have a draft that has been a draft for too long. I have a village I have been writing about since I was twenty-three. I have notebooks, fragments, false starts, the bones of three other things that may or may not become books. And I have decided, finally, that I would rather write in public with empty hands than wait in private for hands full enough to be worth showing.
If you are reading this, you are part of the experiment. Thank you for being here at the early, awkward stage.
The book, when it comes, will come. The work, in the meantime, is the work.