LET’S SAY an author writes a novel. That book is essentially viewed as a product. It’s something to read. Its value is correlated with its quality, and its quality is associated with certain technical skills—such as character development, pacing, dialogue, descriptions, et cetera—that make its readers feel something and is thereby valuable.
In our current era, some try to drown potential customers with additional benefits such as how the act of reading is known to improve memory, focus, empathy, and one’s sleep. Or they highlight how the author is part of a particular group, essentially co-opting an issue of human rights into a marketing tactic. Among strategists, these maneuvers are referred to as the “benefits behind the benefit,” which I’ll address in depth later (See: “Friends with Benefits Behind the Benefits”). For now, though, I’ll say this approach, which either disingenuously frames reading as if it were some kind of nootropic-fortified smoothie or a symbol that affirms you’re a decent human being, is not only too sweaty and embarrassing for most people to take seriously but it also dilutes the important message of, “Hey, this book is really good and worth reading because…it’s, um, really good and might open you up in ways you never expected.”
Regardless of how books are being sold, it’s clear from the statistics in the New York Times article that the people selling them are doing a shitty job, Amazon has eaten all the margin, and the writers producing the work can’t afford to live. Which forces them to go do something else.
One of those options, because it’s writing-adjacent, has become writing about writing. But when an author writes a book with the words “How to” in the title, a significant shift takes place: The writing is no longer a product. It’s a service.
A how-to book can be well-written, insightful, engaging, and funny. It can possess many of the technical qualities that people value in a novel. But its function is to aid the reader in producing their work, not in being a written work. As such, the author has to accept they’ve shifted from a practitioner to a promoter selling picks & shovels. And that shift from product to service is worth scrutiny because the motivation behind writing a novel is very different than the motivation behind writing a how-to book. And for many, exposing the difference in motivation reveals a red-flag reason not to read the book.
A large part of what sells these books is the assertion that the author knows how to achieve the goal of having a career writing novels and thereby can help you do the same. (Sure, some people simply want to write a novel to say they could—the way some people decide they want to run a marathon—but I’d argue they’re edge cases.)
So if the existence of the book is predicated on the idea that the novelist has enough subject-matter expertise to teach others how to do it, then the very fact of needing to write a book about writing, simply to survive, exposes how the idea the book is predicated on is false.
The next question becomes, If the person who promises to teach me how to do something can’t regularly achieve that goal or make a living from achieving that goal, then are they really qualified to teach me how to do it?
Or: If the person who promises to teach me how to do something can’t regularly achieve that goal or make a living from achieving that goal, is it even worth my time?
In either case, the explanations don’t bode well for paying a fee to learn something from a person who either doesn’t know how to do it well enough to make a living or is very good at something that can’t be considered anything more than a hobby (unless you just want a hobby).
The same questions could be asked of authors whose primary source of income is teaching, or giving keynote speeches, or podcasting. Because once a published book becomes a mere validating token to earn income doing something else, it forces people to ask. “Aside from ego or self-promotion, why would I do it?”