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How can you teach yourself anything, even when it challenges the way you see the world? And how can you organise what you learn so it turns into books your readers will find? J. Daniel Sawyer shares his self-education toolkit after decades as a largely self-taught author.
In the intro, Spotify for Authors has expanded AI-assisted creation of audiobooks [Spotify]; Who is Narrating the Future? [Publishing Perspectives; 9 ways AI will disrupt authors and publishing from 2019]; Author Voice, Creativity, and Building a Career as an Intuitive Author-Entrepreneur [How Women Write]; A fallow season [Systems and Soul]; How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories – Joanna Penn.
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J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book is Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
- What is an autodidact, and why school doesn't teach you how to learn
- How to triage information in a world of way too much
- How to recognise fear in your body and turn it into excitement for learning
- Sandboxing dangerous ideas so you can learn without threatening your worldview
- How to organise research and check quotes when writing nonfiction
- Why you should never publish a book dead
You can find Dan at JDSawyer.net, and The Autodidact's Bible is out now on Kickstarter.
Transcript of the interview with J. Daniel Sawyer
Jo: J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book is Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible.
So welcome back to the show, Dan.
Dan: Hello, Joanna. It's great to be back.
Jo: Yes, indeed. You were only on the show a few months ago, which is rare I have somebody twice in the same year, so that is quite exciting. We talked about voice mastery last time, very different to the topic of today. But because we did talk a bit more about your background last time, we're going to jump straight into the book.
So what is an autodidact, and why write a book on it?
Dan: Well, an autodidact is someone who teaches themselves things rather than taking a course. It's not incompatible with being taught by others, of course, but there's a set of skills for being able to pick up new information, new disciplines, new hobbies, whatnot, that's really useful to have.
I wrote the book because I was mentoring a friend's kid through high school. They weren't teaching her anything, and she was having a hell of a time figuring out how to get an education in a school that was just not interested in providing one.
The process of the conversations over the course of a year forced me to surface all of the tools that I had developed, starting as a child, that allow me to pick up all of those disciplines you were talking about before, plus blacksmithing and academics and other stuff like that.
While I have had access to a lot of amazing teachers in my life, I'm largely self-taught, and have become the world expert on a couple of topics as a result.
I realised that the tools that you need to teach yourself and the tools that you get in school no longer overlap very much, at least in the US.
The old style of classical education, and then the middling style of early school education, both gave you those tools so that when you left school, you were able to continue through the world growing. Nobody does that anymore, so I realised I needed to write a book about all this stuff while it was fresh in my mind, so I did.
Jo: I love that. I don't know if it always was like that for some people, too.
We all know now more about neurodivergence.
Back in the day, when you and I went to school, that wasn't really talked about. It was like if you couldn't learn stuff in the way that it was thrust at you, then you were just dumb, maybe.
Dan: Well, what you and I got in school was the very late end of the German model.
The German model of education is what arose in the industrial era, and its job is to create good, obedient workers, not necessarily to create independent citizens who can think for themselves and who can move through a world that's changing and learn things.
That kind of education came from an older tradition, but it wasn't well suited to pulling people out of the hinterlands and putting them in the factories in a way that they could understand what they were supposed to be doing.
So the Germans developed a regimented system that was built around memorisation exclusively, rather than processing. Memorisation and repetition.
Whereas a more classical approach would have you do memorisation as part of repetition, processing, evaluation, and creativity. So when you go to school, you get some of the toolkit you need, but not all of it.
Jo: Yes, and then I think some people were just so bashed over the head with stuff that they didn't enjoy the process of learning, and maybe just moved away from it now.
I want to come back on something you said there, that it didn't enable the independence, the thinking for yourself.
We're living in this really weird time now where we're almost in a splintered world where you can find information on anything you want, but a lot of people are finding information, say, on TikTok or in AI-generated books with no rigorous fact-checking.
So how can you think for yourself in a world where there's almost way too much now?
Dan: Well, one of the most foundational skills of thinking is information triage. The world has always been full of unreliable information, if for no other reason than the state of the art in any given field at any given time is guaranteed to be about 80% wrong.
So even if you're being very careful about only hewing to the most accepted body of facts, facts change over time, partly as we learn more and partly as the world changes underneath us.
Thinking is different than knowing. Thinking is the ability to evaluate the information you're coming into contact with and figure out what's likely to be useful, and then to check yourself based on what you are more inclined to believe because of the way that you're made up emotionally.
It's being able to curb your impulses with an error-checking layer so that you don't get sucked down into a very nasty rabbit hole, which everybody's prone to on one front or another.
So that explains the how and why, but the what is things like knowing your basic logic, knowing the informal logical fallacies that everybody's prone to, things like the bandwagon fallacy.
We're partly herd animals. We tend to want to join a group for protection and identity. So if we're in a group that believes a certain thing, we're likely to believe it out of fashion, which is great for group solidarity. It's not so great for actually knowing if what you think you know is correct.
I've got a whole section of the book devoted to the top 30 or 40 most common informal reasoning fallacies. Knowing how to do basic critical reasoning is one of the things you have to do if you're going to be learning in a way that's useful to you.
Then of course, there's another reasoning kit, which is the non-rational reasoning kit, which I also talk about. That's something that you and I as fiction authors use all the time.
Jo: Explain more about that [non-rational reasoning kit] then, because people might not know what that is.
Dan: All right. So rational reasoning involves logic. If X is true and Y is true, then Z must also be true. That's basic deduction. It basically lets you figure out what's implicit in the body of knowledge you already know.
Then subsidiary to that is induction, which is, if X is true and Y is true, what might also be true that could explain X and Y? That's the scientific method. It's less reliable than deduction, but it actually grows your knowledge rather than just revealing it.
Non-rational reasoning is things like reasoning through analogy, reasoning through metaphor, reasoning through intuition.
These are all reasoning modes that allow you to bring something foreign into your understanding, or to deepen your understanding of something you're already familiar with, in a way that incorporates not just logical propositions, but also emotional truth and relational truth and things like that.
Frequently it can generate things you can then subject to logical evaluation and pull new information about the world out of. A really good example of where this happens in science is in visionary experiences. The periodic table, for example, came out of someone's dream.
Now, the fact he dreamed it doesn't mean it's true, but what happened while he was dreaming is he had a non-rational reasoning chain that brought him this vision, which he then brought out into the real world and started doing experiments on to see if it would work, and it did.
Jo: In that case, yes, I can picture the periodic table, and I often see images of things that help me organise information. So that to me makes sense in terms of somebody who had certain amounts of knowledge, who had some kind of picture in their brain and then was able to prove that.
I wanted to circle back. You were talking about critical things, rational things. You mentioned logic, and you did briefly mention emotion and intuition.
Coming back to where we are at this point in history, so much emotion is being triggered through the media, whether that's social media or traditional media or whatever, that all of those logical, reasoned things can be almost triaged immediately by a big emotional response to something.
So how can we understand that that emotional response perhaps has to be part of the triage?
Dan: Well, simply by stating it outright. What you just said is exactly correct. I've got a model in the book where I talk about the difference between feelings and emotions.
Feelings, in this model, are your interpretive layer. That's, I feel angry or sad or excited or depressed or whatnot. Those are your feelings.
The emotions are the base physiological states that those feelings are laying over. So elevated heart rate, increased skin conductance, things like that are associated with any excitable state, like anger, sexual arousal, anticipation, fear, that kind of thing.
Then depressed heart rate and whatnot, those are associated with depression, relaxation, and a whole bunch of other things.
Learning to recognise the base physiological layer within yourself that's being stimulated allows you a certain amount of freedom about interpreting that base physiological state. That can help you separate your reaction to your own physiological state from your rational evaluation of what's going on around you.
One of the things that our world runs on right now is fear, and there's reasons for this. If you read Edward Bernays' Propaganda, he lays it all out.
Fear shifts your mind into a survival mode.
You're less likely to take time to think through things. You're more likely to be easily steered because, as far as your physiology knows, there's an active threat to you, and you've got to take care of that. You've got to get away from it.
If you stimulate fear in somebody, you can direct who they hate, who they love, who they trust. Very, very useful for anyone who wants to build a cult or sell a product or get elected.
If you learn to recognise in yourself that the physiological state associated with fear is the same one associated with excitement over something new, then you can train yourself, to a certain extent, and it's a learned skill, to do an end run around the fear part and concentrate on the excitement.
Then you can deal with whatever it is that's stimulating you in the way that you would a new piece of information, a new bit of learning, a new adventure. Instead of fear, which closes you down, adventure opens you up, and that's a much better state to engage in learning and exploration than fear is.
Jo: When you said, “That opens you up,” this is exactly what I look for, what is expansive for me. I often reflect on this. When do I feel expansive, and when do I feel like I'm being reduced? When do I feel like I'm hunkered down?
When I'm working with AI tools, I feel expansive, I feel more creative, I feel excited. I feel all these things where I just see so many possibilities, and the horizon is off out there in the distance.
Yet I know other people, some people listening, will feel that that crushes them, that even mentioning it just makes them reduce into themselves and shrink because of fear, I guess.
I also think that a lot of people are feeling those things because they haven't learnt enough perhaps. They are just responding to emotions.
So how can we change those things so we're more open to learning?
Dan: Well, one of the things you run into with creative types is we've all got something weird in our background that makes us do this. We're not just inclined to be creative, because you can meet welders and electricians who are very creative people. They just apply their creativity in a limited domain.
People who go into the arts tend to be either people who grew up in incredibly open conditions, or people who grew up in incredibly closed conditions and had to fight against them.
People who grow up in closed conditions and fight against them tend to be a little better at sticking around for the long haul of an arts career, which can be punishing financially and emotionally.
One of the reasons they can stick around is that they had a lot of practice in sticking around through horrible situations when they were younger. So they're going to have a negative bias when they come up against things that they don't understand.
If you have a negative bias with something you don't understand and it turns out to be wrong, you're not going to lose very much. But if you have a negative bias when you come up against something you understand and it turns out to be right, you're going to survive that thing. Whereas a more open person might just walk into the jaws of the shark, right?
To change that and make your experience better, and give you access to all the advantages that the person who's got a more open temperament has, you've got to find a way to make it safe to experiment with the dangerous thing.
For every dangerous thing, and probably for everyone who's encountering it, it's going to be a little bit different.
With AI, people are worried about the market eroding to the point where nobody cares about human creativity anymore. In fact, my first publishable short story, which is called We Create Worlds, was actually about a novelist trying to outwrite the AI novels. It's become weird.
Jo: What year did you write that in?
Dan: That was in 1999.
Jo: Awesome.
Dan: It's still a great short story. I did do it in podcast form, which you can find on my website at jdsawyer.net, and it's also in ebook on Amazon, and it's part of the Sculpting God short story collection.
But the fear is that humanity gets crowded out of the market in the face of the relentless onslaught of the machines. It's not a ridiculous fear, especially if you look at the history of artisanship.
Everybody and their brother used to have an artisanal business, and now we've got machines that weave socks and make just about everything in our world.
So people like me, who spend half my day every day in a blacksmith's forge making hooks that you could just make by machines way cheaper, are kinda crazy. But there's a market for that. Humans like things that were touched by other humans, as long as they can afford them or justify making a luxury.
On the other hand, the people that adopt tools early and figure out how to make them work for them, those are usually the people that win at scale over the long haul.
So, AI is coming for our jobs, guys, but you know what? You can keep it out of your creativity and build agents that help you deal with your scheduling and your bookkeeping and your marketing, all the other stuff that takes up your time as an author.
Then instead of threatening your creativity, it gives you more space to be creative.
Jo: So it's reframing things a lot of the time.
Dan: A lot of the time, yes.
Jo: I think that's true of everything.
Reframing can help you learn.
Reframing things can give you a reason to learn, I guess, when in the past, maybe at school, you hated learning…
Dan: Yes.
Jo: Now by reframing it into a reason why.
Dan: That really helps, and it also helps the second big problem with learning, which is worldview threat. I think I open the book with an entire section on how worldviews work and how that limits us, and how we can't get away from them even though they limit us.
Your worldview is the matrix through which you experience everything around you, and it's not a window, it's like a lens. It distorts everything, it filters everything, because it's the reflexive layer that helps you make sense of the world, and it's built out of your experience and inflected by your personality and other things like that.
There are things you can learn, and for everyone it's going to be a little bit different, that threaten everything about your worldview.
That's a problem, because your mind experiences your worldview not as an interpretive matrix, but as a survival tool. As far as your deep mind goes, your worldview is perfectly okay because you're still alive. Its job is to keep you alive.
So if you learn something, or come close to learning something or thinking something that could unspool a big part of your worldview, you'll just emotionally go blank. You'll shut down. The information you're encountering will not register, or it will make you angry and you'll steer away from it.
This isn't very good if you're wanting to learn things or grow. So there's a set of metacognitive tools you can use to help you push past that and navigate the existential crises that can sometimes ensue without crushing you entirely.
I spend a section of the book talking about that as well, and detailing what some of those tools are.
Jo: Better give us a tool.
Give us one useful tool.
Dan: All right, so one of the basic tools is one that anyone who's a developer in the audience will be familiar with, and it's basically sandboxing.
You create a little playpen where it's okay to play with this dangerous idea, and you make yourself the promise that until you're really familiar with the dangerous idea, you're not going to connect it to anything else in your worldview.
Then you've got the option later on to decide whether to integrate it or not. But you've got to play with this scary tool.
For someone who comes out of a fundamentalist religious background like I do, one of the big ones here was textual criticism, where you learn about all the manuscript traditions that make up the New Testament especially, and the development of Christian scripture.
I had to know about this stuff because I had a paid writing gig that required me to know about it. But I was a biblical literalist and believed that it all came straight out of God's mouth, and I couldn't even go near it without going, “Ah,” because intuitively some part of me recognised this could be a threat to what you believe.
So I made myself a sandbox. I said, “This is a literary project. If I actually believe in the doctrines of my religion, then this can't be a threat, because even if the words themselves were changed all over the place, the Holy Spirit would have ensured that the important parts of the theology got through unscathed.”
So I had a sandbox. I didn't really have to think about it. I could just learn the topic, and I got through. It was a two-year project, I had a fabulous time, and I came out knowing more about textual criticism than anyone ever should need to.
I actually got to know someone, a friend of my father's, who actually makes the Greek New Testament from the surviving original sources. I learned all sorts of things about biblical translation and about classical literature. It was great stuff.
I sandboxed it until I understood it, and then I decided whether or not to integrate it, and I did integrate it. It didn't actually have anything to do with me ending up being an atheist now. That was because of my research into mythopoetics several years later.
When you sandbox something like that, you give yourself an imaginary play space. This is something you do any time that you go to a movie and you cheer for characters who are doing horrible things that you would never do or condone in real life.
It's a fantasy play space that allows you to explore other aspects of life that you can't touch in real life. When you're learning, you can use that same set of skills of fantasy play and fantasy role play for trying out and exploring topics that might threaten the way you see the world.
Jo: Well, that actually brings up a good reason to do this, and one of the reasons I love to learn new things is to turn them into books. You mentioned earlier your short story about AI, for example. That's a great way of sandboxing and playing with a dangerous idea.
I'm actually writing a lot of, I guess we would call them science fiction, in the science fiction genre. I've never written science fiction before, and suddenly…
Dan: Welcome to the party.
Jo: Yes, exactly. I'm now writing science fiction. I haven't published any of it yet, but it's possible that I'm moving into science fiction because I am weighing up a whole load of these things as I'm learning about it, and I'm like, “Okay, how would I play with that idea?”
So that is one way to use what we learn, or even, like we said, reframing it. One good reason to drive the learning in the first place, I guess. But in that way, I wanted to ask you, because your books are very detailed.
How are you structuring knowledge as you learn it, in a way that is useful for turning it into something else later?
Dan: Okay. Associatively. The way that the brain stores knowledge, it looks a bit like a spiderweb, or like a map of galaxies in the universe. That's probably too geeky. Let's stick with a spiderweb. Everyone's seen a spiderweb. You don't record discrete tabulated facts like a spreadsheet or a database.
You actually record associative memories, and everything you know is associated not just with other things that fact might be associated with in a library catalogue. It's associated with the smell that you were smelling when you learned that thing, and the emotional state you were in when you learned that thing.
The more associative connections you can make to any bit of knowledge, the easier it is to record. When I sat down and wrote The Autodidact's Bible, I literally wrote it front to back without an outline.
There have been some books I've done this with where I had to rearrange afterwards. With this one, I didn't have to, because this is one of the places I live, so I've just got a good structure for the information in my head.
I knew that if I wanted to convey this toolkit and all the things associated with it, I needed to start with what is knowledge and memory, and how does understanding work?
Then move into worldview and the way that emotions affect the way that we learn, and developmental psychology, which has to do with the way the human being is designed to learn from the get-go.
We start off with raw input. I call this in the book type zero learning. We get a fire hose of information we don't know how to make sense of, and our brain adapts itself to the inputs.
Then there's type one learning, where we play around with things and we experiment and we see what they do. It's the “what's this button do?” approach to learning. Then there's type two learning, which is someone else who knows something already tells us things or shows us things, and we pick that up.
All three of these systems are involved at every stage of the learning process. Actually, it's hierarchical. So you can do type zero learning without doing type one or type two.
If you're doing type two, which is what you're doing in school, or when you're learning from a mentor, or when you're listening to a podcast, then if the information is going to stick, you are also involved in type zero learning, which is just taking in a bunch of stuff, and type one learning, which is practising and doing trial and error.
Even if, as you're listening to this podcast, you're just reacting with things like, “Oh, now that's an interesting idea,” and you're having a little fantasy about, “What if I did this?”, that's a version of experiment and repeat, and that solidifies the learning in your knowledge web in your head.
Then the trick is figuring out how to go back and find those things.
Jo: Well, this is what I wanted to talk about. In the book, you do have stuff on memory and that kind of thing.
I have definitely found, and this has got worse with menopause, and this is a completely normal thing with menopause for women, the brain fog that means things don't seem to stick so well, and then the recall is also almost harder.
I'm often reaching for things, and I can't get them back. I've always been somebody who writes everything down anyway, but I now do it even more.
As you know, I sent written questions for this. I now rely on written stuff so much more. So when I'm writing a book, or like I've just been doing with this master's and a lot of research, I have to write everything down.
So I guess my question was more about, for people listening who want to learn things in order to write books from that—
What recommendations do you have for organising your research so that when you write the book, you can reference it in a good way?
Dan: Well, writing things down is great, because that is part of the repetition that helps it stick in your head, and then you've got an external place where, as long as you can remember where you put it, you know where to get it.
The more connections you can make to any piece of information, the easier it is to find. I do take notes, and I have a strictly hierarchical file tree where I know where to find manuscripts and files full of notes and whatnot.
What often happens with me is I will make notes on something, and then I'll forget I did it, and then a few years later I'll write the book and then discover the notes again afterwards, and the book basically matches the notes.
I think the reason that happens is that when I get an idea in my head and write it down, I just start subconsciously playing with the idea, and I play with it and play with it until it's well developed.
Every time you take an idea out, or a memory, and play with it, everything that you're thinking or feeling at that point in time gets reconnected to it. So you actually alter a bit of what you're remembering, but you're also multiplying the mental paths you can use to get to it.
So you've got a very strict external system to help you beat the brain fog. The analogy to do it without the external system is you create that kind of system in your head.
You practise actually walking the system like it's a library or a museum. If you're a very visual person, and this doesn't work if you have aphantasia, you can close your eyes and you can walk through the museum in your head, and you can turn to the left and see a room that's associated with everything you know about biology, and then you can start picking things up in that room.
I'm actually being semi-literal here. I sometimes actually do this like I'm working in virtual reality. Most of the time it's not that concrete, but if I'm trying to find something and I get stuck, I will actually close my eyes and go into the museum and find the room.
The other trick is you don't chase a particular bit of information too hard. All you're looking for is something that's in the neighbourhood. Because once you start working mentally in the neighbourhood, all of that knowledge map comes back to you as a side effect of being in that area.
Let's say you're in England, and you knew neighbourhoods in Nottingham really well, and you wanted to go visit a friend in Nottingham. When you get on the road to go, and you're not using a map, you don't have the whole map loaded into your head.
All you know is, I'm going to go that way on this road, and then you see the exit off the M1, or whatever it is, that you recognise. “Oh, this is the exit I take,” so you take that exit.
All the other information in between, you kinda know it, but you drop it. You don't really actively search for it. Then when you get into the general area of your friend's house, you start to recognise landmarks and you go there.
Memory of non-physical spaces works the same way, and you can actually develop the ability to engage it as if it's a physical space. The technique is called the mind palace. It was discovered in Ancient Greece, and it still works.
Jo: Yes, and I agree with that, and I still have that kind of experience in a way.
When we're writing nonfiction, and you have selected footnotes in this book, for example, although not to the extent of academic text, which is what I've been doing with my master's dissertation this week.
As an example, I knew that Stephen King had said something like, “Writing is a form of telepathy,” but could I remember where it was? No.
hTen I was like, okay, well, it's very likely it's in either one of his introductions or it's in On Writing, his memoir of the craft, because that is an iconic book. But in order to actually get the right quote, because if you're quoting people, obviously it has to be an exact quote as opposed to a made-up thought.
Then if you're doing a proper footnote, for example, it does need what book it is and what edition and what page number and all of that kind of thing.
So when you're writing the nonfiction books, are you doing the memory palace thing, writing the stuff, and then going back and finding where you got it from?
Dan: Yes, and anything that's vague, I just put hard brackets around it.
I don't remember all the people I quoted, but let's say I quoted Schopenhauer. If I was going to be quoting Schopenhauer and I could remember what he said, but I couldn't remember the words, I'd just put brackets around it and say, “Find the place where Schopenhauer said this,” and then put the quote here.
I don't use hard brackets anywhere else in my writing, so I can then just Control + F, find the hard bracket, and retroactively do the research.
Jo: Yes, exactly. I think that is the point I was trying to get to, which is it's all very well having the memory palace, but I can bet you that some of these quotes are not correct.
Dan: Yes, always check quotes. Now with AI, there's search engine techniques where you can actually start from a paraphrase and then refine the search stepwise until you can get the exact quote with a reference, and then you can check it against the manuscript online.
I use a lot of those when I don't have the book that I'm thinking of in my hands. Now of course with AI, I'm like, “Where did this author say this thing…”
Jo: Roughly?
Dan: Yes, roughly. The AI will come back with, “Well, he said this in these words in that book, and these words in that book.” And I'm like, “Oh, boy, I get to pick which one works better for what I'm writing.”
Jo: It's very good. Coming back to what you were writing, I think you have balanced footnotes and source material, but you haven't gone as far as the academic footnoting of every single sentence, which is where I am at the moment.
So for general nonfiction that is trying to reach a broader audience, where would you say the balance lies?
Because I just feel now that we don't do enough of this in the indie community. I read a lot of nonfiction books which need a heck of a lot more attributions.
Dan: First of all, I subscribe to the Terry Pratchett school of footnotes, which is that footnotes are places for long asides that need to be there, but that interrupt the flow of the text. I'm sure you noticed.
Also, for me, it's really important, wherever I can remember where I got an idea, to point it out so that the reader can follow that rabbit trail if they want to.
As a nonfiction writer, I feel like I'm in the business of providing value to the curious person. So anywhere I can point them where they might have fun exploring further is a value add.
That's something I try to do, but I don't always remember, because in the heat of composition, you don't really realise where the ideas are coming from all the time.
The second thing is, if I'm directly quoting or paraphrasing someone, there's always at least an attribution to the author, if not in the footnotes, then in the body text. You know, as Harlan Ellison used to say about being paid as a writer, or whatever.
The great glory, and this is at least partly an aesthetic thing in my head, the great glory of nonfiction is that it taps you into an entire universe of conversations that have been going on as long as there's been a written word.
To pretend that you're not participating in that conversation, okay, it might make you look cool to the novice reader, but you're really depriving your reader of even just the bare awareness that he's dipping his toe in a rich stream that he could follow forever.
Especially in our world where we live in a TikTok world, but before that, we lived in a soundbite world, and before that, we lived in the newspaper world. These are all formats that try to pretend that they exist outside of time and culture, even though they're the most temporally dependent and culturally fickle sorts of entertainment there are.
We've gotten used to the experience of encountering something that feels like it could just be from anywhere, and that's not the way it really works.
Every TikTok video comes out of someone's experience, which is embedded in a culture, which is embedded in a tradition that's full of controversies that goes back to the beginning.
It's not just full of controversies, but it's accompanied by stories, fictional stories, mythic stories, where those controversies get fought out and explored.
I think as a nonfiction author, if you want to be really selfish about it, it makes you look better if you're also pointing at the tradition that you're standing in than if you're pretending that it's all coming from you.
Jo: Yes.
It makes you look better if you are citing things.
I feel like that's such a good reframe. I was reading a book the other day, and I was like, all these ideas are coming from all these other people that I know about.
This person would look a lot better if they actually accredited those ideas to the people they came from. My opinion of that person went down because they were not attributing. So, yes, I think it's so important, and that's the fun bit. Let's circle back to the fun bit of learning.
Dan: Before you get onto that, I should point out that in my writing, I don't do this with academic rigour. I do it as it occurs to me.
I write a weekly nonfiction article dealing with philosophy and history and arts and everything, and I don't always think, “Oh, the readers might not know where this comes from,” and stick it in there. But over the course of reading those articles, you get all the citations. They're just not always in every article.
Jo: Oh, no, I've read your stuff, Dan. You do a good job. Obviously not to the academic attribution detail, but I do think this book in particular, Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible, has a lot of references so people can learn more.
So I do briefly, before we finish, because you and I could talk about this forever, but I do want to ask about Kickstarter. So you're using Kickstarter to launch this book. You've done a couple of campaigns, but not for a while.
So why use Kickstarter for this, and what are the pros and cons?
Dan: Well, as far as I've been able to work out, doing a Kickstarter is the one way you can make sure that you don't publish a book dead. Are you familiar with this term from old publishing?
Jo: You can expand on it.
Dan: Okay. So in traditional publishing, there's a term called publishing dead, which is where the publishing house buys a book, they go to the trouble of laying it out and printing it, and then they just kinda drop it on the market with an entry in the bookseller's catalogue.
There's no publicity, no fanfare, no attempt to get advance buzz going, and it just kinda sits there.
Occasionally someone who buys for a bookstore will get a couple of copies, and they'll sit on the shelves, and a customer will walk by and buy one. Books that are published dead tend to sell 500 copies over a 30-year lifetime. It's not much.
Jo: That's probably a lot of indie books as well.
Dan: That's how most indie books are done. The first 10 years of my career, I was doing fiction podcasting, so everything I was publishing got published live, and they did really well.
Then fiction podcasting kinda died at the same time that my life got really complicated, and so I decided just to let my podcast die with the wave. At just the same time, my personal fiction productivity went through the roof. I went from writing one, maybe two books a year to writing four or five.
I was dropping these four or five books on the world and nothing happened, and all the sales were drying up anyway from the older stuff that had been supported by the podcast. So I decided I wanted to find a way to stop publishing things dead.
I had done a Kickstarter for an audiobook years ago that I produced for Gail Carriger, and so when I was writing Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile, I decided there's a lot of Heinlein fans out there, so even if I don't personally have the name recognition, this is something that I could launch pretty well on Kickstarter.
It did great, and I decided at that point that I was never going to publish another book dead. I was always going to have some kind of occasion to launch with, even if I had to manufacture it.
In the years since, I've published very little, because I've been trying to figure out how to do that. I've got a big stack of books that are coming out now that I've figured it out.
I realised that things like debuting in a book bundle, doing a Kickstarter, or finding a way to time a release with a news cycle, which is appropriate for some science fiction particularly, these are ways to publish a book without publishing it dead and then having to try to figure out why nobody's noticing it.
So that's why I'm doing the Kickstarter.
Jo: I also agree. What I like is doing the two-week campaign. I normally do two-week campaigns, because then I can just focus my energy before the campaign and then during those two weeks, and then I'm basically done, and then I put it up on all the platforms and everything.
I focus most of my energy into that couple of weeks beforehand and then the two weeks of the campaign. Like you, I mean—
We don't want to be spending all our time marketing, but to try and make it an occasion just helps us put a bit more effort into it, doesn't it?
Dan: It really does. And the other thing it does, and this took me a while to figure out, but I've come to understand that most people's relationship with their favourite writers isn't like my relationship with my favourite writers.
I've got about 70 writers I like, but I've got about 10 where I don't care what happens, I will buy and immediately read what they've done.
I realised that for most people, their relationship with most of the writers they like is more at arm's distance. They stumble across, “Oh, I didn't know this guy had something new. I'll pick it up,” rather than being like, “I love the way this person's mind works, and I want to see what it goes at next.”
So the bread and butter as an author has got to be in making sure that those people find you. It's not in serving the core base, the core 1,000 fans.
They're really important, and you want to do that, but if you want the career to sustain and build, you've got to find ways to help people in that second group, the arm's-length fans, stumble over what you're doing.
Because everybody's got more important things in life than your books. But if you've got excuses to be stumbled upon that don't involve standing right up and waving a sign saying, “Buy my book, buy my book,” then you're more likely to build momentum, because people talk about the book they just read and that they love.
If they don't talk to someone in the first few days after they read that book, then unless it was one of the books that changes their life, they're never going to talk about it again. So you want to get as many people talking about the cool book they read last week at the same time as possible, to build momentum.
Jo: Indeed. Right.
So where can people find your cool book, as well as all your other books, online?
Dan: Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible is currently Kickstarting. You can find a link on the top post at my website at JDSawyer.net. You can find all my books at JDSawyer.net/book-list, and you can find my weekly articles on maker stuff, philosophy, creativity, and history at jdanielsawyer.substack.com.
Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Dan. That was great.
Dan: It was a pleasure, as always.