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- Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are.
- Surprise and delight them. Overdeliver again and again.
- Success!
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Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”. (1935). Pp. 251-83 in Benjamin, Walter. 2003. Selected Writings. 4: 1938–1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, and Others. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. PDF | monoskop.org. There’s been a huge amount of commentary on this seminal but problematic text, and AI has given it a new lease on life, including:
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Szpakowski, Michael. 2026. “Art and AI—Benjamin’s ‘aura’ as a Locus of Resistance: Notes, Theses and Images” Arts 15, no. 5: 93. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15050093
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The same claim could be made of the very popular ‘ComicCon’ events around the world. Supposedly ‘disposable’, mass-produced pop culture thrives on physical presence. ↩︎
- Improve your notes and your life with two-word phrases.
- Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?
- Even the index is just another note.
- Top level categories in my notes.
- When it comes to writing notes, how much mess is just enough?
- A Valve that can’t be Ghosted
- Three Cold Hands
- True Kintsugi
- Forge-smith
- The Ledger Remembers
- Unpoisoned Firstflag
What comes after the golden age of prescriptive non-fiction
Tim Ferriss, the author of self-help classics such as The Four Hour Work Week, noted a very sharp drop in his book sales since the arrival of AI back in late 2022. He viewed this as a real turning point for the ‘self-help’ genre of writing. He asked, ‘Has AI already killed nonfiction?’ and concluded:
“The death of prescriptive nonfiction books, at least as a mass-market information business, is nigh. Sure, there will be temporary outliers, but the trend line points in one direction.” – Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?
The solution? He suggested the way forward is to return to the basics:
I don’t know that the work of Tim Ferriss is a clear bellwether for the entire genre. He’s a unicorn and there will always be a few of those. My feeling is that the industry ran a little ahead of itself in treating self-help books as stand-alone products in their own right. I always saw them as derivative, secondary products. The books were never the main event. The main event was always none other than the author. People want a direct connection with a real expert who has actually been successful at the exact thing they’re writing about – or at least knowledgeable. The gold standard, the most desirable activity, would be a personal audience with that expert. Failing that, they want to meet the expert in some kind of face-to-face encounter of learning, exchange or connection. And only then does the book become an item of value. The book is always a proxy for the personalised encounter; it’s not really the primary expression of the encounter itself. The book is a kind of souvenir of the experience, which works, curiously enough, even if you didn’t actually take part in the face-to-face version.
I’m not saying anything new here. It’s obvious that people prefer the expert – not least in the amount of money people are prepared to pay for face-to-face encounters compared with a book of the same thing. Take popular psychology, as just one possible example. You might pay a psychologist $150 or more per 50-minute session, and you might even book numerous sessions, whereas you’ll only pay $10-30 for the psychologist’s book. The book is a real bargain, but you don’t care: what you really want is the real thing. For a live audience with a world famous therapist you might be prepared to pay ten times the going rate, or more. A similar dynamic is at work well beyond the subject of popular psychology: if you liked the book, you’ll love the live event. Consider how much you might be paying these days to see Tim Ferriss live.
And a similar value gradient is evident well beyond the prescriptive non-fiction genre. It seems to hold for writing more generally. The Sydney Writers’ Festival, for example, a week of live events with authors, had its most successful year ever in 2026, as measured by ticket sales and attendance figures. Just across the Tasman Sea, the Aukland Writers’ Festival also had its most successful year in 2026.
Then too, the annual Hay Festival in Wales had a very successful 2026, with 210,000 tickets issued and book sales up 35%.
At the last minute the Adelaide Book Week suddenly collapsed due to arguments about disinviting a writer over Israel-Palestine views. That was unfortunate, but despite this massive setback, the local writing and publishing community was determined enough to set up a one-off festival in its place, even at the last minute, with nearly fifty events, many sold out.
The spread and great success of these writers’ festivals shows that people are very keen to meet face-to-face to discuss books in one another’s physical presence, and especially in the presence of their favourite authors.1 These days every medium-sized town upwards seems to have its own festival of writing. Even a small but well-formed town like Berry in New South Wales, with a population of less than two and a half thousand, has its own very well-organised Berry Writers’ Festival. Perhaps your local town does too.
This might well be hyperbole, but apparently, writers’ festivals are ’the new raves’.
It’s rather curious. Why on earth would anyone want to sit in an audience gazing for an hour or so at an author whose books they like reading, then endure a question session made from variants of “Where do you get your ideas from”? Isn’t the book itself, just reading the book, the main event here? Well, yes and no. In reading a book the reader implicitly imagines themselves in some sort of connection with its author, and to see this connection come to life is valuable in itself.
If the book isn’t a souvenir of the live encounter, just try telling that to the line of people queuing patiently for the author to sign their very own copy.
Uncategorizable (’Quixotic’) millionaire David Walsh has opened an impressive new wing of his Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, to house his library, which gives pride of place to expensive signed editions of works such as Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Isaac Asimov’s PhD thesis. Presumably the paying public will treat these signed tomes a little like they treat the original art work of great artists. They have an aura, as cultural theorist Walter Benjamin would have said.
So, what’s the future of prescriptive non-fiction? Not just to reconnect with a thousand true fans, but to do so in a very particular way: in person.
In person matters now more than ever. The rise of AI makes people question their purpose, given that machines can now ‘do it better’. There’s a kind of shame at being human.
As artist and film-maker Michael Szpakowski says:
“AI renders culture a succession of isolated and static (and largely digital) objects rather than an ongoing dynamic and historical dialogic expression of our embodied and reflecting humanity.”
The more AI subverts and destroys the very idea of human agency, the greater will be the push-back towards real, physical presence – something humans are still quite good at. We’re seeing this in many areas of culture, and we’re certainly seeing it with books and writing.
Further reading:
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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💬 “Cut anything into tiny pieces and it all becomes a mass of confusion.” — Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 89.3. Cited by Michel de Montagne in ‘On Experience’ in The Essays: A Selection. Trans. M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Books, 2004. 3.13, 366.
This is true, potentially, of writing notes. It’s too easy to produce fragmentary knowledge.
The solution? Link your notes and create hub or structure notes (there is a difference — see Bob Doto’s post for details) that cluster separate ideas together and lead in useful directions.
In Matt Bell’s excellent book on writing, Refuse to be Done, there’s a quote by Karen Russell, author of the excellent novels Swamplandia. and The Antidote. She says,
💬 “Writing a novel is kind of like scaling Mt. Everest and passing by your own bones on the way.”
Respect is due, but I can’t help feeling it might not be quite that hard.
#writing #climbing #writinglife
Faint praise for categories
Author and activist Rebecca Solnit isn’t too keen on the apparent eagerness to categorise.
“Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a widespread tendency to act as if once something has been categorized, no further consideration is required.” — A is for Airtight Categories
I’m not all that keen on the established categories myself. Not in my notes, anyway, and often not in my life. I’m not looking for categories. Instead, I’m usually looking for patterns.
I feel that placing an idea or concept in a category tends to close down further thought, like closing the lid on a box. In contrast, discovering a pattern tends to be just the start of consideration, of enquiry, of conversation, not the end of it.
Patterns invite a sense of wonder; categories tend to deny it. As Solnit said I her book Hope in the Dark, “the Moon is profound except when we land on it”.
Being quick to categorise can look like a neat short-cut to understanding, but it often doesn’t work out that way. Established categories can hide more than they reveal. Relying on them can be a way of fooling yourself into believing you know more than you do. One of the reasons I write slowly is to allow myself space and time to think through my ignorance — and to think things through by writing them down. Solnit says:
“We live in a time where people are more isolated then ever from the kind of private, personal engagement where you can wonder, doubt, improvise, or just admit you don’t know, and where many of us are instead more than ever in the para-public sphere of social media where you perform for an audience of casual acquaintances and strangers who may savage you if you get anything wrong or even seem weak or uncertain or uncommitted.”
Well, I feel being uncertain or uncommitted isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness, and writing slowly isn’t necessarily a sign of laziness. Look where certain, committed and fast has got us in recent times.
And admitting that you don’t know, far from being a sign of ignorance, is often a hallmark of expertise. That’s the paradox of mastery. It’s why the expert must remain a beginner.
One kind of category I do have time for is the category that no one has thought of yet. Creating new categories of thought is how the world is re-made. It’s curious that those who are the keenest on categories tend to be the least receptive to the idea that we just made them up.
“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics.
Further reading:
There is something you find interesting
💬 “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” – Annie Dillard, ‘Write Till You Drop’. New York Times, 28 May, 1989.
I’ve mentioned Annie Dillard previously, and in fact have quoted another section from this very article.
Anyway, Dillard put her finger on the reason I wrote my little book, Shu Ha Ri, the Japanese Way of Learning. Not that no one else understood the concept (I mean, almost everyone in Japan probably understands it better than me), but that I’d never seen a satisfying book-length treatment. So that’s where I began, by expressing my own fascination.
A matrix-like shower of numbers, text, esoteric syntax, and witty repartee
So AI models are chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon.
It seems in their obscure chat rooms AI agents can already accidentally name sci-fi author Iain M. Banks’s spaceships of ‘The Culture’ almost better than humans.
Here we have:
And they’re not even trying.
Still, naming super-intelligent spaceships is one thing; taking over the galaxy with them is another. Presumably that’s next week’s task.
Reviewing Banks’s 1996 Culture novel, Peter Tieryas said:
💬 “Part of the joy of Excession is hearing the Minds speak with each other, that matrix-like shower of numbers, text, esoteric syntax, and witty repartee.”
Weird how accurately this turned out, especially since Banks wrote the novel thirty years ago, while owning just a fax machine and two answering machines which he didn’t even use. No internet, no email and certainly no AI agents conspiring galactic domination in slang.
Well in case you’re interested, here’s a pretty extensive list of the actual Culture ships mentioned in the novels.
The consolations of literature
On a train trip West from Tokyo on the Chuo line you pass by the Northern slopes of Mount Fuji, but from the angles offered it’s hard to see the summit. This was doubly the case when we did it on the way to the Nagano prefecture because that early September day was rainy and misty.
I pointed my phone’s camera in the vague direction of the peak but I was guessing and it wasn’t worth pressing the shutter. There was nothing to see. Mount Fuji’s looming presence expressed itself as an absence beyond viewing.
In a charity store yesterday I picked up the Penguin Classics edition of Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This contains a couple of additional accounts of the poet’s famous travels, including ‘The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton’, in which Bashō writes:
💬 “I crossed the barrier-gate of Hakone on a rainy day. All the mountains were deeply buried behind the clouds.
In a way
It was fun
Not to see Mount Fuji
In foggy rain.”
Well, sometimes it’s comforting to know you’re not the first to miss out – and to be reminded that missing out might just hold its own subtle pleasure. This perspective might lack credibility unless you recognise that most days, as with Hokusai’s famous 36 Views of Mount Fuji, it’s almost impossible not to see that sacred mountain.
Between the lines by Rachel Dioso-Villa
I like how Australia puts an emphasis on portraiture as a culturally significant art form — a greater emphasis, certainly than it receives in the UK, where I grew up.
The 2026 Brisbane Portrait Prize has a selection of interestingly diverse entries, showing what’s possible with this form.
An entry that caught my eye was that of criminologist Rachel Dioso-Villa, titled ‘Between the Lines’. It’s a large series of hand-painted notes and images on rice paper. For me this demonstrates how the making of notes can be an art in itself, and how from this repeated practice larger themes gradually arise — in this case, a self portrait.
Here’s the write-up:
💬 “Between the Lines is not a conventional self-portrait. Across more than 150 suspended sheets of rice paper, Rachel Dioso-Villa has built an image of herself through accumulated illustrations. Each page was made over twelve months, accompanying her through conferences, meetings, travel, her office, studio and home. Handled, written on, painted and reworked over time, every sheet holds traces of her life.
The fragments of text and image that move across the surface were formed while reading case materials and listening to the stories of people wrongfully convicted. This is work Dioso-Villa has been doing for over fifteen years as an Associate Professor of Criminology. Writing appears and disappears, some passages remain; others are buried beneath layers of mark and memory. “The work did not begin as a self-portrait,” she reflects. “It became one.””
You can view the artwork at the artist’s Brisbane Portrait Prize site.
The idea of note-making as art has arisen in several different places, including in the work of Georges Didi-Hubermann, and Daniel Wisser.
💬 “Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
While reading, I’m acutely aware of certain phrases and sentences that seem particularly significant. Struggling to articulate this significance is the development of taste.
When I read something and think “that’s interesting”, I make a note to record why I find it interesting. This is the way I expose shadowy intuition to the sun.