the outlier
hello,
It’s been blazing hot in London this week so I’ve taken to the air-conditioned cafe nearby for working stints and the sun-drenched park for late afternoon reading sojourns. I don’t think I’ll make it to a Greek island but at this rate I’ll be as tanned as Odysseus by summer’s end.
Thanks to those of you who decided to pay me this week! According to official advice the ‘conversion rate’ is about what’s expected but the Olympics have me wanting to beat the statistics. Come and join us…
This week paid subscribers received a mystery book recommendation, the topic of what could be my next book project and a roadmap for this newsletter for the rest of this year
the books📖
Endgame is rolling nicely, getting good reviews, a speaking booking and some podcast requests. For a smaller project, it’s heartening to see and it’s been fun to write something people find useful.
Superstrengths is so close and I think we’re decided on a cover. For a launch ‘strategy’, I think I’ll press play on the ebook first, give it away for free for a day and then inch the price up day after day (£0.99 then £1.99 etc etc) to encourage a burst of support and garner the all-important Amazon reviews. Of course, big free giveaway day will coincide with this letter to make sure you all get the goods.
The TikTok Book Awards were a fun evening and it’s incredible how many people I now know in the book and content creator space. At last year’s inaugural awards do I felt like I barely knew anyone while this time I probably didn’t have time to talk to them all! I did have a fascinating chat with a book agent and it sounds like I might be a part of her panel speaking to major children’s publishers about the boys’ literacy work we’ve been doing so it does pay to turn up to these things. As Nassim Taleb says,
‘Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.’
In the absence of any colleagues, unfortunately I have to do the partying myself. Difficult I know.
for your interest
stay smiling and are books over?
stay smiling
Manifest destiny reared its head as the world’s best rugby player singlehandedly turned the tide of the Olympic 7s final and took home a gold medal in a sport he hadn’t played until about 6 months ago.
There are plenty of other people who can wax on about Dupont. All I want to say is that when he was playing for Castres, I was telling friends he would be the best 9 in the world soon. I now regret not upgrading that prediction and making it more public.
What I want to talk about is how unusual it was to see him smile. On winning the game he looked like a little boy, a boy having fun achieving a childhood dream. He even did an odd but quite fun choreographed dance with the team to Miami by Will Smith. I must have seen him smile before but when you think about Dupont, when you conjure his handsome face up in your mind, he looks taciturn. Inscrutable.
I believe the best leaders are. They don’t get too carried away whether they’re up or they’re down. When it’s over, they let themselves become who they are.
I see a lot of ‘how to cope with the present moment’ type post, even from people I admire. And there are difficult things to think about. Climate change, elections, economies, as well as whatever occupies you personally. It can feel like there’s a lot to cope with.
But there always has been.
One lecturer at university, in between his lessons on Arthurian legend and musings on Bob Dylan, told us about his childhood in the US. His parents were German Jews who managed to get out of Germany in the 1930s before the unthinkable happened, making their way to America. Then one day, when he was at school, another unthinkable almost did happen.
His class were quietly and calmly evacuated from their classroom, taken underground to a bunker and told that they’d have to wait. That this might be it. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis and nuclear war looked like becoming nonfiction.
Imagine that.
It’s not always easy to remain optimistic but on balance, optimism is probably the only rational position we can take. It’s also backed by data and if you need convincing things are generally getting better, I recommend the book Factfulness by Hans Rosling. It might not get you dancing like Dupont but it will help you remain level-headed until the next time something happens to get you smiling.
are books over?
For data that does read as bleak, I’m a big book reader but even I cringe at my screentime notifications.
If you asked people, it might feel like fewer books are being read and given the competition - Netflix, scrolling on your phone and gaming - you might think it’s a losing battle. Some publishers clearly think so as the Big 6 became a Big 5 and then almost a Big 4. It seems like something’s rotten in the state of book reading.
That’s why I found this Gallup survey interesting. It found that Americans are reading fewer books with the average being 12.6 books during the past year, two or three fewer than they did between 2001 and 2016. This graph illustrates the changes and the overall decline is a concern, especially if you’re working in it!
What’s striking is that the decline comes from the big reading demographics; older people, women and college graduates. The other striking outcome is that the group with the smallest decline in readership were young adults, ages 18-34, and this group are also the largest consumers of audiobooks.
I’d say this is cause for optimism. Books are flying online, most obviously on TikTok, but not only that, I think there’s going to be more innovation around them as an older, slower-moving sector catches up. The TikTok Book Awards was such a genuinely good vibes event where old and new publishing were mixing around, celebrating independent bookshops and online creators in the same place.
Then there’s also the fact that this cohort who still see the appeal of reading books are the ones growing up and thinking about or getting on with parenting their kids. Gen-Z are probably the first generation to grow up completely surveilled by mobile devices and social media companies and as the impact of this immersion in devices becomes better understood, I think we’ll see those people think very carefully about the impact of these devices on their children. Steve Jobs famously limited his kids’ use of iPads in one of the clearest demonstrations of do as I say not as I do you’ll ever come across.
This is pretty vague data and an incomplete picture I’m painting but given the slew of miserable news stories in the UK this week, much of it feeding off of online activity, I do think there will be and probably already is a general exhaustion at being like this. People are ready to stop doing it and books will always be there, waiting to be picked up, whether you’re young or old.
The other side is that it’s old people letting the side down, given the group with the biggest decline in readership is over 55. If you want to save books then grab a grandpa, take away his iPad and give him a nice, paper book to read.
a book
Last night I finished one of my favourite reads of the year so far. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is a fantastic, funny, messy and stylish book about Iranian-American poet and recovering alcoholic Cyrus Shams on a personal quest to write a book exploring the concept of martyrdom that he believes will make his own life worthy.
The book is stuffed with historical asides, dream sequences, snippets of poetry and multiple perspectives taking us back to his family’s previous life in Iran and their journey to the US and while all of that could easily be annoying, it’s a delight to read. I found the ending perhaps a little obvious but I absolutely loved this book and would read it again right now.
a listen
Listen to my appearance on Beyond Football here or it’s also on YouTube.
This Blindboy podcast episode sees him swapping tales on stage with professional storyteller Clare Murphy. It’s lovely to listen to, entertaining and a little educational (he reckons many old stories are actually repositories of information about how to look after the environment). Her career is also giving me ideas about what I could do when I’m not online.
a quote
Lord, increase my bewilderment
– Sufi prayer (featured in Martyr!)
lastly
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I’ll see you next time.