I’ve written about why I’m writing my next book (on software design) as a paid subscription.
I thought this would tidily align incentives between myself as the author & my readers. I would be incentivized to write because I wanted to retain & attract subscribers. Subscribers would be incentivized to join/continue because they were getting value all along.
One of the themes of Geek Incentives is that all incentive systems have misalignment & unintended consequences, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that the Tidy First? book incentives also contain misalignment & unintended consequences. To paraphrase Monty Python, though, no one intends unintended consequences. Here’s the dilemma:
I came back from a 3-week poker vacation ready to write. Yesterday I wrote a useful chapter on batching tidyings into pull requests. This morning I was getting fired up to write a follow-up chapter on the rhythm of tidying when I felt a tug to slow down. What’s going on?
What was happening is that I both want more subscribers (through attraction & retention) & I want to hang on to those subscribers longer. I generally try to publish a chapter a week. If I publish chapters on succeeding days, I don’t guess I’ll attract more subscribers but I will hang on to those subscribers for a shorter period.
I have a counteracting intrinsic incentive, which is to get the damn book done so I can get on to the next book. The topic, software design, has naturally split into 3 books based on scope: individual, development team, whole team. I’m eager to get the trilogy finished.
And so I have incentives tugging me every which way. That is part of the nature of incentive systems. If we want to understand incentives as a system, we must add together all the vectors of influence (to be geeky about it) to find the net effect of the system. Then adjust. Always adjust.
Your subscribers like the things you do. Like to read you and increase knowledge. Take your time.
idk it sounds like if u were fired up stopping on purpose sounds wasteful ... u can always write 20 chapters in 1 day n' then take a 20 weeks vacation