How I Published This

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Ok, so what’s this newsletter about? 

I’m not 100% sure yet, but I have an idea, and I would love your feedback on it before going any further. The idea: 

How I Published This. 

We are going to talk about ... How to Get Published 

For years, I wanted to get published, but I had no clue how. I wished there had been a place where people who had published a lot would talk about how they got published, or strategies, ideas or frameworks for getting published. 

I’ll give you an example of the kind of idea I'm talking about. 

Write about the invention of something:

The reason it's so powerful to write about how something got invented is we tend to live our lives assuming all these things are real, not invented. We tend to assume these inventions are natural parts of the world order. And so by explaining how or why something got invented, we can challenge accepted wisdom, say something novel, and make a splash.

Now, here's the real reason I love "The invention of ________ " literature. No matter how many times you try to tell people everything is invented, they still think it's real. 

Take, for example, Michael Cook, the most famous member of my dissertation committee. 

During my dissertation defense, he was bothered with the title of my dissertation.

“The Invention of Palestine?” he asked, perplexed. “Surely you don’t mean that? What about the soil of Palestine? Is the soil invented?”

Naturally, I fumbled my response in the moment, but here's what I should have said to Professor Cook: “historians don’t study soil." Historians don’t study the formation of organisms, or the classification of soil types, or the other things the soil people study. Where are ma soil peeeps at?

Thank you internet!

It's no secret that so many writers have gotten so famous insisting everything was invented: 

Then you've got the long tail of "The Invention of _______" books. 

And, if someone has already written about the invention of your thing, just write about its re-invention:

And, my personal favorite:

Now, get off your tuchus, write about the invention of something, and get yourself published. 

So, back to this publication.

The plan is to deep dive into different ways of getting published. That could include frameworks or strategies for generating publishable ideas, like the one we just talked about, or it could be a specific thesis that we think someone should explore, or a lacuna in the literature someone ought to fill, or a half-baked idea that someone else should finish baking. 

The goal is to help you land a monster publication.

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