My brand-new book!
For sale right now and ready to delight.
I’m extremely happy to tell you that, as of this writing, I have a new book. 🎉
It is a collection of my essays, some of which appeared in this newsletter over the last few years, and some of which I wrote for other purposes, and that you have almost certainly never seen before.
You’ll find essays about all the usual stuff: sketchbooks, procrastination, money and art, grief and new love, aging parents and stubborn dogs, art school and not-art-school, police uniforms, ducks, Covid, jigsaws, and Wordle.
The last book I wrote was two years ago: the first collection of my essays, called You Do You.
This new book is completely new — the paper isn’t even recycled.
If you’re a regular subscriber and you like what I write every Friday, but you’re tired of saving my emails in a folder or printing them out or committing them to memory or whatever it is you do with these essays, you’ll be glad to know that they are now going to be available in a beautiful hardcover edition.
I spent ages selecting the essays, editing them, designing and producing the book — but the thing I wrestled with the most was …. the title.
I had considered treating it like a sequel and just adding a number at the end (like “Godfather Part 3,” “Halloween VI,” or “The LEGO Movie 17“), but it seemed weird to call a book “You Do You Too,” so I went back to the drawing board.
After generating hundreds of ideas and consulting friends, relations, and AI (ChatGPT’s suggestions were “Here I Am. This Is What I Made,” “Enough,” and “Bride of You Do You and the Half Blood Prince VII”), the new book is called “Make It Anyway.”
In the book’s introduction, I explain in some detail what I mean by that, but I’ll give you a free preview: I want to encourage readers to be creative, regardless of the hesitation or the obstacles they face, that it is better to make something crappy than not make something at all, that it’s better to pour out whatever’s in your head onto paper than it is to keep it bottled up because you’re not sure it’s perfect. (That was a really long sentence, and I promise you the book doesn’t contain many of those.)
This is a message that will be familiar to readers of these essays, and I’m quite proud of the fact that I managed to boil it down to just three short words. In the future, I might turn to writing bumper stickers and t-shirts rather than books, but for now, well, here it is, and there you have it.
The book is nice and big and hardcover because I wanted to make a nice, big, hardcover book, and it’s my book, so I can do whatever I want with it.
And while it is big and hard-covered, it’s made of advanced materials and especially blended ink that are feather-light. I insisted on this so you wouldn’t have to pay much for shipping, and the more copies you buy, the less you pay per copy.
Which brings me to my next point.
Another awesome thing about hardcover books: there’s nothing nicer as a present for a loved one or even a casual acquaintance than a hardcover book. In fact, the people I like and admire the most are the ones who buy multiple copies of a book they really like and give them out as presents to friends and relations.
This is a really smart idea for the simple reason that if you give the same book to everyone you know, you’ll always have something to talk to them about, and they’ll have something to talk to each other about—namely, how wonderful the book is and even more importantly, how wonderful you are for giving it to them.
This is a common practice among people who are well-read and well-liked. Just saying.
So if you know anyone who is interested in sketchbooks, procrastination, money and art, getting lost in Pakistan, seeing dinosaurs in the garden, growing old loudly, dog training, video gaming, tattoos, scars, budgets, rose gardens, and tempera sticks, your holiday shopping is now complete.
My original plan had been to sell the book for just the cost of printing — but Amazon won’t let me sell a book at cost (Jeff Bezos needs another rocket ship or wing on one of his mansions, or maybe a new wife).
The lowest price that Amazon would let me charge was $13.12. But I’ve decided to jack up the list price to $13.13. That way, I will earn 1¢ on each copy of the book you buy. (If you buy the book in one of the many other currencies in which it is available, the prices are less elegant but luckier.)
If you feel the book is worth more, you are free to buy me a cup of coffee.
However, if you read it cover to cover and determine the book is worth less, let me know, and I will send you a penny. (Of course, the U.S. government just stopped producing pennies, so this will be an extremely difficult thing for me to do. But I’m willing to make the effort to keep you happy — if that’s all it takes. Be warned, I may just send you a drawing of a penny, a drawing worth at least 2¢. Which is pretty nice of me, considering that you don’t even like my book, but that’s just how I roll. I’m nicer than you, apparently.)
Anyways, whether you decide to buy one, or ten, or no copies at all, I remain forever,
Your pal,
Danny