Press the Money Button, Get a Book (Within the Next Decade)

If you subscribe now, you'll get a 'free' book whenever it is done and available, which may take a decade or so

Edit 5/16/24: On my last post, I announced a new feature for paying subscribers: If you send me a question or query, I’ll type you a letter in response and I can scan it to you or mail it to you. It may be shitty and low-effort. But it’s really valuable to hear from readers (even free subscribers!), as few of you as there are.

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First of all, a moment of silence for the martyrs in Gaza. Please take a moment read this father’s story.

An announcement:

The goal of this substack was to create a place where I could work towards a book on the history of sentient oil. The reason I needed to do this in public is that I need to publish periodically to force myself to create preliminary ‘final’ versions of things so I could to move on to the next thing instead of endlessly editing.

There was also the goal of building an audience for my project, so that one or two people would buy such a book when it becomes available.

There’s been steady, organic growth that looks to me like real, interesting people discovering my work, truly reading it, and appreciating it.¹ The total number of readers increases only slowly, just recently having approached 600. I offer a very niche product.

My motivation for looking for an audience is, in part, to spare myself the indignity of self-publishing the book when it is ready. You see, I work in book publishing and understand the business. I don’t want to be published by a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, but there are some small presses I respect too much not to aspire to be published by. Self-publishing is totally fine, but print-on-demand means the book will mostly only be available online, segregating it from the rest of the book industry.

The profit and loss statements of small presses are aspirational, contingent things, but a key factor is the unit cost of the book, which goes down as the first printing can be increased. If they know that I will need to buy 200 copies of the first printing, that unit cost goes down, and they’re more able to take the risk on me. (The more the better, of course.)

So if you subscribe for at least one month, I’ll keep your name and mailing address on file, and will send you a free print book whenever it is available, even if that is the far-flung future. It could take ten years, but it will take at least two years, I’d say. I’m in no rush, but I’ve also been working on this project since 2020 so I’m part of the way there by now. When it’s time, I’ll reach out to make sure I have your current mailing address.

There’s definitely the chance I could lose money on this: a subscription is $5 and a book at authors’ discount is about $10, plus I’ll be picking up the tab on shipping. But hopefully some of you hold your subscriptions for more than one month, and I can break even that way. Know that proceeds go to a good cause: I have an autistic son who needs OT and specialized language therapy, among other needs. You’re not going to be paying for me to spend more time on my writing, because I have to put my family and my job first and second, respectively.

If you want to be on the list but don’t want to pay for any reason, just email me at thespouter@substack.com.

I’m trying to load up the next four posts that finish out the Methane section with the Fracking subsection. Those will drop weekly for the next month, so that if you subscribe now, it’ll feel like you’re getting something. (Those posts will still be free to all.) EDIT: there’s no rush, actually. I’m going to sit on FRACK for a while and publish when it feels right. Then, after that, I’ll have to slow down.

My writing plan, having brought the first-round Petrohistory up to almost-the-present with FRACKING,

• I’m heading back to the 19th century. I want to do a Marxist reading of Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company to develop our theories of petrocommunism.

• I also need to address petrolatum (Vaseline) the petrochemical I smear all over my body multiple times a day (I have psoriasis). which will serve to begin an effort to chronicle the medicinal uses of petroleum products, from the Rock Oil remedies of Petrolia to the use of chemicals derived from petroleum to manufacture every type of pharmaceutical.

• Then I need to rewrite every in order, for the book. While I’m doing that, I may have to completely abandon the Substack, but it’s more likely I’ll post passages that fill in gaps or tangents.

1. At some point, I developed a justified paranoia that if mine was listed in the Substack database as free-only, they would not put me on their carousels. I turned on the subscriptions but asked that nobody send me money. I maybe should have done “pledges.”