Craig Mod: Things Become Things That Last
Craig Mod, author of Things Become Other Things, explains how his love of independent publishing remains uncompromised despite a book deal with Random House and why books represent the perfect focused technology in an age of constant digital distraction.
Today, the Spotlight shines On Craig Mod, a writer, photographer, and walker.
Random House has just released Things Become Other Things, a walking memoir that traces his 300-mile journey along ancient pilgrimage paths in rural Japan. The book blends sharp prose with striking photography, capturing conversations with aging fishermen, inn owners, and cafe "mamas" while reflecting on friendship, loss, and the disappearing village life of Japan's Kii Peninsula. This is an expanded and reimagined mass market edition of the title Craig issued in a fine art edition directly to his online community of followers.
His previous books include Kissa by Kissa, which explores Japan's old cafe culture, and he reaches some 40,000 readers through his newsletters on photography, literature, and walking. Craig's work sits at a perfect intersection of deep attention and wandering feet.
Dig Deeper
• Purchase Things Become Other Things from Bookshop.org, Powell's Books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or Apple Books
• Check out Craig's self-published books on his online store and learn more about his Special Projects membership
• Follow Craig Mod on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, and YouTube
• Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin | Malcolm Gladwell
• 44 Quotes From Kevin Kelly That Will Change Your Life
• Annie Dillard's Mesmerizing Observations of Nature and Self at the Most Conscious Level
• Craig Mod - The 'Rules' of Walking
• How Hugh Howey Turned His Self-Published Story "Wool" Into a Success (& a Book Deal)
• Things Become Other Things (fine art edition)
• Ira Glass on Storytelling (The Taste Gap)
• Driving the Tōkaidō (with 'good walking bud John')
• Anne Lamott on Writing and Why Perfectionism Kills Creativity
• Stephen King | On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
• Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir by Craig Mod · Audiobook preview
• Dr. Derek Muller | Veritasium
• Robin Sloan's Reality Zine
• The miracle of the United States Postal Service
• Craig Mod on The Tim Ferriss Show
• Ten Towns Across Japan — Nothing Exciting Supercut
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I was listening to Rick Rubin interviewing Malcolm Gladwell the other day, and they had a little piece of their conversation that made me think of you and the discussion we were going to have. One of the things that Rick asked Gladwell was, do you ever have projects or themes for your books that don't flesh out?
Gladwell's answer was that he has so many outlets, it's rare that he can't use an idea. I think he may have even definitively said that never happens. He basically has so many different vehicles and outlets—from the podcast to essays, to book chapters, et cetera—he can make his ideas work through one of his outlets.
Craig Mod: Yeah.
Lawrence: That resonated with me, to ask you something similar. Do you ever have to abandon a thread, or given your diversity of outlets, do you have a similar situation?
Craig: That's an interesting question. Like Gladwell, I also have enough outlets that I've deliberately concocted on my own.
That's why the membership program exists. I mean, that was essentially a response to not having an outlet. I was deep in a year of working on an essay for the Atlantic, and then it got kind of canned, or I got ghosted. It just didn't work out, and that's what catalyzed starting the membership program and the Ridgeline newsletter. I didn't want to be in a position where I felt beholden to some random editor's whims on the other side of the world.
Since then, I've been lucky in that I can usually find a place for something if I need to. But until six years ago, I definitely struggled with not finding homes for things or having to abandon certain projects. Probably for the best to a certain degree, because these things weren't necessarily the greatest versions of themselves.
I've talked about this before—from 2011 to 2017, I spent time working on a novel that was based on burying my dad. That didn't get published, which was probably good, and it got rejected many times, but it allowed me to do all these residencies. I got my Virginia Center for the Creative Arts residency, my Ragdale residency, and Tin House. I got into Tin House through it. I was able to do the Iowa Writers Workshop intensive. They have a two or three-month intensive summer program where you just do a bunch of workshops really quickly, like an Iowa Writers Workshop bootcamp.
So that project got me into all those things. Even though it didn't have a classical piece of output in the sense that it didn't become a published book, it was a very useful tool for almost all of my thirties. In that sense, I was grateful for it. It was a really good kind of training ground, and I met a bunch of interesting people and good friends still to this day through that project.
So even the things that don't make it out into the world in the forms you expect them to, obviously have a lot of good, and this was one of them.
Lawrence: Yeah. You'd be very hard pressed to call that a failed endeavor.
Craig: Yeah.
Lawrence: You'd have to be a certain kind of person to view it through that lens.
It's interesting that you tell that anecdote though, because I've had instances in my own life where younger people have asked for advice about getting into creative fields. I've always said, just make your own work. And that could be like a 30-second short—you don't have to go make a feature film—but just have something that you can start and finish. At the very least, you've practiced with your tools, which is invaluable.
Craig: Yeah.
Lawrence: But you've also learned how to finish something, and that's pretty powerful as well as a creative.
Craig: It's everything. And that's what most people don't experience because it's so easy to talk yourself out of finishing stuff. Kevin Kelly has a great quote. He says, "Don't be the best. Be the only." And I love that. So that's another thing to keep in mind—if you're working on stuff or if you feel overwhelmed creatively, stop trying to be the best illustrator or the best Miyazaki-style illustrator or animator. Figure out what your weird, unique overlapping of skills and life experiences can make you the only of.
I think exactly like you say, choose projects that you can complete. There's a reason they call it a practice. That's all you're supposed to be doing, essentially, until you're dead. Just keep practicing, practicing, practicing. So I think that's really good advice.
Lawrence: I wonder if Kevin Kelly got that from Bill Graham. That's what he used to say about the Grateful Dead. They're not the best at what they do. They're the only.
Craig: Yeah, he probably did. It's a great line. Although Kevin, I don't think was a Deadhead, but he was certainly in the scene peripherally at that point.
Lawrence: Yeah.
It strikes me overall about many of your works or a lot of your work, which is I'm curious how the themes reveal themselves to you. So specifically with this work, this sort of intersection of walking and memory and friendship, the veracity of memory or the reliability of memory.
Craig: Yeah.
Lawrence: I think I want to pick at you about your process a little bit. Do these things emerge and you recognize them, or do you have this conscious intention that you want to craft a narrative that conveys this? Could you tell me about that?
Craig: I would be hard pressed to say it was a conscious, deliberate thing. I think a lot of it just comes from what I'm reading or who I'm inspired by or what books I feel moved by or drawn to, or there's something about the voice. So it's almost less about themes explicitly and more about just where the heart feels pulled towards.
That sounds very woo-wooey, but I've just spent a lot of time reading all sorts of different books and certain things speak to me more than other things. Annie Dillard in the way she writes about nature and writes about being in the world is a huge influence. I don't think she has any kind of deliberate process. When she was writing Tinker at Pilgrim Creek, she was just there. She was also really young. She was like 25 or 26 when she was writing that.
So I think I'm more drawn in that direction. Standard narrative has always been really hard for me. I'm uninterested in plot. I'm uninterested in explicit story. That's why a lot of what I do is vignette. Because for me it's not about, "Oh, are we hitting these plot points and does it take the reader to this place and that place?" It's more about just the energy and the feel of almost each sentence and then chapter by chapter, rather than necessarily the whole.
I think Things Become Other Things is probably the most cohesive thing I've ever written in the sense that there is this kind of story, there is this sort of reveal happening. There is this kind of structure to it in terms of acts. The Fine Art edition has less of that than the Random House edition. So that was interesting working on those two editions and growing the Random House one through being able to work with my editor who kind of helped guide it through basically just questions.
She got a Fine Art edition manuscript and then just sprinkled all over it hundreds of questions. The Random House edition is me responding to all of her questions and growing the narrative through that. Then us moving a few things around and trying to shape the narrative more intentionally.
But it was a very organic, unexpected process. I think the walks too, for me, having all the logistics set up so I'm a hundred percent focused on just the walking, and I don't have news or social media or podcasts or anything running in the background. As I'm walking, that physical act just gets the mind moving and stuff tumbles out. And as I'm walking, I'm dictating. I'm constantly dictating. And that's how I'm able to do two, three, 4,000 words a night after walking for eight hours. Then out of that, you can start to find themes.
I remember when I started working on Things Become Other Things, about four and a half years ago now, I went through all of the writing I did during the walk and printed it all out and then literally cut out of the printouts sentences and paragraphs that felt most resonant to me. Then I just put them all on the ground and shuffled them all up. Then started just going through them again. That allowed me to look at the themes that were naturally emerging during the walk in a way that was kind of divorced from the explicit linearity of the walk itself.
So I was just trying to get fresh eyes on what we were feeling, what things were kind of burling up as we were walking. And that became the genesis for some of the first drafts. Then Brian started to sneak his way in more and more. An editor I was working with for the Fine Art edition, Ali Chance, really started helping me pull on that thread. That's when that expanded into more of a thematic part of the book. Then Molly Turin, my editor at Random House, really helped flesh that out even further.
Ali and I kind of have a very minimalist aesthetic when it comes to literature. We like things to be kind of sparse. Part of the reason I said yes to Random House was I wanted to experience what a big publisher would do with a text like this, and it was super instructive. It was a really incredible experience to go through that with Molly, who has an eye for a bigger audience, and having her pull on these threads, me respond to those pulls, those questions, being really proud of and excited about where we landed.
Lawrence: The story of it becoming a Random House edition is intriguing to me because it challenged an assumption I had, which was that larger, more mainstream presses don't like to pick up self-published titles. And quite honestly, I'm not even sure if that's true or if I invented that, but that was always my perception.
Craig: That's true. Yeah, that's true for sure. It's very rare. I think Hugh Howey is a good example of someone who was militantly self-publishing. He wrote Silo, the books that became the Silo Apple TV show—they're called Wool. He wrote a series of books basically on his blog. He just had a publishing blog talking about Kindle and Kindle singles. This is like 15 years ago. He sold hundreds of thousands of books, I think, independently on his blog. Then his stuff obviously got picked up by big publishers, and then over a decade later, TV rights and movie rights, and TV shows are being made and all this stuff.
So I think for him, he is a canonical example for me of someone who's able to do self-publishing, transitioning to much bigger platforms. Random House very much didn't want me to do my edition. Because I had those experiences with the Atlantic where I'd worked on something for so long and then it got ghosted and I felt crushed, I'm now this kind of weird—it's almost like a Great Depression survivor who's always hoarding wheat or something.
Lawrence: A pantry full of cans of tomato soup or something.
Craig: Yeah. So I've got so many beans. For me to give up—to me, what's most important is this independent platform. I'm also just really proud of it, and the systems are all in place to produce great books. I've got my distributor, my printer, I've got a whole marketing machine set up through my newsletters and membership program. I've worked my whole life to kind of build this up.
So this project that I had already—I tried to shop first and foremost to big publishers because I thought, okay, these themes deserve maybe a bigger platform than I can just give on my own. And honestly, it's about honoring Brian to a certain degree, our friendship, that memory.
Then just politically, I mean, the timing of this book, I didn't obviously plan. I didn't know things were going to be so stupid at this point, but people who come from a town like mine understand the stupidity and have understood it almost cellularly for decades. So a lot of it isn't surprising, the stuff that's happening right now in the States, and to be able to have those conversations—I think the book covers a lot of political themes. To do that in a non-didactic, hyper-partisan way or whatever, is really important. It's one of the things I'm most proud of about the book. To do that on a bigger platform, to me, made sense.
So I was shopping around, rejected by everyone. I couldn't get an agent. Everyone was saying, "We can't sell this." So I'd given up. I'd had one amazing meeting, out of many meetings, with Andy Ward at Random House. We had this incredible meeting, super high energy, really great. Andy is a mensch. He is just beloved by everyone who knows Andy. He's George Saunders' editor, so that says something. George just feels like one of the greatest guys alive in contemporary publishing on so many levels.
We had this amazing meeting and then he said, "Oh yeah, we'll definitely get back to you." And then they didn't. That sent me into kind of a trauma place again, going back to the Atlantic and getting ghosted. So then I just decided a couple months after that meeting, not hearing anything from them, I had to do this on my own. That's when I got the machinery running. I was like, okay, let's prepare for this climb. It's going to be this big crazy climb. Get all the gear ready, metaphorically, prepare myself to do this book on my own.
It was three months into that process when they finally got back to me and said, "Hey, yeah, we want this book." By that point I was already committed to my own edition. That meant I was not going to compromise on that.
So when I talked with Molly and she said, "Yeah, we want this," I said, "Do you really want it? People have said they've wanted other things. I'm doing this on my own. I have to do this on my own. I can't compromise on that." She said, "Okay, let me talk to everyone, we'll get back to you really quickly." And they did, to their credit. They were very open to discussions, which was also great, I think, because they just saw how unmoving I was going to be. They offered quite a substantial advance to essentially buy me out of my edition, which made me like them even more. I was just like, "Okay, these people are serious and they get how important this is to me."
But in the end, I said, "Look, we're not competing. A hundred-dollar book is in no way competing with a $20 book. I'm going to give you guys a totally different edition. I know this is weird, but I think it'd be great if we can do both of these, and it would just make me feel so much better." And so we were able to hammer that out.
The contract negotiation was a little bit annoying. Again, I was being triggered by all of this kind of scarcity mindset stuff and wanting to protect my own independence, because that is so critical. But in the end, we were able to get to a good place.
Now I'm basically not selling my edition, because I so badly want everyone to read the Random House edition because to me, that's the one you want to read first. Then if you really, really, really are into that, go find the Fine Art edition, which is a distillation of it. It's a little bit of a different experience.
Lawrence: When you did the deal with Random House, everybody was aligned around the notion of, okay, it will be a—let's call it an air quote—"substantially different edition"?
Craig: Yeah.
Lawrence: Did you have to commemorate that in terms of, like, in the contract, was there a word count that you had to commit to, to make it different? How did you assure them it would be different? Or was this just that you had learned to trust each other so much at that point?
Craig: No, it was just faith. The contract doesn't have anything about word count, but it does have clauses about pricing. So I'm limited to the number I can produce until I hit a certain number on the Random House side, and I can't price it below X. There's some price, but I don't want to price it below X. I'm very deliberate about where things are priced right now. Those were the only constraints.
To give people a sense, it wasn't just like, "Oh yeah, here's the contract. Perfect. Okay, great." We did go back and forth a lot about these numbers, probably in the end in a little bit of a—I don't know—I wouldn't say pointless way because we landed in a place that was not too different than where we started. But I wanted to push. There were just a few things I was trying to figure out, and I realized in the end they were most concerned with hitting certain numbers.
Big publishers just want a book to do 10,000 copies. That's what they want. And internally for me too, I really, really, really want us to sell 10,000 copies of this because that, to me, is the whole point of going with a big publisher—to get to those bigger numbers. Also, at this price point, it's just a much easier possible thing to do than selling 10,000 hundred-dollar books, which is really hard.
Although I'm pretty close to it now. We're in the sixth edition of Kissa By Kissa being printed. We've sold over 6,000 copies of that. Things Become Other Things basically sold out of its 2,500 initial print run, and I've sold a thousand Koya Bound, and so we're close to 10,000 copies at a hundred dollars.
Lawrence: Right, right, right. It's crazy.
Craig: Yeah. So it is possible, but it takes a while, and over a few different books. But for this Random House one, they really want, and I really want us to get to 10,000, and I'm aiming for 5,000 pre-orders. It's really hard. We are not, I don't think, close to it yet. I'm kind of shocked. I get these little updates about where we are with pre-orders and I'm just shocked by how hard it is to get someone to click a pre-order link.
Gratification is delayed when the book doesn't come out for a month or two months or six months. I'm hoping that as we get closer to the pub date and once we hit pub date, those calls to action will be a lot more heated. But the reason why you want to hit those pre-orders is to get to the lists. And again, that's another reason when you go with a big publisher, because I can't aspire to hit a New York Times bestseller list with an indie edition because they just aren't tracked.
So that's another thing—if we're going to go through this process, if we're going to do this kind of contract or whatever, then let's also try to get on the list. Not for an ego reason, although sure, that's nice and that'll mean something to my mom. She'll understand that. But again, it's about maximizing the reach of the story and maximizing the scale of the conversation we're able to have in order to have a bigger positive impact. That's kind of what it is.
So you play all these stupid games, try to hit those points, and then that gets you status points that you can cash in for other things. The contract, I realized when we were going back and forth a bunch, and it was getting weird because I was like, "Why is this so hard for us to agree to this?" I realized, "Oh, okay, they want these numbers." And so I said, "Hey, look. Let's just write those in. Let's just say I'm limited until I hit this number of sold copies on your end, and then I can produce an infinite number on my end."
And they were like, "Okay, yeah, that makes sense." So it was about empathizing. Weirdly, I had to empathize with this giant corporation to get to a place we're both comfortable with. It was like, "Oh, okay, that makes sense." And if we don't hit those numbers anyway, I'm going to be sad. For me, I really want to hit those numbers. Not that I'll consider the book a failure if we don't, but it feels like that's what we should be aiming for if we're doing a project like this.
Lawrence: Yeah. It's okay to have goals, right? It's okay to state them out loud.
Craig: And to use them as a forcing function to do a bunch of stuff like this, like setting up all these podcasts and the book tour—although a book tour doesn't sell books, but I'm doing the book tour because I think it's important to see people, and to get out there. When am I going to do something like this again? So might as well.
Lawrence: It's an acknowledgment of like, it's a statement that there's an alignment of objectives here that may be surprising to everyone. When you talked about the formula of price point and quantity that would allow you to get back to your typical mode of operations, that's a very reasonable arrangement. I was going to call it a concession, but it's not even a concession. It seems reasonable to me.
Craig: Look, if we can't sell 10,000 copies of the Random House edition, then it's unlikely I'll need to make more of my edition anyway. And so that's fine. Maybe I don't make more of my edition. That's also fine. Having limited editions, I think, is also good.
Koya Bound is not going to be reprinted. There's just no reason to reprint it. I'm producing this new photo book that I shot 90% of in February, and it's going to print this week. Basically, I just sent the InDesign files in last night. This is April 9th. We're recording this. That is meant to be now the Fine Art companion to the Random House edition.
So it's funny, you can keep playing with these things and you can build off them and you can use the constraints as further creative fuel. So this new photo book—I'm actually really, really excited about because I just think the photos are great. I also love that it's a photo-only book, which is something I haven't done in about 10 years. It's actually my first solo photo-only book because Koya Bound was with Dan Rubin. So this is just me, photos only, with a very short essay at the end.
I kind of love it, and it feels like a true, perfect companion to the Random House edition, which to me feels like the canonical edition of the TBOT story. This kind of interplay, to me, feels really symbiotic and positive. None of this is planned. It's all this kind of improv jazz, feeling your way through things as you move forward.
I have five books I want to do. I know the next five. If you said, "Okay, you can't do any more walking, you can't do any more traveling"—like if there was COVID again and I just had to sit home for, say, the next five years—I know what I would do. I just have all the books, I have all this stuff kind of drafted. I would just crank through these projects. I have enough kind of accrued built up.
At the same time, I'm trying to be as flexible as possible and not be like, "Okay, these are the only things I can do." I'm also trying to build in these different timeline-scaled projects. So this new photo book called Other Thing—we're going from shooting it to having it in people's hands in two and a half months, which is pretty cool. I love that we're doing that, and that just makes me think, "Why am I not doing at least one of these a year?" with other scale things happening in the background.
Lawrence: It's really interesting because our listeners can't experience this part of what I want to tell you, but just sitting here watching you speak about this process and what's going on with the photo book, the way you came alive talking about it, you can feel the enthusiasm that you have for the project. It's very palpable as your interlocutor. It was very interesting.
Craig: Well, I think what's exciting is it's surprising to me. This didn't exist three months ago—none of it. It was just this impulse. It was like, "Yeah, I should probably go do this." I didn't have time to do it. I had every excuse not to do it.
The book is dedicated to my friend Enrique, who passed away in November last year, who was my roommate when I lived in California in 2010, 2011, 2012. He was just 38, so really young. His memorial happened during when I was on the peninsula shooting this new book. I had just brought my stepdaughter to boarding school in New Zealand a couple weeks before in January. I was exhausted from that.
I don't like traveling. I don't like doing international travel. I really don't like airplanes. I don't like airports. It's just vampiric to me. My life is just totally sucked out of me. If I look at my Aura Ring stats, whenever I'm on planes or walking through airports, even though I try to be the Dalai Lama, I'm so stressed about everything and it's only gotten worse. I feel like we're being ground to dust when you engage with these worlds.
So I don't want to be traveling. I had just finished the New Zealand stuff and then they announced this memorial, and I had already planned the Other Thing photo walk. I had been in contact with all these inns and I had all this stuff set up, and the thought of flying—also, flights are just so expensive now—and the thought of flying to California for basically a weekend or whatever, because that was about all I would be able to fit in, I was like, "I can't do this."
I felt so bad about it because I really wanted to be there with everyone celebrating Enrique's life. So what I tried to do was, when I was shooting the photo book, I just tried to keep Enrique in mind and embody his positivity and his joy and love of life and connection. I tried to really think about that while I was shooting all these people, and I felt really bad to miss the memorial. So the photo book is dedicated to him. I think Enrique would be psyched that I was doing that, and he'd be like, "Dude, don't—I'm dead. You don't need to come to my memorial."
So anyway, just the fact that this project has all these different facets to it, whereas three months ago it didn't exist—it's exciting. There's always something like this right there to be done. It's almost theological—you have to build up this belief system that you can go out there, you can do it, you can find it, you can shoot it. If you put in the energy, you're going to find something interesting.
Going to the peninsula, doing this project two months ago was a huge act of faith. I didn't know who I was going to see or meet, if we were going to get any good photos. I was shooting mainly with film too, for the first time on a big project like this. That was terrifying—not knowing are the cameras even working properly. Are the shutters firing off in the right way? You can't check anything in the moment.
So just having this tremendous amount of faith going into it, and then also keeping Enrique in mind and all that stuff—it was pretty powerful. And then to come out of that, have a bunch of work I'm proud of, forming these new relationships with photo studios and the scanner around the corner for me and all that stuff—it's exciting.
Again, that was just there waiting to be done. I could have done that at any moment in the last year. I think for young artists, creators, it can be so hard to have that kind of faith to commit to a project and believe that something interesting is going to come out of it. The reality is, for the most part, interesting things aren't going to come out of your projects.
There's the Ira Glass quote about taste and skill, taste and talent, where your taste, when you're young, always outstrips your talent. You spend a lot of your time as a young artist trying to rectify, trying to pull up your talent to match your taste. But it can be so discouraging early on. A lot of people just get frozen and stop there. So I empathize when I think about my twenties and the work I did in my twenties—it was a huge constant struggle of not being able to hit taste points that I wanted to hit, but you just have to put in the practice.
Lawrence: When working on the Random House edition, was the editing process different than your typical works and your Fine Art editions? And by that, I don't just mean because you were working with Molly as a personality and as a different human, but it seems to me like this process was more about adding as opposed to going for that minimalist aesthetic you talked about earlier. Could you talk a little bit about how the process may or may not have been different, may or may not have been more or less enjoyable? I'm curious about your experience of that.
Craig: It was great because, because I had done the Fine Art edition, I think my shoulders were able to drop. I was able to be less stressed. I'd gotten a bunch of positive feedback from readers about the Fine Art edition. I didn't have this kind of, "Oh my God, can we do this? What's this going to be?" worry that you can have when you're working on an early manuscript.
So I was in this sort of, "All right. Screw it. Let's just push this thing. YOLO. There's no downside to pushing this thing. Let's just see how far we can push it." Again, these contracts and getting paid for things gives you a kind of permission to do these different things.
So I was like, "Okay, I'm putting on this different writerly hat now because I have this contract with Random House, because they're paying me this advance." Even though they let me do my edition, or even though we came to an agreement where I was going to do my edition, I still got a really decent advance for a first, quote-unquote, "first-time author" doing a weird, esoteric memoir. I mean, a totally honorable and good advance.
So because of that, I was like, "Okay, this is my job to lean into this. All right, let's push it. Let's see where we can go." What we did was we took the Fine Art edition manuscript, and I just shoved that in a Google Doc. We did all of our back and forth in a Google Doc. It was great. We weren't using Word at all until much later in the process, which people who've worked with big publishers were just shocked that we were using Google Docs to go back and forth. But it really is the best commenting, collaborative kind of editing space, thinking space, I think.
Molly just left a trillion questions all over this Google Doc, and I was able to go through and we were able to have little conversations in the margins of clarifying the questions. Then I was able to use that, but I had my own doc. I wasn't writing in the Google Doc because I think it's a little too exposing to have that kind of real-time connection. She'd get notifications, "Craig modified the file," or whatever. I didn't want that.
So I went into a writing hole for about six months with all of her questions and just started fleshing it out, building and building and building. I realized really quickly I had so much more to say.
Also, writing the Fine Art edition was such a convoluted process because I had this popup walk I did, and I wrote a bunch in there, and it was just like daily bloviation dumping text into the newsletter. Then I cut up all the printouts and I had all the paragraphs and sentences, and then I kind of rewrote around that. Then Brian started to become more and more of this kind of forefront character. Then it was like, "Okay, I've got to cut all these other people out of it and rewrite around Brian."
So the Fine Art edition was really convoluted in a lot of ways to get to that final product. It wasn't this straight line at all. Because of that, being able to return to the manuscript where it had kind of a clear thrust and start again in a way and think about all the stuff that had been cut—so the characters that had been taken out, like John doesn't exist in the Fine Art edition at all. I remember I was really sad when I had to tell John, "Sorry I'm cutting you out of the book entirely." He was like—John doesn't care.
To be able to bring him back intentionally and also to reframe the book—the way the Random House edition opens is, it opens with a chapter I don't get to in the Fine Art edition until three-quarters of the way through. I think to get to that chapter took me all the way to that point and then realizing that chapter felt like a pivot for the Fine Art edition.
Annie Lamott, in Bird by Bird—all these books about writing, On Writing by Stephen King—it's like, if you have something great, play that card immediately. There was a certain energy I was getting from that shift in the book, three-quarters of the way through the Fine Art edition. I was like, "This is how the book should just start. This whole book is just a letter to Brian."
That's kind of what happens. I'm tiptoeing, tiptoeing, tiptoeing in the Fine Art edition. Then three-quarters of the way through it shifts to this letter to Brian, and then the whole last quarter is kind of facing him. And I was like, "The whole book should be facing him. Screw this. That energy—I want to imbue the whole book with it." Once we did that, which was like this major surgery, it gave the book space to be so many other things.
Bringing John back in was a big part of it. And then bringing John back in allowed us to bring in The Book of John and all of this historical background and more context about me and say all this stuff because now Brian wasn't this thing we were building up to. Brian was acknowledged from page one, and he was able to be present through it all. That was exciting to have that.
Talking through this, it sounds insane, but I don't think most books are this convoluted. This book had to be to get to where we got it to.
Lawrence: It's interesting because it doesn't sound convoluted to me, actually. It sounds like a very unique and special experience to be able to go back and take a work, revisit it, rework it, re-engineer it, expand it, rediscover it. And even the process you articulated about getting Molly's questions and then going away—that seems very orderly, and I'm sure there's more nuance than what you described, but it doesn't sound like it was a disaster by any means.
Craig: No, it wasn't a disaster, but it was just so improv jazz, you know? Nothing was planned. It was just tap dancing here and there and avoiding these pitfalls and these traps. I think you can over-revisit something too. That was always top of mind. I would say there's a 0.00000001% chance—I won't say there's no chance, but there's almost no chance I would ever want to come back to this and do something with it again. I am so sick of this manuscript and so sick of this story, I think, and that's actually how you want to feel when you launch a book. That means you have just wrung and wrested from it every drop you could possibly get from it.
I just recorded the audiobook on Sunday morning and Monday morning—15 hours. I was in the studio recording an audiobook, which is basically like waterboarding your brain. I mean, it's terrible. So much respect for professional audiobook people because that's hard. Maybe if you do it a lot—I'm sure if you do it a lot it gets easier, but holy crap, that process just took everything out of me.
Monday after the studio, I was like, "Oh, I'm going to do all this work." I had to get this InDesign file done. I was a shell. And also reading the second half of the book—and you're not just reading it, you're performing it in a way and kind of accessing all the emotion of the second half of the book. It was actually really exciting to reread it.
We found one copy error, which is really annoying because we really combed the hell out of this thing. So there's one word that's in there that shouldn't be in there, and there's one bar over an O that's missing on one of the Japanese romanizations. That was interesting to see because you're reading so psychotically closely at this text when you're doing the audiobook, because it has to be perfect. It has to be identical. The producer kept stopping me. He was in California, and he kept stopping me and being like, "Oh, you said 'a,' when it's 'the,'" and telling me to redo these sentences.
But reading the book and feeling the energy of the second half of it, the emotion of the second half of it in this almost out-of-body way was really exciting. That was really sweet. I was like, "Wow. Yeah. The second half really does have this heightened energy." I think it just accesses this—the first half is closed off, protecting myself. And then the second half is when the guard is kind of let down. And I felt that in the reading and the energy I got from the reading, even though I was exhausted and used up. There's this kind of high from it too. Anyway, I hope the audiobook is okay. (laughter)
Lawrence: It's funny you talk about it because that was also in the Gladwell interview the other day. He was talking about how awful it was having to do his audiobook and that he actually realized he couldn't read some of his own prose, and he went back and rewrote it so it was actually readable. He said the way he wrote it was just never meant to be spoken out loud, and he couldn't get through it. So he just rewrote the paragraph and read it for the audiobook in a way that was actually readable.
Craig: I rewrote—I wanted to rewrite a bunch of stuff for the audiobook, and I kind of held back. There was one sentence where I was like, "We're rewriting this. I can't say this," because I used the word "peculiar" three times. You start looking at these words and you start to lose your mind because you just start to go loopy.
I had to say, "On this peculiar shrine on this peculiar peninsula and this peculiar day," and I was like, "No, no, sorry, sorry, sorry." Peculiar is the word I switched it from. I was like, "Wow, why is this so easy to say now?" It was "peculiar." Oh yeah. Try saying that three times. That's awful. "Peculiar this peculiar shrine on this peculiar peninsula." I was like, "I can't—I literally can't do it." So we changed it to "particular," which is more fun. "Particular." Particular, you could say that.
Lawrence: Yeah. It's easier to say.
Craig: Peculiar, peculiar, peculiar, peculiar. Say that three times and then match it with "peculiar peninsula." No, it's like you just can't do it. So I forced us to rewrite. I was like, "I'm the author. Come on, we're getting rid of this sentence."
Lawrence: It actually seems like the audiobook should be the last thing that gets done before the book goes to press, so that you could capture any final changes.
Craig: A hundred percent. Yeah, I think normally it would be done that way, but for some reason we've been working on a little bit of a crunch schedule, I think, because I was slow in getting a bunch of my rewrites to them in the fall. I was about a month behind, and so that pushed everything, and then we hit the end of the year crunch. Then I had the Kissa By Kissa Japanese edition come out, and that took up a bunch of my time, and I couldn't do more—I couldn't do another pass on the revisions. So I think normally yes, that probably happens, but right now we're kind of like everything's last minute, but thankfully just one word. That's fine.
Lawrence: I appreciate that our time together is coming towards its end, and there's a bunch of stuff that I know we're not going to get to, but I do want to ask you a couple more questions if we can get them in. I'm really curious about your relationship or your thinking about analog and digital.
Craig: Yeah.
Lawrence: Walking, bookmaking—analog. I'm curious about your relationship with digital tools and digital environments. You talk about it a lot. You talk about your media diet, if you will, or your media starvation in some cases. But I'm curious also—I think about a lot of these as experiments with disconnection. Could you talk a little bit about your philosophy of technology use? Like when you were talking earlier, something I was curious about was your daily writing practice and the dictation.
Craig: Yeah.
Lawrence: Do you use speech-to-text software or do you transcribe, and has that changed over the years? I'm less interested in that specifically, although I'm interested in that, and more about your overall philosophy of tech.
Craig: For the walking and talking stuff, it's all speech-to-text, just in Notes using Siri basically. There's probably better options now. All the Open AI stuff, all the LLM stuff—it's just so much better at transcription. The Siri—
Lawrence: The thousands of dollars I've spent in my life on transcription that I pay now $19.99 a month for—it's—
Craig: It's insane. Well, I mean, come on, talk about thankless jobs we're getting rid of—transcription is almost worse than recording an audiobook. At least recording an audiobook, you're producing something useful. Transcriptions are often just like whatever secondary stuff, or supplementary stuff or whatever.
The way you can speak bilingually to an LLM too is really powerful. So I can say, "Hey, I'm walking the Kii peninsula in Japan. I'm going to be mentioning a bunch of places that are down here. I'm going to be speaking English, but I'm going to be mentioning these Japanese places, please transcribe those accurately." And then they will. Right now I have to spell things out. I'll be like "K-I-I-K-A-T-S-U-U-R-A," and it's hard to do these romanizations and do them in real time. So my files are full of these, and it puts it in all caps, so it's just kind of weird. But yeah, basically just Siri in Notes and just this running notes file of Siri transcriptions.
But otherwise, my core philosophy—I'm someone who grew up in that elder millennial generation where we had a taste of pure analogness in childhood and then quickly shifted to digital in early teens, but not smartphone, psycho digital that we have today, this dopamine-crazy digital that we have today. So I've experienced kind of all three categories from the whole spectrum, from analog to extreme, extreme plugged-inness.
For me, I've landed on the digital stuff isn't real. Nothing happening on the internet should be considered permanent or should be considered in and of itself a final artifact. That's why, with my members' stuff, I always say first and foremost, whenever I run a board meeting, the purpose of this program is two things. We're making books, physical books—that's the number one purpose of this program. And then number two is education. That's why I run the board meetings and stuff like that, but the education stuff directly comes out of doing things that make me better at making the physical books.
So it's not this totally altruistic thing of, "Oh, I'm just going to do educational stuff because I feel like I should." I'm doing it because it helps me do the other stuff better. So everyone wins. It's a win-win.
Lawrence: Hmm.
Craig: But the reason why I've landed on "the only thing that matters is the books" is because that really does feel like the place to have the best conversation. By focusing on the books, I want people to engage with this stuff with their full attention. I want to be having conversations with folks that are totally present. And I think a physical book is still maybe the best way to do that, even more than a movie, because you turn a movie on, people are still reaching for their phones. You can have the ambiance of a movie and you're still doing all this other stuff with your attention. Whereas a book, if you're not fully in it, you're not in it. You can't multitask with a book.
And so I think it is a perfect, focused piece of technology, piece of media. In that way it's really exciting. All of this other stuff is supplementary in my mind, and all of this other stuff will be gone. It will disappear. The archives, the digital stuff is so tenuous, but if you put a thousand printed books out in the world, unless someone really hates you and hunts down every copy and burns every copy, chances are that artifact is going to be in the world forever—for hundreds of years. And I don't think there's any other piece of media that you can say that about.
End to end, books force you to collate your thinking because they are so final. There isn't a way to go back to them and revise them in the form that they're in. Yeah, you can do the things like I've done with the Random House edition and kind of do additions and stuff like that. But that's it for that form of the thing. Because of that, it creates this sense of deadline and a sense of refinement that online stuff, digital stuff doesn't bring to the table. It doesn't bring that sense of urgency.
So that also makes it exciting for me in the sense of, this is the best version of this thing I could have possibly done. And here it is, immutable. Here it is in the world, in thousands of copies, hopefully tens of thousands for this Random House edition. It's probably going to be here forever. That feels like it's respecting the project in a way that a lot of digital-only stuff doesn't respect the project.
Certain things—when I think about YouTube a lot and I think about the people on YouTube, I think about how much effort is going into these channels and how much time and production now today is being put into these things, and it kind of breaks my heart that there is no real archive of this stuff. With DVDs and Blu-rays, at least you had some physical media, even though it's not very robust physical media. With prints, 35-millimeter prints, at least if those are archived properly, they can last a long time. But a lot of this YouTube stuff is just all of this creative energy kind of going to this place where it sort of evaporates.
Lawrence: Even worse with TikTok. Anything you create in-app? Oh my goodness.
Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's—I think the only way to think about those mediums is to assume they're temporary. But I'm friends with Derek Mueller from Veritasium, and Derek has created essentially this incredible TV show entirely on YouTube. And I do wonder, is there a way we could archive this? Is there a Veritasium book that he should do that somehow distills a lot of these great videos and a lot of the amazing infographics he's produced into some kind of printed archive? Because that feels like it would honor the work he's done in a way that just existing on YouTube doesn't.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Craig: The scale is different, obviously, and you have to think about that, and you have to keep that in mind. Derek's reaching hundreds of millions of people on YouTube, but what is the quality of that attention? What is the quality of that conversation? I think those are important questions to ask.
So for me, the original question was, how do I think about digital and analog? More and more, I think the power of analog is becoming readily apparent. As digital becomes more and more diffuse, it's obvious that we aren't going to be able to archive everything because so much stuff is being produced.
For me, I'm really grateful to have this analog practice, which I've been doing my whole life or my whole adult career with physical books. And so for me it's really intuitive, and I do think physical books are kind of a perfect analog instantiation. I think they are a perfect piece of technology to a certain degree, and we've kind of really dialed in, perfected it, and we're really lucky that we have the postal system.
Global postal systems are pretty incredible. Robin Sloan just produced this print-only zine that I have here they did with his risograph. It just says "reality has a surprising amount of detail" on one side, and it's this beautiful kind of—I guess this is probably A3, I think—folded over twice, and it's got this photo of this pilot on it. And then on the back he has this essay that only exists in this printed zine, and he just—it's this basically love letter to the US postal system. An acknowledgment of the miraculousness of it, the miracle that is global postal systems.
Because he's like, "I can mail this thing anywhere in the world basically for $1.65." That's insane. It's insane to me that for all of the fractured nature of politics today, the world has agreed on postal systems functioning everywhere that basically isn't a war zone.
Because you think about it, it's weird. I pay—you pay a dollar sixty-five in the US, but you can send it anywhere in the world. Doesn't that create kind of a postal deficit? The thinking was that, say, Robin mails me this in Japan. Japan's not getting any money from that stamp. Japan—the Japanese postal system is agreeing to this global agreement where we say, okay, we are going to—but they keep track of the trade imbalance. The thinking was that a letter begets a letter. So this letter coming here, I would respond in kind to the person back in the States. So I'm going to pay the Japanese postal rate to send it back to America. So you'd cancel those things out.
Obviously that doesn't happen all the time, and there is a rectification of postal imbalances. You can look it up on Wikipedia. It's pretty interesting. So at the end of like, whatever, a year—I don't know what the timeframe is—but Japan goes, "Hey America, we have covered hundreds of millions of dollars in postage for you." I don't even know if it ever gets that big. And then America goes, "Okay, yeah, we'll pay that out." Or Italy says, "Hey, you owe us $20,000 in postage," and it kind of gets balanced out, but it is miraculous that this all works. And Robin's kind of acknowledging that.
For me too, my practice couldn't exist—my independent book system couldn't exist without this system. The fact that I charge what I'm charged for shipping and handling, which is about 30 bucks. So 30 bucks, I can send this object beautifully packaged, protected, and it arrives pretty much anywhere in the world in two or three days. It's essentially a teleportation device. And for $30 I can teleport this object that weighs almost a kilo, kind of big and onerous, and it arrives in perfect mint condition anywhere in the world. Acknowledging the fact that we can do that and that the cost is reasonable, I think, is really important.
Anyway, so that's a very long-winded response.
Lawrence: There's a lot poetic around that because what you're teleporting as well is a piece of your soul, a piece of your intellect, like your lived experience. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. It's very cool. All right, before I let you go, a quick one and then another one.
Craig: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence: Will there be an ebook edition of the Random House?
Craig: No, I don't care. I have no preciousness with this Random House edition. Also, it's just printed in essentially mass market hardcover form. So it's on that kind of rough—I mean, I really love that sort of rough mass market paper. It's a book. It says book, and it's all black and white and everything's kind of grainy, so there's no preciousness to it. So yeah, make every edition—I have no preciousness to it. So yes, there will be an e-edition. I'm very happy to have it.
Lawrence: That's wonderful. So you're about to—the book's going to press. We've got the early May street date. Things are going to happen that are going to happen. I noticed it was number one in travel, in Japanese travel guides on Amazon today, so congratulations.
Craig: Well, well, whatever. Thanks. That means I sold six books. (laughter)
Lawrence: I come from the music business where a number one record in America sells 80,000 units. And it's like we're a nation of 360 million people and 80,000 units is the number one record. Like, go team.
Craig: Well, for books it's even smaller. I mean, like 5,000 to 10,000 puts you on the bestseller lists.
Lawrence: It's incredible, isn't it? It's really incredible. So you're doing the podcast. You mentioned you're going to go on the book tour that ends, you go back to Japan, you sit down, you exhale. Then what?
Craig: I have no idea. I just know I'm going to need recovery time.
Lawrence: Yet you have five years of projects staring down the barrel at you.
Craig: Yeah, well, I'm setting up a new studio, and that's directly in service to those next projects. And so that's sort of my goal for July, August is to do, I hope, as little travel as possible. I hope to really get this new studio space dialed in in a way that it's all—look, I could do these projects in a closet if I needed to. I don't need a perfect workspace to get these things done. I think that's really important to acknowledge.
But it would be amazing—this would be the first time in my life I have a true, fully dedicated project space. Because I'm always taking over my living room or whatever, and the floor is covered in the book for weeks and I'm hopping around them and there's dust and hair and crap on everything. It just sucks. So to have a true—again, not massive, but big enough workspace where I'll be able to map these things out in a way that feels exciting, it feels fun, and it feels like that'll be a totally different register of brain to be using.
And so I'm excited to hopefully just be able to come back and lean into that and build that space out. Just take stock of things. Going on Tim Ferriss a couple weeks ago—that podcast came out and I've got hundreds of emails that I know there's no way I'm going to be able to respond to all the stuff that came in from that, but I would like to spend a little time sitting with it. When I'm on this tour, I'm not going to be able to do anything but the tour. And so I expect there's going to be a backlog of stuff.
I'd like to just have quiet time where I'm not working on a book, I'm not doing interviews, I'm just getting the studio space built out in a way that feels great and kind of reflecting on these first—basically March, April, May, June of this year. So we'll see.
