那个创投大佬，发誓再也不写书了
Andrew Chen 是前 Uber 增长负责人，现在在 A16z 旗下基金投游戏/XR/娱乐科技。
他 2021 年 12 月在海外发布了一本书《The Cold Start Problem》，围绕「具有网络效应的产品如何实现冷启动」卖了不少信息差。国内中信去年引进并翻译完了这书，我给写了推荐序，今年 Q1 应该会上了。
这哥们大概为了宣传此书的全球多语言版本，最近写了一篇博文《How to write a business book -- behind the scenes from THE COLD START PROBLEM》。
读完挺有意思的，给想写本专业书的人打开了一个视角：如何缘起、怎么接洽、过程经验、意外情况、工具手段等。读这篇文章，唤醒了一波我当年写《增长黑客》的尘封回忆杀。
他尤其提到，「这是一次很棒的经历，尽管如此，我发誓我再也不会写书了」。Hhhhhh，真实。
老规矩，我借助 AI 对照翻译了这篇文章，推荐出来。
原文地址：https://andrewchen.com/how-to-write-a-business-book/
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(above: Me in Sep 2023, a happy author, finding the Japanese translated version of my book at the wonderful Daikanyama Tsutaya Books in Tokyo)
（上图：2023 年 9 月的我，一个快乐的作家，在东京精彩的代官山茑屋书店找到了我的书的日文翻译版本）
Dear readers, 亲爱的读者，
As many of you know, 2 years ago I published my first book THE COLD START PROBLEM. It aims to tell the story of why some products — YouTube, Instagram, Uber, Slack, Dropbox, and others — end up with hundreds of millions (and sometimes billions!) of users, and to provide the definitive theory of network effects which are often referenced in the tech industry, but only superficially understood. It’s been a success, now in a dozen markets, translated into many languages (including Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, etc).
正如你们很多人所知，两年前我出版了我的第一本书《冷启动问题》。它旨在讲述为什么某些产品（YouTube、Instagram、Uber、Slack、Dropbox 等）最终拥有数亿（有时甚至数十亿！）用户的故事，并提供明确的网络效应理论在科技行业经常被引用，但只是肤浅地理解。它取得了成功，现已在十几个市场上市，并被翻译成多种语言（包括日语、中文、西班牙语、俄语等）。
Here’s a screenshot of some of the wonderful pictures that readers took during launch week:
以下是读者在发布周期间拍摄的一些精彩照片的屏幕截图：
This was an awesome experience. Nevertheless, I swear I will never write another book again . (I guess never say never, ha)
这是一次很棒的经历。尽管如此，我发誓我再也不会写书了。（我想永远不要说永远，哈）
The creative process was a long, meandering path, and folks ping me from time to time because they want to take on a masochistic journey of their own. So this post will be about the messy, annoying, behind the scenes leading up to writing a book like this — it describes a bit the creative process, but also some of the major milestones and lessons learned.
创作过程是一条漫长而曲折的道路，人们时不时地给我打电话，因为他们想踏上一段属于自己的受虐之旅。因此，这篇文章将讲述编写这样一本书的混乱、烦人的幕后故事——它描述了一些创作过程，但也描述了一些主要的里程碑和经验教训。
Hopefully it will be useful for someone in the future who is thinking of a big writing project of their own.
希望它对将来正在考虑自己的大型写作项目的人有用。
A brief summary of what I’ll cover:
我将介绍的内容的简要总结：
Month 0: At first, writing a book seems like a fun idea (until you figure out it’s not)
第 0 个月：起初，写一本书似乎是一个有趣的想法（直到你发现事实并非如此）Month 1-6: Finding an agent, writing a proposal, and opening up your Christmas presents early
第 1-6 个月：寻找代理人、撰写提案并尽早打开圣诞礼物Month 6-12: Collecting and organizing the ideas — lots of fun chats, reconnecting with colleagues, talking to great people
第 6-12 个月：收集和组织想法——大量有趣的聊天、与同事重新联系、与优秀的人交谈Month 12: How to write the initial the outline, then the mega-outline — finding the formula
第 12 个月：如何写出最初的大纲，然后是大纲 — 找到公式Month 12-24: The very messy middle, the trough of sorrow, the hard slog, followed by
trench warfare (yes, it’s 3-5 years to write a book)
第12-24个月：非常混乱的中间，悲伤的低谷，艰难的跋涉，然后是阵地战（是的，写一本书需要3-5年）Month 24-36: Why you’ll feel insecure about the creative process
第 24-36 个月：为什么你会对创作过程感到不安全Final months: Just ship it already
最后几个月：已经发货了
I’m also going to link to various copies of
我还将在此过程中链接到中间内容的各种副本 - 不幸的是，我无法分享所有内容（例如采访笔记等），因为有些内容必须保密，但无论如何，这里有一些有趣的内容
Initial book proposal (then called MOONSHOT). First thing I wrote!
最初的书籍提案（当时称为 MOONSHOT）。我写的第一件事！First book outline. Very very rough set of topics set across 3 pages
第一本书大纲。非常非常粗略的主题集，共 3 页Mega outline. 30 pages that needed to be expanded to 300 pages
巨型轮廓。30页需要扩展到300页
OK — so let’s get started on the journey.
好的——让我们开始旅程吧。
Month 0: At first, writing a book seems like a fun idea (until you figure out it’s not)
I joined Andreessen Horowitz in mid-2018, I had already been writing on my blog for 10 years and I was kind of having some creative boredom over it. At that time, Elad Gil had just published his book and we had a nice convo at MKT’s lounge about a week after his book was out — he had amazing things to say about the process (he writes faster/better than me, in the back of Ubers it turns out), and he said it helped him a lot professionally. At a16z, as you all know, Ben and Scott have both written fantastic books as well, and it seemed to really be great for them professionally, so I thought it might be a fun challenge to do the same. So think of the motivation as 50% a creative challenge, and 50% seeing what it had done for other people.
我于 2018 年年中加入 Andreessen Horowitz，我已经在博客上写作 10 年了，我对此有些创作上的厌倦。当时，埃拉德·吉尔 (Elad Gil) 刚刚出版了他的书，在他的书出版大约一周后，我们在 MKT 的休息室进行了一次愉快的交流——他对这个过程有很多令人惊奇的事情要说（他写得比我更快/更好，在后面）事实证明，这是 Uber 的一部分），他说这对他的职业生涯帮助很大。众所周知，在 a16z，Ben 和 Scott 也都写了很棒的书，这似乎对他们的职业生涯真的很有好处，所以我认为做同样的事情可能是一个有趣的挑战。因此，50% 的动机是创造性的挑战，50% 的动机是看到它为其他人做了什么。
I had two lines of thinking in terms of picking the book topic. First, I’ve had good luck taking
在选择本书主题时，我有两种想法。首先，我很幸运地采用了无处不在的术语，并撰写了关于该主题的权威博客文章——我在增长黑客、CAC/LTV、病毒循环和类似概念方面所做的事情。我的脑海中闪过一些想法，感觉这些想法都是不错的选择。“超级用户”就是其中之一——我们随意使用这个术语，但没有强有力的理论基础。“网络效应”是另一个，因为我们一直在 a16z 上谈论它，但是当需要查看指标并回答问题时 - 好吧，这个产品有它吗？？——然后就变得有点糊涂了。另一个是“产品/市场契合度”或“MVP”，并进一步扩展了这些概念。
The other line of thinking revolves around answering the big question — why? I decided my focus would be on something targeting a very small group of nerdy founders and executives, rather than a wide topic that might be more mainstream. I could write about, say, career advice or how to start a business (in a general sense), but felt like those would be too broad.
另一种思路围绕着回答一个大问题——为什么？我决定将重点放在针对极少数书呆子创始人和高管的事情上，而不是可能更主流的广泛主题上。我可以写一些职业建议或如何创业（一般意义上的），但感觉这些内容太宽泛了。
In the end, I picked the topic of network effects because it’s a genuinely important topic, I felt like I had something to say, and I also felt like it could fold in a lot of concepts from my prior work on growth. Once I started down the path of picking, I started to talk to people at a16z about it — they recommended I start with writing a book proposal.
最后，我选择了网络效应这个话题，因为这是一个非常重要的话题，我觉得我有话要说，而且我也觉得它可以融入我之前关于增长的工作中的很多概念。一旦我开始走上挑选之路，我就开始和 a16z 的人谈论这件事——他们建议我从写一本书的提案开始。
Month 1-6: Finding an agent, writing a proposal, and opening up your Christmas presents early
The team at a16z was very helpful, and in the first few weeks I worked with Hanne Winarsky (now at Substack!) and others to start meeting agents, which is how I ultimately met Chris Parris-Lamb from Gernert who also represented Peter Thiel for Zero to One, and Pete Buttigieg for his book. I sent him the following book proposal with a placeholder name, MOONSHOT. The proposal usually kinda reads like a business plan:
a16z 的团队非常有帮助，在最初的几周里，我与 Hanne Winarsky（现在在 Substack！）和其他人一起开始与代理商会面，这就是我最终遇到来自 Gernert 的 Chris Parris-Lamb（他也代表 Peter Thiel）的方式。《从零到一》和皮特·布蒂吉格的书。我向他发送了以下图书提案，其中包含占位符名称“MOONSHOT”。该提案通常读起来有点像商业计划：
Overview 概述
Chapter summaries 章节摘要
The market 市场
Author bio 作者简介
Competitive books 竞争书籍
We quickly agreed to work together, and that we would approach various publishers to solicit offers. The actual approach was kind of fun, honestly a more efficient version of what we do in venture capital. Chris ran the whole thing, and the process looked like the following:
我们很快同意合作，并且我们将联系各个出版商以征求报价。实际的方法很有趣，说实话，这是我们在风险投资中所做的更有效的版本。克里斯运行了整个过程，过程如下所示：
Chris approached publishers and sent along the book proposal
克里斯联系出版商并发送了图书提案They read the proposal (thank you!) and asked for 30 minutes of time
他们阅读了提案（谢谢！）并要求给予 30 分钟的时间We got on the call and they asked me detailed questions, showing they had actually read the proposals — UNLIKE a typical startup/VC process where the founder uses the time to present
我们接到电话，他们问了我详细的问题，表明他们实际上已经阅读了提案——与典型的初创公司/风险投资流程不同，创始人利用时间来展示Later, they submitted an offer (I think 7 did?)
后来，他们提交了一份offer（我想有7个人提交了？）Chris then took the top half of the offers, and gave them a second chance to bid again
克里斯随后接受了上半部分的出价，并给了他们第二次再次出价的机会The top 2 bids were close, but I chose to work with Hollis Heimbouch at Harper Business
前 2 个出价很接近，但我选择与 Harper Business 的 Hollis Heimbouch 合作
I chose Hollis because she’s legend in the industry, and worked with Jim Collins, Clay Christensen, Satya Nadella, and others on their most famous books — a16z had also worked with her for Ben’s previous book and it went well. My advance was high mid six figures, which I was told was very good for a first-time author, and would be paid out in parts as the book progressed (one part at signing, the next on the draft, the next at publishing, etc).
我选择霍利斯是因为她是业内的传奇人物，并与吉姆·柯林斯、克莱·克里斯滕森、萨蒂亚·纳德拉等人合作编写了他们最著名的书籍——a16z 也曾与她合作编写了本的上一本书籍，进展顺利。我的预付款高达六位数，有人告诉我，这对于第一次写作的作者来说非常好，并且会随着书的进展分部分支付（一部分在签名时支付，一部分在草稿上支付，另一部分在出版时支付， ETC）。
The entire process of doing this was maybe 3-4 months? I’ve described the early days of this as “opening up your Christmas gifts early” because you get all the good vibes up front of selling the book, without the work of actually writing anything. But soon I was going to pay the price!
整个过程大概需要3-4个月吧？我将早期的日子描述为“尽早打开你的圣诞礼物”，因为你在出售这本书之前就获得了所有良好的氛围，而无需实际写任何东西。但很快我就要付出代价了！
Month 6-12: Collecting and organizing the ideas — lots of fun chats, reconnecting with colleagues, talking to great people
The rest of the first year was pretty fun as well — I realized I needed to do a lot of primary research, so I started reaching out to people I respected, asking them for short interviews. Thank you to Li Jin who tag teamed with me on many of these interviews, where I asked open-ended questions, heard stories, and tried to write as much of it down as possible.
第一年剩下的时间也很有趣——我意识到我需要做很多初步研究，所以我开始联系我尊敬的人，要求他们进行简短的采访。感谢李进在许多这样的采访中与我合作，在采访中我提出了开放式问题，听到了故事，并试图尽可能多地写下来。
Readers want to hear opinions. The sharper and funnier, the better, and I had a theory that if I could collect all of it, then that in itself could be the bones of a book. Thus, I wrote down pithy, opinionated statements whenever I heard them — anything that might be a good tweet would also be a good title or a good opening paragraph. Opinions like, “launching with Techcrunch is stupid” or “never build a social network, it’s just too hard” — those are gold.
读者想听听意见。越尖锐、越有趣越好，我有一个理论，如果我能收集所有这些，那么它本身就可以成为一本书的骨架。因此，每当我听到简洁、固执己见的言论时，我都会写下来——任何可能是一条好的推文的东西也将是一个好的标题或一个好的开头段落。像“与 Techcrunch 一起推出是愚蠢的”或“永远不要建立社交网络，这太难了”之类的观点——这些都是金言。
All the interviews went into a spreadsheet tracker like this, which linked to individual notes for each, plus a little summary.
所有采访都进入这样的电子表格跟踪器，其中链接到每个采访的单独注释，以及一些摘要。
In the end, I ended up with 200+ interviews from people in the industry, and pages and pages of opinions and thoughts. It was absolute chaos. But I could also tell there was something interesting in there. I eventually interviewed some senior folks in the industry — the founders/CEOs of Slack, YouTube, Twitch, Tinder, Dropbox, Zoom, Linkedin, and may others — those all ended up being super fun, and were the showcase stories in the book. Getting time with these folks ended up being some of the most memorable moments while writing the book.
最后，我收到了 200 多位业内人士的采访，以及一页又一页的观点和想法。这绝对是一片混乱。但我也能看出里面有一些有趣的东西。我最终采访了该行业的一些资深人士——Slack、YouTube、Twitch、Tinder、Dropbox、Zoom、Linkedin 等的创始人/首席执行官——这些人最终都非常有趣，并且是书中的展示故事。与这些人一起度过的时光最终成为写这本书时最难忘的时刻。
Month 12: How to write the initial the outline, then the mega-outline — finding the formula
If you have hundreds of pages of random notes from interviews, plus pages of research, and a jumble of ideas in your own head — what do you do? You need some kind of organizing principle that makes all these ideas readable. I figured there was probably a formula in some of the best business books out there, and so I re-read Lean Startup, Crossing the Chasm, Innovator’s Dilemma, and many others.
如果你有数百页随机采访笔记，加上几页研究报告，以及你自己脑子里的一堆想法——你会做什么？你需要某种组织原则来使所有这些想法都具有可读性。我认为一些最好的商业书籍中可能有一个公式，所以我重新阅读了《精益创业》、《跨越鸿沟》、《创新者的困境》等等。
What you find it that the bones of the book often look something like this:
你会发现这本书的骨架通常看起来像这样：
Opening story 开场故事
Describe a big problem/dilemma/question
描述一个大问题/困境/问题Present a framework 提出一个框架
Go through one part of the framework
浏览框架的一部分Start with an anecdote
从一个轶事开始Then describe the theory
然后描述一下理论Go through another part
浏览另一部分Then another part 然后是另一部分
Then again… 然后又……
Conclusion 结论
This isn’t all business books, but look, it’s pretty
这并不都是商业书籍，但你看，它相当普遍。所以我想我应该从像这样构建我的初始大纲开始，这就是我最终得到以下简短版本的大纲的方式。第一本书大纲。
Btw, Ryan Holiday has a great discussion of how he wrote his book, with tons of photos, and I want to link that here. He has a photo of a box representing every topic/idea in this book, each one in a note card, categorized into sections:
顺便说一句，瑞安·霍利迪（Ryan Holiday）对他如何写这本书进行了精彩的讨论，并附有大量照片，我想在此处链接。他有一张代表本书中每个主题/想法的盒子的照片，每个主题/想法都在一张记事卡中，分为几部分：
I sort of ended up doing the digital version of this, where I created a document that I called my “Mega Outline” — where I took every opinion/point that I wanted to make in the book, and built out the first 2-3 levels of bullets in a much larger version.
我最终做了这个的数字版本，我创建了一个我称之为“大纲”的文档——我在书中提出了我想提出的每一个观点/观点，并构建了前 2-3 个观点更大版本的子弹级别。
Here’s the first page, so you can get a sense:
这是第一页，大家可以大概了解一下：
I’ve linked the entire Mega outline here if you want to peruse — it’s 30 pages where each page needed to probably be 10x’d. That is, 1 page of outline = 10 pages of written
如果你想细读的话，我已经在这里链接了整个 Mega 大纲——它有 30 页，每页可能需要放大 10 倍。也就是说，1页大纲=10页书面散文，当我开始写前几章时我很快就弄清楚了。有一个有趣的乔治·R·R·马丁讨论（他是权力的游戏的人），他谈到有些作家是建筑师，有些是园丁。建筑师们做了瑞安·霍利迪和我所做的事情——一开始我们遇到了一些混乱，我们试图无情地压制它们，并使用一些组织原则将其组合在一起。一旦有了一个结构，那么它就像一座建筑物的地基——建筑师然后一层一层地写作，并建造整个建筑。最后加上一些润色。事实证明，GRRM 将自己描述为另一种原型，即园丁，你可以在这里或那里种植一些有趣的点，然后在写作时重新审视它们。但这就是为什么他的书令人惊叹并且花了十年时间写成。
Month 12-24: The very messy middle, the trough of sorrow, the hard slog, followed by
This whole middle section after the first year gives me PTSD so I won’t dwell too much on it, and just cover the lessons learned. The mechanics of this phase are pretty simple — you really just need to translate the mega outline bullet by bullet into pages of written
第一年之后的整个中间部分给我带来了创伤后应激障碍（PTSD），所以我不会过多地谈论它，只介绍所学到的教训。这个阶段的机制非常简单——你实际上只需要将巨大的大纲逐条翻译成书面散文。但这是您将面临的所有问题：
Your normal tools are not good for writing a book. Most writing that you do on a daily basis, like email, might be composed of a few paragraphs. That’s easy. If you need a longer document, then you might have multiple sections that contain multiple paragraphs each, and you’ll use Microsoft Word or GDocs. But what if you have a book with 7-10 parts that contain 5-10 chapters each, that contain 3-4 major sections that themselves contain a large number of paragraphs? And what if halfway through, you realize all the stuff you’re writing in one section should actually belong as a chapter in another section? Also what if you want to do a word count of different chapters or sections? It’s all a pain. In the end, I used Ulysses which at least has the concept of nested folders, and then each chapter would be a folder that would then contain files containing each part. The app then sync’d it all to a bunch of Markdown files in a Dropbox, so that I could work on it from multiple locations
你的普通工具不适合写书。您每天所做的大多数写作（例如电子邮件）可能由几个段落组成。这很容易。如果您需要更长的文档，那么您可能有多个部分，每个部分包含多个段落，并且您将使用 Microsoft Word 或 GDocs。但是，如果您的书有 7-10 个部分，每个部分包含 5-10 章，其中包含 3-4 个主要部分，而这些部分本身又包含大量段落，该怎么办？如果写到一半时，您意识到您在一个部分中编写的所有内容实际上应该作为另一部分中的一章，该怎么办？另外，如果您想对不同章节或部分进行字数统计怎么办？这都是一种痛苦。最后，我使用了尤利西斯，它至少有嵌套文件夹的概念，然后每一章都是一个文件夹，然后包含包含每个部分的文件。然后，该应用程序将其全部同步到 Dropbox 中的一堆 Markdown 文件，以便我可以从多个位置处理它You write on a computer, and your computer is very distracting. You need a browser to do research, but your browser is also where you can check what’s happening on social media. You can’t fully turn off the internet, since you need to do research. And sometimes you need to go to YouTube to watch an interview, but right next to the video you’re supposed to be watching is a gadget review for something you might want to to buy. So what do you do?
你在电脑上写作，而你的电脑非常分散你的注意力。您需要浏览器来进行研究，但您还可以在浏览器中查看社交媒体上发生的事情。你不能完全关闭互联网，因为你需要进行研究。有时您需要去 YouTube 观看采访，但在您应该观看的视频旁边是您可能想购买的产品的小工具评论。所以你会怎么做？Distraction free devices and treating yourself like a kid. Eventually I started to try and buy a bunch of different tools to keep myself focused. I bought a plexiglass timer safe thing and I’d lock my personal phone away for an hour or two at a time. I bought a separate laptop, and put it in a different location, and turned on all the child-safe filters so that I couldn’t go to Reddit, Twitter, etc. If I needed to look up research, I would often just print out pages and pages of it, so that I would stay analog and not mess around. I bought a series of e-ink Android tablets called the BOOX that could run a Markdown editor, connect to Dropbox, and could pair a nice keyboard.
无干扰设备，像对待孩子一样对待自己。最终我开始尝试购买一堆不同的工具来让自己保持专注。我买了一个有机玻璃定时器安全的东西，我会把我的个人手机锁起来一次一两个小时。我购买了一台单独的笔记本电脑，并将其放在不同的位置，并打开了所有儿童安全过滤器，这样我就无法访问 Reddit、Twitter 等。如果我需要查找研究，我通常只会打印一页又一页地写下来，这样我就可以保持模拟而不乱七八糟。我购买了一系列名为 BOOX 的电子墨水 Android 平板电脑，它可以运行 Markdown 编辑器、连接到 Dropbox，并且可以配对一个漂亮的键盘。Say goodbye to vacations, weekends, and evening time. To hit the deadlines I had set for myself, I ended up converting a lot of my holidays and weekends into writing time. It’s hard to write for more than, 3-4 hours in a row, so you still can go somewhere nice and sunny — but I found that I needed to wake up, work out, and get writing before noon, in order to make progress. You get your evenings, but it’s tough. And weekends are like that too.
告别假期、周末和晚上时间。为了达到我为自己设定的最后期限，我最终将很多假期和周末都转化为写作时间。连续写作超过3-4个小时是很困难的，所以你仍然可以去一个阳光明媚的地方——但我发现我需要在中午之前起床、锻炼、开始写作，才能取得进步。你有晚上的时间，但这很艰难。周末也是这样。
Here’s a funny photo of one of these kSafe timers I’d hide my phone into during my writing times — by the end, I had 5 (!!!) of these in various writing spots, so that if I was feeling in the mood I would throw my phone in:
这是一张有趣的照片，其中一个 kSafe 计时器是我在写作时将手机藏起来的——到最后，我在不同的写作地点放置了 5 个（!!!）这样的计时器，这样如果我有心情的话我会把手机扔进去：
I have to admit, it was a grind. Not easy at all. If there was a point where I could have gotten stuck and quit, this would have been it.
我不得不承认，这是一种磨难。一点也不容易。如果有一个点让我陷入困境并放弃的话，那就是这个了。
Month 24-36: Why you’ll feel insecure about the creative process
One of the craziest things about writing a book is that it’s such an incredibly solitary experience, and there’s eventually a point where you’ve written enough that you feel sorta okay about where it’s going, but no one else has seen it yet. And so it might suck. But you’re honestly not sure. I got got to this about 2 years into writing the book. I had written the first ~10 chapters (out of 35), and I had a lot of questions for myself:
写一本书最疯狂的事情之一是，这是一种令人难以置信的孤独体验，最终到了一个点，你写得足够多，你对它的去向感觉还不错，但还没有人看到它。所以它可能很糟糕。但老实说你并不确定。我在写这本书大约两年后才开始做这件事。我已经写了前 10 章（共 35 章），我对自己有很多问题：
Is this book any good?
这本书好不好？Am I saying stuff people already know?
我说的是人们已经知道的事情吗？Or is this book too nerdy, and going into details that are unnecessary?
或者这本书是否太书呆子了，并且讨论了不必要的细节？Are the stories actually interesting, or too obvious? Have people heard them already?
这些故事真的很有趣，还是太明显了？人们已经听过它们了吗？
And to be honest, you kind of don’t know until you take a half completed version of the book and ask a few trusted friends to read it. I got a bunch of very very good feedback — thanks in particular to Lenny Rachitsky, Sachin Rekhi, and many folks at a16z for taking the first crack — and it was also the first time my publisher and agent were reading it. I got a bunch of useful conceptual feedback, for example that the first few chapters felt a little slow to get into the action. It felt too theoretical at parts. There were certain specific topics that felt trite. Some sections felt repetitive. And so on. Brutal honesty is what you need here. In the end I also felt like, underneath the scruff, was a book that I would really enjoy reading myself, and that it just needed to be tightened.
老实说，直到你拿到这本书的一半完成版本并请几个值得信赖的朋友来阅读之前，你才会知道。我得到了很多非常非常好的反馈——特别感谢 Lenny Rachitsky、Sachin Rekhi 和 a16z 的许多人，他们第一次尝试了——这也是我的出版商和代理商第一次阅读它。我得到了很多有用的概念反馈，例如，前几章感觉进入行动有点慢。有些地方感觉太理论化了。有些特定的话题感觉很老套。有些部分感觉重复。等等。这里你需要的是残酷的诚实。最后我也觉得，在这本书的背后，是一本我自己非常喜欢读的书，只是需要收紧。
I will say, the most painful refactoring happening in this period. As I neared completion of rough versions of all the various chapters, I ended up with a roughly 100,000 word book (which is normal, turns out). Sometimes it takes 3-5 years to fully get to this, and the fact I had a demanding day job and was able to finish in ~3 years — that’s great. But if my worry was that if I had to significantly rewrite portions part way through, it would become a 5 years process, which I’ve learned is not uncommon. This kind of refactoring particularly comes when you have a full length book and then you decide to combine a chapter or two. Or to take a theme that’s appearing in a few spots, and make it into its own section. And then you have to update everything in the book so that it flows properly. It’s easiest to do with a blog post, or a document, or something like that, but with a 35 chapter book — that becomes a heavy lift. But so it goes.
我会说，最痛苦的重构发生在这个时期。当我接近完成所有各个章节的粗略版本时，我最终得到了一本大约 100,000 字的书（事实证明，这很正常）。有时需要 3 到 5 年才能完全实现这一点，事实上我的日常工作要求很高，并且能够在大约 3 年内完成 - 这很棒。但如果我担心的是，如果我必须在中途大幅重写部分内容，那么这将需要 5 年的时间，据我所知，这种情况并不罕见。当你有一本完整的书，然后你决定合并一两章时，这种重构尤其会发生。或者选择出现在几个地方的主题，并将其放入自己的部分。然后你必须更新书中的所有内容，以便它能够正常进行。对于一篇博客文章、一份文档或类似的东西来说，这是最容易做到的，但对于一本 35 章的书来说，这就变得很繁重。但事情就是这样。
Final months: Just ship it already
By the end of the writing process, I was dead tired. Honestly, I got to a point where I was both simultaneously feeling good about the materials, particularly the first few chapters that I had polished up. But also the process was long and arduous and I was ready to just ship it. The problem with books, however, is that they are really developed in a waterfall process for good reason — once you submit the book, and it’s printed, that’s that!
写作过程结束时，我已经累得要命了。老实说，我对这些材料同时感觉良好，尤其是我润色的前几章。但这个过程漫长而艰巨，我已经准备好将其交付。然而，书籍的问题在于，它们实际上是在瀑布式过程中开发的，这是有充分理由的——一旦你提交了书，它就被印刷了，就是这样！
One fun back and forth happened as I started to work on picking the final cover. I worked with a designer who had done a lot of work on Stripe Press books, which I always loved — however, they are
当我开始挑选最终封面时，发生了一次有趣的来回。我和一位设计师一起工作过，他在 Stripe Press 的书籍上做了很多工作，我一直很喜欢这些书籍——然而，它们是精品经营，这给了他们很大的自由度，可以做什么，而且设计上的文字通常很小。封面（毕竟，在数字优先体验中，标题将位于网页上的某个位置，对吧？），或规定的奇怪材料。这是一场旨在弄清楚什么是实际可行的谈判。
I also learned that almost all the US hardcover books are printed at one company (crazy???) and here’s an excerpt about that from a Vox article:
我还了解到，几乎所有美国精装书都是在一家公司印刷的（疯狂？？？），以下是 Vox 文章的摘录：
Most book printing happens in the US. Books with heavy color printing, like picture books, are sent to China, but in order to keep the cost of shipping low, most publishers do the rest of their printing domestically. That’s getting more and more difficult to manage.
大多数书籍印刷都在美国进行。重彩印刷的书籍，如图画书，被送往中国，但为了保持较低的运输成本，大多数出版商在国内完成其余的印刷工作。这变得越来越难以管理。Until 2018, there were three major printing presses in the US. Then one of them, the 125-year-old company Edwards Brothers Malloy, closed. The remaining big two, Quad and LSC, attempted to merge in 2020, but then the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit. Quad responded by getting out of the book business entirely; LSC filed for bankruptcy and sold off a number of its presses. Smaller printers have continued to operate, but the infrastructure to keep up with the demand for printed books in North America is in shambles.
直到2018年，美国共有三台主要印刷机。随后，其中一家拥有 125 年历史的 Edwards Brothers Malloy 公司倒闭了。剩下的两大巨头 Quad 和 LSC 试图在 2020 年合并，但随后司法部提起了反垄断诉讼。Quad 的回应是完全退出图书业务。LSC 申请破产并出售了其许多印刷机。较小的印刷商仍在继续运营，但满足北美印刷书籍需求的基础设施却一片混乱。
Crazy right? Couple other interesting things I learned at the end:
疯狂吧？最后我学到了其他一些有趣的事情：
You only need ~10,000 preorders to be a bestseller — far below what it used to be
只需约 10,000 份预订即可成为畅销书 - 远低于以前的水平There are tons of books that become best-sellers because people buy many, many copies of their own books — often via anonymous networks of buyers to obscure what’s happening (I did not do this, btw)
有大量的书籍成为畅销书，因为人们购买了很多很多自己的书——通常是通过匿名的买家网络来掩盖正在发生的事情（顺便说一句，我没有这样做）The US is not actually the primary market for business books, at least by units — it’s China. There’s usually 3:1 ratio of books sold there versus the US
美国实际上并不是商业书籍的主要市场，至少从单位来看是这样——而是中国。那里的图书销量与美国的图书销量比例通常为 3:1The average book has 250-500 books sold in its lifetime (!!!) — and maybe the median is more like a few thousand. But either way it’s quite low
平均一本书在其一生中售出 250-500 本书（！！！）——也许中位数更像是几千本。但无论哪种方式，它都相当低
Anyway, as the final months approached, I traded a bunch of revisions with Hollis and her team at Harper Business. Even though I was very tired at this point, I had the incredible help of Olivia Moore at a16z who did a once over at the end, that really polished things up, as well as my agent Chris, and many others. There are way too many people to thank, so I encourage you to look at the acknowledgements :)
不管怎样，随着最后几个月的临近，我与霍利斯和她在《哈珀商业》杂志的团队交换了一些修改意见。尽管我此时已经很累了，但我得到了 a16z 的奥利维亚·摩尔 (Olivia Moore) 的大力帮助，她在最后做了一遍，这确实让事情变得更加完美，还有我的经纪人克里斯 (Chris) 和其他许多人。有太多的人要感谢，所以我鼓励你看看致谢:)
It was only in the final months that I started to think about marketing the book. I also have a ton of notes there :) Will share more later. In the meantime, hopefully y’all found this interesting! It was a good 3+ years of my life and there’s finally enough distance to reflect now.
直到最后几个月我才开始考虑营销这本书。我在那里还有很多笔记:)稍后会分享更多。同时，希望你们都觉得这很有趣！这是我人生中美好的三年多，现在终于有足够的距离来反思了。