Writing a book is hard... that's why people do it

Amanda Goetz is a serial entrepreneur, startup executive, athlete, and mother. She also just completed the manuscript for her first book. According to Goetz, it was “a top 10 hardest thing I’ve ever done.” 

One of my favorite quotes comes from Dorothy Parker : “I hate writing, but I love having written.”

Writing is hard. Writing a book is the marathon of the writing craft. Writing a great book is more akin to creating an artistic masterpiece or Unicorn startup. It’s nearly divine. But it starts with a lot—I repeat, a LOT—of hard work.

And that’s why people do it.

A certain subset of humans have never shied away from hard things. Writing a book ranks among the pantheon of intellectual feats that still inspires awe after 600+ years. And despite the flourish of content machines at our disposal today, I don’t expect book-writing to go away anytime soon. In fact, books may be on the upswing as people take back their attention from social media and seek our more intentional uses of their time.

As a publisher, I think a lot about AI and its use-cases in the book world. Yes, there are people who claim they can use AI to churn out a book in days, even hours. And while their claims become more true by the day, it doesn’t take away from the feat of writing a book the old fashioned way: collecting enormous amounts of research and experiences and distilling it into a narrative that enthralls.

Just like the car didn’t replace the marathon race (if anything, this convenience made running more popular than ever), AI will not replace the writer, and certainly not the author.

A rare connection

As long as there is a human desire to connect with others, there will be books. Humans aren’t just social creatures, but communicators by nature. We crave connection with others—it’s why our brains treat social media like sugar or heroin. It’s feeds our dopamine receptors the way fast food feeds our stomachs: cheaply and endlessly.

But books… books are connections of a highest order. Because they are so hard to write, only authors with something truly worthwhile to say will bother writing them (and I’m explicitly referring to good books written for their own sake, not the “business card” books churned out by vanity publishers and content mills).

The process of researching, writing, distilling, re-writing, editing, and packaging work to craft a keen message that is rare in the world today. Yes, there may be a fast food joint on every corner, but they only serve to amplify the spectacular restaurant experience, not take away from it. Social Media and junk food content only makes books more desirable and more important—thus, there will always be people eager to write them.

I wrote my book, Great Founders Write, after 5 years of working with founders and startups on marketing content. I saw a problem over and over again: the smartest founders struggled to share their knowledge in interesting and concise ways. I wrote the book because I wanted to help these founders and felt like I was qualified to do so. It still took me two years to write and publish.

Writing books are hard. Which is exactly why they are worth writing—and reading.