Afterword, for now.
Now that Cadence & Slang has sold out, it’s worth doing a postmortem. Copies went on sale on October 15, and it sold out on April 18. So that’s about six months to ship about 700 copies. On average that works out to 26 copies per week, but the reality is much less even: Cadence sold in large bursts that were contingent on third-party publicity and word of mouth.
Because Cadence & Slang had no advertising or marketing strategy, the impact of specific events was really easy to measure, as long as I paid careful attention to what was going on, and who was talking about it. Reviews of the book (both positive and negative) found me quickly, blog posts were easy to parse with google alerts, and Twitter’s easy to search in the short term.
Word of mouth is interesting when applied to Twitter. A rough math can be worked out that correlates one’s subject of interest, their follower count, and my book’s sales. Basically: the more involved you are in UX or product design, and the more followers you have, the more copies I would sell as a result of your single tweet about my book. I don’t plan to use this to target people through social media in the future, because that sort of thing makes me feel kind of skeezy, but it’s probably interesting all the same.
I also took measures to research who was buying my book. Because I had a relatively small customer base, I could find most peoples’ Twitter handles, thank them, and tell them when their copy would ship. I’m interested in seeing where my customers work, and what they do there, if only to sate my curiosity.
It’s extremely easy to take this research and use it for questionably ethical purposes, to pester people with marketing and pursue them in areas that make them uncomfortable. It would be really problematic if, for example, I mass-followed all of my customers, or friend requested them on Facebook, or even added them to a Twitter list. Single @-reply tweets, which won’t show up in my followers’ timelines, are (in my opinion, at least) ephemeral enough that they won’t make a difference in the grand scheme.
I learned that graphic designers, developers, project managers, and CEOs bought copies of my book. Very few IAs, UXers. Ultimately I’m very happy about whom I sold my book to; my customers represented a much broader diversity in roles than I had expected, and I think the best thing for UX right now is to evangelize the practice in other tribes.
But researching this wouldn’t be possible if I were more popular, selling more copies faster. In general I’m happy with the pace that copies sold, although the holidays were hectic enough that I was unable to keep up with demand for about a week.
Second edition.
I’ve decided that no more print copies will be made of this edition of Cadence & Slang. I plan to revise it continuously over the years, and when enough revisions have accumulated that it makes sense to re-release the book, a second edition will be made. It will happen, but not, like, tomorrow or anything. Patience.
What’s next?
I’ve learned a lot about the process of designing an object that has a lot of moving parts (e.g., proofing, revising, complexity of the manuscript, interplay between sections of a very compartmentalized outline), making a bunch of that object, getting that bunch sent to me, and then sending that bunch to a lot of people. All of the shipping was my doing, and every copy went through my living room before their final destinations. Relatively little went wrong, so although I have only one data point, I think I can say I’m good at it - or at least good enough that I have enough confidence to, one day, do it again.
And so a few new loves have come as a result of this. I love doing things myself. I love coordinating a lot of moving parts. I love the substance of quality long-form writing, and think the web writ large is sorely lacking for it. (There are exceptions.) I love print, despite everybody heralding its death, and I believe that “print” in general is a red herring, as people still harbor an abiding love for well-designed, beautiful print. (Make your own resurgence-of-vinyl analogy here.) And I love obsessively editing something until I think it’s ready.
With the exception of the aforelinked A List Apart and the now-sadly-defunct Emigre, this space is largely empty. (I am following The Manual’s progress with great interest, although they have not published an issue yet.) I enjoy many of the design books that are coming out, but they’re often too one-dimensional, too professional… not enough opinion. No teeth.
So I want to keep doing this, again and again. And I want to do it with longer-form writing, both mine and others’. It’s going to be a challenging task, but I reckon I’m up for it. What shape it’ll take - well, figuring that out is half the fun, right?
