How this book came together (entirely on Twitter)

Twitter has had a special place in my life for over a decade now. It created life-changing opportunities for me. Yet, I was still surprised it drove every single step from idea to publication of my book. I’m still underestimating the power of Twitter!

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant came together almost entirely on Twitter:

Vetting the idea

“Vetting the idea” is probably overstating how intentional I was about this. Here’s the real story:

• I had 4% of an idea.

• I thought of a stupid pun.

• I tweeted the 4% idea + stupid pun without even thinking about it.

• Naval retweeted it.

• I woke up to find 3,259 people thought I should create a book about Naval.

33.9% Haters. Not bad, not bad.

Guess I better figure out how to write a book...

Naval’s Tweets

The original idea was to compile some transcripts. But, as soon as this had the momentum of a few thousand excited people behind it, there was immediate ‘scope creep.’ Compiling transcripts just doesn’t add much value to the reader. 

I realized we had to start from zero and come up with something thoughtful -- to do some hard, creative work. I put my side project, Evergreen, on hiatus and dove into building this book.

Naval offered to export his entire history of tweets for me, which became valuable raw material for the book:

No idea what I had to think about for 3 days.

Curating, categorizing, and finding the proper context for nearly 20,000 tweets is not an easy job. This was my first big chunk of work, and became the skeleton for the rough first draft of the book.

Keeping readers updated

To bring everyone along on the journey, I was casually tweeting progress. It took a looooong time to get this book done. I wanted readers to know that I was working on it, progress was being made, keep the faith! 

As I made progress or hit milestones, I would tweet. This was every few months or so. I tried not to be obnoxious about it. Over time, this filled up an email list to about 1,000 people. Not bad for just a few tweets like this:

It was closer to 30% complete, in retrospect.

I put up a really janky site early on. And I mean real janky. But it was an MVP. Just something quick on Instapage. (Related: Instapage suuucks.) It was just enough to get the idea across and collect emails for tweets like this.

[Anyone got a screenshot of how terrible this site was? I can’t find it anymore.]

Illustrations

I’m not much of a “visual learner” so images and illustrations aren’t my strength. I was planning to just not have any in the Navalmanack.

Until @JackButcher from @VisualizeValue cold DM’d me to show me his work:

I looked at the collection of illustrations he’d already created based on Naval’s Quotes and it was brilliant. We got on a call, talked through more options, and I found a deep calm listening to his british accent. Better than any meditation. Anyway.

After I gave him the draft he combed through for more inspiration. We kept brainstorming and iterating illustrations until we had a dozen amazing, timeless visualizations for Navals wisdom. They add a lot to the book, and I’m so grateful Jack reached out. He’s building something really cool with Visualize Value, and it’s super fun to watch.

One of many brilliances from Jack Butcher

Alpha Readers (Peer Reviews)

Since the project had such a public start, I would consistently get DM’d offers to help, edit, or contribute. (Or just requests for early peeks!) I’m grateful for all of the outreach, support, and encouragement. 

Many of these offers turned into “Alpha Readers” who got early drafts of the book to read, on the condition they would do a call with me after to debrief, answer questions, etc.

I’m still shocked people like the name “Navalmanack”

I learned this is a great way to learn what content engages people, what gets skipped, and how to get the concepts in the right order. After 20+ conversations with a variety of readers, I started hearing the same things over and over. That’s when I knew I was finding the right path.

(I learned this is not a great way to do line-editing. I needed a professional. I used Kathleen Martin. Highly recommended.)

Publishing Deal

When I tweeted about a completed manuscript, that’s a starter pistol to publishing companies. When student is ready, master appears:

Tucker and I got on a call and talked about my goals for the book, the creative vision, and how Scribe was uniquely qualified to take this from Google Doc to world-class published book. I’d been following Scribe since they were Book-in-a-box, but when I learned they had also consulted on Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and published my friend Taylor Pearson’s The End of Jobs, I knew there was no other choice.

Also, Tucker and people on his team know Naval and I could trust they would absolutely nail the vibe we wanted through every piece of the book. We came to a quick agreement, and I signed with Scribe. They guided me through the final steps to actually complete the manuscript and complete everything I needed for submission to the publishing team. 

Getting Blurbs

As the final cover was getting designed, we needed ‘blurbs’ to put on the jacket. I decided since Twitter was where so much of Naval’s audience already lived, there was no better place to get testimonials! 

Boom. 40 great testimonials from readers all over the world, just like that. 

What’s Next?

These make sense now, but in each moment, I was completely making it up. And that’s what I’ll continue to do! 

So who knows what other ways Twitter will come in handy as we get closer to launching the book and sharing it with the world. I’m excited to find out.

And I’ll update this post later as we discover what the future holds...