Books and Kindle Singles

Recently I started re-reading Vikram Chandra (the novelist and Berkeley academic)’s book “Mirrored Mind”, which has been published in the US as “Geek Sublime”. I hadn’t read it earlier – I had only read the Kindle sample and then discarded it, and I recently decided to pick it up from where I had left off.
In fact, that was hard to do, so I decided to start from the beginning once again, and so went through the introduction and preface and acknowledgements and all such before diving into the book again. This time I liked it better (not that I hadn’t liked it the first time round), and so decided to buy the full book. But somewhere midway through the full book, I lost enthu, and didn’t feel like reading further. My Kindle lay unused for a few days, for the “loaded” book on that was this one, and there was absolutely no enthu to continue reading that. Finally I gave up and moved on to another book.So one point that Vikram Chandra makes in the introduction to the book is that he initially planned to make it a Kindle single, but then decided, upon the urging of his wife and others, to make it into a complete book on coding and poetry. While the intent of writing a full book is no doubt well-placed, the result doesn’t really match up.

For when you try and turn a Kindle single into a full book, you try to add words and pages, and for that reason you write things that aren’t organically attached to the rest of the book. You want to add content, and depth, but instead you end up simply adding empty words – those that you could have done without, and chapters which are disconnected from the rest of the book.

And so it is the case with Vikram Chandra’s Mirrored Mind. There is a whole chapter, for example, on the sociology of the Indian software industry, which is clearly “out of syllabus” for the otherwise excellent novelist, programmer and creative writer Vikram Chandra. He goes into long expositions on the role of women in the Indian software industry, the history of the industry, etc. which are inherently interesting stories, but not when told by Chandra, who is clearly not in his zone while writing that chapter.

And then there is the chapter on Sanskrit poetry, which is anything but crisp, and so verbose that it is extremely hard to get through. There is nothing about code in the chapter, and it is very hard to cut through the verbosity and discern any references to the structure of poetry, and that lays waste to the chapter. It was while reading this chapter that I simply couldn’t proceed, and abandoned the book.

This is by no means a comparison but I’ve gone down this path, too. I’ve written so many blog posts on the taxi industry, and especially on the pricing aspects, that I thought it might make sense to put them all together and convert them into a Kindle Single. But then, as I started going through my posts and began to piece them together during my holiday in Barcelona earlier this year, I got greedy, and I thought I could convert this into a full “proper” book, and that I could become a published author.

And so I started writing, mostly in cafes where I went to for breakfast (croissant and “cortado”) and for coffees. I set myself ambitious targets, of the nature of writing at least two thousand words in each session. This might help me get out a skeleton of the book by the time my vacation ended, I reasoned.

Midway through my vacation, I decided to review my work before proceeding, and found my own writing unreadable. This is not always the case – for example, I quite enjoy going back and reading my own old blog posts. I’m quite narcissistic, in other words, when it comes to my own writing. And I found my own work-in-progress book unreadable! I immediately put a pause on it, and proceeded to fritter away the rest of my vacation in an offhand way.

I got back to Bangalore and sent the “manuscript”, if it can be called such to editor extraordinaire Sarah Farooqui, I don’t know what trouble she went through reading it, but her reaction was rather crisp – that the “book” was anything but crisp and I should cut down on the multitude of words, sentences and paragraphs that added no value. The project remains stillborn.

So based on these two data points, one from a great novelist (none of whose novels I’ve read), and one from my not-so-humble self, I posit that a Kindle single once conceived should be left that way, and authors should not be overcome by delusions of grandeur that might lead them to believe they are in the process of writing a great work. The only thing that can come out of this is a horribly overblown book whose information content is no greater than that of the Kindle single originally conceived.

Long ago on this blog I had written about “blog posts turned into books”, after reading Richard MacKenzie’s book on pricing (Why popcorn costs so much at the movies). The same holds true for Kindle singles turned into books, too. And when I started writing I intended to be a 500-word blog post, not the 900-word monster it has turned into. I wouldn’t blame you if you if you didn’t get this far.

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