The Accidental Capitalist
For the first eighteen years of my career as a pop culture writer I was lucky. All I did was write. Oh sure, I watched movies and suffered through the occasional meeting and interviewed famous people but all of that was in the service of writing.
When I was the head writer of the A.V Club, a section/site I wrote for for roughly eighteen years, from 1997 to 2013, and then again from 2015 to 2017, there were dozens of other people doing the myriad other jobs involved in running a huge organization like The Onion Inc. There were people who sold ads and chased partnerships and handled publicity and all sorts of bullshit I couldn’t begin to understand or care about.
The same was true when I left The Onion/A.V Club for Pitchfork and The Dissolve. There were lots of people there who were very good at their very specialized jobs, some of which involved protecting the reading public from the inexorable horror that is my raw prose.
Then I started Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place and I went from being a role player, a pure writer, to being a one-man band. I write! I edit! I graphic-design! I pull graphics! I come up with ideas! But it goes beyond that. After not having to think about the business of pop culture media for nearly two decades, except for the countless ways it made my life and job harder and less satisfying, I suddenly found myself in a position where I’m forced to be a small businessman handling every aspect of my site’s financial existence.
I’m an accidental businessman, a capitalist by default. I never wanted to be anything other than a writer but the cost of the creative freedom I enjoy at the Happy Place involves doing almost everything by myself. I’m happy to make that trade-off but it undeniably comes with a cost.
Running the Happy Place has been a wonderful, creatively satisfying and incredibly exhausting adventure that has taxed me to the full extent of my time and energy and talent. Now I have an even greater business challenge staring me down.
After publishing my first few books with Scribner, whose authors include oh I dunno STEPHEN FUCKING KING, and coffee table book kings Abrams Image, I will soon be self-publishing just under 500 copies of a 400 page page book with fifty two original illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro and an introduction by Al himself, then autographing and sending out five hundred copies of the Weird Accordion to Al book.
On one level that is unbelievably exciting. I am absolutely gobsmacked that I was able to pre-sell five hundred copies of a book that is not cheap via crowd-funding. That is really fucking good. I am proud of myself that I was able to sell so many copies the independent route, from people who were willing to put down money before the book was even finished.
At the same time, it is going to be an extraordinary challenge to handle volume of that sort. There are so many moving parts to the publishing process, and while I’m pleased to say that I’ve got people helping me and guiding me through the process I am going to have to do the vast majority of this myself, including exhausting physical labor like ensuring that hundreds of books get published, signed and then make it into your eager little hands on time.
As an accidental businessman I’m stumbling my way through all of this, learning by example and learning as I go.
I’m learning in part by making stupid mistakes I then learn from. One particular stupid mistake was settling on November 27th as a release date because 27 has special meaning to Al’s fans and that would give me time to finish the project and Al to fact-check everything but still be available for Christmas shopping.
Then I realized that November 27th is the day before Thanksgiving, which would be an astonishingly stupid time to release a book, one of the worst. So I’ve decided to push back the release until December 5th.
I know I can handle the release of the Weird Accordion to Al book. It’s just going to entail an insane amount of work and physical labor but I don’t mind. I’ve done successful campaigns before but never on this level or this scale but I have fond memories of schlepping constantly to the post office for previous campaigns because every package I had to mail represented someone who believed in me and my vision and my career enough to fund it directly.
You believe in me. That makes me believe in myself and the possibilities of Declan-Haven Publishing. It’s all a fuck-ton of work; it’s just a good thing I fucking love what I do and the people I do it for.
Support independent media by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
AND of course we’d super duper dig it if y’all would check out the Weird Accordion to Al book campaign as well over at https://make-the-weird-accordion-to-al-book-a-ridiculous-r.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders