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Hello and welcome to the brand-new Crumbling Empires podcast! I’m Lyndsey Medford, author of My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World that is Sick.
This is a podcast about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires, with realism and with hope. Just like I’ve become a person who’s very comfortable talking about disease and doctors and the near-inevitability of disability in all of our lives, I’m also someone who very cheerfully assumes that most of the systems and structures around us are slowly falling apart, even if they appear not to be. Many of us admit this ourselves any time we casually use the word “unsustainable” to describe habits, systems, or cultures. “Unsustainable” sounds sort of benign or jargony, but it literally means: this pattern will eventually become self-destroying.
Not to put too fine a point on it, extractive colonial capitalism, and the systems and cultures of oppression it creates, are the ultimate unsustainable empires.
I’m cheerful about all this because, well, nothing lasts forever and lots of things need to change. And because very few of these unsustainable things actually suit us very well. They don’t contribute to our flourishing or our neighbors’. They hide or distract us from what we truly want, what we were created for.
But that doesn’t negate the reality that we still live within them, and that navigating them, resisting them, or replacing them, as wholehearted human beings, is a skill we’re still struggling to develop.
So after this episode, this will actually be an interview show. I’m bringing on guests to share about various crumbling empires and various strategies for living practically and meaningfully in the midst of these realities. I am so excited to share a conversation with Courtney Ellis’s on practicing presence amidst transience and loneliness, Kim Knowle-Zeller and Erin Strybis’s wisdom on mothering in this nonsense world that is so inhospitable to mothers, and Sara Billups’s perspective on the crumbling empire of the American evangelical church. And of course, those are just the folks who have confirmed so far!
Before we get to the interviews, though, I thought I would share a bit more about why I’m doing a podcast, which is actually also my behind-the-scenes reflection on life in the midst of the crumbling empire of publishing and influencing and being a spiritual writer. Which I hope will have a bit of relevance to non-influencers!
If you follow any conversations about publishing, you know that it is a mess. I deeply, honestly, genuinely love and appreciate my publisher, Broadleaf Books, and everyone I work with there. But my guess is they would also tell you the industry is a mess.
Basically, lots of things about the internet disrupted how publishing works and how publishers make money. So the goal of publishing really interesting, insightful, helpful books and the goal of running a publishing business have never been more divergent.
This makes it really confusing and difficult to be an author who cares about content and craft, even when your publisher, like mine, does their darnedest to make those goals converge again.
A lot of us work in places where we are kind of set up to fail because we are supposed to meet competing goals. One place I’ve encountered this is in church planting. You are supposed to follow the Holy Spirit’s lead and build really deep community and try new and creative things, which in reality often means failing, but you’re also supposed to hit a bunch of metrics about what an impressive church looks like that don’t measure those things. Most nonprofits have this same tension between their real mission, and what they feel pressured to make their organization look like to those who fund the mission without actually being involved in it. And I think anyone who works in any industry or organization with certain profit goals, or certain markers of belonging and status, but who also wants to live out justice and liberation in their day-to-day life, is also going to feel torn some of the time.
Another thing all these situations share with my own experience in publishing is that this specific place of bewilderment is common enough that a bunch of people are very happy to step into this gap and offer magic solutions that are supposed to tell you how to reach all your goals. The problem is, their magic solutions don’t have to actually work for their business to be successful. They are trading in hope. And some of them are also trading in really hard-won expertise and empathy for their customers, but you don’t always know who they are.
So all of this is the background just for me to say: I have done a lot of research on the supposed path to becoming a successful author, and almost all of it has been stuff that doesn’t actually have anything to do with writing good words and serving an audience well, or it doesn’t work. And so, when it came time to launch this book, I had to make some decisions. Do I just kind of grit my teeth, put on my work boots, and hustle my way about selling selling selling my work? Do I basically give up on marketing this thing like I’ve seen a lot of authors do? Do I look around me and try to blend in by following all the industry norms?
None of those felt like the right option to me. Not least because the book itself is about how we live into greater integrity and Wholeness. And about how we keep going without giving up. And about how we resist what isn’t helping us and isn’t actually working even when it feels like we’re going against the norm.
So here are some supposedly common-sense things that were not working for me:
- Instagram. Instagram looks shiny and braggy and it gives you instant feedback which is a head rush. But to actually sell books from that platform I think requires authors to be on there basically all the ding-dang time. There are people for whom that fits into their daily schedules and their patterns of creating. I’m not that girl. At least not right now.
- Self-promotion. By this I do not mean saying that I think the book is good and you should buy it! So maybe this is a bit of a misnomer. But what I mean is that there is this received wisdom that authors are inherently isolated creatures. And when you launch a book, everyone trains their eyes on *you* and asks you what *you* are going to do and you feel all this pressure to do all the things and because you are so pressured, you also feel bad asking anyone else for help. And everyone just assumes this is how things go.
- Launch Day/week/month itself. Generating a lot of momentum with some well-placed buzz can help move books. And obviously, if your goal is to hit some sort of bestseller list, you have to throw all your energy at one single week. But otherwise, there is not an expiration date on books! There are lots of ways to sell them besides getting artificially stressed about an imaginary deadline. And if you know me, you know that getting artificially stressed about an imaginary deadline is particularly, materially, corporeally UNSUSTAINABLE for me. IN FACT, I’m becoming more and more aware that front-loading the hype like this makes a lot of sense if the book is not particularly good. If you can’t count on the quality of the book to speak for itself, you better sell it hard.
SO. How do you sell books with integrity in the midst of a crumbling empire. Frankly, I do not know the answer yet. Frankly, it has been a slow start—WHICH a lot of people involved with this book expected. But I will tell you two ways that I am doing it in a way that feels SUSTAINABLE.
First, extending this bizarre imaginary timeline. I think it is a well-kept secret that most authors give up on their books way too soon. Here’s the thing: there are people in business or in other entertainment industries who write books in order to grow their platforms. But authors get it stuck in our heads that we have to have platforms to sell books and by the time it’s Launch Day it’s already too late. The truth is a book is an incredible tool for growing a platform. But it takes time. It honestly takes a lot of time. What’s sad about not taking the time is that there’s a point where inertia stops working against you and starts working for you.
It also just seems like a more reasonable way of working for most of us. Like, I have now added this book to my body of work and I’m going to make my way out there to keep sharing it indefinitely, because this work is important to me, this idea is interesting to me, and I want to connect with people who feel the same. When we are running around frantically pitching articles and podcasts everywhere under the sun in the space of a month, of course we get totally sick of it and all the “nos” coming in at once make us sad, and all the “yeses” coming in at once make us stressed, and we get really tired of hearing ourselves talk, and we forget things and drop balls, and our butts fuse to our computer chairs, and we complain to each other and feel oppressed. Whereas if we just are willing to keep plugging away at it, no matter how slow the pace objectively is, we’re still going to do way more in a year, and be able to do it really well, than we did in that exhausting month.
The second thing is that I’ve been very frustrated by the sense of isolation authors have, that I’m slowly becoming more and more convinced is really unnecessary. I also think it’s pretty harmful and kind of bizarre to imagine that this really intensive creative work is being served by our belief that books are the work of lone geniuses. When you write a book you know that’s not true, but because of this myth, you also feel the pressure of making it “succeed” by yourself. But the truth is, writing and authoring in community is just far more sustainable on every level. It makes your work better. It introduces some accountability into your process. It feels good when other things about writing and authoring do not feel good. It can challenge you and expand your ideas. AND! It is an incredibly powerful strategy for selling books. (BUT! Caveat! It only rarely looks sexy on Instagram.)
So for a while I’ve really been craving more ways to work collaboratively and to meaningfully promote other authors. And so far I’ve been lucky enough or irritated and stubborn enough to do some of that in more behind-the-scenes ways. But I’m really, really, really excited to finally get this podcast going and start putting these things regularly on the schedule. I’m really hopeful that this is a way to be helpful to other authors in a way that doesn’t feel draining for me. Frankly, I just like talking to my friends and soon-to-be-friends!! To return to sustainability, it also feels more feasible with some of the tools that are fairly new to the scene, like Substack, in a way that it didn’t before now.
I also think this Substack will be a lot more valuable and fun with some other voices included. As an author, I could figure out manipulative ways to keep growing my audience while not actually offering that much, or I could get mad that there are “too many Substacks” now, or I could take the competition as a challenge to get creative, to figure out what resonates with you, dear listener, and to really look at all the tools at my disposal and see which ones best suit my strengths and interests. And I’m really, really hopeful that asking great questions of some amazing authors is a way to make your day better.
(By the way, if you are listening on a regular podcast app and not via Substack, I regularly post essays that I also read as audio reflections, *like this one,* on Substack, while only the interviews will go out to all the podcast feeds. So please join me over at lyndseymedford.substack.com.)
To get back to the crumbling empires theme, this all comes down to turning down the noise and acting on what I actually believe about how good books should make their way into the world with some sense of conviction that it can work that way. Which requires wayyyy more focus on the process and on how it feels and aligns, rather than on measuring the results at artificially close intervals. A lot of things that work really well, but on non-linear timelines, get discarded in favor of things that work kind of OK on super-short timelines. And I just won’t, and can’t, work that way. What happens when we choose this process way, though, is that we allow our work to be sustainable, and creative, and surprising, and we learn to fail and move on, and we find these incredible untapped sources of power that we missed this whole time. I think it “works” far more often than we expect it to. And even when it doesn’t quite turn out how we’d hoped, we’re growing these amazing skills and alternative ways of seeing, doing, and being, that we will need any time an empire crumbles.
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