There are only two types of people who make the mistake of writing a book: non-writers, who don’t know any better; and writers, who can never be happy and therefore must always seek out pain in order to feel alive. Either way, every book is the product of suffering. The best thing a new author can hope for is to discover that he is a masochist.

After two decades as a journalist, I published my first book in 2024. This does not make me special. In the same way that people in relationships often wake up one day married with kids due purely to peer pressure, all professional writers bear the burden of the expectation that they will write a book. With each passing year, those who haven’t done so are regarded with increasing suspicion. Typing all those words, but not a single book? Why, don’t you have anything to say?

As a young man, I regarded the book-publishing industry as an unapproachable bastion of erudite literary sophisticates. I was relieved of this notion during the years that I wrote for a popular blog, and regularly received solicitations from agents and editors encouraging me to turn my latest viral blogpost into a book. Though flattered, I was always struck with skepticism at their enthusiasm.

“Really?” I would wonder. “You think that ‘Ten Best Breakfast Sandwich Breads, Ranked’ could be a good book?” This is how I learned that many people in the publishing industry spend their days browsing the internet in boredom, like every other office worker. Their daily consumption of listicles and celebrity gossip is what qualifies them as more literate than the average American.

When you do decide to write a book, you must first write a book proposal, which your agent must use to convince a publisher to give you a book deal. This entails a series of meetings with editors that are ostensibly editorial in nature, but which in fact give them a chance to look you over to decide whether you look sober enough to actually write the damn thing on time.

This is reasonable enough on their part: writers have been known to take their advance and fuck off to the French Riviera to smoke cigarettes and go to dinner parties, playing out the fantasy of looking like a writer without doing the dreary work of typing all those words. It can be an appealing lifestyle, until the money runs out – which, given the average size of book advances today, will happen in a few months.

Like many creative industries, publishing makes all of its money on a small number of big hits, while most books sell shockingly few copies. On one hand, this is nice, because it is a form of socialism for all of us who write about less popular topics. (For some reason, few reported analyses of the labor movement appear on the New York Times bestseller list.) On the other hand, it is excruciating, because the books that do become bestsellers are generally either awful ghostwritten works of celebrity self-fellatio, or are written by your personal nemesis, who is suddenly rich enough to purchase a “writing cottage” in the Hamptons.

Indeed, coming to terms with the fact that you will not be the next Stephen King – or even the next Stephen Kang – is a critical part of being an author. This task is easier for non-fiction writers, who can dismiss our sales numbers simply as proof that the frivolous general public doesn’t care about the critical but nuanced topics that our books are about.

Novelists have little choice but to experience low sales as a direct rejection of their own, personal, heartfelt art, something I imagine is psychologically crushing. This – and the fact that I don’t have any ideas and don’t know how to write fiction that doesn’t sound like I am trying to rip off A Confederacy of Dunces – is why I am not a novelist.

It is true that the median book author’s experience is years spent torturing yourself before a blank page followed by months of anxious scrambling for reviews and publicity, followed by oblivion. But do not let that dissuade you. It is also true that a book comes with a host of fringe benefits you cannot get anywhere else.

People will take you more seriously, and treat you as more of an intellectual, even though you are the exact same idiot you were before you typed 100,000 words. You can apply for entry to “writers’ retreats”, where adults go to lounge around in private cabins and eat catered food and try very hard to look like artists engaged in grand mental work, rather than overgrown summer campers.

Your book-release party will impart a sense of social obligation that trails only weddings and funerals, meaning that every friend you have made in the past decade will show up for it, and it will be fun.

Then you can go on a book tour, where actual human beings will leave their homes and travel to a bookstore and sit quietly while you talk about your favorite subject in the world for 45 minutes. People pay therapists thousands of dollars for a fraction of that experience. It is a gift. Savor it.

You should not write a book in order to get rich. That won’t happen. You should not write a book in order to get famous. That won’t happen, either, unless you are somehow drafted into the NBA while you are writing. You should not write a book because you think it will sell a million copies, get made into a movie or land you a job as a tenured professor of thinkfluencing, where you can bore an entire generation of college students who will be forced to purchase your book for a usurious price from the university bookstore.

These things do happen, yes, but it is very unlikely that they are going to happen to you.

No. You shouldn’t write a book for any of those reasons. You should write a book because you have something to say. You should write a book because – long after all of your essays and blogposts and op-eds have been lost to time – that ragged, dusty hardcover book will still be sitting on the shelf of a library somewhere. And someone that you have never met, in a place that you have never been, can pick it up and look at it. And when you’re dead and buried and forgotten, that book, that tangible thing, will be read by a person, and the thing that you wanted to say will live on. That is enough.

Hell, they might even like it. Just don’t count on it.

• Hamilton Nolan is the author of The Hammer: Power, Inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor