Every once in a while someone emails me and tells me I should write a book about weight loss, or gluttony, or exercise.
This maks me laugh. I'd like to write a book someday. I started my blog thinking maybe it might turn into material for a book, or at least some articles. But of all the topics that I hoped I might write about — of all the subject lines I wanted to see at the top of dozens of "You should write a book!!!" emails — I never, ever, ever expected it would be "weight loss." On the one hand, I'm pleased that people have found something I wrote inspiring and practically helpful. On the other hand, I don't particularly want to be personally associated with the diet-book industry!
There are a lot of weight loss books in the world. Most of them are drivel. The world doesn't need any more.
OK, the armchair economist in me has to clarify that. Obviously the world must be demanding them, otherwise there would not be such a limitless supply. But I reiterate that the world doesn't NEED any more.
And then there's the "weight-loss memoir" genre. But there are a number of those too. And my forty-odd pounds is just not that impressive compared to Shauna Reid's175 pounds or Kim Benson's more than 200 pounds. Maybe if I keep it off for the next twenty years I'll have done something worthy of a book.
I'm not interested in making money off of what I've written either. Well, that's not quite true. I'm not interested in putting the kind of time into it that would make the weight-loss stuff pay me any money. So I'm content to leave the blog content out there for free. If it helps some people , so much the better.
That being said, I got an email last week from a reader who made a point I haven't considered before.
You can't easily print it out and take it with you.
OK, I can see that. If you read it online, it's easy to navigate. Not so if you want to print it out and take it along. And I would like the material to be helpful. I enjoy organizing information, so it might be kind of fun to put it together into a more book-y form. Maybe I'll do that.
So I want to throw a couple of questions out. I'm going to make this post sticky for a few days so it stays on top and hopefully inspires a longer discussion.
Hypothetically, if I were to put the weight loss posts together into an e-book for easy downloading and printing, what sort of book would be the best to organize?
(1) Weight loss memoir -or-
(2) More-organized diet/eating less advice (the "diet book"), trimmed of specifically-Catholic content except where necessary to support and explain my personal experience fighting -gluttony stuff -or-
(3) Mostly spiritual-journey stuff where the gluttony/weight loss thing is only a concrete example – or-
(4) Don't organize it. Just string together the relevant blog posts in order and make it available for a single .pdf download
Comments, suggestions, questions, and your own vision of what I should do are welcome in the comments. Go for it. This post is sticky for now.
[Editing note. Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.
I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.
I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them. Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]
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