Future Failing

Encouraging people to think differently about the future is hard

Variation of a concept cover for Future Rising: A Journey from the Past to the Edge of Tomorrow. Neither the subtitle or the cover art worked for my publisher — I still rather like them though!

There’s a golden rule of being an author: You never admit to failure, no matter what the evidence says. And it’s a rule I’m about to break.

Just over three and a half years ago Future Rising: A Journey from the Past to the Edge of Tomorrow was published. And it failed.

It was supposed to be a great success. My editor at Mango Publishing loved the concept. There was talk of placements and outlets. And we though that audiences would be hungry for the ideas explored in the book.

Then COVID hit, and everything fizzled.

It wasn’t just COVID — there were a number of reasons why the book never took off. As most authors will tell you, it’s a lottery when it comes to publishing success, and this was no exception.

It certainly didn’t help though that what looked like a solid plan at the start of 2020 dissolved into near nothingness as COVID swept round the world.

My first quarterly sales report for 2024 — which I received a few days ago — underlined this rather starkly, and prompted this reflection.

It turns out that, despite early enthusiasm, in just over three and a half years I have sold a mere 596 copies of the book! And this includes the hardback version, the Kindle version, and the audiobook.

Ouch!

To put this into context, this Substack has been read over 120,000 times since I started it in April last year, my articles on The Conversation (just one of the outlets I write for) have been read over 700,000 times since October 2020, and even my YouTube Channel Risk Bites (which I rarely create content for these days) has been watched over 2 million times over the same period.

In other words, I occasionally produce stuff that people find useful. Just not in book form.

This disconnect has bugged me for quite some time. It’s not so much about me as it is about the challenge of successfully bridging the gap between my academic work and people who might potentially benefit from it — a public responsibility that I take very seriously. But if I’m being honest I’ve also been hit hard by by the implication that there’s something off about Future Rising — or that the theme and ideas simply don’t resonate with people.

This was hinted at by less than encouraging reviews of early drafts by some of my grad students (there was an apocryphal — and most likely false — rumor that one of them claimed it was the worst book they’d ever read!).

It’s always hard to tell as an author just how valid critiques like this are is — and to be fair they did help refine the final manuscript. And feedback from a number of people after publication has indicated that there was at least some value in the book.

But it still failed to have any substantial impact. And this highlights a conundrum that I know is not unique to myself — how, as academics and experts in our respective fields, do we make ideas and insights at the cutting edge of research and thinking as accessible and relevant as possible to broader publics when it’s just so damned hard to get people to read what you write?¹

This is something that academics in particular are constantly being challenged to do as they’re seen as occupying positions of isolated privilege in their “ivory towers.”

It’s not a particularly fair or accurate perspective as many of my colleagues spend their lives driven by a commitment to serving the public good. But it does highlight the need and the expectation — I’d go so far as to say the societal obligation — for academics to ensure their work is as accessible as possible to anyone who can potentially benefit from it.

Such a translation of ideas and knowledge becomes difficult though when attempts to make research and thinking accessible simply don’t gain traction. And it’s harder still when the preferred way of making the inaccessible accessible is through writing books — a medium that still allows subtle and complex ideas to be developed and explored in ways that few other platforms do.

There is, of course, the “market argument” — the claim that in the market of ideas the consumer is paramount, and that if a book (for instance) isn’t read, it’s because it doesn’t offer sufficient value to those who might read it.²

This is an important argument, especially for academics who’s end goal is sales rather than the spread of ideas. It begins to feel a little hollow though when the intent is to make ideas and insights as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, rather than to make money.

Unlike writing primarily for sales, if your goal is to make the knowledge and insights you’ve spent a career honing accessible and relevant, you can’t simply pivot to something else if there’s no market for what you know and understand.

Of course, the market argument can also be applied to the “economy of insights.” If no-one thinks that what you know and how you convey it is of value, you probably shouldn’t be working on the assumption that it is (although there’s an important proviso here in footnote 2 below).

I get this as a communicator. But what if there’s value in what you do and know that isn’t recognized by the “market,” but is important nevertheless? And what if “value” as perceived by potential readers is not determined by content, but by how effectively your book is marketed and promoted, or by who the author is, not what they’ve written — or, indeed, by faceless algorithms?

This gets us dangerously into ego territory as who’s to say that what an academic thinks is of value to others, actually is. And I do worry that my work is often only relevant to an audience of one (me) — or, to be more precise, 596 others when it comes to thinking about the future.

Given the rather reflective mood that the most recent quarterly report from my publisher put me in, I went back to Future Rising to see if I’d somehow missed something and that this was, in fact, an ego project rather than a book that conveyed new ideas in a way that was accessible and meaningful to others.

I may of course be wrong, but re-reading the book my sense is that it’s more relevant now than when I was writing it three and a half years ago.

The intent of the book was to explore different ways of thinking about the future and our connections with it through an tapestry of sixty interconnected and disciplinary-spanning reflections. These were purposely designed not to be preachy or dogmatic, or driven by ideology. Rather, they were intended to take readers on a journey that helped them develop their own ideas about what the future is, and how this might impact how they understand themselves and their actions in relation to it.

I won’t bore you with the contents, although you can download and read the first section of the book here if you’re interested. But I will say that the broad brush narrative and insights in the book still resonate with me as I grapple with understanding how to make sense of our individual and collective relationships with the future at a time of profound social and technological change.

Despite this, the book has clearly not achieved what I intended, and has left what I consider to be some of my most personal writing languishing in some Amazon fulfillment center, or worse.

But this still leaves me with a dilemma — if there is value in the work that went into the thinking and ideas explored in the book, how is this value to be realized?

Perhaps it isn’t to be. Maybe I simply chalk this up to a future fail and acknowledge that, outside of 596 people, there’s no call for thinking differently about the future and our relationship with it.

After all, it’s not as if there’s anything new or disruptive going on in the world that might affect this …

1. I suspect many readers are thinking at this point “don’t write books — they’re so old media!” But there are still remarkably few other platforms that allow someone to develop and convey ideas and insights with depth and breadth, and without a large budget and support crew. Articles, blogs and podcasts can convey bits of ideas, but struggle with scale and nuance. Films and documentaries can sometimes achieve more here — but they are expensive! As a result, for an academic, thought leader, or expert, books remain a powerful medium for capturing and conveying knowledge and understanding in a way and at a cost that few other platforms can match. As long, that is, that people read them!

2. This is for another article, but there are also serious questions around whether the market of ideas is an illusion in a world of algorithmic feeds and suggestions that are based on everything but the validity, timeliness, usefulness, and value, of ideas.