March 4th, 2026
Today marks the one-year anniversary of Tiny Experiments! I’m not exaggerating when I say that this book changed my life.
Over the past year, I have received many emails asking about the process of writing a book, and I thought this edition would be the perfect time to share what I’ve learned.
Whether you’ve ever considered writing a book or are just curious about the process, I hope you find these hard-earned lessons helpful.
1. Nothing will prepare you for it. I had been writing the Ness Labs newsletter every week for years before I started working on Tiny Experiments. I assumed that a book was just a longer, more structured version of what I was already doing. I was wrong. A newsletter is a sprint: you have an idea, you write it, you publish it, you move on. A book demands sustained focus across months and a coherent through-line that connects every chapter. And unlike online writing, where you can always go back and tweak a sentence, a book is terrifyingly final. Once it’s printed, it’s printed. That permanence felt paralyzing.
2. It takes a village. Before writing Tiny Experiments, I knew the romantic image of the solitary author in a cabin was a fantasy, but I had no idea just how many people would be involved. A literary agent to shape and pitch the proposal. Editors to strengthen the manuscript. Designers and illustrators to create the visual identity. Marketing and publicity specialists. A public speaking agent. Even if you go with a small team – just you, an editor, and a designer – you’re never working alone. Those decisions about who to bring in will shape everything about how the book gets made, and it’s worth thinking about it early, before you’ve written a single chapter.
3. Collaboration will break your heart and save your book. Working with other people means giving up control, and that’s harder than it sounds. During the editing process, we decided to cut some pretty dark material about my mental health to keep the book lighter and more enjoyable to read. My editor also asked me to cut an entire chapter – painful, but ultimately the right call. These are decisions you don’t always agree with in the moment, and that means the finished book is never fully yours. You have to trust that this co-created version is better than the one that exists only in your head.
4. Your ideas aren’t as clear as you think. A book is a stress test for your thinking. I thought my ideas were solid, but when I had to organize them into a book, gaps I’d never noticed became impossible to ignore: concepts I’d written about in the newsletter that fell apart when I tried to build a full chapter around it, ideas that worked as standalone posts but contradicted each other when placed side by side… A book will show you which of your ideas were never fully formed.
5. You’ll have to kill your darlings. Tiny Experiments was originally called Liminal Minds, but readers and collaborators found “liminality” confusing, so we changed the title. That process taught me that the book is not just for me – it’s for the readers – and forced me to choose clarity over ego.
6. You’ll face big life questions. Writing a book sounds like a creative project, but it’s also a series of identity crises. How public do you want to be? How commercial? How broad should your target audience be? How much of your personal story are you willing to share, and how much are you willing to cut? I’m still navigating some of these questions a year after publication, still in the liminal space between wanting to promote the book and wanting to protect my privacy, between the empty calendar I used to love and the keynotes and podcasts that now fill it.
7. The reward for writing is less writing. Here’s the irony nobody warned me about: what a book demands after it’s written – keynotes, podcasts, social media – will pull you away from the thing that made you want to write it in the first place. For me, the writing itself is what makes me feel most alive. But the post-book life is largely not writing. It’s talking about writing. It’s promoting the ideas you’ve already had instead of developing new ones. The reward for doing the thing you love turns out to be a calendar full of obligations that aren’t the thing you love. Now that I know this, it won’t catch me off guard for the next book.
Ultimately, writing a book is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done – not because of the writing itself, but because of everything around it: the collaboration, the compromises, the identity crises, the life that follows.
And yet, I would do it again. Because nothing else forces you to think this clearly, work this closely with others, and confront who you really are as a creator. If everything I just shared sounds less like a warning and more like an invitation to you, then you might be ready to write a book.