Announcing The Pathless Collective & First Zine Launch: Unwritten | #306

TL;DR: I’m launching the Pathless Collective. It’s purpose is to launch cool shit into the world as a group. My book has inspired many people to harness their inner creative spirits but doing high-quality work is hard without formal structures around you. I wanted to start this group to help people raise their own ambitions through publishing high-quality creative work. Our first release is a 46 page, sexy color magazine, aka “Zine,” produced by eight people from around the world on the theme of thresholds.

Here’s how it happened:

Earlier this year, I started working a bit more after coming out of an intensive two-year parenting chapter of my life. I was trying to drop into my old mode of creating, sharing, and tinkering, but everything seemed off. The social networks weren’t as fun; hyper-optimized creators seemed to be eating every last scrap of attention, and I felt like I was going in loops writing about the same topics.

That’s when I stumbled upon Yancey Strickler’s video on “nine creative meditations.” In it, he talked about his own creative journey and challenged, from founding Kickstarter to doing his own creative work, to now founding another company. The whole video is worth watching, but the part that jumped out was when he talked about creative scenes throughout history. He noticed a common pattern across intellectuals, creatives, and weirdos: “a group of people who shared the same worldview who released work in a shared context.”

The word that jumped out for me was released. By releasing The Pathless Path, I realized the power of leveling up my ambitions and shipping something I cared about. But after that book, I started to think about my path only as a series of book-shaped quests. I did pull off a second book, but books are hard and take time. I started to think, why am I not releasing more and different things?

I realized that a big reason I started sharing early on was that I wanted to help others do the same and bring others along with me on the journey. So immediately after watching Yancey’s video, I dropped a note in The Pathless Path Community.

Over the last six months, I’ve been learning a ton. We got off to a slow start but over the last month, I sort of figured out what we needed and were able to complete a finish product which is pretty awesome.

check it out here

The finished product is a zine/collection of essays that we are calling Unwritten: Crossing the Threshold. It’s a collection of essays on place, time, parenting, change, and the unknown. Everyone’s task was to simply write about the theme “thresholds.” It’s a very pathless pathy, but also a bit different.

The theme: crossing thresholds

Per Frank Chen:

The word “threshold” represents that moment of stepping through a doorway, not quite in either room, that captures the experience of being in-between identities or life paths. It’s both a boundary and an invitation, a place of vulnerability where we can start to leave behind the security of what we know while also accepting the enormity of what might emerge.

It’s in this suspended state where we often find our most profound insights and unexpected strengths. Those who linger at the threshold, rather than rush through it, discover the unique wisdom that comes only from inhabiting this liminal space.

Here are some issues from the upcoming release

Each essay in this collection explores the feeling of stepping into and moving through a threshold, whether in our sense of home, bold life changes, identity shifts, the passage of time, parenting, or place.

Contributors And Essay Contributions

• Paul Millerd, Foreword (Lead Editor)

• Frank Chen, Editor’s Letter (Producer & Co-Editor)

• Francesca Galli, The Places We Call Home

• Josh Knox , Is it Safe?

• Frank Chen, Where Do I Sit In The Coffee Shop?

• Becky Isjwara, I Quit Corporate. Then I Freaked Out

• Bess Hambleton, Every Morning Is a Threshold

• Brian Wiesner, On Finding a New Home

• Alex Dobrenko`, Briefly, Forever

• Frank Chen, Parting Words

Splitting The Money & Building A Treasury

I suspect people don’t attempt things like this because it’s quite hard to make much money doing it. We will be profitable because we can predict the costs. Shipping is the only variable we can’t predict, but since we’re expecting most orders to come from the US and U,K we can predict those somewhat too.

The other reason people don’t attempt these kinds of collaborations is that payments can be a pain. Metalabel has built in backend splitting after they take their fees and Stripe’s fees. Then you can split the profits after costs with contributors and a general treasury for the collective.

Here’s a breakdown of what that looks like:

I think people underestimate how much background infrastructure and protocols like payment splitting influence how much people are willing to do collaborative projects like this and am pumped to be experimenting with this.

After any costs, all profits will be split:

• Pathless Collective treasury: 30% for future projects and any other bills

• Frank Chen, Producer: 17.5% (10% for producing, 7.5% contributing)

• Seven Other contributors: 7.5% each

• Me: I decided not to take anything on this

We are going to price the digital edition only at $5+ and the print edition at $30+ using gift pricing if people want to add an additional contribution.

For a $30 print magazine plus $6.99 shipping, here is what it will look like:

So each contributor will get about $1 for each sale. Obviously no one’s getting rich doing this, but it will still be cool for people to get paid (many of the people haven’t really made money from writing online yet).

Reflections

The ease of online publishing has led more people than ever to share their ideas with the world. This is great. But I think the ease of doing so has also led to less ambitious work on the margin. People are complacent with hitting publish with an online post and moving on and don’t attempt to write a book unless they are chosen by a publisher. But I want to dare people to go deeper with their work, and earlier in their journeys. When I wrote The Pathless Path, it didn’t make sense on the normal online writer trajectory. I didn’t have a “big enough” audience. But a lot of good stuff has come from ignoring such thinking.

Working with the people in this group confirmed that this sort of thing is a good container to really challenge and push people to be more creative and take things more seriously.

But doing this was still hard. A few reflections:

• Initially, Frank was the “producer,” leading design and editing, and corralling of everyone. I think it was a bit too much, and when I took over as editor and he as design/project management, we found our groove. I had a lot more experience managing others and editing people’s writing, so it was a much more natural fit. In future projects, I think the lead editor would be a singular role.

• We did a round robin of peer comments. I don’t think these worked quite well, as most people just gave comments on the current drafts of things, and people went through a few rounds of what I think were probably marginal edits. I had much higher expectations of each person’s essays, and when I started engaging a bit later in the process, I pushed people pretty hard, and some people had to do some very dramatic revisions and up to 5-6 additional rounds of edits. This was a bit frustrating and jarring for people, but I think most eventually appreciated it, as all of the essays are really good. Lesson for me: I was a bit too hands-off and trusting at the beginning. I should have done a better job of setting expectations and doing initial full edits earlier.

• An “easier” version of this could have been picking only established writers who had lots of experience rewriting and editing their work. But for me, the whole point was getting some of the people in my community to go beyond what they thought they were capable of. I want more people to write books and this is a good first step of feeling what a more challenging writing project might feel like. I actually really enjoyed editing and helping people shape ideas. This continues to be something I want to keep leaning into.

• I’m really excited to do more experiments like this! I doubt this will make much money, but it actually was quite energizing and feels exciting to share. I now have more confidence in knowing how to bring together people in creative projects. Let me know if you want to be involved in a future one!

You also might be interested in:

Writing this up, I also thought back to 2020, before putting out a book. Early in the pandemic, tons of people were hanging out online. Out of that chaos emerged a small scene of indie creators in Venkatesh Rao’s Yak Collective. Without much to do while locked down in the Canary Islands, I started engaging in the group and got involved in a project corralling a bunch of weird and interesting ideas emerging out of the pandemic. Quickly, through my strong opinions on the art of PowerPoint slides, I became the lead editor of the project. Over about a month, I helped pull together a report called “Don’t Waste the Reboot,” It was my first experience working on a project that was more than n=1 as an online indie type.

• I also wrote a short reflection here about the project in 2020. It’s interesting to read back as this was the peak of my optimism for the internet. I think some of my perspectives here hold, and some predictions didn’t pan out as well.

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I’m still having fun, thanks for being here.

I’ve been doing some form of public writing since 2015. I’ve somehow figured out how to hack a living doing things like forming collective for 8+ years now. I’m amazed myself, don’t worry.

If you like what you read here, you’ll probably enjoy my books The Pathless Path and Good Work:

grab them here

If you’d like to meet others on “pathless paths,” or potentially get involved in the next release you can join The Pathless Path Community.

Some things I endorse: Readwise for book notes and reviewing highlights; Readwise Reader for my attempts at re-creating RSS readers (2 months free for each. Crowdhealth, an alternative to US health insurance that I’m still using while abroad; Kindred, a home-sharing app; Collective for handling your S-Corp accounting needs; and Nat Eliason’s Build Your Own AI Apps course

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