SEASON 2 - EPISODE 0096 - FEB 14, 2024

The Myth of the Overnight Sensation

This week, join your host Kimberly Rhodes along with the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, as they celebrate Basecamp’s 20th and 37signals’ upcoming 25th anniversaries. The excitement extends to the success of their book REWORK, which recently surpassed a million copies sold worldwide.

They delve especially into the chapter titled “The Myth of the Overnight Sensation,” exploring the book’s journey, impact, and the challenges faced during its creation. From unexpected compromises with publishers to the book’s timeless nature, Jason and David share insights on treating a book as a product and how it has aged well, continuing to resonate with readers around the globe.

Jason and David also reflect on the writing process and the book’s unique qualities, including its concise nature and impactful content. Tune in for a fascinating exploration of the past, present, and potential future of 37signals’ writing about work and business.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:39 - Big news: REWORK just surpassed a million worldwide copies sold!
02:13 - The book was definitely not an overnight success.
04:12 - How treating books as products enhances impact, and longevity.
05:29 - The book, initially 50,000 words, was cut in half to 25,000, which caused a conflict.
07:06 - Hear about the compromise that was made.
10:25 - The book’s brevity, initially concerning, impressed the editor, leading to improvements.
13:58 - How the book serves as a persuasive tool, empowering readers to articulate their thoughts.
15:52 - David points out that the book’s immediate start contributed to its success.
18:24 - Writing a book is overrated; instead focus on consistent online writing.
20:06 - REWORK’s success lies in compiling proven internet hits for lasting impact.
24:39 - Any plans for another book?

REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website. Full video episodes are available on YouTube and X.

If you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 708-628-7850 or email, and we might answer it on a future episode.

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to REWORK a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host Kimberly Rhodes, and I’m joined by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. It is all kinds of celebration time around here because Basecamp just celebrated 20 years and 37signals is about to celebrate 25 years, and I understand there’s some celebration around the REWORK book as well, so this is perfect timing for us to talk about the chapter of the book called The Myth of the Overnight Sensation. It obviously does not happen overnight. Tell me, what’s the big REWORK news you guys?

Jason (00:39): We just crossed what about a million copies sold worldwide. That’s digital print everything. Yeah, I don’t even know how it’s all added up.

David (00:47): That’s everything. 1,556,000 or something. It’s the first official update we got that crossed a million mark.

Jason (00:55): Yeah, and I don’t think anyone really knows the actual amount. I feel like there’s no way to really know because not every bookstore reports and everything, but to have at least a million plus reported is wonderful and really exciting. I don’t think we ever thought we’d get anywhere close to this. We didn’t write it for that reason and it was the first major, well, we actually did publish a book years before called Defensive Design for the Web, which was with a traditional publisher, but this was the first book we really said let’s work with a traditional publisher, write a business book with, to a broad audience. And it happened, took a long time, but it sells like crazy still and it’s been translated into, I don’t know, over 20 languages now I’m guessing, something like that. And we still get emails constantly, especially from India right now. It seems to be very big in India, people writing us. I get close to 10 a week at least of emails from people saying, hey, just read the book for the first time. This is great. Where’s it been my whole life? That whole thing. So it’s great that it still has an impact and is still making an impact in people’s lives and we’re really proud of the work too. It’s aged very, very well.

David (02:01): I think that aging is…

Jason (02:03): Unlike my chin, it’s all gray now.

David (02:06): Mine too. There’s some gray.

Jason (02:08): There you go. I’m a few ahead of you, so get used to it.

David (02:13): Yeah, I think that what’s so interesting about the book is that it’s timeless because it was timeless when it was published. It was not written in the six months leading up to the publication. In fact, the majority of the ideas, the majority of essays, they were extracted from either blog posts that Jason and I had written or points that we had made in presentations over a course of maybe at least seven years. Certainly since the publication or the release of the original Basecamp, which just celebrated 20 years on February 5th, 2004 was when we first released that and quite quickly thereafter, I’m trying to put the whole timeline in order as I’m writing up the celebration posts for REWORK, we started doing these Building a Basecamp workshops or seminars. We’d invite, I think it was 40 people, it was a thousand dollars for a one day super packed eight hours deep dive with Jason, me and Ryan.

(03:16): I think Matt perhaps helped with a few too, where we would really go into everything that we learned building Basecamp, which was so funny in part because we had just released Basecamp, but also we had been in the industry already at that point for 10 years. I started working with the web in '95, Jason probably around the same time for you. So when we say it’s not an overnight success, it’s two layers of not an overnight success. First of all, to even release Basecamp, we’d been working in the industry for 10 years then to release REWORK. We’d been working with Basecamp at that point for six or seven years and writing about it and now it took 14 years. Wait, is that right? Yeah, 14 years for REWORK to sell a million copies. You can trace all of that back and I mean you can count to that’s 30 years. That is very much the opposite of the overnight success.

Jason (04:12): One thing I was going to add too is even though this is a book, I think we’ve always kind of thought of it as a product also just like our other products. It’s a collection of ideas. It’s an approach, it’s a lens to look at the world with or through, which is similar to what Basecamp is in a sense. It’s a lens, it’s a way to interact with your coworkers and to work with clients and to put projects together. Even though it’s on pages and on paper instead of on the screen. I think we think of these things as products and I think it helps to approach writing a book that way. The book industry historically has always been like you write a book just for exposure, you’re never going to make any money on it. It’s a vanity thing, frankly. It’s a way to get into the conference speaking circuit, and I think that’s unfortunate.

(04:59): I think that’s underselling what books can be. I think if you think about them as a product and go, how much time are we going to put into this and can we make some money off this and what can this really do for people? You’re going to end up making something better versus just this thing you’re going to put out there and then forget about which is what books, people do a book tour and they kind of move on. I love seeing that these things have a long life actually just like software can have a long life too. It’s just a nice collection of thoughts that can impact people just as a feature in a product can.

David (05:29): And I think if you take that product building metaphor even further, it really applies to this specific book in terms of its polish in terms of shipping half, not half-assed. One of the essays in the book, and it also applies to the book itself. The original manuscript for REWORK was 50,000 words. The manuscript we shipped was 25,000 words. The publisher flipped out when we turned in the final manuscript because it had gone, we’d been working through it, they’d been reading it, they’d been reading it, and I think the second to last version was 48,000 words. And then the last version would go like, all right, we’re done. It was 25,000. And then went like, what? You just cut the book in half. We can’t sell this. We can’t sell a business book at full price, which by the way, it has to be because we’ve given you half a million dollars in an advance.

(06:22): We really twisted their arm on that one. So we extracted half a million dollars as an advance to make sure that they took this seriously, that we were going to publish this book and we didn’t want the publisher just to five minutes after go like, all right, bye. Have fun. We wanted them to have a stake in it. We wanted them to have skin in the game. So there was that, and then we turned in this half book and they freak out and go like, you can’t do this. I remember our editor going, I’m sorry guys. You can’t do this. You cannot sell 25,000 words. So we went like, well, that’s the book. I think at one point it got a little testy, as in people were starting to talk about is this in the contract? What have you actually designed? And we arrived at a really wonderful compromise, which is the compromise that I have used several times in my career as a student, which is when you have a page count, you’ve got to hit, you just pad the shit out of it, not in terms of his content.

(07:21): We did not budge on a single word. We did not put in one line of filler anywhere. What we did was we increased the font size, we bumped up the line spacing, we shrunk the margins, and then we added a picture for every single one of the 87 essays in there, and that basically ballooned the book back up. Now it looked like a normal business book again, and that was important for the publisher. Maybe it was also important for the customer, but what was such a nice revelation I think for a lot of people is they would pick this book up, it would look like a normal business book, and then they would start reading and they would realize this is not a normal business book in any sense of whatever normal is. We wrote this book in part as a protest, or at least I did my contributions as a protest to the kind of business books that I was just sick of reading, the kind of business books that would take three good blog posts and then they would just stretch 'em, stretch 'em out to fit 300 pages, and there’s just not enough here.

(08:25): These three ideas should have been covered in 10 pages, not 300. And all these anecdotes and all this other bullshit you’re loading the book up with. It’s just wasting my time. So we wrote a book that had 87 essays in it. Some of them were so succinct, Jason, I just went back to look at ASAP is Poison, which is one of my favorite essays.

Jason (08:46): Less than a page.

David (08:48): Not even less than a page. It’s four paragraphs. It’s literally four paragraphs. It’s so small that I can now quote it in a celebratory post I’m about to post on HEY World and it doesn’t look out of place. It just looks like it’s a quote out of something. No, no. That’s the whole essay. And the entire book was written with that maniacal focus on, do you know what, no jargon, no filler, no bullshit.

(09:14): This is just going to be the stuff and it’s going to be the very best stuff that we have because the editing process really took years. I mean, if you look at everything that Jason and I had written on Signal vs. Noise, the main place we were publishing at the time, there were hundreds of essays, maybe even thousands if you can add it up. 87 made it into the book, and that was after being paired down and it ended up creating this kind of timeless product. I just saw someone celebrate the first iPod going, this was the perfect iPod, the tactility of the wheel, all the ingredients. You can look at that object today and go, do you know what? It’s 20 years old, but I’d buy it. I’d buy it right now if that was a thing that was, it just has that quality to it and a lot of really nice timeless objects do, and I think that’s why this book is still selling. We treated it like a product. We cut it down, we honed it, we removed until there was nothing left to remove and what was left really could stand the test of time.

Kimberly (10:16): And I think why people resonate with it is because it’s easy to read. Anytime people write back, I feel like they’re like, it’s so easy to read and relatable. It’s not jargon as you guys are saying.

Jason (10:25): Yeah, you can read the whole book in three hours basically. And I think credit is due to a fellow named Rick Horgan. Rick was our editor for the book when we wrote this book, and he really believed in us. And I remember when we handed over that really short transcript, besides the shock and awe of it, he really goes, you know what? Let me read this. He was shaken in a sense because the book industry, it’s funny. It’s about how thick is the book? I mean, it is about how good is it, but really it’s about how thick is it? You got to work back from that. They’re going to charge $24.99 for the book retail or whatever. It’s got to be on a shelf. People don’t pick up, this was back, not pre Amazon, but bookstores were a bigger deal back then. People would pick it up off the shelf and is there any heft here?

(11:08): Is it thick enough that you can even fit the words, REWORK on the spine, all the things it had to do with thickness. But he did take a pause and read it and actually told us, this is a better book. It is better. He was surprised. He’s like, but this is better and this is really, really good. And then we worked through the compromise that David talked about, the padding and the font size and the graphics, which were great because we knew this guy named Mike, who was a friend of ours, lived in Milwaukee. He was an illustrator and we’re like, hey, can you do an essay or picture per essay? And then we used him on remote as well, which was fun. And that kind of kicked off his career too in a sense because I mean, he was a talented artist and designer, but that gave him a lot of exposure. So it’s always fun to be able to expose someone that way too. So there’s a lot of good things that came from the constraints of like this book’s too short. Now what?

David (11:58): Do you know what’s interesting though? The Japanese version of rework is tiny. I should have picked it up so I could show it. It is literally a quarter. I may

Jason (12:07): I may have a copy. Go ahead, let me see.

David (12:10): And it is just so slim and I thought, do you know? What a beautiful illustration of cultural differences that the Japanese can go, we can sell this book being this tiny tomb that actually fits the content. We don’t have to wrap this pompous wrapping around it, if you will. I love the REWORK book. I like the heft of it. I totally, there it

Jason (12:32): Is. I think the, gosh, I’m embarrassed. I don’t know which version this is. This is also remote.

David (12:38): Oh, that’s Remote. Gotcha.

Jason (12:39): Yeah, I should hold it up to a real book.

David (12:41): But they did the same thing. They did the same thing with REWORK, and it was just such a beautiful illustration of do you know what? It is not uniform that these expectations exist, that a book has to be exactly 300 pages and it has to have this size and so forth. But it was in the U.S. and I think it kind of created a Trojan Hoge. People would pick this book up and they would go, they would expect it to be a normal business book. They would expect it to have three ideas stretched out over 300 pages, and they found exactly the opposite in an order of magnitude, the opposite direction. And I think that level of underselling or under promising, overselling really worked in its favor, really created a lot of goodwill and I think made the book so viral, if you’ll excuse the term. I hate that term, but so much of REWORK’s spread, continued spread, selling…

(13:40): What was it? The latest one we got in the U.S. in the last few months, it sold 10,000 copies or something crazy for a book that’s 14 years old and doesn’t have a huge animating campaign behind it, comes from the fact that people are so smitten by that under promise over deliver thing that they are going to, you got to read this. I got an email or tweet from someone the other day, said, oh, I bought 10 of these, 10 of these to give out to people and you have to read this. And I think it is a product in that sense too. It’s a product of persuasion. Our most ardent fans of it, we’re telling them maybe a few new things, but we’re also telling them a lot of things they already knew and were afraid to express. We’re giving them permission to go like, yeah, ASAP is poison.

(14:29): I find it so dumb, annoying when we’re constantly talking about everything is a whatever it is, whatever essay really speaks to you. There’s usually, when Jason and I get a letter from a reader, there’s usually at least one of those essays were like, this is what I thought, but either I couldn’t have articulated it or thought you weren’t supposed to, you guys did that. Now I’m going to use this as a hammer to make that argument to others in my life, Bruce, perhaps particularly my boss or my colleagues or whoever else it is. I want to persuade.

Jason (14:59): The thing that’s interesting too is Seth Godin has been a long time author and his books are always short and compact, so it’s totally doable. It’s just that when you’re stuck in an industry that is pretty old, the book industry is quite old, there’s all sorts of pressures on you that it’s not like an editor can change the way the publishing process works. They’re inserted into the process, but there’s contracts and printing size and paper size, all these things that you don’t really have a lot of control over. You can, I suppose if you go into it, but we went into it wide-eyed, and we had no idea what we’re going to do, but I guess you can. I guess Seth must have set up a deal with his publisher. I don’t even know who publishes his books. I can’t remember now. Is it Penguin or something saying, I’m just going to write books this way. If you want 'em, great. If not, I’ll go somewhere else. And that might be a good way to approach this. I dunno.

David (15:53): One of the small victories on that level that we did get was the book starts right away. Yes. We don’t have 10 pages of filler and index. I think even the table of content…

Jason (16:04): Copyright pages at the back.

David (16:06): The copyright page is at the back. And that was one of the things when we even proposed that, they were like, oh, I don’t even know if that’s possible. I’ve never heard that suggestion before, that you can move the copyright page to the back. But the book starts right away because again, we wanted to treat it like a product, and a product needs or should have attention paid to its packaging and not just go like, oh, this is the standard box size. We should just ship everything in the standard box. No, no, design a nice box, set the tone, set the premise for what you’re going to talk about. And I think there just, there’s a bunch of little anecdote like that that went into the whole production that I’d like to believe contributed to the fact that this book has turned into a classic.

Jason (16:50): But even if it didn’t, we did it because we thought it was fun. And that’s enough too.

David (16:55): Yes.

Kimberly (16:56): Okay. Let me ask you this, because I know so many people have on their bucket list, I’m going to write a book, but you guys actually did it and did it several times. What do you think was that deciding factor like, no, let’s really do it and not just talk about it? Was there a moment or was it just because you were writing already?

Jason (17:10): Well, I think to be honest, I think the idea of writing a book is a letdown for most people. It’s a shit ton of work, and most books don’t sell at all. Most don’t get published and then they don’t sell. We’d already written this book, as David mentioned, we wrote this book over the previous, I dunno, 10 years, wherever the heck it actually was with all these blog posts. So for us, it was a matter of aggregation and then refinement and finding a unified voice because David and I have different writing styles. And so we had Matt Linderman who worked for us, who really melded the two, I think, really successfully to try to find a unified singular voice, but we’d already written the book. So it was kind of that we had all these ideas that were scattered everywhere. So for us, it was more of a way to pull it all together.

(17:55): And I mean, at some point you’re like, this will be taken more seriously. I could send someone 88 links and they’re not going to send that to their boss and be like, “Hey, boss, read these 88 blog posts from some rando on the internet.” Versus here’s a book that makes a noise when I drop it on your desk. It’s a hardcover. You know what these are? And there’s some authority that goes into a printed book with heft. But I don’t remember the exact question now that you asked Kimberly, but I think writing a book, it is people’s bucket list. I think writing, if you just want to write. Just this idea of writing a book, I think it’s held up too much. It’s put on a pedestal. It’s not really the interesting part. And frankly, you can probably reach a lot more, you probably will reach a lot more people if you write online than if you write a book unless you happen to really hit it just right, because the industry, first of all, the other thing to know is that publishers don’t really help you.

(18:53): You think you’re going to write this book, you going to put this book out there? Publisher is going to give you a tiny advance. We happened to get a big advance because we’d sold a ton of a book that we wrote before called Getting Real, which we self-publish as a PDF. So we already had a track record. Most people don’t, when they write a book, they get a very small advance. The publisher doesn’t really care very much. And they also, even if they get a big advance, they don’t do a whole lot. They didn’t really promote the book for us that much. We had to spend our own money making our own videos, talking it up, the whole thing. They get it in bookstores, they deal with the distribution. Although these days, most business books especially are sold on Amazon and what 95% of them of our sales are on Amazon still, something like that. So I would just say, forget the book part and just write one thing at a time, one day at a time, one essay at a time, one essay a week, whatever it is, and then maybe in a year or two or three, you have a book’s worth of writing and then you can put it together. So I think it’s an easier way to approach it.

Kimberly (19:52): It kind of reminds me how food bloggers will put together a cookbook after having blogged all these recipes for years. Then it’s like, and now I’m going to spin this off into an actual product.

Jason (20:04): Yeah, I think that’s the best approach for most people.

David (20:06): And I think that’s also why REWORK worked, because it was a compilation of the greatest hits. We already knew these ideas were bangers. We’d been publishing them on the internet, and we knew a bunch of ideas that we’d put out there. Do you know what? People don’t care. A handful of ideas to the moon. It was the moon ideas we put into the book. So it was sort of a way of, again, aggregating, if you could do an album, a music album in reverse order, you’d like, oh, I’ve put out a hundred songs and 10 of them turned into hits. I’m just going to publish the album with the 10 hits. And I think that way of using the book as almost like a wider distribution platform. The other metaphor I like to use is standup comedy. So if you are putting together a Netflix special that takes, a lot of comics it takes them a lifetime to do that because they have to come up with so much material test, so much material in small clubs, small venues, find out what gets the laughs, and it just compounds over time.

(21:15): And then you start with your hot five minutes, and then maybe you have a 15 minutes, and then if you’re really great, you will accumulate 60 minutes worth of A material. Plenty of comments, never get to 60 minutes of A material. But that slow aggregation actually goes to the essays that we talked about, the overnight success. The overnight accumulation, the overnight inspiration of just grandeur is such a misnomer for almost anything that’s ever been created, whether it is a product or a book or a standup show or an album. Very rarely do you get lightning in a bottle in the sense that like, oh, yeah, it just all came to me, on the spot in the moment. I think maybe we referenced this, but I think it’s in REWORK, this notion about the Beatles, how long the Beatles spent playing in Hamburg in these small little bars before they had enough practice, enough material, enough whatever, to take it on to the next step.

(22:15): This is one of the reasons why I’ve been enjoying writing for HEY World so much because it has lowered the bar for when I will write. I write way more now than I’ve ever done. Sometimes I’ll write an essay a day. And I can do that because I don’t have the, oh, this got to be a banger. And what I found is I have a really poor sense of gauging whether something is interesting or not. I’ll put a ton of time and effort into some essay and crickets. Nothing happened. I’ll put together, I think perhaps the best example of this was the cloud exit post. I was just like, oh, yeah, we talked about that at the meet. I actually just write about like, oh, we’re doing cloud exit. I put it down, takes 10 minutes. Millions of millions and millions of views of that one.

(23:00): Let me just share it. It’s really hard to gauge upfront what works, what will get a laugh, what will be a hit. If we could do that, do you know what AI would already have taken over everything because you could just like, oh, here, make a hit, make a New York Times bestseller book. Not that easy. But in retrospect, you can sort of do it. You can do these compilations. You can take your best material that you’ve already proven and then you can encapsulate that. And I think to me, what the book gives us is this staying power. If those 87 essays were still permalinks in the internet, still be great. I love the Permalink. I refer back to the archives of Signal versus Noise all the time. But as Jason says, it just doesn’t have the gravitas of a book. There’s a reason why books have stood literally the test of times why some of my favorite books are 2000 years old, 2,500 years old. It’s actually sort of a service to humanity, the expansion of knowledge, the accumulation of our culture that you could think, yeah, do you know what? My book is probably not going to be around in 2000 years, but it could. Maybe, is the permalink going to be around in 2000 years? No chance. No chance. Some chance. Maybe a spec out of a galaxy’s chance of REWORK still being around 2000 years, but that possibility alone is just animating.

Kimberly (24:29): Okay. Last question before we wrap up, and I might be putting you guys on the spot, but you said that REWORK was written 14 years ago. Do you guys have any plans of a next book?

Jason (24:39): Yeah, we’ve been discussing potentially starting another book this year. We haven’t really gotten anywhere. I mean, we have some ideas, some thoughts, some general ideas for essays or categories of things we might write. It’d probably be very much about how we run the business today, like this sort of either minimalist management style or running a company through intuition and by your gut versus by data. And maybe it’s some combination of those things. Maybe those are the same things that we don’t really know. But this general topic, I think is interesting, especially in this day and age where everyone’s trying to measure everything and try to be certain about everything and follow very specific procedures about everything and think that there’s some pot of gold on the other side of that. And I think the truth is nobody really knows anything. You just kind of make it up as you go.

(25:33): Even the most seasoned veterans make it up as they go. You’ve got a hunch about what might work, what might not, a directional idea about what you think is going to happen, but just admit that you just don’t really know. And that’s totally fine. And I think in the same way that REWORK gave people sort of permission to realize that all this business process that they’ve been used to is unnecessary and in fact a hindrance. And in the way, I think, I hope that if we do do this book, it’ll be a similar thing where people are like, you know what? Every time I trust my gut, I tend to be okay actually, but I was told I shouldn’t, or I’m not allowed to. Or I’d never felt professional by just trusting my gut or going with an intuition or giving something a shot, or making a quick decision. I like these books that give people permission to do what they already knew they were doing, but somehow felt was wrong. And so I think this could be one of those if we end up putting it together.

Kimberly (26:26): Okay. Well, you heard it here first. Can’t wait to hear about that new chapter in our 37signals lives. Thanks for joining us. REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37 signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube andTwitter, and if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 708-628-7850. You can also text that number or send us an email to rework@37signals.com.