i have a proposal for a book about secret networks of influence dynamics ... and how japanese food became a high-end cuisine in america in the late 1970s. 

inviting opinions about whether this is too weird for traditional publishing (at least two agents have told me that so far), and suggestions for alternatives.

not-knowing ✹ 🍕-fan ✹ productive discomfort + idk ✹ Marseille / Singapore / Auvergne ✹ The Uncertainty Mindset (2020) ✹ now: vaughntan.org/now-ish

several ppl have told me that weird books are in a paradox space: they seem too weird to be marketable, yet only weird books can become unexpected hits.

same paradox as innovation: building really new things is failure-prone and we are averse to it — but if we know how to build it, it is definitionally not new.

I think the irl ‘secret networks of influence’ angle is VERY interesting.

Maybe if u focus on that, and Japanese food is just one example, you’d have a more universally consumable, quirky, book topic.

That might mean researching a lot of historic examples of the phenomenon.

Writer.

From casts 2 epics, shorts 2 series, I craft original copy which cuts thru the dross of interminable, ai-aided, cookie-cutter crap crowding your feed!

I meannnnnn… if u can break the story of these networks, you have a Pulitzer-level story! 

Maybe it’s impossible to get the data? Maybe it’ll take a long time, I don’t know. 

But as the verified opinion of a total stranger on the internet (😉), the networks themselves sound super interesting.

yea — the secretness of the networks makes it hard to find many deep examples though. the jp food example came out of an accidental discovery of a thread in an archive, that kind of thing