I’ve been an amateur producer of web content almost all of my life. But as I reflect on the publication and positive reception of The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4 I’ve come to a greater appreciation and respect for the professional, mainstream, slow-moving avenues of book publication.

There is an argument that creating more small, low-stakes projects allows you to experiment, refine your skills, iterate, and learn from mistakes. ‘Fail faster,’ they say: make minimum viable products, realise what fundamental problems limit their scope, and rebuild the next one better from scratch. Creating YouTube videos is one way to do this.

But there is a limit to how much you can upskill from making a slew of small, low-stakes projects. This is because pulling off one large, high-stakes professional project requires certain skills which are not tested and refined in low-stakes amateur projects. Completing a book is not the same as scripting 10 YouTube videos or even 100 YouTube videos. It’s also not the same as preparing and writing stories for a class you’ll be teaching in person. A book project is a different beast entirely, with steps that never happen in smaller projects.

Namely, subjecting your own personal work to professional editing and allowing it to be substantially changed by someone else is a fundamentally different creative process than merrily making everything exactly the way you like it (or think you like it, now, in this moment).

Hiring external editing is a step which no one would bother taking with a small throwaway project. If failure is cheap because each project only wastes a small amount of time, there isn’t much of a risk in letting small projects fail and moving right along to the next thing. Conversely, there isn’t much to gain from polishing up a small project.

But paying for professional editing is pretty much mandatory if you have spent hundreds of your own unpaid hours writing a professional-quality book and don’t want to completely sabotage all your hard work. The larger the project, the more important it is not to let the investment of time in that project go to waste. It becomes more important to be diligent with every step of the process.

Hardly anyone cares if you make a mistake in a YouTube video; it’s over in 10 minutes anyway, and the algorithm has already moved on to recommending the next thing. But a book? This is something tens of thousands of words long, with hundreds of pages, taking people days to read, printed on quality paper and bound with quality binding, intended to last many re-reads, pass ownership hand-to-hand and live a long life. Books are meant to be read and savoured years, even decades later, and hold up reasonably well for their age. Blog posts and YouTube videos are meant to pop up on your phone and disappear as quickly as they came.

The life cycle of a book is fundamentally different from the life cycle of a YouTube video, a blog post, a lesson plan for your students, or a pdf bundle on TeachersPayTeachers.

A lot of CI Latin books independently published by teachers in recent times are curriculum-specific materials rushed to printers so they can be used immediately before their Latin curriculum moves on to different set texts. A substantial portion of the rest of Latin CI materials work well as in-house resources that teachers have made for their own students, with whom they have an established relationship of trust, but which don’t appeal to schools and individuals outside their immediate context.

Books are public in a way that in-house teaching materials are not. The reason for this is, once again, the scale of the project. Large-scale projects need large audiences in order for the hours invested in working on them to be worth it. Something you cobble together for a class of 20 students on a whim does not need to be as broadly appealing as a piece which requires hundreds of paying readers to compensate for the substantial effort of creating it. The larger the project’s scale, the more it has to appeal to people who are strangers to you.

And why should books be long, large-scale projects in the first place? Why shouldn’t authors just sell individual 2,000 word stories in thin, ~100 page books? Put simply, printing costs and value for money. Each page is more expensive to print the smaller the book it comes in. According to Amazon’s Printing Costs Calculator, a 98-page, 6 inch by 9 inch novella costs 2.3469 cents per page to print, while a substantial 354-page paperback book of the same cover size costs 1.4831 cents per page to print, which is 37% lower (or, put another way, the smaller book is 58% more expensive to print per page than the larger book). (I took those numbers from my own book and a recently published Latin novella by another author.) The relative cost of colourful paperback binding is higher per unit the smaller the book.

On top of that, independently published books are usually made print-on-demand. Production costs of print-on-demand books are higher than books which are printed in huge batches.

When these factors compound on each other and Latin CI authors offer small-scale, tiny, print-on-demand novellas, even before the shipping cost is factored in, buying up these novellas becomes frustratingly expensive compared to the small amount of content contained in each book. This is worse for customers outside the United States. As an Australian I frequently have to spend $30 or $40 on a single novella with only a few thousand words inside.

To a friendly, in-house audience, these problems are easily forgiven. But to a public audience, which by definition contains more strangers than friends, frustrations about not getting value for money are real sticking points that limit the wider viability of CI Latin books. Making CI ‘hit it big’ and go mainstream will require a completely different approach than producing CI as in-house materials for our own familiar circles and staying in our comfort zones.

Put simply, there is a fundamental difference between executing small scale projects and large scale projects. The risk management strategies for small- and large-scale projects are completely different, and the bigger audience is less forgiving of sloppiness (though very appreciative of quality work!).

It reminds me of the fable of the tortoise and the hare: Short-form content is like the hare – flash-in-the-pan, easy to produce, but difficult to keep up long term engagement with after the excitement of their newness is over and the frequent editing mistakes become more obvious and burdensome. Long-form, permanent, evergreen content is like the tortoise. It takes much longer to produce and goes through many more production steps. It gets edited and vetted and fretted over, and finally goes public. And it may fail too. Or it may stick around for years or decades, slowly but surely amassing reliable sales from satisfied customers and eventually surpassing the hares.

My final reflection is that even if a large-scale project does fail to repay the investment of labour it took to produce, it teaches the author project management and professional collaborative skills which they would never have gained from repeatedly completing solo small-scale projects. It’s a calculated risk, but even the downside is not so bad if it helps you upskill as a professional creative content producer.