The Project I Built Publicly and Failed Publicly

I was 26 and working as a graphic designer in Portland when I started a public project that I had been privately planning for two years: a series of illustrated essays about American urban history that I intended to produce as a book and that I had begun sharing chapter by chapter on a newsletter with, at its peak, about three thousand subscribers.

The decision to do it publicly was deliberate - I had read that public accountability helps people finish things and I had a history of abandoning projects before completion, and I wanted to change that.

The newsletter ran for eight months and produced work I was genuinely proud of and an audience I was genuinely grateful for. Then the publisher conversations I had been quietly pursuing - two agents and one small press - all came back as passes within a three-week period, and the reasons they gave were consistent enough to tell me something I had not wanted to hear: the project as I had conceived it had an audience problem that the newsletter did not reveal because newsletters self-select for existing interest.

The book, for a general market, was too specialist in its appeal to be commercially viable as I had framed it. I had to decide what to do with that information in front of three thousand people who had been following the project.

I wrote an honest newsletter about what had happened - not a spin on it, not a reframe that turned the rejection into a victory, but a direct description of where the project was and what the feedback had been. The response was more generous than I had expected and also not the point.

The point was the experience of failing at something I had cared about in public, which turned out to be survivable in a way that fear had not permitted me to imagine.

It was uncomfortable and it was finite and what remained afterward was something I had not expected: a clearer sense of what about the project I genuinely cared about versus what had been driven by the desire to produce something publicly impressive. I have rebuilt the project on a smaller and more honest foundation.

It is not a book yet. It might be one day. Either way, the failure did not end anything. It clarified what I was actually doing and why.