Hello again, friend!
We did it. Scott Dooley and I birthed a book!
You’re Not a Real Parent Until... is out today. It’s pub day! (Publication day, for those of you not in the biz. For those of you in the biz, my condolences.)
Earlier today, Scott and I went live here on Substack for our official virtual launch. Thank you to everyone who tuned in live and shared your parenting experiences! (Watch the full replay above.)
First, the winners... We promised to give away one free copy of the book. Then, mid-show, without checking with Scott, I gave away two more.
Congratulations to: Darlene Campbell, Rhonda, and TELMC
If that’s you, reply to this email with your postal address (or a PO box, whatever you’re comfortable sharing with two strange men who draw children wearing underwear on their heads), and we’ll get your copy in the mail.
Everyone else: you can buy it right now at yourenotareal.com!
The experiment.
Normally, when you put a book out, you do press. Podcasts, TV, radio, guest articles, reviews.
We’ve done none of that.
Instead, we’re trying to sell this book using only Substack. No ad spend, no publicist, no begging an algorithm for mercy.
This isn’t a “help me become a New York Times bestseller” thing. (Those are GoFundMes with extra steps.) It’s that we’ve talked to a lot of friends with books out, some with huge publishers, some self-publishing, some with a million followers, and none of them has found a marketing method that reliably works. Worse, the second they post a link to something they’re selling, the platforms quietly bury it.
Substack is different. You opted in. You signed up to hear from me about the things I make. So we’re going to see whether a couple of lower-to-middle-rung cartoon-makers can sell a book by talking directly to the humans who actually want to hear from them, and showing you how we made it.
We’ll document all of it here, so if you’ve got a book (or anything else) to sell, you’ll see what works and what doesn’t. (We should point out that we have not cleared this with our publishers. This experiment may be career-limiting.)
The book follows parents from babies to toddlers to tweens to teens to “all grown up”. Every page is a gag that starts with You’re not a real parent until... and a cartoon underneath.
We pump three or four hundred punchlines into a spreadsheet, all with the same setup. Then we hash them out over a series of meetings at bars around Manhattan: the wording, the image, which ones live. (One of the rods for our backs: not starting every single punchline with the word “you”.)
Every drawing was done by hand. Pencil, dip pen and ink, then colour. For the first time in my life I used a colourist, the brilliant Nahia Mouhica, and I’ll never go back. We printed it on matte paper so it feels like an art book rather than something you’d find in a dentist’s waiting room.
Scott is a parent. His son Leo is two, and the book is dedicated to him. (Technically, Scott says, it was for Messi. He was going through a whole Barcelona thing.) I am not a parent. So we built out families. Divorcees, same-sex couples, mixed-race couples, widows and widowers, all with names and kids of their own, so the gags could run as stories across the book. There’s even a death in the middle. Scott is the guy who dies. (Why not?)
Our favourite image in the book is from that storyline:
A couple of gags got gentle pushback from the publisher. One was, in the technical language of the industry, “a bit nipply”. Another was “This too shall pass”, which has been said in reference to something a child has swallowed. That one made it in. (You’re welcome.)
The whole point of the book, underneath the poo jokes, is that there’s no single right way to do this.
Everyone’s figuring it out as they go, and you don’t have to be perfect. As Scott pointed out, the people most outspoken about bad parenting usually don’t have children. It’s like being told how to stack your dishwasher by someone who doesn’t own a dishwasher. (I would like to reiterate: I am not a parent.)
From the chat...
We asked you to finish the sentence You’re not a real parent until... and you delivered:
Rhonda (three kids, two grandkids): ...you’re perfectly fine with your three-year-old’s fashion choice of undies on her head, as long as it keeps her ears warm.
This sent us down a rabbit hole about leg holes. Y-fronts leave the ears out. Boxer briefs offer full coverage. And somewhere in there, a cartoon was born: two kids with underpants on their heads, one of them in Calvin Kleins. (Rich Dad, Poor Dad.)
Darlene has three daughters and now three grandchildren, which puts her firmly in the book’s “all grown up” section: the parents whose children come to them for advice and then completely ignore it.
Another viewer shared that becoming a parent cut the time it takes to get dressed in the morning from an hour to 10 minutes. Which, as Scott pointed out, puts parents on par with pop stars doing backstage costume changes.
And Tracy asked me to draw a bee. So I drew a bee.
It was, by general consensus, a B minus.
What’s next?
We’re going to do more of these lives, and we’ll announce them in advance. (Tracy, you asked. Done.) If you’ve got a Substack and want us to come on and chat, reply and tell us. We’ll document that too.
I’ll also be writing more here about how the series started, how a premise becomes a book, and what happens to this experiment. (and all the behind-the-scenes drawing stuff you know I love yapping about.)
And if you can’t wait, Scott and I do a podcast about coming up with cartoon ideas, Is There Something In This?, where you can watch us do the same thing every week with less paper.
Please buy the book!
The single best thing you can do for this experiment is buy a copy today, ideally two. One for you, one for the parent in your life who has stepped on a Lego in the dark and said nothing.
And if this experiment doesn’t work, we’ll document that too. (Career-limiting, remember?)
‘til next time!
Your pal,
PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.
