415: Scrubs, self-publishing, and making the coolest thing possible (with Shea Serrano)

Incredible.

Something that you did, which I thought was really cool, was the collection of essays that you wrote about scrubs.

And you saw that, I think I'm right in saying this, on Gumroad as just like a PDF kind of download.

Yeah.

At the time, I think you did one with The Office as well.

Why did you decide to do that? And why did you decide to just create a download and just put it onto Gumroad? Why was that the route you took with those essays?

Okay, so when I did that, when I did the scrubs thing, the office thing, I had by that point written a few books.

So I knew how to make a book.

I knew all of the steps of the process.

I knew about not just writing it, but also editing it and also the layouts.

and the design, and the copy.

I knew all of the pieces that went into it.

And so I had done it a few times.

I knew how to do it.

And when you sell a book, when you write a book, every six months, you get a royalty statement from the publisher that tells you how many copies of your book were sold during the six-month period, and then how much money they're going to send you off of that right every every like april and october a check will show up or whatever it is and i got the uh i would get a royalty statement and i would always look and see oh cool i'm gonna get like fourteen thousand dollars or whatever six thousand dollars whatever it happened to be i'm just making up numbers here

okay

I would always look at that and be like excited.

And then one day I looked for the rap yearbook, which was the book I wrote in 2015.

I looked at that one and I was getting like a $25,000 check,

which as I

mentioned, was how much I got paid to write the book itself.

And I was like, holy shit, this rules.

This is so cool.

Just like free money.

But