Should you start a membership program? Probably not. But boy am I glad that I started mine.

Today (basically) marks the sixth anniversary of starting SPECIAL PROJECTS. Each year, I’ve written up everything I learned. In total, here are nearly 40,000 words on running a membership program (each a little snapshot of how I felt that year, a slight evolution in thinking about Doing the Thing):

1. Running a Paid Membership Program (2020)
2. Running a Successful Membership / Subscription Program (2021)
3. Memberships Work (2022)
4. Running a Membership Program: Four Years In (2023)
5. Five Years of Memberships (2024)

This year, I thought I’d try something (slightly) more concise. Here are my so-called “rules” for the membership program, which have been refined over time.

#Books in 2024

Speaking of goals, Year Six of SPECIAL PROJECTS was a great year for books. I spent a huge chunk of it deep in the trenches of the Random House edition of Things Become Other Things. I didn’t expect to spend this much time on TBOT in 2024, but it turns out I had a LOT more to say than what was in our Fine Art edition. The Random House edition is over twice as long (word count) and has over a dozen new photos, including stills from films (securing those rights was arduous and Kafaka-esque — to say the least — but, I think, worth it).

My editor at Random House did a massively close reading of the Fine Art edition, returning a manuscript with hundreds of comments and questions. I answered nearly all of them. The end result is that something has, indeed, become another thing, and I am bursting with pride over this new thing — a book realized at a level I’d been unable to previously hit. And the core of it — the immutable core — is the Fine Art edition’s text. That makes me doubly happy. A membership thing begetting something else, operating at — possibly — a different scale (without compromise), which should (one hopes) feed back into the membership program. I hope (fingers crossed) we find a win-win-win virtuous cycle here.

This entire process has been captured (mostly) in a members-only pop-up diary called Nightingalingale (members get access to the full archive). I just published issue 281 (out of a supposed 21 — the original goal was to “finish the book” in three weeks — HA HA HA HA HA HA *dies laughing*) and by the time TBOT comes out on May 6, it’ll have been nearly four years since I sent the first issue of the pop-up newsletter that kicked off this book. So it goes, book writing.

I’m running a big pre-order campaign. Grabbing a copy is a huge help to me, and the life of this new book. Thanks in advance.

2024 was also the year I finally got a book out in Japanese — Kissa by Kissa, Japanese edition (「路上と喫茶：僕が日本を歩いて旅する理由」) was published in November by BOOKNERD in Morioka. We had a huge launch party, and have since started doing talk events around the country. It’s been A BLAST. It is so nice to have something out in Japanese — something I am hungry to talk about. And the book feels as fresh as ever, and the themes (rural decay, depopulation, disappearing culture, PIZZA TOAST, etcetera) more critical than ever. I did a talk event in Nagoya in January and one of the attendees had read the book six times (!!!!!!).

I got an incredible email from a Japanese reader just the other day; allow me to quote:

I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I only recently learned about Craig’s work through the latest episode [I was on the (apparently very popular) Japanese podcast, rebuild.fm] and instantly became a big fan.

I immediately purchased and read the Japanese version of “KISSA BY KISSA.”

I was amazed by your activity of walking to visit these coffee shops that seem to capture, like amber, the gradually disappearing atmosphere of the Showa era.

At the same time, l’ve been thinking about interviewing lesser-known restaurants and businesses in my area, so I find many commonalities with Craig’s activities, which is very inspiring.

While my walks are nowhere near the same length as yours, I’m particularly intrigued by how you’ve made walking your profession. [Me too lol]

Yesterday, I signed up for “Special Projects” and have been voraciously reading through past pop-ups. I was reading “THE RETURN TO PACHINKO ROAD” and was shocked by the volume and amount of text produced per day!

I’m thinking of trying to follow in Craig’s footsteps soon, starting with around 30,000 steps. I’m literally trembling with excitement at the incredible archive before me.

As mentioned in “KISSA BY KISSA,” I’d like to learn more about strategies for becoming friends with coffee shop

“I’m literally trembling with excitement at the incredible archive before me.” I mean … as an author, there is no better email to get than an email of this ilk. Inspired by my work, trembling before the archive, actionable next-steps to be had, a growing sense of awareness, lifestyle changes in the positive. Thank you, dear reader — for reading so closely and also for taking the time to compose this email.

Coöinciding with the launch, I set off on a huge media tour as well. Doing a dozen+ TV, newspaper, and magazine interviews. I was on a Saturday morning show, live, for ninety minutes as one of those talking goofballs so common to Japanese TV. Anyway, it’s been a joyful adventure, and I’m happy to be building up a durable readership here in Japan, finally, after so many years.

Random House (which has world rights) is working on selling TBOT to a Big Japanese Publisher. I hope we find one sooner than later! I’ve spent the last two years inadvertently in a Japanese Media Training Gauntlet, and I’d love to deploy these skills with focus and aplomb for this new book.

#Technical Crapola

I’m still using, basically, the same tech stack I was using last year: A custom app made using Python’s Flask runs my members-only website where all the goodies live. LLMs make tinkering and building tools like this easier than ever. (Truly, LLMs for language learning and programming are genuine piece of miracle software.) I’ve upgraded a few bits and bobs on it, but it’s still using the integrated sign on via Memberful, my membership software.

I’m also still paying a ~$5,000 USD/yr tax to Campaign Monitor; but also, they keep delivering my emails and emails are the bedrock of everything I do online, so it’s not too painful a cost. (I’m forever “just about to” switch over to Listmonk, the self-hosted, Amazon SES-based, open source newsletter alternative; this would reduce my newsletter costs to about … $100/year (?) but would also invariably incur/induce innumerable headaches.)

I wish there was a better photo-sharing network than Instagram. What a big mess. (I suppose the universal law is that all software from a sufficiently monolithic companies will become sufficiently terrible given ten years; see: Google Maps, Adobe Everything, Meta Everything, iPadOS (what even is this?), macOS’ recent paper-cut-death of boneheaded dialogs, and on and on.) My take on Instagram is to use it for ad-hoc Q&As while I walk on a members-only account (it’s the simplest / neatest technical solution to perform this activity), and otherwise treat it as a very light-touch one-to-many announcement space (where most people won’t see the announcement ¯\(ツ)/¯).

I wrote up my general feelings on social networks in 2025 over in Roden the other day.

#Future Memberships, Closing Thoughts

I’m not trying to grow this program to a hundred-thousand paying members. I like doing things that aren’t “cool.” That don’t “align with the algorithm.” I know I’m “limiting my reach” by not becoming a “Japan influencer” with a YouTube channel showing you “the real Japan,” but the whole point of this program is to never, ever have to become that. Shtick is death. Shtick is fundamentally “inauthentic” (that fraught word).

I am supremely lucky in who my members are. I’m lucky in what they appreciate about my work, and what they want to see me continue to do. Not “doing Influencer” is (thank god) what they’re here for. What makes me most uncomfortable about those kinds of activities is the lack of agency or autonomy. The alignment, the constant pathological alignment and realignment with an unseen, capricious algorithm. YouTube burnout is real; my goal is to keep doing this work until I’m dead (and not let the work itself be the thing that does the deadening).

As I stated way back up at the top, the goal is books, books, and more books; durable, everlasting nuggets of experience condensed. I have (and have started on) the next five books. And I know that in doing them, I’ll find other unexpected, delightful tendrils of life to explore. More books await. Constellations of books. Galaxies of books. Books are one of the greatest bulwarks against kleptocracy and authoritarianism because they hone focus, attention, and can imbue a mind with calmness required to take clear action: Qualities required by a society to “win.” To be reductive (and somewhat alarmist): The feed, the doomscroll, the hyperventilation, is the heartbeat of political and social death. It is not life. It is a false heartbeat. BEWARE the feed and what it makes you do and think; cultivate the clear mind. (Please, for all of us, cultivate the clear mind.)

And so amidst all this — the inauthenticity of social media and algorithmic apnea and 3 a.m. scrolling, of endless cyclical global turmoil of abject narcissistic vacuity — a membership program like SPECIAL PROJECTS gives me the permission to work with purpose: To keep exploring, unfettered by what some platform (or dictator) “wants” me to do or be, and unbeholden to the gatekeeping of, say, big companies (publisher or otherwise). (This is a tremendously privileged position, and one that is not lost on me for even a single second.)

So THANK YOU! — to everyone who has joined, who has bestowed this permission via your memberships and purchasing of my books and prints. I feel a tremendous obligation to you — to do right by your support. To stay on this weird path (one feeling increasingly important) that we’ve created together.

Onward into Year Seven,
C