Hello from very much the season of doing. Good lord. The end of the year. The shove-it-all-in sprint. The air is crisp and the runs are good and we’re still on the edge of t-shirt weather, despite it being December.
This is Roden and I’m Craig Mod and boy am I behind in everything.
Claim Your Pre-order Discount
Let’s get to it. Today marks the official pre-order campaign launch for the Random House edition of Things Become Other Things. (I meant to launch this two week ago, but launching the Japanese edition of Kissa by Kissa proved to be an action packed adventure involving lots of live TV appearances and, like, twenty media interviews, so here I am, a shell of a man, a brain of mashed potatoes, launching this a bit late.)
If you pre-order (or have pre-ordered) Random House TBOT, you are entitled to a one-time $30-off discount to be used in the SPECIAL PROJECTS shop.
Pre-ordered from a local bookshop? No problem, simply email tbot-preorders@specialprojects.jp and in the body of the email write: “Hey Mod! I pre-ordered from <SHOPNAME>.”
The book comes out on May 6, 2025 (a scant six months away!!), but pre-orders have a huge impact on the “energy” of the book leading up to launch. So a big thanks to everyone who has pre-ordered already.
Haven’t pre-ordered? Easy: Random House Things Become Other Things can be pre-ordered most places that sell books, including:
Bookshop.org (which weirdly still doesn’t have a cover image)
It can also be ordered from local bookshops — just go in and say, “I’d like to pre-order Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod.” We love local bookshops.
Forward your pre-order receipt to tbot-preorders@specialprojects.jp and you’ll be immediately sent the $30-off coupon, which can be used in conjunction with other members-only coupons. So if you’re a Yearly SPECIAL PROJECTS member, you can combine the $30 pre-order and $40 Yearly discount for $70 off TBOT’s fine art edition or Kissa by Kissa. Or use it for a discount on one of the few remaining signed photo prints. Yearly members get a whopping $145 off The Tomato Farmers, so why not get $175 off with the pre-order discount? Etc etc.!
All SPECIAL PROJECTS shop orders ship next-weekday from Japan, using DHL, and arrive to most addresses around the world within 3-5 days. Meaning, any orders placed this week will easily arrive in time for the holidays. (Any order before the 16th should be safe.)
Ordering Multiple Copies
For those of you who are pre-order fanatics:
If you preorder 5+ copies (to hand out / gift to friends, etc.), you get a one-year free membership / extension to your current SPECIAL PROJECTS membership (or you can gift the membership to someone). Please email me separately at memberships@specialprojects.jp and we’ll get that membership up and running / extended.
Pre-ordered 15+ copies? You get a free year and are also entitled to a one hour zoom (I’m assuming this would be a bookclub-style pre-order) sometime in the second half of this year. Again, email me at memberships@specialprojects.jp to set this up.
If by chance you pre-ordered 350+ copies in a fit of rapturous mania, (!!!!) I’ll try to fly to wherever you are in the world during the months of May / June / July 2025, and give an hour long talk + 30 min Q&A to your organization (I hope it’s an organization and not a single human, but hey, I’m flexible). Email me at memberships@specialprojects.jp to organize this.
You may be thinking: Dear Craig, I already own and read the fine art edition of TBOT, isn’t this the same thing? And having now spent the last couple of days re-reading (for the first time in about four months) the final-final-final-final laid-out PDF, I can say unequivocally: It is a new book. One of my early readers and editors and proofers on the fine art edition just read the proof of this Random House edition over the weekend, and he said (without knowing I’d share this): “Loving loving loving TBOT! Really fleshed out. Much stronger sense of who you are. High poignancy factor, but also hilarious. It’s brilliant. So fucking good.” Take that with a grain of salt (friend, extreme bias, etc.) but … I have to agree: This edition has landed in a pretty special place (if I may shamelessly say so).
Anyway, I will shut the hell up about this for now. Apologies for the extreme commercial / transactional nature of this email, but welcome to the glamorous world of being an author in 2024.
路上と喫茶
Oh: also, in the SPECIAL PROJECTS shop, I’ve just put up a Kissa by Kissa Japanese edition set — you can get the Japanese and English (5th ed.) Kissa by Kissas combined at a slight discount. The Japanese edition is a physically smaller, more compact book, but it contains 10 additional photographs and a new epilogue reflecting on the last four years (which can be read in English using your preferred translation tool of choice 🤓). It’s also cute as heck. If you want to buy the Japanese edition alone, it’s best to grab it from publisher BOOKNERD’s website. (Email me if you have problems getting that order to work; BOOKNERD tells me they’re shipping internationally but it might still be a bit tricky.)
Japanese Events and Media
Like I said, during the last two weeks I’ve been amidst a surprisingly fun (yet naturally exhausting), full-blown media push here in Japan around the Japanese edition of Kissa by Kissa. I was on live TV for nearly two hours on Saturday morning. I filmed a TV special with a famous and beloved “erotic poet” (Tenshin Kimura) in which we walked an old shopping street and I took photos of ashtrays and we ate delicious pizza toast together, marveling at the beautiful community vibes of a stalwart kissa. The book had a sold-out launch event in Morioka (and another smaller, still sold out event, in Tokyo), at which Governor Tasso of Iwate came and made the opening remarks, and then graciously sat in the front row, studiously listening to our ninety-minute talk show, furiously taking notes. (He’s a really lovely guy.)
Here I am shamelessly plugging Kissa by Kissa on live TV (and yes, that was about as big as I could make my eyes; I think this was about ten-interviews-in-two-days into the interview gauntlet):
Special shoutout and thanks to Baba-san of Azumaya for being my “media manager” during this launch, and setting up an overwhelming amount of press.
The plan is to do more Japanese talk events next year in Kyoto, Fukuoka, Kanazawa, Kamakura, Tokyo, and beyond. Basically anywhere with a cool bookshop. The events have been a lot of fun so far. I even got the most amazing care package from one reader with tea and chocolate and manuka honey and bath salts and all sorts of other goodies in it. Thank you!
Mainly: It’s been a blast chatting about books, publishing, indie shops, and translation on stage with Kissa by Kissa’s excellent translator Imai Eiichi and publisher, Hayasaka Daisuke. It’s been an honor to have this book come out, finally, in Japanese, and to have all these rich conversations at scale about how community is built and nurtured, and how to keep a city like Morioka feeling as vibrant as it feels now, far into the future.
Thank you for all the kind notes about Enrique. It means a lot to me (and his family). And it’s been inspiring to see so many other stories and posts appear online about him as well. He is missed.
As the year comes to an end, I am reflecting on how lucky I am to have the support of you SPECIAL PROJECTS members. I’ve brought this up a few times during my interviews / book launch events in the last two weeks, but everything I do flows from SPECIAL PROJECTS. I wouldn’t have done the first Nakasendō walk in 2019 that lead to Kissa by Kissa without the program. And thanks to the incredible response to Kissa by Kissa, I was inspired to write TBOT. Together, the books and membership combination constitutes a real, sustainable business built on — dare I say it — art and literature. And affords me the freedom to work on, and explore all the weird tendrils I’ve been exploring these last six years. I can already see the next ten years of work. Of walks. I can see the next five books (!!) I want to write. I’ve already started writing them in one form or another. I hope you’ll continue to join me on the journey.
For now, I’m going to sleep the sleep of a man wrung dry. More soon.
C
(Here I am getting very excited about a banana sandwich)
