“But this is also the moment my engagement starts to tail off as a portion of the book’s… life in the world? Let’s say the book takes eight hours to read from cover to cover; if even one thousand readers finish it, that’s about four years of full time work, unless I fudged my math somewhere. I will, of course, read at readings, appear at appearances, and sign copies at signings, I will show up for my own work on social media, and most of all I will pledge myself to the keyboard as I write the next and final book in the Series. But so much of the book’s life now is out there, with you, rather than in here: it’s going out to be read, talked about, traded, borrowed from the library, left behind at youth hostels (that’s how I found my first Wild Cards book!), dog-eared and coffee-stained and in the world”
https://maxgladstone.substack.com/p/its-time-for-dead-hand-rule