Office Hours The Side Projects Edition N°315 happened on July 3, 2026 at 0900 California time (UTC-7).
The Side Projects Edition opened with a deceptively serious question: what separates genuine DIY publishing from merely uploading something to another platform’s machinery? The distinction matters because publishing is a physical, social, and economic act. A file appearing online is one thing. Choosing a form, paying for its production, asking people to support it, and taking responsibility for the result is another.
Dré shared an AI-assisted book experiment that moved from idea to finished audiobook and print edition at unusual speed. The interesting part was not just the speed. It was the possibility that generative tools might help creators bypass slow, trend-chasing publishing systems and make work that would otherwise wait for permission, a market signal, or a production window.
Rick pushed back on frictionless print-on-demand. DIY publishing, in his view, means taking a meaningful risk and asking a community to support the physical thing you chose to make. Outsourcing the entire process to Amazon may produce a book-shaped object, yet it leaves the central act of publishing somewhere else.
Sabrina described her emerging “forever project” of writing children’s books. The stories include uncertainty, balloon-hating children, and an accidental three-hour duck rescue. Finding stories is not the hard part. The harder work is moving through agents, publishers, audience-building, and timelines that can outlast the cultural moment that made a story feel urgent.
The practical publishing advice was blunt: decide how much time and money you are willing to spend, then put the numbers in front of you. Independent booksellers can become powerful allies when they understand precisely who a book is for and why someone walking into the shop needs it. A good bookseller is a reader, curator, salesperson, and local signal system at once.
Julian told the deeply encouraging story of his mother self-publishing a book at 90, after people in her community kept asking her to write down what she was saying. Sometimes the strongest publishing strategy is recognizing that real demand is already standing in front of you. The audience may already exist as a set of people who keep returning to the same voice, story, or piece of practical knowledge.
Rick shared Matter’s hardcover master services agreement and its much larger employee handbook: contracts transformed into designed, physical declarations of accountability. Julian reframed the idea for his own work. A book can operate as a statement of work, carrying the terms, obligations, values, and boundaries of a practice in a form people can hold. It can be a working agreement as much as a container of ideas.
That led into a larger conversation about labor, transparency, livable wages, long-term relationships, and the possibility of eventually turning a studio into a cooperative. Rick’s underlying principle was direct: mistreating people rarely saves money. It redirects the cost into distrust, theft, turnover, and damage. A studio’s operating model is visible in the quality of its relationships and in the artifacts those relationships produce.
A discussion about prison abolition became a more nuanced argument over punishment, rehabilitation, profitable carceral systems, and what it would mean to abolish the existing model while still addressing genuinely dangerous behavior. The group needed a shared text before attempting the full debate. That shared reading would give the conversation something more useful than inherited slogans and familiar positions.
Brandon brought in plans for a public futures workshop in Dallas built around autonomous vehicles, delivery robots, public space, and the limits of over-frameworked design practice. The advice was to use tangible artifacts, constrained challenges, fictional institutions, role-play, collaborators, and enough ambiguity for participants to activate their own imaginations. A workshop can give people a portal into a possible world without explaining every inch of it.
The session’s most useful workshop principle may be the simplest: do not squeeze the hamster too tightly. Give people a convincing portal into another world, let them handle the evidence, and invite them into what Rick calls “full fucking contact pretend.” The artifact, the constraint, and the invitation do enough work when people have room to imagine.
Watch Office Hours The Side Projects Edition N°315 on YouTube
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