Paul Hobby's Glorious Tension Still Finds Readers Three Years After Launch, With Zero Marketing
“I want to give this to the world because we’re all so frustrated. And then you want to add something new to the argument. And if the world wants to read it and the world wants to absorb it, then that’s great. So it was my offering to a divided world.”
Paul Hobby, author of Glorious Tension
Paul Hobby has been a federal prosecutor, a candidate who lost 49 to 49 and a half, and the founder of a private equity and private credit firm now on its fifth fund. He wrote Glorious Tension with no intention of selling a single copy. Three years after publishing with Scribe Media, the book still brings him unsolicited reader mail and invitations into rooms that had assumed he was not one of them.
It started as cathartic COVID era scribblings
Clip · Paul Hobby on the writing that started it · 37s
Hobby had written opinion pieces for local newspapers and for the New York Times, and he had quit, because he no longer believed there was an audience for them. The people who already agreed sent nice notes. Everyone else sent what he calls “nasty grams.” So he kept writing anyway, for himself, not knowing whether there was an audience other than him.
“But I used to think that appealing to people’s reason was a persuasive technique. And I’m embarrassed by that. We all now know that people think with their heart and not with their head.”
— Paul Hobby, author of Glorious Tension
That is the premise the book is built on. Not that people are stupid, but that reason is the wrong tool, and that the playing field is the one we actually have rather than the one we would prefer.
The 1938 speech that turned scribblings into a book
Clip · Paul Hobby on his grandmother's 1938 speech · 24s
Hobby’s grandmother was not an ordinary grandmother. She founded the Women’s Army Corps, published the newspaper in Houston, served alongside Eisenhower in the European theater, and became the first secretary of HEW, the second woman ever to sit in a cabinet. In 1938, in a position to see what most Americans could not yet see, she gave a speech to a national women’s group that walked her audience chapter and verse through the dominoes falling in Europe. Hobby found it, in his words, in the bowels of the internet.
“When you read the speech, it gave me chills because you could literally replace the names and the places with names and places from today.”
— Paul Hobby, author of Glorious Tension
He read that as a sign, and reproduced roughly two thirds of the speech in the first chapter. As he puts it, “the sum total of the speech is that extremism is not just, it’s not just lazy, it’s dangerous.”
How he found Scribe Media
Clip · Paul Hobby on finding Scribe Media · 17s
Hobby has a media background. His family was in the business and he bought Texas Monthly, a magazine he describes as the launchpad for a lot of important journalists. He never hired a formal editor for the book. What he had instead were sophisticated friends who were generous with their time, and Austin relationships that pointed him somewhere specific.
“There was a friend of a friend who had used Scribe with great satisfaction to publish a few books. And so I reached out to Scribe and the process was pleasant and thorough and professional.”
— Paul Hobby, author of Glorious Tension
He never tried to sell it. It found readers anyway.
Clip · Paul Hobby on never trying to sell the book · 29s
Hobby is not building a speaking business on the back of this book. He says plainly that he has made no attempt to sell it and that he is not a bookseller. He has done a few podcasts for the University of Virginia and the University of Houston. That is the extent of the campaign.
The book went out and did its own work. Reviews on Amazon came back positive. People he had not spoken to since college found it somehow and wrote to tell him he had said it for them. And it got him a hearing he could not otherwise get: invitations to speak to clubs that had assumed he was not part of their tribe, because somebody read the book and reported back that he was not throwing bombs or calling names. As Hobby describes the effect, it has been “a good thing in terms of people’s willingness to hear the argument without the reflexive defensiveness that we find all around us.”
“I’ve been encouraged by the people who find it and write a review. And literally just this morning, I got an email out of nowhere from somebody I’d never met before.”
— Paul Hobby, author of Glorious Tension
That email arrived three years and two months after the book went on sale, from a stranger, with no marketing anywhere behind it.
What he tells people sitting on their own journal entries
Clip · Paul Hobby on advice for first-time authors · 39s
Asked what he would say to someone holding a folder of cathartic writing and wondering whether it is a book, Hobby kept it short: “I would just say, just do it. It’s not hard to get it out there, and there’s some money involved, but it’s not that difficult.” Then he pointed at the part of publishing nobody brags about. The fact checking and quote checking he found irritating in the moment is the reason a book that argues with the extremes of both parties has never been caught out on a detail.
“Nobody has ever written anything about the book that said, well, Paul’s wrong about this quote or this fact. So I give Scribe a lot of credit there.”
— Paul Hobby, author of Glorious Tension
The book opens with a speech his grandmother gave in 1938. It closes, in a way, with something else she handed him, a rule he still repeats: “Paul, always phrase a criticism as a question because you avoid embarrassing your audience and you might be wrong in your premise.” That is the whole book in one sentence, from the woman who started it, two generations before he wrote it down.
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