Turning My Passion into a Passion Project
How my Medium journey helped me self-publish a book on Amazon.
In January 2020, I made a resolution to dedicate more time to reading. After years of few patches of reading sprints followed by long droughts, I felt it was time to truly sit down and commit to it.
It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy reading — I love learning about anything and everything, whether from TV or casual gossip at tea stalls. But when it came to reading, I always felt the need to be in the “right frame of mind,” which, 80 percent of the time, was just an excuse my brain made up. But this time I was determined. I even changed my lifestyle a bit, going as far as deactivating all my social media accounts. With more time on my hands than ever, I finally started my reading journey.
Little did I know what was coming.
Less than a month later, COVID-19 changed the world. Soon, lockdowns followed, giving me even more time than I had imagined. With ample time and fewer distractions, I naturally gravitated toward my interests. But there was a catch: I had to go digital, as everything around me was closed. I know the debate between physical books and digital ones is deeply subjective, and people will prefer what they prefer. But for me, the convenience of having any book just a download away made all the difference.
As I dived into my reading, I began taking notes — initially just to deepen my understanding, with the thought that I might turn them into blog posts. Then, at one point, an idea struck. A thread started forming in my mind, connecting all the summaries I had written, spanning from the beginning of the universe to the present day. That’s when I decided to create a summary series, linking themes from science, history, religion, and finance — the genres I was most reading.
For the next seven months, I devoted myself to writing this series and published it on Medium, dreaming of one day turning it into a short book. But it still felt like a distant dream. The idea of publishing a book seemed too grand, with all sorts of preconceived ideas like you have to be a professional writer, hire professional editors, find a publisher, etc etc. Long-story-short, it seemed a world entirely different from my day job of crunching numbers.
Until one random Medium article.
One fine day, I stumbled across a random Medium article about how to self-publish a book on Amazon. It was a detailed article on Amazon Kindle Direct publishing (Amazon KDP). Suddenly, the idea didn’t seem so far-fetched. It seemed possible that a part-time blog writer could actually publish a book.
Two years later, I had another three-month break, which gave me the chance to revisit my work. With feedback from friends and readers on Medium, I made changes to structure the content into book chapters. Finally, using all free and independent platform — Amazon for publishing, Grammarly and ChatGPT for editing, and Canva for design — I self-published my book on Amazon.
I know writing a book is not the same as writing software. But my experience (and mindset) from tech — whether it’s releasing a minimum viable product and iterating based on feedback or using independent free platforms — has helped me turn my passion into a passion project. It has also made me grateful towards our world for how the collaborative, feedback-driven nature of the internet has made it possible for even independent amateurs to turn their passion into passion projects.
As I share this piece on Medium — the platform that played a vital role in this journey — I can only express my gratitude to everyone who supported me.
Lastly, if you’re curious about history and our world, I kindly invite you to explore my book, a concise 140-page read, available on Amazon. You can also read it online on my personal blog.
