The hardest part about writing my books for worldbuilders hasn’t been the content (which is basically vomiting out cool things I learned while studying for my PhD, and since)—it’s been figuring out how to structure the content. I beat my head against the wall for several years while working on Volume 1 before I finally settled on a structure that made sense, with each chapter building on and augmenting what came before it. More recently, I decided that I needed to break the planned Volume 2 into two separate books, since the “Commerce” material didn’t really fit with the “Tyranny” material. Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out how to organize the chapters in “Commerce.” (Also, what the title should be! But that’s less urgent.)

At about 5:00 this morning (because of course it was…) I think I may have figured out the structure. First, I need to keep in the forefront of my mind that it’s not a book about economics, per se; it’s a book about how people organize themselves to better use resources, and the conflicts in so doing that we writers can exploit. (Yes, that’s part of economics, I know, I know! But I’m less concerned with, for example, demand curves or monopolistic markets or such like that. I’m not trying to write an economics textbook, I’m trying to write a resource for worldbuilders.) That gives me a landmark to orient with, to help decide what material needs to be in the book, and what material needs to be cut.

(For one thing, I need to more explicitly discuss government’s role in affecting transaction costs, for good and ill. I’d been groping in this direction before, but didn’t have a clear picture of where such discussions would actually go in the book, or what function they would play. Still, I had a nagging feeling that it would remain relevant. My subconscious is pretty smart, but I wish it were better at communication…*)

Second, I think at a high level, the book should begin with the discussion of energy surpluses as in my previous plan, but thereafter it would be organized around the four factors of production: Land, Labor, Capital, and Entrepreneurship. That gives me a neat framework to slot in more niche subjects like the governance of pirate ships (i.e. entrepreneurship) or the functioning of the stock market (i.e. capital) and have it make sense in the larger flow.

Starting with Land would also be very useful for worldbuilders, since it should help people draw their fantasy maps and figure out where everything needs to go. I’d be putting the discussion of cities in Land, as well as related things like ease of transportation. It’s all very concrete and immediately helpful, as opposed to the topics that will now go under Entrepreneurship such as uncertainty and transaction costs. Those latter topics will now make a lot more sense to the reader, since they will come after a lot of discussion of specifics. Starting with them would have been much too theoretical.

So, not much of consequence in this post—other than to report that progress is happening in the book project, and perhaps to solicit feedback from you, Gentle Reader!

* For one thing, my subconscious somehow understood that the topic of self-defense was important to Right Authority well before I even decided that RA would be my dissertation topic—but it neglected to tell me how it was important until three years later!

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)