I recently had the experience of writing a small little book, synbio25 (available at synbio25.com), and I made actual print copies of it, and gave em out to people at a bunch of different events. By now I've given probably 100 copies away. In ALL of those copies, I don't think I've had a single conversation about what the core of the book is really about; which is directly stated in the second paragraph: "We too often treat ideas as amorphous, independent entities, unconnected to the human experience that created them.". Synbio25 was quite technical in its analysis of the current state of biotechnology, while still maintaining the promise of being very much about the human experience that created those ideas. The problem is that I think I overestimated the amount of people that would be interested in both.
Synbio25, roughly speaking, was divided into 3 sections, with a preface. The preface essentially acted as a manifesto, then section 1 dove into the technical side, section 2 dove into the societal side, and section 3 dove into the human side (ie, me). The intended reading was that, in the preface, I communicate my idea that I have strong opinions about not only the future, but how the future is made, with an special emphasis on the human side. As I am a technical participant who is actually building things, I go fairly deep on what I think the future holds, then expand the scope to how I think this should or will influence society, and finally, about me, and how I think about these topics.
In particular, I believe that often people form ideas about the world by first feeling them, then justifying it after. Once I got to section 3, I tried to channel as much as I could the feelings and emotions that drove me to come to these ideas (and justifications). For me, this was a kind of cathartic meta-analytical section where I explored why I was doing what I was doing in a very vulernable way. It was the kind of thing I would absolutely love to read.
Turns out, not really many agree with me there. I got quite a few technical folks tell me they liked section 1 (without comment on the other sections), while people who knew me personally but not scientifically liked section 3. Basically, I wrote to myself; but there aren't a lot of people like me, so what I actually did was make a book that was suboptimal for the vast majority of people. The very technically minded didn't give a shit about the human experience that created these ideas, just how well I explained them, and the non-technically minded didn't actually finish the damn thing because it got technical and boring. I filtered out people who couldn't be technical; then I served the ones who passed through the technical filter with non-technical shit. Didn't work well.
So... do I change? I'm not sure. I think it is very important for art to be created from the heart, and in any case, I just value true communication of myself, whether or not the world likes it. I think there is honor and respect in doing that truly, which cannot be quantified anywhere, but can be seen everywhere. On the other hand, it'd be much more fulfilling if I could actually talk to people about the ideas within the book, beyond than just technical agreement and non-techinical silence. It comes to the depressing conclusion: there simply aren't people like me in my circles would like this kind of thing!