Craig Mod has spent seven years proving that a few thousand readers who actually care will pay for better work than a few million who do not

In 2019 Craig Mod walked the Nakasendo, the old highway that runs between Tokyo and Kyoto, on foot. Forty days, about a thousand kilometres. The book that came out of it is called Kissa by Kissa, and it is substantially about pizza toast.

That sounds like a joke until you understand what a kissaten is: the mid-century Japanese coffee shop, an institution built around a specific idea of hospitality and a small menu that almost always includes thick toast. They are disappearing, quietly, as the people running them get old. He walked a thousand kilometres between them and photographed and wrote what was there while it was still there. The book is now on its sixth edition, which is an unusual number of editions for a self-published photobook about toast.

The economics nobody else runs

The reason this exists is a membership programme called SPECIAL PROJECTS, now in its seventh year. Members pay him directly and get the newsletters, the members-only podcasts, the lectures, the discounts on the books, and in a real sense the books themselves, because the membership is what makes producing them possible.

Seven years is the part worth sitting with. A membership programme is easy to launch and brutal to sustain: every month you owe people something good, forever, with no advertiser to blame and no algorithm to hide behind. Most people who try this quietly fold it back into sponsorships within two years. He has run it long enough that it now funds books, walks, physical production and a second imprint, and he writes an annual public accounting of how it is going.

He describes the trade as choosing beauty over scale. In practice that means a few thousand people who genuinely care, rather than a few million who scroll past, and the freedom to spend forty days walking because that is how long the walk takes.

The walk is the method

Ridgeline goes out weekly and is nominally about walking, which undersells it. Walking is the instrument: it moves slowly enough to see a country at the resolution most people miss, and it produces the kind of writing you cannot do from a desk. Roden goes out monthly, on books and design and Japan.

Things Become Other Things started as a daily pop-up newsletter written while he walked the Kii Peninsula in 2021, then became a self-published book in 2023, then got picked up by Random House in 2025. That order matters. It went to a major publisher having already proved itself to the people who paid for it, rather than the other way round.

He has been in Japan since 2000 and is at work on another book. If you want the argument for slowness made by somebody who has actually run the experiment for twenty-five years, it is here, and it comes with photographs.

Members produce books, newsletters, longform essays, podcasts, walks, and more together.

How SPECIAL PROJECTS describes itself, which is a strange and better description of an audience