Why Foxtome Exists

Foxtome started because Christian Schröder finally snapped.

He'd just spent eleven days reading a 340-page book about focus. Eleven days. The book's actual useful content fit on roughly twelve pages somewhere near the beginning. The other 328 were a parade of anecdotes about Silicon Valley executives who wake up at 4:17 AM, take cold plunges, drink celery juice, and apparently have nothing else going on in their lives.

He brought this up to Anders Heidecker at a café in Nørrebro, fully expecting sympathy. Anders, who has been writing for Danish newspapers and magazines for over a decade, just laughed at him.

“Of course it was 340 pages. Publishers want books that look serious on a shelf. Serious means thick. Thick means the author can charge €28 and put ‘national bestseller’ on the back. Nobody's going to pay €28 for a pamphlet, even if the pamphlet is better.”

Jacob Christensen, who was supposed to be working on his laptop and instead was eavesdropping like an honest person, leaned over and contributed the line that started everything:

“So write shorter books. Sell them for nine dollars. Stop being cowards.”

Jacob is like that.

The three of us had been writing in different corners of the same world for years. Christian wrote about behavioral psychology and what your phone is doing to your brain. Anders wrote long-form narrative journalism and had strong opinions about adverbs. Jacob researched productivity, decision-making, and — based on the number of half-finished books on his desk — apparently the limits of human attention span.

We all had the same frustration, just framed differently. The best ideas in most self-help books could fit in a long essay. The other two hundred pages exist because somewhere along the way, the publishing industry collectively decided that a book under 250 pages doesn't count as a “real” book. Which is how we ended up in a world where you can buy a hardcover called The Power of Saying No that is, somehow, 312 pages long. About saying no. The word “no” is two letters. They stretched it into a trilogy.

We didn't want to write books that looked impressive on Instagram. We wanted to write books that you actually finish — preferably before you forget why you bought them.

So we made a rule. If it can't be read in one sitting, it isn't ready. If a chapter is just the previous chapter wearing a hat, it gets cut. If we catch ourselves writing the phrase “in this chapter, we will explore,” we close the laptop and go for a walk to think about what we've done.

Every Foxtome book covers one specific problem. One clear framework. One plan you can actually start tonight, not a vague suggestion to “cultivate awareness” or whatever the current wellness-influencer phrase happens to be. Under 100 pages. Done before bedtime.

Christian's first book, Stop Doom Scrolling, came out of three years of him documenting his own embarrassing phone habits and quietly interviewing dozens of equally embarrassed people who were fighting the same battle. It's 82 pages. We considered making it longer, briefly, and then we remembered why we started this in the first place.

We're based in Copenhagen. We drink an amount of coffee that would probably alarm our doctors. We argue about commas. And we genuinely believe that a book you finish is worth infinitely more than a book that just sits on your nightstand looking thoughtful.

That's Foxtome. Short books. Real books. Books that respect the fact that you have a life.

— Christian, Anders & Jacob