The Diary of an Uber Driver
Stories from the Backseat of American Life
12 years. 10,000 rides across 200+ cities and towns. 100 pages of driver notes. 2 full in-car journals holding 400 stories, each written by a rider.
By Jim Lantos
The pitch
“For 6 years I kept a journal in the backseat of my Uber. Passengers wrote in it: stories, confessions, love letters, family recipes, advice to strangers, goodbyes to people who had died.
Combined with years of my own driving notes, the result is an archive of how America actually talks when 2 strangers share a random rideshare ride together. Given that no one talks anymore (only texting and social media, post-pandemic struggle), this is a ‘necessary’ project to help society get back to a healthier place.”
Jim Lantos
Humans of New York with a steering wheel: a first-of-its-kind illustrated book drawn from 2 real handwritten passenger journals, 12 years of notes, and a country that finally had something to say to a stranger.
The book
A designed object, not a transcription. Each featured entry is a 2-page spread: the scanned handwritten original on the left, clean typeset text on the right.
| Part | What is in it | Pages |
|---|---|---|
| I. The Backseat | How the journals began | ~45 |
| II. The Journals | 100+ featured entries, 2-page spreads | ~220 |
| III. The Road | 12 years of driver notes and blog essays | ~60 |
| IV. What I’ve Learned | Closing essay on loneliness and listening | ~25 |
| V. The Field Guide | 30 rider recipes and 400+ restaurant picks | ~40 |
What already exists
Unlike most first-book proposals, this one is built on a decade of existing material. The work left is organizing, transcribing and curating, not inventing.
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2 handwritten journals
400 stories written by riders in Boston and Maine, with more arriving every month. Both scanned at archival resolution.
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12 years of driver notes
100+ pages from 2014 to today, 1 ride per line: 500 to 1,000 story seeds, organized by date.
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About 60 essays
Written since 2018 on bostonautotour.com. Selected posts adapt into Part III.
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30 rider recipes
Handwritten, family-sourced, photographed and transcribed.
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400+ restaurant picks
Collected from riders, sorted by region, cuisine and price. See the food guide.
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9 voiced readings
Journal entries professionally voiced and produced as video. Watch on YouTube.
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A pilot screenplay
The Secrets of an Uber Driver. U.S. Copyright PA 2-510-840, WGA-E I374571, February 2025.
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A Kickstarter campaign
Built and ready to switch on, with 6 reward tiers. See the draft.
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A promo video rough cut
Produced with Matt Negrin of The Daily Show. Watch the rough cut.
Why now
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180M
Uber monthly active users (Q2 2025).
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30%
of U.S. adults have used rideshare.
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61.5M
U.S. Uber users, the book-buying demographic.
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3M+
weekly listeners to This American Life.
- Post-pandemic loneliness. The U.S. Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public-health crisis comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The journals document the small, unplanned moments where that isolation lifts.
- The gig-economy reckoning. Rideshare fares rose 9.6% in 2025 while driver pay rose 4.1%. The conversation is louder than ever, but book-length first-person material is almost nonexistent.
- BookTok and visual books. #BookTok has 370+ billion views. Handwritten, scanned-artifact nonfiction excerpts well on short video.
Where it fits
No one has yet published the canonical book about the rideshare era.
| Next to | The Diary is different because |
|---|---|
| Humans of New York | It is a sustained narrative, not only portraits. An author holds the room. |
| The Moth | It is handwritten, not transcribed from performance. |
| Kitchen Confidential | It has many voices, not 1. |
| Working | It includes food: recipes and a rider-sourced restaurant guide make the back of the book separately giftable. |
A long tradition
The Diary sits inside a long, commercially proven tradition: the journey story in which strangers’ voices shape the narrator.
| Form | Precedents |
|---|---|
| Classical | The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Canterbury Tales |
| Novels | On the Road, The Catcher in the Rye, Generation X, Travels with Charley, Siddhartha, The Alchemist, Into the Wild, Blue Highways |
| Films | Easy Rider, Paris, Texas, About Schmidt, Lost in Translation, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Green Book |
| Television | Taxi, Route 66, The Fugitive, Kung Fu, High Maintenance, Modern Love, Taxicab Confessions |
The Diary twist. The driver is rooted in 1 city and always moving, and the rider journal turns him from narrator into curator of strangers’ first-person voices.
Beyond the book
A publisher acquiring The Diary is acquiring the flagship volume of a property, not a single title. The premise is universal: 2 strangers, 1 ride, something true gets said. Boston and Maine are only where the material was collected.
Follow-up books
The archive supports 4 or 5 more, 1 every year or 2: Faith, Recipes, Confessions, Grief, Arrivals and Departures, plus Boston and Maine editions.
Podcast
A serialized anthology, 8 to 12 episodes a season, in which each journal entry is 1 self-contained episode framed by the driver’s own arc. The closest cousin is Modern Love. The archive can sustain 5 to 10 seasons, and the 9 voiced readings serve as the pilot reel.
The Moth podcast draws 100M downloads a year. Modern Love has run since 2016 and been optioned to screen twice.
| Deal | Industry range |
|---|---|
| Podcast option | $5,000 to $50,000 |
| Full production deal, first season | $25,000 to $250,000 |
| Platform-exclusive deal | $100,000+ |
Screen
A scripted dramedy in the register of High Maintenance and Modern Love, on the ground Taxicab Confessions proved, without the reality-TV ambush. Studs Terkel’s Working became a Netflix limited series in 2023. Film and TV options run $25,000 to $250,000+.
Social and BookTok
Real handwritten pages by strangers excerpt to TikTok, Reels and Shorts as they are, with no talking head. Ed Moran already curates this format for Snapshots of the Past on Facebook, which has grown to 35,000 followers.
The plan is a 6-month build before launch: 4 to 5 posts a week, a weekly Substack with 1 featured entry, and 2 voiced journal videos a month on YouTube.
| By launch day | Conservative | Realistic | Breakout |
|---|---|---|---|
| Followers, all channels | ~5,000 | ~18,000 | ~60,000+ |
| Email subscribers | ~1,500 | ~4,000 | ~12,000 |
| Launch-week sales influenced | ~100 | ~400 | ~1,200 |
| Audience-driven revenue | ~$3,000 | ~$12,000 | ~$36,000 |
Assumes $200 to $400 a month in paid boost and $30 a unit.
Platform
All of this is running today, not planned.
- A published author. 16 books in the Pictorial America series, a 15-year relationship with Applewood Books and now Arcadia Publishing, which distributes to about 30,000 customers. See Books.
- A forthcoming title. A new illustrated history of Halloween, co-authored with Ed Moran, with Annetta Benzar as co-editor.
- A 3,000-contact press list. Curated New England media: Boston, Maine, regional press, podcasts, TV stations and lifestyle editors.
- NPR in Boston. A 2019 ride with Arun Rath, host of GBH’s All Things Considered, led to a story that was developed, then paused by the pandemic.
- The Rideshare Academy. A college-backed course at Southern Maine Community College. The 2 to 4 million current and former U.S. rideshare drivers are a reachable market.
What people say
Matt Negrin, The Daily Show
“‘An Uber driver in Boston left a journal in the backseat, and his passengers bared their souls… and some stories about playing beer pong with Mark Zuckerberg.’ If done right, and simply, this thing sells itself.”
“You’ve got some great stories that can be shared. You have ton — more than you can count — of experiences… Subtle and funny, dark and clever.”
“Every project in some way has to provide a fraction of the answer to that question [why we’re here / what we’re doing], which yours does.”
“As has always been the case with this project, you have never had the problem of lacking for material. I think if anything, you may have an embarrassment-of-riches situation.”
“The payoff will be there. I have faith it’ll end up great.”
Emmy-winning Senior Producer at The Daily Show, where he produces its TikTok and social video. Formerly ABC World News with Diane Sawyer, The New York Times and The New Yorker. Wrote White House Correspondents’ Dinner speeches for Roy Wood Jr. (2023) and Trevor Noah (2022). LinkedIn
6 screenwriters who read the pilot cold
They were hired through Upwork, a market that does not reward flattery. 2 arrived on their own at the same idea: each journal entry is 1 episode.
“Jim, you might be a genius. Each entry would be one episode. It’s the kind of show that HBO or Apple would pick up.”
Brooklyn Hudson
Sucre Entertainment. Writer-producer on an HBO pilot assignment. Wes Craven Award winner. Co-creator, Amityville: An Origin Story (MGM+). IMDb
“An interesting idea. The rideshare-driver-with-weekly-passenger-arcs format presents a legitimate serial-plus-episodic TV arena.”
Bob Shayne
Emmy winner. WGA Award nominee. 2-time Edgar Award nominee. 30+ years in network primetime. Sold 20 pilots.
“Very compelling. Best case: pilot → attached director → cast package. I would approach my agent at Buchwald and Brillstein-Grey.”
Rick Dahl
WGA member, 30+ years. Co-writer, Red Rock West. Sold pilots to USA, FX, NBC, WB and CBS.
“Elegant, simple, highly pitchable, marketable, and easy and affordable to produce. I love everything about this idea. It is a rare, great project.”
Robin Shushan
Writer and developer, AMC’s Feed the Beast. Offered to develop the pilot on spec.
“This is a great idea with legs. I’d commit to the process until it gets sold to a network or streamer.”
Eric Ingram
MFA Screenwriting. 60+ screenplays, several optioned. Former Lyft driver.
“Sometimes it is the most simple — most obvious — most every day ideas that are NOT produced that should be — i.e., your idea. I would be thrilled to be involved with the project.”
Daina Smith
Twice-optioned writer. Owns a film production company.
Others on the record
Maria Giese
Feature director and one of Hollywood’s “Original Six.” A 2018 Maine ride put her in the back seat, and she praised the concept directly. Profiled in Pacific Standard.
Raney Aronson-Rath
Executive Producer of PBS Frontline, who made the introduction to Arun Rath.
Genine Tillotson
Director of the Harvard Square Script Writers. Endorsed the podcast concept and asked to have the pilot read by her group.
Hundreds of riders
Across both journals, riders have called this a “necessary project” and said they would pay for the book. Read the testimonials.
The numbers
Sales: 3 scenarios
About 36,000 copies is a realistic target.
- Arcadia-tier titles routinely sell 5,000+ on regional tentpoles alone. Boston and Maine are 2 tentpoles.
- Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver, with less platform and less format distinction, has been in print over a decade.
- Breakout upside is plausible, not required.
Revenue: 5 streams
| Format | List | Author share | Units, 5 years | Gross royalty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hardcover | $32 | 10% to 15% | 18,000 | $58K to $86K |
| Paperback | $19 | 7.5% | 6,000 | $8.6K |
| eBook | $12.99 | 25% net | 6,500 | $13K |
| Audiobook | $24.99 | 10% to 25% | 5,500 | $14K to $28K |
| Foreign rights | 50% split | 2 to 4 | $5K to $25K | |
| Total, before earn-out | $99K to $161K |
Before launch: about $62K
- Kickstarter: about $35K. The anchor tier is a $50 signed hardcover.
- Press: 40 to 75 placements. Warm curated lists land 5% to 12%, against 1% to 3% for cold pitches.
- Social and email: 15K to 25K followers and about 4,000 email subscribers, the highest-value asset.
This pipeline carries launch-week momentum into the publisher’s BookScan numbers, which speeds the earn-out.
The ask
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Floor
$30,000
Covers production and part of living costs. Below this, the book cannot be delivered at publishable quality in 12 months.
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Realistic target
$40K to $55K
Full production, including a developmental editor, plus 9 to 12 months of focused author time. Paid in thirds.
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Stretch, in auction
$65K to $100K
If 2 or more publishers engage, or morning-show coverage lands before a deal.
At the target, a publisher pays a median debut-memoir advance for primary material already collected, a format proven at million-copy scale, a 16-time published author, live endorsements, an editor already engaged, and a pilot already copyrighted.
Where the advance goes
| Line item | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
| Transcription labor, about 340 entries | $2,400 | $4,800 |
| AI tooling: Transkribus, language models, voice | $500 | $1,500 |
| Ed Moran, developmental editor | $8,000 | $12,000 |
| Line edit and copy edit | $2,500 | $5,500 |
| Cover design | $700 | $1,500 |
| Interior layout | $3,500 | $7,000 |
| Permissions, rider releases, legal | $500 | $1,500 |
| Rider follow-up interviews | $800 | $2,000 |
| Production subtotal | $18,900 | $35,800 |
| Author living costs, 12 months | $22,000 | $30,000 |
| Total cash needed | $40,900 | $65,800 |
12 months, contract to manuscript
| Months | Stage | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 2 | Foundation | Contract signed. Transcription at full volume. Part I opened. |
| 3 to 4 | First half | All journal entries transcribed and sorted. 80 featured spreads prepared. Parts I and II drafted. |
| 5 to 6 | Second half | Parts III, IV and V drafted. Full first draft to the editor. |
| 7 to 8 | Revision | Developmental edit in. Legal and permissions complete. Layout proofs approved. |
| 9 to 10 | Polish | Line edit. Photo selection. Fact-check and sensitivity read. |
| 11 to 12 | Delivery | Final manuscript. Launch content calendar live. |
The next 90 days
- Representation. An agent within 90 days. I am ready for conversations now.
- Submission. Publisher submission and contract within the following 90 days.
- The work. 12 months of focused manuscript production, starting the day the contract is signed.
Samples
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Manuscript sample, PDF
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Manuscript sample, PDF
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Manuscript sample, PDF
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Manuscript sample, PDF
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The Secrets of an Uber Driver, PDF
Let’s talk
Every ride is a story waiting to be told. This one has been collected for 12 years. It is ready to become a book.
The full proposal and sample packet are available on request.