michael_nielsen

As nearly as I can tell, the issue is one of quality. In most areas, a good book will take a 1-5 years of fulltime work to write. My guess is that for @Austen's original wish to be fulfilled requires on the high end of that, usually 3+ years.

Of course, the books you're talking about can be very useful, & written quite quickly. But they're not the Wright Bros bio...

I have a hypothesis that the future of writing is self publishing. If you can eliminate the 80-90% a publisher captures it’s relatively easy to sell enough copies to make, say, $100k/book. (I self published my book and made more than 99% of authors)

You offered "3,000+ Tech PR contacts!" with your book. Where did you source these contacts? Did they allow their contact to be used in the book, or was this a public aggregation? Do you think that played a big role in selling your book at $100 a pop?

Link to book here: https://www.secretsaucenow.com/#download 

There were a bunch of add-ons; I didn’t see it as a book so much as a product, so hard to say. You could get those contacts pretty easily other ways. Sold $250k+ so far though, including one today, and almost sheer profit each one.

This seems like a great model that's going to do a lot of good in some areas. And won't obviously work in others (e.g., most biography). It'd be lovely to find models for those other areas!

Something that bugs me: a really nice idea about the market is that it should ideally align maximizing a selfish good (the entrepreneur's and company's self-interest) with overall social welfare. But for books, the "best" thing to do for social welfare is to give them away online