michael_nielsen

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

This sometimes works out well - I was very lucky giving one of my books away for free online ( https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1031256363458916352 … ). But that involved (a) a lot of luck; and (b) was very field-specific. I wish there was a general model for aligning these interests.