Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

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.

I'd love to hear how you think it might work! Historically, patronage has done some amazing things, but has very limited scaling capabilities. Arguably, the biggest success has been universities. Which, er, as you know have some shortcomings

It's common to point to Patreon and Kickstarter. But the blunt fact is that the number of very high quality creative projects these have supported at a reasonable income is tiny. It's great for those people, but (so far) hasn't provided a scalable model.

I think there's great potential for self-published books with mainstream appeal to be launched via interviews on established podcasts or even independent pod mini-series. IMO, we need to bring back the "wealthy benefactor" for niche writers to free them from academia

But also: what you want to be paying for is not *a book,* but for a smart person in the grip of obsession to make themselves into a world-class resource. The book is *an* output, maybe not *the* output. Book sales are a terrible funding model

In the best of worlds, producing a book is a marginal cost to the author, a rounding error on their path to greatness, but hugely valuable to many readers, as valuable as the author's main line trajectory.