accidentally entered vwww instead of www without noticing! Thanks for letting me know. https://vibeflirting.com/
Oh that's funny, I stumbled upon this a few weeks ago. Maybe via X? I like it. I think maybe a hot or not feature could be dope to help guys figure out which of their pics are most popular? Beautiful lander too btw man.. can't wait to be able to make stuff like that.
I appreciate you for taking the time to not only have a look but also leave a comment. I'll continue to work on it and try to improve them. (Although, technology is moving so fast, I wouldn't be surprised if this issue resolves itself in a few months.)
>I suspect people who read a memoir, an auto-biography, an eulogy or about true crime may well be interested in reading about a topic rather than looking for actionable advice?
Those don't classify as the type of non-fiction problem solving books we're talking about.
All models and methods are an approximation of the world (excluding pure mathematics). That error in approximation creates problems when you don't respect the domain of validity of the theory.
Right now, what you claim as over-generalising, I argue is you taking our theory outside its domain of validity.
I agree that it breaks there, but that's only because it wasn't designed for that domain so it's kind of a strawman argument.
I agree but you can't fake this. You still have to follow our process because a book that doesn't have strong word of mouth and doesn't resonate doesn't give you credibility.
I.e. you can't just slap a book together and think you've got credibility. People see right through that.
This is something Tendayi Viki of Strategyzer talked to us about:
"HOW DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE BOOK AS A PRODUCT?
In my line of work, credibility is very important. I can’t cold call companies and be like “Hey, you know that those innovation programs are very important? Well, we have the best one. You can buy it now for three easy payments of 599.” Reputation matters a lot. It’s so much easier if someone comes to you. If they already respect me before we start the conversation.
Now, there are two ways to do that. You can deliberately be the snake oil salesmen. But that’s why those books don’t work because it’s so obvious what the person is trying to do. They write a book so they can say “I wrote a book”.
Or, you can say “I actually have something authentic to share and let me share that.” That’s the approach I’ve taken. I know I need to build a reputation but I don’t want to build it on nothing. If people pull back the curtains, they can see substance."
Notes
I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing you of saying that. I'm merely adding to your comment.
I respect your opinion, and if you're the type of person who considers that a blanket conflict of interest than our book isn't for you.
I don't consider that good or bad, it just is. Similar to how some people prefer fish over meat and vice versa.
However, I will push back against the broad stroke generalization that you either teach people for free or charge money and be considered a scam.
Our advice is solid and battle-tested. There's Rob who wrote the Mom Test and Devin who wrote The Workshop Survival guide with Rob. And then there's our community with over a 100 up and coming authors who we're helping increase the probability of success through our process. The early results are already positive and it'll only improve as we keep trying to nail our process even more.
Is YC a scam because it isn't free?
If an author is like Tai Lopez you don't get word of mouth and burn through your lead pool. That means you're constantly trying to attract fresh leads, which is why these scams eventually tend to break.
What we're doing is teaching a process that minimizes some of the common mistakes authors make. Yes, we're charging money for that.
But if you look at our process, or heck, just read this article, you should be able to see that there's value worth paying for.
If you use nothing else but this article with these 4 common pitfalls to avoid, you'll do better vs. not having read it. And this was free.
Thanks! I agree that our marketing is good as the CMO. Just kidding.
Strongly agree with this:
>not a universal truth that you can only be successful with "huge budget".
That quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The true GOATS of advertising and marketing, like for example Dave Trott, beat the point that you should play games you can win into your head over and over.
If one can't compete buying a ton of ads, don't try. But making a book that's useful to a small group of people, by making a clear promise, specifying who it is and isn't for, and then aggressively iterate with beta-readers until you start to get word of mouth, changes the equation more from needing lots of money to putting in a lot of the right kind of effort.
Did you use beta readers? This is just one of our posts.
We talk more about the mechanics of useful books here.¹
Unfortunately, if it's not organically growing, it's not getting word of mouth, and if it's not getting word of mouth, it's just not that useful.
Either people don't have the problem you think they have, your book doesn't solve it, or the audience isn't right (in which case people don't run into people they can recommend the book to.)
That's the kind of stuff I like to write myself as well. But after hundreds of essays, years in, my audience is still tiny. Churn is also higher because when you have such a style, it's harder to make a crystal clear promise so the probability that the content/reader fit isn't just right is higher.
There just aren't that many people like that.
For the gen. pop. you're better off making a crystal clear promise, being very clear about who should and shouldn't read it, and delivering on that promise so the book proves useful to the reader and gets recommended.
Most people read non-fiction to solve a problem. It seems that what you and I like is learning for learning's sake.
>But odds are you won't make all that much. You might write far better than JK Rowling and still not sell very much because you write something that just doesn't catch the imagination of book buyers.
Really like that sentence. Very true.
>One of the things a publisher gives you, that many who choose to self-publish don't want, though, is an objective third party assessing if you've written something that they think is likely to sell. Of course they can be wrong, and frequently are. But they're investors, effectively, considering whether it would responsible for them to put their resources and time at risk to back a book or an author. They're selective because frankly most authors are not very good, and many one the ones that are good or even amazing are unlikely to sell or unlikely to sell to their audience.
I slightly disagree here. I don't know if this is true for fiction, but I don't think it's true for non-fiction.
Publishers can only asymmetrically help. They're able to somewhat accurately spot which books might work, but they can't do the inverse (spot which books won't).
I had an interesting reply on Reddit a while back from someone who went the publishing route and regretted it.¹
"This is incredible advice. Great write up.
I want to reiterate and add to the first point: signing with the publisher before you have leverage.
I got really “lucky”. I was writing a non-fiction technical book and actually got in a competition between two publishers. I had never written before. Never published. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I knew that most first time authors end up self-publishing out of what I thought was desperation. But here I was sitting between two publishers who were fighting for my book.
I worked them a little against each other. I eventually got royalties up to 17.5% and got triple the advance of the original offer. At the time I thought that I had “made it”. I was guaranteed success. Not only did one publisher want me as a first time author, but two did and they even showed that support by increasing royalties and advances. I told everyone I knew that I was getting published. I figured that as soon as my book officially published that the publisher was going to go out and sell it like crazy. I figured I was the author, my job was to write it and the publishers job was to sell it. Now that I had a publisher, they would go sell it for me. I would be rich, my publisher would be rich. Everyone wins.
Oh how wrong I was.
To this day, I’m honestly not sure what a publisher does. I was harassed on the daily about my progress with the book. Then they needed changes all over the place. The book scope started to shift far away from what I originally intended it to be. The publisher was demanding a different book, claiming market research (which I don’t think was real). The book kept shifting and shifting. At the end, I was so glad to be done. I hated what I had written. It wasn’t the book I wanted. I wasn’t proud of it. But I figured it was my first book. No one loves their first of anything. So I was happy to be done, my first one was behind me. I learned a lot about the process. It was time to reap my reward, let the publisher sell the book, and start making money and work on my next one.
I did a few launch events at the request of my publisher. I organized these entirely. All my publisher did was demand that I figure it out. The publisher never sent a marketing team to sell my book. It was ALL on me. I started getting emails every week from the publisher asking what I was doing to sell the book. They started giving me lists of ideas for how I could go out and sell it. But they never really did anything to promote it themselves. I played along for a while but eventually just got annoyed. I was doing 100% of the work. They emailed it out to their email list a few times. Maybe the occasional mention on their site. But nothing significant.
Now I realize I might sound privileged and stuck up that I was refusing to go sell my book that I had written. Many people on here probably are thinking “well duh”. But here’s the thing, the finances don’t work out for me to grind away to sell my book. For example if I organize an event and sell 20 books, I’m making $60 or so with royalties. (I only get 17.5%). So for that event it might take me 2-3 hours to organize it. Plus a few hours to attend. Plus various other administrative stuff. I’m spending 6-10 hours to make $60. Meanwhile I make the publisher about $500 for all that work that I did by myself. Remember, I’m doing nearly all the work other than printing. So it wasn’t as much that I wasn’t willing to go run an event, it was just that I hated doing an event that made the publisher $500 and made me $60. I spoke at a conference once and sold around 100 copies. It was a “success” but I had to negotiate the speaking gig, plan the speech, go early to the event, wait around all day, spend 40-50 hours practicing, writing, prepping my speech, transport to and from the event. So I spent a whole day at the event and doing the event, plus another 50-60 hours of planning and preparing. Just to make around $300 for myself and my publisher $2,500. I really resented the publisher.
I actually somewhat enjoyed doing the events and selling the book. That’s not what bothered me. It was the amount of work to reward ratio. I also hated knowing how much money I was making the publisher who I felt wasn’t earning that money. If I self-published instead, then I would be keeping closer to the $2,500 for that speaking gig! That would be worth it! I could have done more speaking gigs and reused my speech and scaled it. It would have been worth it. But with my current arrangement of 17.5/82.5% it simply didn’t make financial sense for me.
Like OP said, the publisher needs to be able to make you 7x the sales that you could get yourself by self publishing. In this case I think my sales and the publishers sales were around 50/50.
It got worse as the publisher wanted me to do lots of one on one support with people that had bought the book (it’s a technical book so they essentially want consulting advice). Again, I hate to be rude here. But I’m only making $2-$3 per book sale. I can’t really sit down with every person that buys my book individually for 10 - 30 minutes. It just doesn’t make sense. If I was self-publishing and making $20+ per book then I’d be more willing to consider it. But at $2-3 it’s just a waste of my time.
I started to see that the publisher had a lot to gain here and almost nothing to lose. At first I figured that the advance was their risk. But after doing some math I realized that they earned back their advance on the first day. Remember they keep 82.5% of the sales. They earn back their advance far faster than I work over it.
In the end, I actually was “successful” for a first time book. I broke through my advance and started getting real royalty checks. I wasn’t quitting my day job (which I had btw), but it was nice extra money.
But this goes onto OP’s second point. A book with an expiration date. My nonfiction book was a technical book. It had an expiration date. The technology I was writing about becomes less relevant over time. I got about 1 year of solid royalty checks (after breaking through the advance) before hitting that expiration date. A book without an expiration date would make all that upfront work more worth it because I’d get the payout over the long tail. I will admit though, that even though my book had easily “expired”, I still get royalties on it. I just got a quarterly payment 2 weeks ago for $223.17. So it’s still making me about $1,000 per year. It’s not much, but it’s free money at this point. I’m not doing anything to support it.
The reason I wanted to tell this story is that in the end, as a first time publisher I think you should self publish. I got published and regretted it. It got me stuck in a position where I didn’t even want to sell my book a lot of times. I kept thinking I would write another one that more closely reflects what I wanted to write and then go self publish and sell that book.
I did the math about two years ago on that book after getting one of my quarterly royalty statements. I calculated what I would have earned if I had self-published the book given the numbers on this book from launch to that current date. My jaw dropped. I estimated about 80% margin (the book sells for $30 and costs about $7 to print self published). I would have made a ton of money if I had self published and done all the same work I did with the publisher.
I really recommend self publishing your first book. Publishers really don’t make sense unless your book is going to sell at a scale that you can’t manage yourself. I also highly recommend that anyone who is considering a publisher right now should interview them. Ask the publisher what they can do for you. We often are afraid of publishers because we feel like they hold our destiny. But they don’t. You’re going to make them a lot more money than they will make you. So make them earn it. Ask what they can do to sell more books. They should have a plan."
Perhaps it wasn't the most useful way to spend your time through a solely economic lens. But if you felt it was something you had to do and you shipped your work, you can take pride in that.
> Writers should just write for the pleasure of writing and expect that the majority won't make it. It's about as likely as winning the lottery
It's interesting.. all these different languages. Wonder if at some point in the future, you'd just have 1 language. (not an engineer so idk if that's possible/practical)
Sounds fun yeah.. Really should start to learn to program. Got a background in pure math but for some illogical reason I feel kind of intimidated by programming.