Why I’m Abandoning My Book Dreams, And (Maybe) You Should Too…
Since January, I’ve been chipping away at a book titled “They Are All Bad Ideas” - an actionable guide to innovation. I’m talking 40,000 words of pure, unfiltered business wisdom 🤣.
Reality meets my book dreams:
There I was crafting my magnum opus one carefully researched chapter at a time… Meanwhile, AI-powered publishers started announcing plans to pump out thousands of books this year. Thousands.
How could I write about innovation using an outdated model?!
The reality is that most business books sell fewer than 3,000 copies total. Even if mine somehow beat the odds and sold 10,000 copies (which, let’s be honest, would require a miracle), I’d be looking at maybe $20,000-30,000 in royalties. After two years of work. Not a great ROI.
Fish where the fish are:
And right now, the fish aren’t hanging out in bookstores hoping to stumble across another business book with a clever title. They’re in their inboxes, looking for actionable insights they can implement this week, not next year.
My newsletter already reaches more engaged business professionals than most books ever will. Further, while traditional publishing would give me 10-15% royalties on whatever copies actually sell, newsletter monetization works completely differently.
Plus, and this might be the most important part: I get to test these ideas with real people in real-time. Instead of writing in isolation and hoping I got it right. It’s a real world example of successful innovation practices applied to my book about innovation (very meta).
Enjoy!
I will be writing the chapters in parts and adding them to this site as I progress. However, each part can be read on its own and still provide immediate value to you (the reader). I hope you enjoy the results!