Does anyone here want to read a book that wasn't written by an expert on the topic? How upset or sad would you feel if you spend several hours reading a book only to discover it was produced by an opportunist who picked that keyword and asked someone in a developing nation with no expertise about the subject to grok some blogs (which might or might not be factually correct) and pad out to make it a 3hr audiobook read.
I'm sorry, I just think it's a shitty thing to be doing. I'm not against making money (I'm a VC!) but it just undermines the integrity of the medium of books because now you have to sort out 'real' knowledgeable authors from this carpet bagging.
Knowledge used to be reserved for the elite, locked behind closed doors that the majority never knew existed.
Then the printing press came along. Knowledge was commoditized, no longer reserved for those born into families of status. Society changed, and I’d like to think for the better. We began to see innovation like never before.
This evolution was not without burden. Knowledge can be irksome at times—after all, it requires a certain degree of mental exertion to process. Fortunately, the means to publish knowledge remained somewhat exclusive; one need not look further than a book store for an authority on any subject. If it’s in print, it’s trustworthy.
Then the internet came along and commoditized that, too. Now, we’re forced to analyze all information presented to us should we seek the truth. How do we tell what’s trustworthy? Why must we expend such effort to sort fact from fiction?
I see this as a natural progression, given our history as a society. We’ll adapt, and we’ll be better for it.
On the other hand, I’m some random person typing into the digital abyss while lying in bed. Am I a subject matter expert, or am I a 13-year-old who’s presently failing History? You’ll never know, and that’s the beauty of it: you’re stuck judging my statements without the context of authority or a librarian’s recommendation.
Nothing has changed here. You should always be questioning what you read. Open an encyclopedia from a few decades ago; you’re quite likely to find numerous mistakes on each page.
Ah, but you don’t want to waste time reading something that never even tried to be correct, right? Well, that’s a problem we haven’t solved yet: give everyone a voice, and all you hear is noise. Maybe some young, enterprising VC will sort that out for us, but exclusivity isn’t the solution.
And still, in reality, in an economy like our, that's what you get.
I don't believe that's difficult. You can almost always differentiate real books from the grift-type ebooks by looking at them by publisher. Big difference between serious non-fiction publishers and print on demand titles.
Because of the 'business' described above, that book is now impossible to find. It's been swamped by hundreds of easily generated titles which are at best copy pasted from the wikipedia, at worst utter gibberish.
I'm not quite in my 30s yet but "published" in general vs "published by a specific publisher" (like O'rielly) seems really odd, especially after some of the absolute garbage we were forced to buy in college.
An expert ghostwriter would be undercut by a ghostwriter supplying copy-pasted material just good enough to get past the publisher. A publisher who actually cares about whether or not the book is worthless would outbid this publisher for the skills of the expert.
I looked the twins up. Looks like they've figured they can make more selling courses on what you describe.
A family member does FBA and does quite well. The book selling thing just sounds grim to me.
I can't exactly point out what, but it feels gross.
I don't blame people for going for the easy money, but it's like paying "writers" to write thousands of articles about "best pool equipment 2021" to target keywords on Google just so you can soak up Amazon affiliate revenue. Sure you make money, but how many people are reading your "blog" as fact?
These sites aren’t going to to really test the pool cleaning equipment, the web hosting services being reviewed and ranked, learning Python tutorials. Nobody is going to pay anyone to test anything to make sure how the how-to cobbled together from three similar articles actually works.
I'm not the only one doing this, of course. Most of the books I see my competitors make are of lower quality, but they probably paid a lot less for them. In general, books made by people like me read like really long blog posts - because that's where most of the information comes from.
No income source is truly "free". Either you pay with time or money.
Don't write them yourself, that's a lot of work.
Instead, do key word research about what books sell in non-fiction categories (fiction is a whole different ballgame). Look for keywords that 1) auto complete in the amazon search bar, and 2) have less than 4,000 matching books, and 3) have an average Amazon BSR of less than 150k.
The above isn't easy, nor is it particularly difficult.
Once you've found a good keyword, create an outline on the subject. You'll have to do a bit of research here, but this can be done in a few hours to a few days. The more time you spend here, the better your result will be.
Then, hire a ghostwriter to produce a 30k-ish word long book. This will run you around $1000, and produce a book long enough to turn into a 3+ hour audiobook on Audible (audiobooks over 3hrs get significantly better royalties than less than 3 hours).
Get a cover made. This will run from $50ish on fiverr to several hundred on 99designs or upwork. Don't cheap out, good covers are important.
Publish on amazon. Run ads.
There's obviously more too it than this. If interested, look up the Mikkelsen twins or Dane McBeth on youtube.