For the amount of effort that goes into writing a book, the deal major publishers get from authors borders on predatory. I have a lot of friends who have written books, and I'm not sure any of them really benefited from it.

Having your ticket punched opens doors plain and simple. In general being published by a major house will open doors just like a Harvard degree will. Doesn't mean there aren't ways around that. Doesn't mean for anyone. But I don't agree that you can make the same pitch for something more lucrative.

Also with that statement you have to make a distinction between the traditional world and the online world. Being a top ranked commenter online means something online but it probably won't get you on 60 Minutes or (as easily) quoted in the WSJ or NY Times etc. I mean if I was in PR I could certainly pitch it that way and perhaps I would succeed. But my job would be much easier if you had been blessed by a major publisher.

"For the amount of effort that goes into writing a book, the deal major publishers"

I've been meaning to ask you this for quite some time. By your karma ranking you obviously put much time into HN. There is no doubt that this has paid off for you. Did you ever wonder or tally up that time and have any idea of how that effort would have paid off if you had followed another route?

But to the point at hand: I can easily make a case for my HN comments being more lucrative than any book I could have written. Easily. There is no way a book would have been as valuable as recruiting vector, for instance; I've hired more people from HN than any other source.

I can easily see how in the case of someone being as active as you are, and at the top of the heap, how this pays off for you (and before I posted my comment I almost said that). But I suspect there are many others that spend a fair amount of time that, while enjoyable and with benefit, might not fall into that category.

I'm wondering if you've ever thought about leaving HN and forming your own, um "family" if you get my drift. I'd put some seed funding into that family. You already have the gold medal, why not try to do something new? My guess is that others would follow.

The first is "why buy the cow if the milk is for free"? The second is how I'm reminded of women that never get their long time boyfriend to marry them because there is no line in the sand, no deadline, no imperative to make a decision or do anything.

To wit: "I'm here until Paul Graham offers me...". People need a reason to make a decision and to do something. (Not that you can say "if/then" or anything.)

For all I know of course you have had discussions with Paul or someone else about a YC slot or are totally joking. (I can only speculate and offer thoughts in case anyone is still awake in the thread my thoughts).

I do plenty negotiating and I've never closed a deal w/o having a time limit (in which of course the bluff sometimes goes bust obviously but that's the risk of the game). I never ever leave something open ended unless I don't want someone to make a decision because I am trying to buy some time while waiting for someone else.

My point of course is not that you could ever say "make me YC or..". Just that there is no clear reason for PG to do anything and make a decision.

It seems to me that a 35 - 60 page ebook might be better for your reputation than 35 or 60 blog posts. Not sure, but it seems to me, "Go look it up on Amazon. I'm published there" should send a pretty good signal, particularly if you have mostly positive reviews.

I agree. I think the deal is becoming much worse for prospective authors with the evolution of technology.

A few decades ago, if you wanted to sell a book, you would have to turn some words on paper (typed up if you were lucky) into a professional quality product both physically and of course in terms of the content. Then you had to get that product into bookshops. Then you had to find ways of promoting it to your audience so they would go to the bookshop and buy it. All of this took a lot of time-consuming, laborious work and relied on extremely wasteful processes for things like stock management. Publishers would be expected to handle these things for their authors, in addition to providing professional editorial and support services for the content itself. They would also be expected to guide authors toward creating a product that would actually sell, based on their knowledge of the markets.

Today, we have DTP software where someone can either create professional grade work on their own computer or hire someone to do it for them. Either way, by the time it gets to the printers, you can usually just hand over camera-ready copy in a PDF set to their specifications, and if you or your hired help are good then you'll probably achieve a much better standard of presentation than the phone-it-in quality some publishers seem to generate by default these days. Those printers can then print on demand, again to a reasonably high level of quality these days if you go to a good one, and even have arrangements to accept orders and ship direct to customers, negating any need for wasteful stock management for most kinds of book. To get those sales, you can do just fine via Amazon and/or major e-book channels, without ever touching a bricks 'n' mortar store unless someone wants to order your book, and again there are various integrations within the industry so book stores can still order in directly from your print-on-demand/self-publishing services if they want to. Obviously for promotion, we have search engines and social media, which make any token effort at promotion that most publishers might give a new author rather insignificant and IMHO negate what little brand value remains in being published by a "major" publisher. I had no idea who published the last few books I bought, though looking along the shelf they are all "big names". I did know who every author was before I bought the book, though.

The situation is only going to shift further away from favouring publishers toward a self-publishing approach as e-books increasingly take over and printing at all, on demand or otherwise, becomes relatively unusual for anything but showcase books. I see a rise in fortunes coming for professionals like editors and designers of various kinds, who can freelance out their skills on merit to authors who lack the ability or the time and money to do such work to a good standard themselves. I see a rise in fortunes for modern distribution channels, catalogue sites, payment services and the like. I see a potential niche for a "book project manager" who can identify what combination of services will be useful for a project and recommend/co-ordinate the hired help. In fact, if I were running a publishing house right now, I imagine I would be shifting to more of a one-stop service-provider model just about as fast as I could making hiring/firing decisions accordingly.

But for traditional publishers who won't adapt, who think the author is just one small part of a larger chain who should fit into their frameworks as one of many minor components, I don't see much future at all. Technology is making their business model obsolete, and it amazes me that they still get good authors signing up for the kinds of deal mentioned in the posts above.