Some notes on self-publishing and the art of being a wild animus

The Art of Being Minimalist is minimalist in more ways than one: It currently possesses only two stars on Amazon.com.

The reviews, of which there are lamentably few, are mostly pretty bad. UPDATE: The Amazon reviews are gone as of 2/25/11. I can only assume Bogue had something to do with this. Lame.

Recently, I read the first 25 pages of Bogue's new e-book, Augmented Humanity, and you can do the same here.

Rather than doing a point-by-point analysis (believe me, I'm tempted) I would like to bring up just a few things.

In this book, Bogue makes the claim that many books that are 200-400 pages long need only be around 100 pages long, and that a single tweet can say more than a thousand books combined. He states very openly that Augmented Humanity is only 20,000 words long. Stand back for some math action. 20,000 words, at an average of 5 letters or so per word, means this book is roughly 100,000 characters long. So it's worth about 700 140-character tweets and thus... SEVEN THOUSAND BOOKS.

Beautiful!

I've written 20,000 words in a single eight-hour period. Based on the number of typos and repetitive statements in this e-book, Bogue probably did the same thing. He also seems to have employed the widest margins available to man; there's so little text per page it almost looks like a book of poetry.

So, the soul-crushing day job I wrote about not long ago? It's at a bookstore. I deal in books. My title is "bookseller" but I'm also a book buyer. My job requires me to be knowledgeable about the market value of current books, out-of-print books, various publishers, trends, and stuff like that. Maybe it's because I work for a discount retailer, but I was stunned that Bogue thought he could get away with a $30 price tag on a 20,000-word book. Obviously, I haven't downloaded the book, so I'm not sure exactly how many pages it does have, but with wide margins like that I would estimate that each page has 150-200 words. That translates to around 100 pages.

For a hardcover book from a reputable publisher, $30 for 100 pages is not unheard of. But for a self-published e-book that clearly has not been edited by a professional? Oof. I can't wait to read some reviews of this thing. And I don't mean the hand-jobby reviews Bogue's second self splatters all over the internet.

As you might guess, in my line of work (as in society at large), self-published books are looked upon with scorn. They simply do not sell, and if they do, it's because they've become infamous. Some are so shitty and ubiquitous, they're practically unavoidable at a used bookstore. I have a feeling that if Bogue dared put his books into actual print, they'd become infamous at bookstores within a few years. I'm not saying this because I dislike Bogue. Strictly from a business standpoint, his books fucking suck. I think that's the technical term for it, right?

As usual, nobody summed up the situation as perfectly as the master himself. On a recent blog post called "Why I'm Working with Ebookling" he wrote,

Then the Internet happened, and we were able to publish anything. And we did.

You sure did, Ev. You sure did.