Self-publishing is a very underrated way of exchanging knowledge for money with high ROI. I'm approaching $200K in 6 months from 2 self-published info products: one is a short ebook on AWS (160 hours to produce), and the other is a video presentation about building an audience (16 hours to produce).
I just thought, I know that name ... DVassallo ... oh, yes, now I remember! You're this guy who comes here to brag about his income in regular intervals! Always a pleasure :)
Yes, I attribute practically all my sales to having an audience. I doubt I would have sold any if I didn't have any followers.
That said, I only had 10K followers when I announced my first product, and 24K for the second. But I've seen a few people get similar results as I had even with 3-5K followers.
Not a lot, but I didn't track the hours. The only promotion I did for my second product was sending 5 tweets and 2 emails, so maybe a couple of hours towards promotion. That made $85K in sales: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1270940834989355009
I promoted the first product similarly, but I also experimented a bit with paid ads and I invested some time there, so I'd say about 20 hours total. That product made $97K in sales, $13K of which from paid ads ($6K spent on ads).
> "Not even being provocative but if you think Greta Thunberg has the maturity to guide global policy-making then you cannot object to Jeffrey Epstein paying 16-year-olds for sex."
I figure the author is here so 1. Maturity doesn't equal consent.
2. Even if legal, consent does not equal lack of manipulation 3. It's attacking a strawman, and is inherently provocative.
Provocative doesn't have to mean wrong, but in this case it fails on it's premise.
It's concerning to me the author doesn't have a basic understanding of why underage laws exist. It doesn't mean that anyone underage can't make mature decisions. It's there because it's a time ripe for abuse in a manner that's difficult to prove. Without getting very realistic, dark, and entirely off topic I can't go into details, but there are very good reasons why that exists. It doesn't mean they can't not be trusted to drive, or handle money, or whatever. There isn't a relation.
> It doesn't mean that anyone underage can't make mature decisions. It's there because it's a time ripe for abuse in a manner that's difficult to prove.
I am unable to see the contradiction. If Greta was indeed guiding global policy (which she's not even remotely close to doing) there would exist very strong incentive to manipulate her and the aggregate potential harm would greatly exceed that of a single instance of child abuse.
It's indeed a total strawman on the face of it, but I think the actual point he's making is that forbidden thoughts exists and the replies on Twitter are a proof of that point imo.
You are replying to inflammatory twitter bait in a reply to not-the-tweeter on hacker news.
Seriously, also @orf, why take this here? Clearly the impulse to reflexively argue about this is too big to handle for some. Go do this on twitter where you copied it from.
Describing the personal pilosophy of an author of a philosophy book is clearly relevant. It's not an argument, it's a statement of fact: "The author of this book holds these views".
Like most people I feel a certain way about his views but in the original comment I don't share those. If you find it uncomfortable to see those views discussed then I would humbly suggest that it may be your problem to deal with and not mine.
the author plays a game on twitter that many people do, which is ‘find an apparent contradiction in the prevailing morality and make a reprehensible/funny argument with it’; robin hanson for example is the master of this game. this may not be obvious without context but it is literally just negative attention bait to gain an audience
I think that it’s worthwhile to note that the author of the linked article has equated a child protesting climate change with systematic child rape. That’s very helpful context for reading his other work.
> It's concerning to me the author doesn't have a basic understanding of why underage laws exist.
I think he does, he is not stupid. I guess he just wanted attention and tweets like that play well into his base, who might not have the same understanding.
He agrees with you that maturity doesn't equal consent; in fact, he relies on that it doesn't, he is saying something about immaturity. He is saying "Greta Thunberg is immature, why would you listen to her talk about long term issues of international economics (externalities)? If you would listen to her seriously, you would also hold to [other obviously absurd proposition]s." Your reply to him reads to me like you're shaking him by the lapels to say "your obviously absurd proposition is obviously absurd!!!"
Why is it so hard for "woke", "critical thinking" "virtue signallers" to follow simple analogies and reductio ad absurdem? One key to following somebody's argument is to not change their wording, just engage with the words they used and make sure you stick with a meaning that is consistent with what was said.
edit: just wanted to add for clarity, you might think for whatever reason that he's wrong and we should listen to Greta Thunberg's message. That's fine, but you know what that is called? it's called "staying on topic". It's all he was talking about.
and you may also think he went about making his point in a foolish way. That's also ok, but you say that more authoritatively if you show you get the point he was making, see above.
The biggest problem with his Greta Thunberg comment is that he started it with a lie. He did say it to be provocative. There are other ways he could have made the same point without being offensive, but then it would have been an uncontroversial opinion.
He doesn't appear to be taking a position affirming or denying either the antecedent or consequent propositions in that tweet; he merely states a relationship between them.
Yes, there is clearly a relationship between thinking “Greta has an opinion on climate change that I agree with” and “pedophiles are ok”.
I’m glad that he brings this valued point to the discussion and I’m thankful someone so impartial brings this up during the very important “Agree with scientific consensus on climate change == agree with pedophillia” debate.
> I’m thankful someone so impartial brings this up during the very important “Agree with scientific consensus on climate change == agree with pedophillia” debate.
I mean, his point was fallacious in more than one ways, but we should always debate against the strongest possible interpretation of the other side's argument. Straw men are so easy to knock down that there isn't even much value in doing so.
"a" relationship? It was an if/then relationship! That's hardly an amorphous undefined relationship! The if/then is the objectionable part! Man, sometimes abstract thinking gets really silly.
After reading the post article (which was interesting), that tweet fits his MO, which seems to be "convert words into money without particular concern for quality or value".
I doubt he actually believes the two things are comparable, rather he knows there's the right mix of pseudo logic and gratuitous drama to appeal to his target demographic.
Most of Murphy's discourse around "how to be an intellectual" focuses on how to support yourself financially and build an audience or platform while doing work that traditionally relied on support from academic institutions, not "how to be smart" or anything like that.
Most of Murphy's actual intellectual work seems slapshod, but his efforts to figure out how to essentially do academic work outside of academia are interesting and seem to be in good faith. I don't get the same vibe from his as I get from alt-light or alt-right "Anti-academics". He doesn't spend an inordinate amount of time lambasting colleges for restricting free speech or supporting Marxists or any of the other standard talking points.
> writing, which was my main project for about 2 months.
> The writing itself only took about 70 hours (measured hours of focused time actually writing, not a vague estimate of my time at the desk)
AKA: How I made slightly under $50/hr for about 2 months of work.
I don't want to take anything away from the author (I've written zero books), but it's not an indication to me of an extraordinary outcome relative to the time, effort, and expertise required.
The question, though, is how long he'll continue to make sales. I wrote my first short book on a couple of plane rides, and it has reliably done $50-100 a month in royalties since launch. I'm not doing anything at all now to maintain it, so the effective hourly rate of my time spent working on it just keeps going up.
The first version was really short, something like 80 pages and priced at $2.99, though as you can see from some reviews people apparently thought that was too short even for that price. I ended up writing what was going to be a sequel but just added it into the original and upped the price. It's been interesting to see the price elasticity of it... I actually sell about the same number of copies at $2.99 (even when it's the longer version of the book) as I do at $6.99.
Sounds like a good enough reason to test higher prices even for the short book. Some percentage of people will always complain about cost, but I (and many others) have found that you actually get more of those complaints at lower price points.
At a certain threshold price: the people buying already see the value in it no matter the length, or they see the value of their time as so high that taking the time to request a refund actually has a low ROI.
I'm pretty sure optimizing for $ per time/effort wasn't the point. Writing philosophy books would be the last activity to consider for someone looking for such optimization. The point, I believe is that it's at all possible to write philosophy books and not starve to death without being employed as an educator.
Very cool, congrats. I've published a couple of books on Amazon with similar levels of success (https://www.amazon.com/Product-Management-Interview-Manager-... is the most recent), and the one thing I'd strongly recommend to you is to try Amazon advertising. It's very simple to set up and has been profitable the whole way. Nothing earth-moving; in the last month I've spent about $30 in ads and that's yielded about $80 in profit (before the cost of ads). The sales from ads also help keep your book higher in search, which can generate organic sales.
Do you have any blog post on your experience of writing the book? I've got a few topics but I couldn't get started at all. Perhaps, the fear of not completing it or the # of pages I see with Packt Books (like ~300 pages). Do you have any tips for cases like this?
Unfortunately I probably don't have much of anything that'll be useful. The genesis of that book was that I was on sabbatical and had decided to get a job again, so I interviewed at a ton of places. I took a lot of notes for my own sake, and when I saw how many sales the most popular PM interview book on Amazon was getting, I figured if I even got 10% of those it'd still be worth my time to compile the notes into a book.
In terms of general tips on writing this kind of thing, I just start with a big Google Doc and start writing sections about whatever's on my mind. If I'm thinking about a particular interview question, I write about it and leave it with some kind of a note to make it easy to find when I'm searching later. Once I've got a fair amount of content, then I start organizing and filling in the rest.
as a warning to HN users unfamiliar with the author, this article should probably be taken with a grain of salt -- the guy is known to be somewhat of a jester within that very same niche philosophical community he talks about. think of him as the tai lopez of french theory internet enthusiasts
he's built a reputation basically making memes & posting hot takes on twitter for retweets, and harnessed a sort of following among people who mostly get their knowledge of philosophy through memes and fb groups. the article probably reflects more of a marketing lesson than anything else
you can judge that based on his very content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmdWfFrevzI; he gives a very generalized account of the eternal return (one of the central concepts in D&G's, klossowski's and nietzsche's philosophy) which probably wouldn't get a passing grade in an undergrad philosophy course
he does have many genuinely good and interesting takes; he is definitely purposefully inflammatory and i can’t really evaluate his philosophy writing as someone who doesn’t pay attention to any, but his blog has some excellent and well argued essays. this was my introduction to him and my favorite:
https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1268622381964095488