The author of Bit Lit­er­acy (one of the Startup Bibles) on the secrets of book pub­lish­ing that they wish they had known:

  • The pub­lish­ers are not doing it for the love of books; they want some­thing that sells.
  • If your book will sell, it doesn’t mat­ter what you’re writ­ing about.
  • Your main job — prac­ti­cally your only job — is to explain very clearly why the book is going to sell.
  • “Orig­i­nal” means “risky,” which means “it might not sell”.
  • You write the book, you pro­mote the book — in other words, you cre­ate the prod­uct and sell it. The best way is if you have a fol­low­ing online — via a blog or newslet­ter — that you can sell the book to.
  • Don’t write a book for the money.
  • Dis­tri­b­u­tion is not the same as sales.
  • The good news is that there are other options than find­ing a publisher.