Why Burn Books When Nobody Reads? (Stats on Reading)

This episode delves into the declining state of reading in the U.S., focusing on the economic challenges authors face and the shifting dynamics within the publishing industry.

1. The U.S. publishing industry is heavily skewed towards celebrity books and bestsellers, often neglecting new authors.
2. Most authors make a meager income from book sales, with significant earnings being an anomaly.
3. Traditional publishing may not be the most effective way to reach an audience given the digital age's dynamics.
4. Platforms like YouTube, podcasts, and social media can provide more direct and profitable ways to reach audiences.
5. The episode underscores a significant shift from traditional book reading to digital consumption of content.

1: Introduction to the Decline of Reading

The hosts introduce the topic by presenting statistics on reading habits and book sales in the U.S., setting the stage for a detailed discussion on the challenges facing the publishing industry. Simone Collins: "Almost a third of Americans don't read books at all."

2: Economic Realities for Authors

Discussion on the financial implications for authors in the publishing industry, highlighting the low earnings from book sales compared to other forms of media. Malcolm Collins: "96% of fiction book sales happen in the first year."

3: The Role of Celebrities and Bestsellers

This chapter explores how celebrity books and long-standing bestsellers dominate the market, sidelining intellectual and new content. Simone Collins: "The publishing industry spends most of its budget on celebrities and repeated bestsellers."

4: Alternative Publishing Platforms

The conversation shifts to alternative methods for authors to reach their audience, such as self-publishing and digital platforms. Malcolm Collins: "If you write a book and get accepted by Penguin Random House, you have a 96% chance of selling less than 1000 copies."

5: Conclusion and Advice for Aspiring Authors

The hosts summarize their discussions and advise aspiring authors on navigating the changing landscape of content consumption. Simone Collins: "Books should not be on the list of best ways to engage with people anymore."

1. Consider Digital Platforms: Authors should explore digital platforms like YouTube and podcasts for publishing their work to reach a broader audience more effectively.
2. Understand Market Economics: New authors should familiarize themselves with the economic realities of the publishing industry to set realistic expectations.
3. Build a Direct Audience: Building a direct relationship with your audience through social media and personal platforms can enhance engagement and profitability.
4. Evaluate the Need for Traditional Publishing: Evaluate if traditional publishing serves your goal or if self-publishing could offer more control and better financial returns.
5. Focus on Content Quality: Regardless of the platform, focusing on creating high-quality, engaging content remains key to attracting and retaining an audience.

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone dive deep into the current state of the publishing industry, revealing shocking statistics about book sales, author earnings, and the strategies employed by major publishing houses. The couple discusses the alarming decline in reading habits among Americans and the dominance of a select few authors in the bestseller lists. Malcolm shares startling figures from the antitrust case between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, exposing the industry's reliance on celebrity books and backlist titles. The couple also examines the disappointing sales of books by well-known figures with substantial social media followings. Throughout the conversation, they offer valuable advice for aspiring authors, emphasizing the importance of exploring alternative platforms like YouTube, podcasts, and Substack to reach and engage audiences effectively.

People

Simone Collins, Malcolm Collins

Companies

Penguin Random House

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Malcolm Collins
That means authors are earning roughly between 18,100 $80,000 on a New York Times bestseller. Keep in mind now these are being split with the publishing houses. If you write a book and you get accepted and you get paid by Penguin Random House, you have a 96% chance of selling less than 1000 copies from the squad. She has a significant social media presence with 3 million Twitter followers and another 1.3 million on Instagram. Yet her book has has sold only 26,000 copies.

Piers Morgan. Okay, 8 million on followers on Twitter. In the US, it sold just 5650 copies. How are these big publishing houses staying in business? And it is bibles, celebrity books, like Britney Spears books and their backlist.

It is not on things that are intellectually enriching the population. These two market categories, celebrity books and repeated bestsellers from the backlist, make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project, publishing all the rest of the books we think about publishing, that is basically a vanity project. How do they approach people? What they are thinking about when they go out and approach people is, how can I turn their pre existing follower base into money? Yeah, they're looking for a platform.

Simone Collins
They only care about your platform. And I think they're starting to realize, though, that even the platform doesn't sell. This conversation is really relevant to people who are thinking about writing a book. Would you like to know more? Hello, Simone.

Malcolm Collins
We are going to do a stats heavy episode today, which I am excited about, and I hope I ordered these stats well, to make a narrative. But it is on reading in America, the state of reading and what the publishing industry is turning into and how it's transforming the way books are being published, the type of books that are being published, and the type of books that are being read. So first, let's just. I'm going to do a lot of quoting here in this episode. This is from Pew.

Almost a third of Americans don't read books at all, and according to the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the ones that do spend only 16 minutes per day reading. Compare that to the average Netflix watcher who spends close to 3 hours per day consuming video content. At that pace, a watcher might get through 681 movies in a year, while a reader get through only 16 books. And that's presuming those 15 minutes are spent reading books. Keep in mind, it was just reading.

So that could be newspaper, that could be online content, and goodness knows I'd fudge those numbers even this year when leisure time increased as a result of the pandemic novels saw only a subtle increase in sales over last year by 2.8%. News consumption, however, saw an increase of 215%. Most of that time taking place on Facebook, 23 minutes per day, Google, 14 minutes per day, and MSN, five minutes per day. So when people say news consumption, they mean Facebook and Google. So this is highly targeted news.

Not even. Just like I'm picking a conservative versus progressive news show to be my bubble of information I'm getting, it's the news stories that are specifically tailored to my interests. Okay, so now we're going to talk a little bit about how few authors are actually writing the books that people are reading. So they had created a list of the top selling books in the US. And of the 2468 fiction books that made the list, they were written by only 854 authors.

It's worth mentioning that 51 of those books were written by James Peterson, 31 were written by Clive Cussler, and 25 were written by Daniel Steele. A huge chunk. It's written by very few people. And this, we've seen this in other stats in terms of how much authors sell, like a very, very small number of books, ultimately. Oh, we're about to get into that.

Okay, this is bad. This is bad. According to the EPJ data, 96% of a fiction book sales take place in the first year. And the majority of the New York Times bestselling books sell between 10,100 thousand copies in their first year. Presuming the average royalty check is 12%.

And the average hardcover fiction book retails at $15, that means authors are earning roughly between 18,100, $80,000 on a bestseller. This is a New York Times bestseller, 18,000 to 18,0000. Also, writers are not being paid anything, so why would they bother? Keep in mind now, these are being split with the publishing houses, and this is only for New York Times bestselling authors. As a New York Times bestselling author, you might be earning $18,000 off of that book.

Simone Collins
Wow, you're way better paid being a public school teacher. People argue that, like, teachers are not paid anything. And yeah, splitting that with the publishers. Yeah, when you're like a best selling author, it's so funny. I remember the first time I met someone who completely didn't understand how much people actually made.

And he was telling someone who's probably making less than he was, he's oh, wow, like, I bet you have a yacht or something. And he just had no idea that people in the writing world don't make money. Yeah. When it's also true with our books people are always like, why don't you publish more books and stuff like that? You guys must be.

Malcolm Collins
Why don't you use some of the, like, your books money? Like, you guys taught the Wall Street Journal non fiction bestseller list. And I was like, yeah, we did. We did. We did top the Wall Street Journal nonfiction bestseller list.

And they're like, what did you do? One of my favorites is they go, what did you do different with that book? Just do that again. And I was like, that was our least selling book by, like, one fourth of the sales of our next. Just make money again.

And they're like, why do your least selling book top the Wall Street Journal nonfiction bestseller list, but none of your others did? And the answer is simple. All of our other books were Amazon exclusives, which do not qualify for that list, or the New York Times bestseller list. The way we got on the list was intentionally hampering the launch of one of our books, putting it in Barnes and noble when we typically would only list in Amazon. And as a result, we cannot give the book on Kindle unlimited like we can all our other books, but we were able to technically be Wall Street Journal bestsellers with lower reach.

Simone Collins
With lower reach. With lower reach. So we hampered our reach, but we got the title that I had wanted. I wanted to be a bestseller for my whole life. We don't qualify for New York Times.

Malcolm Collins
A lot of people don't know this to be a New York Times bestseller until fairly recently, and now they break the rules only for, like, progressive aligned books. But you have to be published by a New York Times based publishing house. It's not any book. If you self publish, you cannot get on that list. And if you're not self publishing, you're splitting your money with somebody else for basically nothing.

Keep in mind that $18,000 that they're making is being split with a publisher, or Max, around $180,000 for normal New York Times bestseller. That's being split with a publisher who's taking about half. You're making, like, 90,000 per New York Times bestseller book, and most of your books aren't going to be that. But let's keep going here so we can get the idea of what are the actual numbers involved in sales here. So there's a chart I'm going to put on screen here which shows the copies sold in one year.

Number of print titles that sell over a million is zero. Number of digital titles that sell over a million is one. And number of audiobooks is zero. Wow. 100,000 to 1 million.

Number of print titles, eight. Number of digital titles, ten. And number of audiobooks, 6100,000 to half a million. Print titles 260. Number of digital titles 267.

And number of audiobooks, 111. And something you'll start to notice from this point in the chart on that's really interesting is the number of print books and digital titles that make it into each of these categories is about equal. So what if you get this explosion in the digital world? But it's really not that much above the print world where you get that one book that's over a million. 10,000 to 10,0000.

Print, 6.5 thousand. Digital, 7000. Audio, 2000 and then 1000 to 10,000. Print, 57. Digital, 75,000.

Audiobooks, 17,000. So we're doing actually pretty good in terms of artbook sales, when you think. Yeah, our book sales, yeah, we typically do about 50,000 per book or something like that was a lot of our books. I think we might be over that now. I haven't checked in a few years.

Simone Collins
What you're also not, you haven't yet pointed out, at least, is that the majority of these books that are selling are probably romance novels or like really smutty, not sometimes smutty teen fiction and stuff. When you look at what's actually selling. Yeah, a lot of the books that actually sell are romance novels or like really smutty. When you. Authors who actually make money, they're romance novel writers.

Malcolm Collins
So, yeah, so I'm going to keep going with more stats here and we can talk more about the industry and what's happening, but I want to give people an idea of how little people are actually reading as we go into this. In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon and Schuster, the two publishing houses just, these are coming from like a ton of different articles. If you want to find them, just google the words I'm saying. I just tried to pull together the most interesting quote from a bunch of articles on this. The two publishing houses made up 37% and 11% of the marketing share, according to the filing, and combined, they would have condensed the big five publishing houses into the big four.

But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly. During the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency group got on stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye opening account from the inside. The big five publishing houses spent most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson, and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of bibles, repeat bestsellers like Lord of the Rings and children's books like the very hungry caterpillar. These two market categories, celebrity books and repeated bestsellers from the backlist, make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanish, their vanity project, publishing all the rest of the books we think about.

When we think about book publishing, that is basically a vanity project. And that so checks out. We have multiple copies of the very hungry caterpillar in our house, which ripped over one this morning. They're just everywhere. And then it goes on to say, which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1000 copies.

I want to keep that in mind the entire. What you think of as like, the literary industry, if you're like, if they're only making 180,000 to 20,000 a year on New York Times bestsellers, how are these big publishing houses staying in business? And it is bibles, celebrity books like Britney Spears books and their backlist. It is not on things that are intellectually enriching the population, which is wild. Because when you look at old libraries, when you look at people read in the past, it was a different story.

Simone Collins
The market hadn't discovered yet that you could publish gossip and romance and whatnot in books. But it's crazy to think of what. The old library would used to look like now. People buy books just for signaling. There are lots of people, like youtubers, people with their Zoom backgrounds of all these substantive books.

I feel like maybe now 50% or more of the substantive, nice hardcover books that are being bought literally as Zoom background or YouTube background dressing, nothing more. I wouldn't be surprised about that at all. And I would also just promote books for a second here. Or even audiobooks. Like you could be listening to a podcast like the one that you're listening to with us.

Malcolm Collins
I'm not trying to lower our listener base here, but I'm just telling it like it is. Or you could be listening to an audiobook, right? If you are listening to this podcast versus one of our audiobook, everything on this podcast is off the top of our heads. Okay. Generally speaking, occasionally I'll do a pre written thing, but those are usually our worst performing videos.

Every single line in our audiobook was counter checked by each of us maybe a hundred times. Yeah. And there's still typos. There are still typos. And three people copy edited them.

Simone Collins
Yeah. And what happens when we write books? Malcolm writes them. I completely rewrite every sentence to make it more, like, palatable. Then he completely rewrites them because he's completely.

Don't understand anything. And then I completely rewrite them again because I'm like, no, this is not clear at all. And then somewhere in there, it stops maybe two more rounds later. That is so much more work. The number of hours it goes into each book.

People recently have been contacting Malcolm and saying, oh, it's sad that you're not going to write books as much as you did before. But when we look at the beginning. People watch my YouTube channel. They don't read the books that much. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
And a lot of people. And this podcast is really relevant to what we're discussing now. That is to say, this conversation is really relevant to people who are thinking about writing a book. One of the early podcasts that Spencer Greenberg did on clearer thinking with Spencer Greenberg, his podcast was interviewing someone who really had this strong theory that we have passed an age at which books made sense. And if you want to actually reach someone with a message, as much as it seems wrong, because it doesn't seem as intellectual, it doesn't seem as prestigious, you really should be engaging with people on different formats.

Simone Collins
But I think the question is on what format is should you be engaging with people? Because, for example, engaging with people on Twitter, we found Twitter doesn't really convert. Twitter doesn't really change minds. We found that YouTube does change minds, and we do think it's really meaningful. And we found that podcasts are the same.

So you have to be thoughtful about where you are. But books should not be on. Yeah, and before I go further with the stats, I think you make a good point there. Like, we could get broader reach potentially by trying to do something like TikTok or Instagram shorts, but we're not reaching people in the right mental space to engage them. I don't care about being famous.

Malcolm Collins
I care about changing mind. That's the point of all of this, to helping people think deeper, think more, and understand their world better, everything. Like, it wouldn't matter if I was just in front of a bunch of people. Like, that's not interesting to me. And so YouTube seems to be the perfect medium for this, but you have to do the type of content we're doing on YouTube.

You have to have a really heavy upload schedule, which we have, but it prevents superscripted stuff from us. Yeah, exactly. Unless we were to start a different channel for it. But I don't even know if that's something I want to engage in. But, okay.

To go further with the quotes here, because this is actually really interesting stuff. Okay, so Madeleine McIntosh, CEO of Penguin Random House us in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies. And 96% of all the books they published less than 1000 copies. That's still the vibe. Oh, you're so sweet to the little one, Simone, just so you register that, I want to run that by you again of Penguin Random House.

Okay. Of all of the books they sold, only 268 sold more than 100,000 copies with 96%. So if you write a book and you get accepted and you get paid by Penguin Random House, you have a 96% chance of selling less than 1000 copies. Like when we talk about how worse. Than venture capital, isn't it?

Yeah. When we talk about how small these numbers are. So if you want to contrast that with suppose some of our videos, right? Okay. Yesterday we had a video that already today is that went live is at 8000 views.

Over 8000 views. The day before that we have a video that's now at 22,000 views. So those are some of our better performing videos. But that's daily. We are producing something that is getting more purchases or watches than a book.

So we can look at the one that went live today. That is not like a very, it's a particularly poor performing episode because I put effort into it, the levels of thinking episode. So that's an eight of ten of our last ten episodes we've released. So it's near the bottom of our episodes, but it's already just today at 1.5 thousand views. And people should be like, oh, that's just a number of people who clicked on it.

They're not necessarily watching it a long time. The average person viewing that episode is watching for 17 and a half minutes. So that's pretty deep watching. If you're going to reach people with intellectual content, this is just not the way to do it. Books anymore.

And then here's an interview with her question. Do you know approximately how many authors there are across the industry with 500,000 units or more during this four year period? My understanding is that it was about 50.

Sorry. And I should point out here that we are small time youtubers. Like small time youtubers. We're like 12,000 subscribers or something like that, right? That we are out.

96% of authors who go through multiple rounds of editing get accepted by a major publishing house, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera is insane. Question 50 authors across the publishing industry who during this four year period sold more than 500,000 units in a single year. Yes. They were incredulous. The DOJ's lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90% of them sold fewer than 2000 copies and 50% sold less than a dozen copies.

Okay, so next, 75% of our acquisitions come from approaching celebrities, politicians, athletes, the quote unquote celebrity adjacent, et cetera. That way we can control the content. We are approaching authors and celebrities and politicians and athletes for ideas. So it's really, we are on the lookout. We are scouts in a lot of ways.

Jennifer Bergstrom SVP Gallery Books group top selling authors were defined as those receiving advances, that is, guaranteed money in excess of $250,000. Far fewer than 1% of authors receive advances over that mark. Publishers Marketplace, which tracks these things, recorded 233 such deals in all of 2020. So I'm going to go over some of these categories, and then we're going to talk about what this does to readers and what this does to the publishing industry more broadly. Category one led to titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up an advent for something of that is around half a million titles was a sales goal of 25,000 to 75,000 units.

Get an advance of 150,000 to a million titles with a sales goal of 10,000 to 25,000 units. Get an advance of actually $50,000 to $150,000. More than you'd expect, given how little league they're making. You can really see what they mean by this is a pet project. Titles with a sales goal of 5000 to 10,000 units.

So imagine one of our episodes had five southern watches. We would consider that like nothing. Right? This is the goal for them. They're getting an advance of $50,000.

They said 50 something or less. That's still pretty good. Yeah, it is. And I love the author here is, is anyone else alarmed that the top tier of book sales projections is only 75,000 units? Enough like one post on subsequent gets more views than that.

Simone Collins
Yeah, I think what you need to look at this as is the number of people willing to put down money to consume someone's ideas. So it's investing both money and time. So really what you should be looking at is paid sub sac subscribers as an equivalent, or paid Patreon followers, or paid YouTube subscribers, or people who leave super thanks on YouTube. Because there, there is a difference with books. People are putting down money in addition to time with streaming and podcasts and Twitter, whatever you might have there, it's people only investing time so I would give a little bit of a premium to publishing, but it's still a lot less in here.

Malcolm Collins
You're going to hear the sad news. There are plenty of books that we spent. So this is coming from Madeline McIntosh, the CEO of Penguin Random House. There are plenty of books that we spend 1 million on the advance and published them last year and they did not even make it into the top 1000 books on book scan. Less than 45% of those books, the books we spend a million dollars on, end up in the thousand bestseller list.

So less than half of the books are giving these million dollar advances to are even making it into the top thousand best selling books. And to be clear, we have regularly made it the top thousand best selling books. It is not hard to get into that. To get into the top thousand best selling books, you are. You need to sell like 10,000 copies, I think, or something around there.

It's really not that hard. 5000 copies, I think, on a launch month. Okay, sorry. According to Hill, 85% of the books with advances of a quarter million and up never earn out their advance. 85% aren't earning out their advance.

The entire royalties made by the book. So they're never getting any royalties, anything like that. Those authors, even celebrities, though sometimes you think it's going to be a big bestseller. Flops. Andrew Kumo's book was sold at the height of his being America's governor during COVID crisis.

That book was sold for 5 million, I believe. I don't know for a fact, but at the time it came out, the nursing home scandal had happened, the me too issues, and the book didn't do any business. Sometimes it's just a timing issue. Like Murray Kondo, she did a book about joy at work and making your office sparked with joy because it's not cluttered. It published March of 2020.

That was a literary agent talking about that. Having a lot of social media followers and fame doesn't guarantee it will sell well. The singer Billie Eilish, despite her 97 million Instagram followers and 6 million Twitter followers, only sold 64,000 copies. Within eight months of publishing her book. Billie Eilish only managed to sell 64,000 copies.

Simone Collins
She has more fans than that, right? The singer Justin Timberlake sold only a hundred thousand copies of his book in three years after he published it. I guess the problem is that these people also did not have salacious books. So I fall. I don't.

I haven't read many biographies, but I do follow youtubers who read the biographies and summarize them for me. And the only reason why they bother is because there's a lot of hot goss in those books. And it seems like perhaps these people didn't have that. But even that, see, that's the thing is, my whole point is also you have keep in mind the number of books being sold are mostly gossip, romance, totally not substantive. And the problem here is that even the non substantive stuff that publishers are like, at least this one will make us money.

It doesn't always make them money. Oh, it's so sad. It's so sad. Hold on, we've got more here. This one, I think, is going to surprise you.

Malcolm Collins
Snoop Dogg's cookbook saw a boost during the pandemic, but he still only sold 205,000 copies. That makes sense. This whole snoop Dogg Martha Stewart thing, as much as I love it, is very forced. There's no audience for that. Okay, you wanna hear another one?

That'll probably make you happy to hear. Okay. Representative Ilyan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota. Ilyamar, from the squad. Yeah.

Simone Collins
Whose daughter protested at Columbia and then became homeless and destitute because she was kicked out of Barnard. Okay. She's no global pop star, but she has a significant social media presence with 3 million Twitter followers, who. Many of those are Democrat bots, but. And another 1.3 million on Instagram.

Malcolm Collins
Yet her book, this is what America looks like. My journey from refugee to congresswoman, which was published in 2022, has sold only. Can you guess? I don't know. 12,000 copies?

26,000 copies. No one wants to hear that, though. Like, you hear that title and you're like, I get it. You can even be a fan of hers, but you don't want to. I don't want to relive that.

Simone Collins
That doesn't sound fun. I don't even want to live that vicariously for the first time. Like, why bring this up? This is ridiculous. Okay, here, I've got two more that are good ones.

Malcolm Collins
Okay. So Tameika D. Maleroy, a social activist with over a million Instagram followers and who has paid $1 million for a two book deal. Her first book, State of Emergency, sold only 26,000 copies. Here's one that kind of bums me out.

Piers Morgan. Okay. 8 million on followers on Twitter. He's interviewed us before on Instagram. He has 1.8 million followers.

And he wrote the book, wake up. Why the world has gone nuts. In the US, it sold just 5650 copies, 5000 for Piers Morgan's book. No one knows him here. Perhaps that's the issue, but I hear it.

Simone Collins
No one reads. No one reads. Also, Gen Alpha doesn't know how to read. There's that as well. So this is where, and this is where I want to tie this all up with sort of our message to young authors and stuff like that.

Malcolm Collins
When you're reading all of this, there is no reason to go through a traditional publisher anymore. Yeah, you are getting nothing. They're gaining worse. Worse. So what you've talked about here is a lot of public, or a lot of authors have not made it past their point at which they can start making royalties.

Simone Collins
Right. They've not made past that point where at least the publishers have a slight profit or net neutral. We know many authors who in their contracts were then obligated to sell a certain number of books. And if they failed to sell them, guess what was in the fine print of that contract? You got to buy them.

So we know all these people who are like, yeah, I have a garage full of books, would you like one? Because I, like, want my garage back. Because I had to buy a gazillion books because it was in my contract and I didn't manage to sell the number that I was obligated to sell. So not only are you probably not getting any money, any actual readership, you might also be, like, completely in a financial hole. I don't think we've made.

Malcolm Collins
What are you thinking? If you're in the publishing industry, you're like, now, how do they approach the industry? How do they approach people? What they are thinking about when they go out and approach people is, how can I turn their pre existing follower base into money? That's what they're attempting to do.

They are not attempting to turn nobodies into famous authors. Oh, no. Yeah, they're looking for a platform. They only care about your platform. And I think they're starting to realize, though, that even the platform doesn't sell.

Simone Collins
So what do they do? Or an author without a platform, there is no reason for them to work with you or really give you any money, and then you can go out and sell by yourself. But then, like, why not just keep all the money? Like, you really gain so little by going through the traditional publishing houses and as repeated bestselling authors. I can just go through what you're getting from them.

Malcolm Collins
A chance at a New York Times bestseller slot, if you are the right politics. If they're a New York publisher. If they're a New York publisher, okay, so that's what the second thing you get is some credibility among idiots. Prestige. But most people don't really care.

The other thing that you get is it's not really helpless marketing. They don't really do that anymore. So you're not really getting that. You might like the editorial oversight, some don't, but really, it's, they're like that. You get editors, it's no, you lose control of editing.

You lose control of the title of your. Some like that, some don't. Some like that, some don't. We have to say that some people. Just want to be told by may get an advance.

If you don't expect your book to do well, yeah, 100%, go for that advance. As long as you can get out of the fine print that Simone's talking about, what do you lose? You lose pricing control, which is literally everything in today's market. Yeah. All of our books retail for $0.99 for the digital book because we know we're not going to make money from them, and we just want people to get them.

And we give everybody our audiobooks for free. If you get the digital book, you can also get them on audible if you like. Find it easier to use that platform because it's easier than using just mp3 files for some people, if they have a lot of money. But, yeah, we don't try to make any money off of our books. People are like, oh, I got your book as a favor to you.

And I'm like, then put it somewhere prominent in your house. That's how you do me a favor. All the profits go directly to our nonprofit bank account. So it does help the nonprofit. No, but we're making, like, 50 cent per book because I put it at, like, the lowest level that we can price it at.

Simone Collins
Yeah. So that's one thing that you're losing, which then makes it so you have less reach with your books. But if I wanted to go for more than, I'd be making higher margins. But then you also have total control of how it's released, where it's released, et cetera. And then for audiobooks, just read your own book.

Malcolm Collins
Like, initially we hired, like, audiobook people, and I was like, why am I doing this? I just read my own book. And that's the way we do our books now. But I think what this means is a lot of people, they see books as a refuge of, like, academics or intellectualism, but it isn't that anymore. I think the true intellectuals now are sub stack.

I think that's the most intellectual reading and high ideas engagement platform at the moment. Yes. And then after sub stack, I think it's blogs. Like, you go to aporia or something like that. And then after that, I think it's YouTube.

And then after YouTube, I don't really think anything is even in the game. Podcasts. Come on. Oh, yeah, podcasts together. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I guess podcast. Some people are watching this through podcasts. One of my favorites is like, oh, I watch your YouTube videos, and I put them through AI so I can turn it into written text, so I can read that and consume it faster. And I was like, we have a sub stack that automatically does that, right? I pre translate all of these to written text.

So that's the way you prefer to consume them. Like, my job is just. Or my goal is just to touch as many people as possible. That's the goal with these ideas and these platforms, and that's how you do it these days. You need to adapt to your environment.

And I think a lot of people will say things like, yeah, but the podcasts and the youtubes, those won't be seen as classics in 100 years. But I'm like, yeah, of course they will. And they're like, podcasts from 100 years ago aren't seen as classics. I'm like, podcasts for 100 years ago were things like the federalist papers. That was two people arguing against each other in, like, the op ed section of a magazine.

That was the podcast of its period. Or, like, St. Paul's letters or something like that. Not everything was done in book format. Yeah.

Even like this panic about people, like, young people over watching podcasts and it dumbing them down. I think you. You see this. In the early days of books, people were afraid of reading fever. Like, young girls getting reading fever.

They would just do nothing but read, it was said, and it was rotting their brains. Uh oh. And because they believed that books were addictive and messed with the brains of young women, if that sounds familiar to you. But anyway, I have loved this conversation, and I'm glad that we were able to bring this topic to our audience. Likewise, TL Doctor, don't write a book, make a podcast, or substack.

And I love you to death, Simone. Love you, too, gorgeous. You are amazing. And if you do want to check out our books, it's the pragmatist Guide series, and we have one on religion, sexuality, relationships, life and governance.

Simone Collins
And if you do want to check out our books, it's the pragmatist Guide series, and we have one on religion, sexuality, relationships, life and governance.

Malcolm Collins
And if you do want to check out our books, it's the pragmatist Guide series, and we have one on religion, sexuality, relationships, life and governance.