My Books, Essay #1

My experiences with publishing

I will write a series of essays that extracts ideas from my published books. But I will start off with an essay about what I learned about the book marketing process itself.

My first book was Under the Radar: Starting Your Net Business Without Venture Capital. In 1994, I had started one of the very first Web-based businesses, a site focused on real estate and mortgage finance, as a solo entrepreneur. I folded it into a partnership with a relocation firm more than a year later, and we unloaded it onto one of the public Dotcom companies in 1999, which was a good time to sell a Web business.

The experience was intense. In those days, we talked about dog-years, where one year of being in business on the Net was like several years of being in business in the pre-Web days. So for me writing the book was to some degree therapeutic, a chance to pause and reflect back.

The book that I intended to write was my analysis of the significance of the Internet, both commercially and in general. But that is not what I ended up writing.

My thinking was that if I wanted people to read the book, I needed to get a publisher behind it. In order to get a publisher behind it, I believed I needed an agent. I contacted one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a successful book about the Internet, and asked for suggestions about an agent. I took the suggestion.

I wound up writing the book that the agent succeeded in pitching instead of the book I wanted to write. It was a book that described my own experience (that is probably the best part) and also had short “case studies” of a couple dozen other entrepreneurs, most of whom were just getting started.

I advise against writing a book based on what an agent is able to pitch. Years from now, the only people who might care about your book are your grandchildren. You want them to read your book, not your agent’s book.

I expected that the publisher would work on publicizing my book. That was wrong. Publicizing your book is your responsibility. In fact, publishers nowadays care about your ability to self-promote (how many Twitter followers do you have?) at least as much as they care about your manuscript.

Not satisfied with that experience, I self-published my next book. Titled Learning Economics, it was a collection of essays that I had written on the Web, mostly for a site called TechCentralStation (TCS). There was no conflict with an agent over the content of the book. But there was no publicity for the book. So that was not particularly satisfying, either.

Health care policy was a major issue in the early 2000s, and I wrote several essays on that topic for TCS. Cato’s Brink Lindsey and Michael Cannon commissioned me to write a book, which became Crisis of Abundance. I don’t know how well it did, but I am very proud of it. I said in 2006 when it was published that I thought that the analysis would hold up for ten years, regardless of how health care policy might change in the meantime. In fact, as of 2024 I still think that the analysis holds up. I don’t think you will find a better book on health care policy written before or since.

Another book that made me proud was my next effort, written with TCS editor Nick Schulz. We championed an approach to economics that emphasized intangible factors, as opposed to the materialist focus of mainstream econ. I contributed chapters that were essays on various topics, and Nick contributed chapters that were interviews with famous economists, such as Paul Romer and Robert Fogel.

For publication, we went with a conservative publisher, Encounter Books. We struggled to come up with a title for the book. The first edition was called From Poverty to Prosperity, which captured some aspects of the book but failed to convey the main theme. When the paperback version came out, it was retitled Invisible Wealth, which better described the theme of intangible economic factors.

Whatever you title that book, its lessons are timeless. That is fortunate, because the process of getting it into print was delayed.

Meanwhile, I had written another book, this one solicited by Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution. Titled Unchecked and Unbalanced, it is my most libertarian book. But while it was being written in 2008, the Great Financial Crisis occurred, and Peter convinced me to tie that event to the main theme of the book, which was that in the United States power has become too centralized.

The result is a mixture of some timeless thoughts and a discussion of then-current events. I think that each detracts from the other. When I refer to the book, I always call it “widely unread.” One consolation is that George Gilder read it and credited in his book Knowledge and Power, because one of my main themes was what I called the knowledge-power discrepancy, with policy makers in Washington having too much power relative to their knowledge.

Speaking of the financial crisis, Mercatus published my lengthy analysis called Not What They Had in Mind. You might think of it as a book, although it is shorter than that.

In 2013, not long after Amazon introduced self-publishing for the Kindle, I came out with The Three Languages of Politics. This was to become my most well-known work. Cato’s Aaron Ross Powell offered to publish a new and expanded edition in their Libertarianism.org imprint. I have not tracked total sales, and I took a fixed $5000 payment with no royalties, but that book has been a pretty decent word-of-mouth success.

I am also very proud of another book that Cato published, called Specialization and Trade. I think of it as economics as it should be presented, as opposed to mainstream economics today. You owe it to yourself to read it. You can download it for free. Of course, reading it will cost your time.

I wish that this book were better appreciated. The late Herb Gintis put up a nasty review on Amazon, which I am sure inhibited sales. He was a creative economic thinker, but way over on the left, and he hated the book for that reason.

I think that most of my books are under-promoted. As disappointed as I am with publishers, I have to put most of the blame on myself. I just seem unable to focus on self-promotion. If you write, and you want to be read, do as I say and not as I do. That is, play the promotion game really well.