Remnant Review
Recently, someone asked if I would read his book critical of somebody else. In almost all cases, I turn down these requests.
My time is valuable. Now that I devote time to my anticancer protocols, I have even less time than before.
What really annoys me is this: an author who has just written his first book wants me to read it. This assumes that my time is of zero value to me. But the author is desperate to have somebody he perceives as having authority read his book.
He asked if he could send the book to me. I agreed, but I did not agree to read it. Nobody who is a published author is ever going to agree to read somebody else's first book. That just does not happen. He may take a look at it. He may look at some chapters. He may decide to read one or two chapters. But he is not going to agree in advance to read the book. He has read too many bad books already. He has shelves full of bad books. He has shelves of good books he hasn't read yet. He is not going to read the first book of an unknown author unless there is some payoff in terms of either amusement or knowledge.
A day or so later, I got a notification from the individual that he had sent me the book. Then, predictably, came the bottom line. He asked me to endorse the book. Any time an author senda you an already published book, he is fishing for something. He's not giving it away free of charge. He wants something. What he always wants is an endorsement.
Here's the problem. They want the endorsement because no one knows who they are. They naïvely think that an endorsement is going to sell the book. It isn't. But, being first time authors, and never having published anything, they are unaware of this. They really believe that the endorsement of somebody famous within a particular movement or group is going to sell their book. That is a classic mark of a first-time author.
When I got the book, I found that it was not a book. It was a 37-page pamphlet stapled together. Worse, it was printed in what appears to be 9-point type. It may be 8-point type. It is the type size associated with footnotes.
The moment I saw it, I knew that the project is doomed. It was published in a format that nobody over age 50 is going to read, and hardly anybody under age 50 is going to read. People don't read small-type books.
The pamphlet screamed "amateur." Never start your publishing career with a book that screams "amateur."
BEFORE YOU WRITE YOUR BOOK . . .
I do not recall ever having been asked for advice by any would-be author before he wrote his book. They always write the book, and then they want me to read it. They also want free advice on marketing. Above all, they want a public endorsement.
These people don’t understand the basics of book publishing. Here is one of them. A public endorsement doesn’t sell books. Basically, nothing sells books except being online, producing YouTube videos, having a popular website, giving away a free Kindle version on Amazon, or finding a publisher willing to put a lot of money into promotion, which publishers don’t do with first-time authors. Publishers are so desperate to get sales that they spend whatever promotion money they have on promoting the latest books by their two or three best-selling authors, who are committed by contract to using the same publisher to sell their books. This is left over from the bad old days, when authors signed contracts authorizing publishing houses to publish their next three or four books. No published author in his right mind signs such a contract anymore. Nobody needs publishers anymore. A successful book author can self-publish the book and make a lot more money than some dying publishing house is willing to pay them in royalties.
I have written articles on self-publishing. A budding author should go to the search engine on this website and search for this phrase (marked in parentheses): "your first book."
Of course, no budding author ever starts out this way. Nobody writing his first book is going to come to my website to find out what to do. A few of them will come to my website to get my email address, in order to contact me about reading the book they have already written.
FIVE RULES OF SELF-PUBLISHING
First, it is not a good idea to start your book writing career with an attack on a living author unless that author is really famous. This is because a career that begins with a negative book is not based on this crucial career assumption: "You can’t beat something with nothing." The person who starts his career with a negative book is attempting to fight something with nothing. He doesn’t have a reputation. Nobody knows who he is. He doesn’t have a website. He has not written two or three books that are positive. Nobody is aware of his operational presuppositions. Nobody knows if he knows what he’s talking about. Nobody knows if he has any alternatives to the person or movement he is writing about. It’s not good enough to list the reasons you don’t agree with somebody else. For each of these arguments, you need at least an article and preferably a long report on the positive alternative for the incorrect opinion that your opponent holds.
Nobody except a perpetual complainer is going to commit himself to your position unless he is confident that what he is committing to is both the beneficiary of positive sanctions and the supplier of positive sanctions. Anybody who commits himself to a negative movement is exactly the person you don’t want to attract in the first place. At some point, he’s going to turn on you, too. Count on it. He flits from negative cause to negative cause because he does not want to commit to anything positive. Don’t write a book that attracts these people. Remember this rule: “bright lights attract large bugs.”
I started my book-writing career with a book critical of Karl Marx, but Marx was long dead, and in 1968, when the book appeared, about a third of the world’s population lived under Marxist tyrannies. Also, there was a war in Vietnam going on, and officially that war was anti-Communist. So, I thought there was a market for my book when I began writing it in 1965.
Second, you need a website. Before you publish your negative book, you should have published 40 or 50 articles, plus several dozen book reviews, in order to establish your intellectual, moral, and practical credentials. People need to know what you believe in, not just what you think is wrong. Anybody can list a lot of reasons why something else or somebody else is wrong. This doesn’t involve much effort. The correct questions are these. What do you suggest as an alternative? Will this work? Is there evidence that it is productive?
Third, you need a YouTube channel. You need to produce videos on a regular basis. These can be talking head videos. They can be screencasts of PowerPoint presentations. They must be available online. You have to build the following online. This requires short videos, no longer than three minutes. Then it requires longer videos of perhaps 9:52 minutes. Then it requires teaching videos, which are to be about 25 minutes, unless they are Sunday school courses, in which case they probably should be about 35 minutes.
Fourth, don’t start with a pamphlet. A pamphlet is usually always negative. Again, anybody can write a negative pamphlet. It doesn’t prove anything. I started my writing career with a pamphlet: Inflation: The Economics of Addiction (1964). I still have a copy of it. I hope nobody else does. I later published it as a chapter in my book, An Introduction to Christian Economics (1973). As a chapter, it’s fine. The pamphlet was poorly typeset, poorly printed, and an embarrassment. I learned my lesson.
Fifth, don’t have anybody else write a preface, a forward, or an introduction. This is the classic sign of a person who is insecure. He thinks he needs support from experts who either don’t know him or who are not going to commit much time and energy to promoting his work. If you are sufficiently informed to write a negative critique of somebody else or something else, then you had better be sufficiently confident that you can do this all by yourself. Don’t look for anybody else to baptize you or your book. Whenever I see a book with an introduction by somebody else, unless I know the author of the book, and have read something else that he has written, I immediately think: “This is an insecure person who is not really confident about what he is writing.”
My first book had a preface by my father-in-law, R. J. Rushdoony. I did not ask him to write it. I did not want him to write it. But because he had intervened with the publisher to get my book published, I did not complain. When I reprinted the book in 1988, I did not reprint his introduction.
Never self-publish a book that needs a foreword from a third party unless the person writing the introduction has a Facebook following of 100,000 people or more. Better yet, he has a mailing list of 100,000 or more. If the person you want to write the foreword doesn’t have a mailing list, then his endorsement is not going to make a difference in terms of sales.
Fifth, you need a systematic marketing program for your book. It should begin with a free Kindle edition. The Kindle edition should contain a short bit.ly URL to a page on your website that offers a free PDF of the book. The PDF should be indexed. Let readers of the Kindle edition know this. Your sales page should also offer a hardback version of your book. Make sure this price is high enough to generate some profit. Sell only a hardback. People will pay extra for a hardback. True believers want a hardback. I recommend a price of $24.95. You are not going to sell many of them, but at least you will make some money on the ones you sell. These should be available either from a P. O. Box, or on Amazon’s site. If you sell directly by mail, print at least 250 copies. The easiest way is to have it published by print on demand, which can do everything automatically: print, bind, package, and ship. You get the names and addresses. You don’t want to pay for the fulfillment. You will not make much money in royalties, but you’re not writing the book to make money. You’re trying to expose the errors of somebody or something.
You need a comprehensive marketing program in place before you write your book. I don’t mean before you self-publish your book. That goes without saying. You need to have a comprehensive marketing program before you write the outline of your book. You have to know what you’re doing. You have to be clear about your main goal for the book. Every step in the book-writing and book-publishing process should be governed by this single goal.
CONCLUSION
Any movement has to have a positive program and a negative program. This is because there are positive and negative sanctions in life. Not many people have the ability to balance positive and negative sanctions in their lives. We are supposed to learn how to do this as parents. It is not an easy thing to learn.
When you’re starting a local movement, it had better be based primarily on positive sanctions. The negative sanctions should be outworkings of a systematic program of positive sanctions.
In direct-response marketing, this is an unbreakable law: “Lead with the benefits. Follow with the proof.” This rule should govern the recruiting strategy of every new movement and every old movement.
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