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

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.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] That means authors are earning roughly between 18, 000 and 180, 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 percent chance of selling less than a thousand copies. Okay Ilyan Omar 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 sold only

Simone Collins: 26,

Malcolm Collins: 000 copies.

Piers Morgan.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: 8 million on followers on Twitter. In the U. S. it sold just 5, 650 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 [00:01:00] their project, publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book 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 preexisting follower base into money.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They're looking for a platform. They only care about your platform. And I think they're starting to

Malcolm Collins: realize though, that even the platform doesn't sell

Simone Collins: This conversation is really relevant to people who are thinking about writing a book,

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! We are gonna 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.

[00:02:00] 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 U. S. 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 gets through only 16 books. And that's presuming those 15 minutes are spent reading books. And 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, [00:03:00] 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 U. S. And of the 2, 468 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 Kussler, and 25 were written by Daniel Steele. A huge chunk is written by very few people.

Simone Collins: [00:04:00] And this, we've seen this in other stats in terms of how much authors sell, like a very few.

Very small number of books, ultimately. Oh, we're

Malcolm Collins: about to get into that.

Simone Collins: Okay. This is bad.

Malcolm Collins: This is bad. According to the EPJ data, 96 percent of a fiction book sales take place in the first year, and the majority of the New York Times bestselling books sell between 10, 000 and 100, 000 copies in their first year.

Presuming the average royalty check is 12 percent and the average hardcover fiction book retails at 15, that means authors are earning roughly between 18, 000 and 180, 000 on a bestseller. This is a New York Times bestseller. 18, 000 to 180, 000.

Simone Collins: Also, writers are not being paid anything, so why would they

Malcolm Collins: 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 [00:05:00] paid anything.

Malcolm Collins: And you're splitting that with the publishers.

Simone Collins: Yeah. When you're like a bestselling 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.

Malcolm Collins: 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, why don't you use some of like your books money? Like you guys taught the wall street journal, nonfiction bestseller list.

And I was like yeah, we did. We did. We did talk to the wall street journal, nonfiction bestseller list. And they're like what did you do? I'm one of my favorite things. 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 just make money again.

And they're like wait. Why did your least selling book? top the Wall Street Journal nonfiction bestseller list, but none of your others did. And the answer is simple. [00:06:00] 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 listen to 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. 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. 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. [00:07:00] Is being split with a publisher or max around 180, 000 for a normal New York Times bestseller that's being split with a publisher.

He's taking about half now. So 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 that sold in one year number of print titles that sell over a million is zero A number of digital titles that sell over a million is one and number of audiobooks is zero.

Wow. 500, 000 to 1 million number of print titles eight You Number of digital titles, 10 and number of audio books, six, a hundred thousand to half a million print titles, 260, a number of digital titles, 267, and number of audio books. 111. And something you'll start to notice from this point in the chart on that's really interesting is the number of print [00:08:00] books and digital titles that make it into each of these categories is about equal.

So what is you get this explosion in the digital world, but it's really not that much above the print world. Or you get that one book that's over a million 10, 000 to a hundred thousand print 6. 5, 000. Digital 7, 000, audio 2, 000 and then 1, 000 print 57 digital 75 1, 000 audio books, 17, 000.

Simone Collins: So we're doing actually pretty good in terms of our book sales. When you think about

Malcolm Collins: 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 smutty sometimes money teen fiction and stuff.

When you look at what's actually selling.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. A lot of the books that actually sell a romance novels are really smutty. When you talk with

Simone Collins: [00:09:00] authors about authors who actually make money, they're romance novel writers. So yeah.

Malcolm Collins: 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.

So in 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon 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 percent and 11 percent 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 [00:10:00] 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 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

Simone Collins: that so checks out. Multiple copies of the Very Hungry Caterpillar in our house. I

Malcolm Collins: tripped 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 a thousand 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 [00:11:00] 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.

Simone Collins: Which is wild because when you look at old libraries, when you look at people read it in the past, it was a different story. The market hadn't discovered yet that you could publish gossip and romance and whatnot in books, but it's crazy to think about the old library when used to look like now people buy books just for signaling.

There are lots of people like YouTubers, people with their zoom backgrounds, with all these substantive books. I feel like maybe now 50 percent or more of the substantive, nice hardcover books that are being bought literally as zoom background or YouTube background dressing. Nothing more.

Malcolm Collins: I wouldn't be surprised about that at all.

And I would also just to promote books for a second here, or even audio books. Like you could be listening to a podcast, like the one [00:12:00] that you're listening to with us. 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 audio book, right? If you are listening to this podcast versus one of our audio books, 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 audio book was counterchecked by each of us. Maybe a hundred times.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And there's

Malcolm Collins: still typos. There are still

Simone Collins: typos and three people copy edited them. 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 you 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. [00:13:00] But when we look at their book,

Malcolm Collins: people watch my YouTube channel, they don't read the books that much. Yeah.

Simone 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 clear 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. 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 found that podcasts are the same. So you have to be thoughtful about where you are.

But [00:14:00] books should not be on.

Malcolm Collins: 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. Engage them. I don't care about being famous.

I care about changing minds. 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, super scripted stuff from us.

Simone Collins: Yeah, exactly.

Malcolm Collins: 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, cause it's, this is actually really interesting stuff.

Okay. So Madeline McIntosh, CEO of Penguin Random House US in 2020. [00:15:00] Only 268 titles sold more than 100, 000 copies and 96 percent of all the books they publish were less than a thousand 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 Penguis 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 percent chance of selling less than a thousand copies.

Like when we talk about how it's worse than

Simone Collins: venture capital, isn't it?

Malcolm Collins: 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 [00:16:00] at 8, 000 views over 8, 000 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 the 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 at 8 of 10 of our last 10 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, that's not just 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 books?

500, [00:17:00] 000 units or more during this four year period. My understanding is that it was about 50. And I'm 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 outperforming 96 percent of authors who get, goes 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 a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2, 000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

Okay, so next 75 percent of our acquisitions come from approaching celebrities, politicians, athletes, [00:18:00] 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, i. e. guaranteed money, in excess of 250, 000. Far fewer than 1 percent of authors receive advances over that mark. Publishers Marketplace, which tracks these things, recorded 233 such deals in all of 2020.

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna 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 advance for something of that is around half a million titles was a sale goal of 000 units get an advance of 150, 000 to a million titles with a sales goal [00:19:00] of 75, 000.

000 units get an advance of actually 50, 000 to 150, 000 more than you'd expect, given how little they're making, where you can really see what they mean by this is a pet project. Titles with a sales goal of 5, 000 to 10, 000 units. So imagine one of our episodes on 5, 000 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, 000 or less, but that's still pretty good.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it is. And

Malcolm Collins: 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 subtext gets more views than that.

Yeah, I think

Simone Collins: 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 subsack subscribers as an equivalent or paid Patreon followers or paid YouTube subscribers or people who leave super thanks on YouTube, because [00:20:00] 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.

Malcolm Collins: And here 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 publish them last year. And they did not even make it into the top 1000 books on book scan. Less than 45 percent 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 they're giving these million dollar advances to are even making it into the top thousand bestselling books. And to be clear, we have regularly made it into the top thousand bestselling books. It is not hard to get into that, to get into the top thousand bestselling books.

You are, you need to sell like 10, 000 copies I think, or something around there. It's really not that hard. [00:21:00] 5, 000 copies, I think on a launch month. Um, okay, sorry. According to Hill, 85 percent of the books with advances of a quarter million and up never earn out their advance.

85 percent 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, so sometimes you think it's going to be a big bestseller, floss. Andrew Cuomo's book was sold at the height of his being America's governor during COVID crisis.

Cuomo. 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 Marie 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 [00:22:00] well the singer billy ellish despite her 97 million Instagram followers and 6 million Twitter followers only sold 64, 000 copies within eight months of publishing her book.

Simone Collins: Billie Eilish only managed to sell 64, 000 copies. She has more fans than that.

Malcolm Collins: The singer Justin Timberlake sold only 100, 000 copies of his book in three years after he published it.

Simone Collins: 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 too, that's the thing is my whole point is also, you have to keep in mind number of books being sold are mostly gossip, romance, totally not substantive.

And the problem here is that even the non substantive stuff that, [00:23:00] 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.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. We've got more here. This one I think is going to surprise you. Snoop Dogg's cookbook saw a boost during the pandemic, but he still only sold 205, 000 copies.

Simone Collins: That makes sense. This whole Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart thing, as much as I love it, is very forced. It's, there's no

Malcolm Collins: audience for that. Okay. You want to hear another one that'll probably make you happy to hear. Okay. Representative Ilyan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, Ilyan Omar from the squad, whose

Simone Collins: daughter protested at Columbia and then became homeless and destitute because she was kicked out of Barnard.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: She's no global pop star, but she has a significant social media presence with 3 million Twitter followers. How many of those are Democrat bots? And another 1. 3 million on Instagram, yet her book, This is What America Looks Like, My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman, which was [00:24:00] published in 2022, has sold only, can you guess?

Simone Collins: I don't know, 12, 000 copies? 26,

Malcolm Collins: 000 copies.

Simone Collins: 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. 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,

Malcolm Collins: Here, I've got two more that are good ones. Okay, so Tamika D. Mallory, 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.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: 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 U. S. it sold just 5, 650 copies. 5, 000 for Piers Morgan's book.

Simone Collins: No one knows him here. Perhaps that's the [00:25:00] issue.

But I hear it. No one reads. No one reads. Also Gen Alpha doesn't know how to read. There's that. As well. So this

Malcolm Collins: 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. When you're reading all of this, there is no reason to go through traditional publisher anymore.

You are getting nothing. They're getting worse.

Simone Collins: 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, 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. Cause 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 [00:26:00] money, any actual readership? You might also be like completely in a financial hole. I don't think

Malcolm Collins: we've made what are you thinking?

If you're in the publishing industry, you're like, no, 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 preexisting follower base into money. That's what they're attempting to do. They are not attempting to turn nobodies into famous authors.

Simone Collins: Oh, no. Yeah. They're looking for a platform. They only care about your platform. And I think they're starting to

Malcolm Collins: realize though, that even the platform doesn't sell. So what do they do? You are 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?

Yeah. 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. A chance at a New York Times bestseller slot if you are the right politics.

Simone Collins: If they're a New York [00:27:00] publisher.

Malcolm Collins: If they're a New York publisher. Okay. So that's one. The second thing you get is some credibility among idiots, but most people don't really care. The other thing that you get is it's not really help with marketing. They don't really do that anymore. So you're not really getting that. You might get editorialized, but some don't.

But really it's, they're like you get editors. It's no, you lose control of editing. You lose control of the title of your book. Some like that, some don't. Some like that, some don't.

Simone Collins: We have to say that. Some people just want to be told what to do. And you

Malcolm Collins: may get an advance. If you don't expect your book to do well, yeah, a hundred percent.

Go for that advance. If, as long as you can get out of the fine print that Simone was talking about. What do you lose? You lose price and control, which is. Literally everything in today's market. Yes. All of our books retail for 99 cents 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 audio books for free. If you get the digital book, we, you can also get them on audible if you like, find it easier to use that platform because it's [00:28:00] easier than using just MP3 pot files for some people if they have a lot of money, but yeah, we don't try to Any money off of our books.

Some 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.

Simone Collins: We, all the profits go directly to our nonprofit bank account. So it does help the nonprofit. Yeah, moderately.

Malcolm Collins: But 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.

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 audio books, just read your own book.

Like initially we hired like audio book people, and then 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 the 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. [00:29:00] Reading and high ideas engagement platform at the moment. Yes. And then after Substack, I think it's blogs, like you'd 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.

Simone Collins: Come on.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, podcasts together. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess this is technically a 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 if 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 a hundred years. And I'm like, Yeah, of course they will. And they're like podcasts from a hundred [00:30:00] years ago aren't seen as classics.

I'm like, podcasts for a hundred 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, but they would just do nothing but read. It was sad and it was rotting their brains.

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.

Simone Collins: Likewise. TLDR. Don't write a book. Make a podcast or sub stack.

Malcolm Collins: And I love you to death, Simone. Love you too, Gorgeous. You are [00:31:00] 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.

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