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Quite a few people make this argument, thank you for mentioning it. My feeling is that this is a holdover from a time when there was a substantial barrier-to-e
by braythwayt 9y ago
Quite a few people make this argument, thank you for mentioning it.
My feeling is that this is a holdover from a time when there was a substantial barrier-to-entry for authorship. Back when publishers were the gatekeepers, anybody could write a book, but relatively few were published.
People could vanity-press anything, but nobody would hear about them, because just as publishing was concentrated, so was marketing.
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But today, anybody can publish a book, and likewise anybody can market a book, super-cheaply. "I wrote X" is worth geometrically less today than it was a decade ago.
If you write a book for other reasons, by all means bask in the reputation. But I find it extremely unlikely that if you are doing it strictly for economic reasons, that writing a book and then marketing it is going to be superior to the many other ways you might have of building your professional resume.
Maybe you should answer a lot of questions on Stack Overflow. Or--like me--become a blowhard on Hacker News.
- themodelplumber 8y agoI don't think it's really as easy as you say. At the same time, it wasn't really hard to self-publish in the 20th century either; even self-marketing could be a matter of buying mailing lists and paying for help with bulk mailing. I had friends who did it and sold their books in local bookstores too. Putting a book together, as compared to many things, takes a lot of time and energy and definitely sends social signals. Just last night a friend dropped "he just published a new book" in conversation where Stack Overflow creds would have sounded like a joke. SO just isn't known the way book publishing is. Since the comment was an effective social cue to the audience, she freaked out and asked a bunch of questions. It still works just fine.
- braythwayt 8y agoWhat you describe sounds more like "proof of work" than "proof of competence." The bottom line of your story seems to be that anybody who publishes a book must have worked hard to write it. And we are to assme their expertise because... They wouldnkt have bothered unless they had something worthhwile to say? That may appeal to some, but given the number of books written that are absolute dreck, the argument carries no more weight with the discerning audience than saying that you put in the work to get a CS degree, so you must be smart. Now, if you write a book and get nice reviews, thatks a different signal. But absent that... I doubt it's more than an invitation to a conversation. I wouldn't want to belong to any club whose sole requirement was that I had written and self-published a technical book.