No matter how good a writer you are, no matter how clever your style, no matter how refined your wit, just don’t.
Of the 195,000 non-fiction books written in the English language last year, only a few hundred of them sold above 1,000 copies, if I remember Thomas Woods’ figures correctly.
Very bad idea.
What if you’re doing it for fun?
How about a fiction
If you’re trying to be an academic, it’s better to focus solely on writing journal articles, and then compile your articles into an edited collection/book. Peer-reviewed articles get you tenure faster, and are looked upon more approvingly by the profession.
Writing a book proper is not fun; you write, and then you read what you wrote very slowly, and then you erase most of it, and then you write it again, and then you organize it properly, and then you rewrite it again to connect it properly, and so on.
You see, my father was a telecom lobbyist back in the days of extreme regulation of telecom, and he was once considering writing a book about the industry and its future direction in the poor world. He considered against, after seeing how many people were likely to know of or read it.
I also know a few profs who wrote books long back, and were forced to make myriad revisions by publishers and suit it to be in a particular manner, so much so that they prefer not to write any more.
Books are like business, in the sense that it’s about luck and creative destruction, in which most attempts fail. Except that means that the people who can have their books sell are good at understanding books market, and not necessarilly the area on which they write. Can a man be an expert in both books and his own field?
What about self-publishing and advertising your work yourself?
@Prateek Sanjay
i thnk a more proper criticism would be don’t invest lots of your money in writing a book, or keep your expectations to a minimum or simply don’t loan or invest your money in writers. I would probably reccomend to anyone aganist putting yourself in a situation of ‘writing to live’, but by all means if you ‘live to write’ well, write! If you find that only your spouse and your mother buy a copy of your book, then write it off as a monetary loss and a cognative gain and put it out on the interent for free.
Writing is such a fun process and i love Rothbards words of advice, “if you don’t know enough about a subject, write a book on it”.
It is true that writing can be tedious at times, as is studio time for bands when they are need to play and play till its right, or when your an artist trying to find an outlet for people to see your work.