Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money

Authors have the same problem as musicians. Their work has zero marginal replication cost, zero distribution cost, low barriers to entry and they're competing for finite attention.

What invariably happens then is the top 0.1 percent of output is duplicated and sold to hundreds of millions of customers and that eats up all of the attention bandwidth for that vertical. It's the ultimate winner take all setup.

Contrast this to the prospect of running a successful restaurant that is fundamentally limited by geography. No matter how well it serves region A, region B, C, D, etc is still up for grabs. A franchise can try to duplicate its success, but it's much more costly than a successful author making endless free digital copies of their work.

I enjoyed this, I thought it mostly made good points, and it linked to other articles I will look at. Yet..

I started reading a blogger who teaches how to make a successful blog, sells courses about it, etc. I soon realized her blog is just about her making money from promising to help you make money from your blog. A frighteningly vacuous operation. It seems a modern cousin to the old ad in magazines promising to reveal the secret to wealth for $20. When you write to the given address you get a letter back saying "Do as I do." It's a pyramid operation.

Writing books about writing books seems similar. Selling the dream of high sales when you write on other topics, when their books are the same "making money from promising to help you make money" from your book seems a bit fishy, has a scammy element. It's more than a lil "Do as I do."

I share your opinion (I particularily like essays; I follow along the arguments, think whether I agree with them or not, etc. but absolutely hate the "how-to" kind of books which I strongly associate with the hustle and self improvement culture that I find quite toxic.)

But I agree with the author that the later kind of books seems much more popular with the general public, being handed solutions appears to be more attractive to many people that being encouraged to think about problems that probably aren't even relevant to them. And in a sense it's perfectly understandable, but I personally prefer the intellectual stimulation from a good essay over what is essentially a marketing speech from a professional hustler.

The real reason why most non-fiction authors don't make a profit is because only scam topics which sell a dream but don't add any real value can make any profit in our current scam economy.

Self-help gurus, spiritual charlatans, snake-oil salesmen, get-rich-quick con men, corporate consultants, slick marketing experts; these are the people who are making profit in our scam economy.

Just focus your energy on a fucking scam and you will make money by the boatload. You don't need a long article to tell you that. Just open your eyes and look around.

It's not just writing which is affected; every 'intellectual' industry is affected; art, music, science, politics, technology... All the successful people are scammers. That's why you can't find any good content anywhere these days. The shit always floats to the top. The media is concentrating all our attention on the shit and away from the good stuff.

Also, the rich people who are running the show are morons with no taste and 0 intellect.

> Marketing requires a huge budget in the VC age since you're competing with ever increasing ad prices.

This is a mental trap that is super easy to fall into. The author of the article is writing a marketing guide. Marketing encompasses the entire product and go to market design, of which advertising is just a tiny part. Notice in his table of contents that advertising is only mentioned in one chapter very late in the book.