Why to Not Write a Book

I found a families, great grandfather’s memoirs while doing their estate. I realized with the family all gone and there were few in his class with the education to speak of early American life so I published it and illustrated the e-book. https://books2read.com/A-young-Mans-Adventures-In-19th-Centu...

That sounds like hundreds of hours of work.

So curious who the anonymous example is

Maybe just me, but authors gravitate towards certain formats that fit them. Oscar Wilde did great with Dorian Grey but it was nothing compared to his plays. Imagining J.K. Rowling writing a blog feels wrong. I get Gwern's perspective, I'm not sure if I would read a gwern.net book... but on the flip side Randall Munroe (XKCD) has a couple of great books. So who knows?

The main reason not to write a book is that the topic doesn't need a book-length treatment, and would be better as an article. Fiction of course is one thing, but even then, some fictional ideas and personality combinations are better as short stories. Personally, as a reader, I find a lot of book ideas interesting (especially in the realm of popular science), but I can stomach very few of them because they are excessively wordy and often full of overly long (IMO) personal experiences.