Beware, citizen, you are now departing from the world of allowable opinion.

The Tom Woods Show.

Welcome, everybody. It's Wednesday, September 3rd, 2014.

And I'm talking today about publishing.

I have some experience in this area.

And I thought some of you who may have an

interest in writing or publishing a book or anything like that may find this helpful, but even

if you're not, I bet you might find a sneak peek behind the scenes interesting and revealing. I bet

you're going to learn some things you didn't know about book publishing.

So let me dive right into this. I thought of this idea yesterday when I did that Q&A session,

and then tomorrow we'll go back to having guests. We've got the author of The $100 Startup tomorrow, so that's going to be interesting. But I thought I'd do a little episode on publishing.

I want to start off with the subject of sales.

There are people who think, I'll write a book and then I will retire on the royalties. And these

people are deluded. These people are living in la-la land. There is no such thing that is not going to

happen. Even people in the Liberty Movement, whom I thought kind of knew how this all worked

will come up to me and say, boy, that's great, you must have sold millions of copies.

Well, let me tell you something, nobody sells millions of copies. I wrote an article for

Lou Rockwell.com some years ago called precisely that. Nobody sells millions of copies. Now, there are exceptions,

and I'm talking about nonfiction. Fiction, of course people sell millions of copies.

Americans don't read nonfiction. That's just a fact. They do not read nonfiction.

So to get them to buy nonfiction in any quantity whatsoever is a feat of, I don't know,

Herculian proportions, let's say. They just don't buy them. And that is borne out by the statistics.

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