"Self Publishing Is The Worst Scam On The Internet." Tiago Forte
Practicing The Write Stuff Issue #15
This week I got to read a longform tweet - or ‘X,’ whatever you want to call them, from Tiago Forte, the self styled '“second brain guy.” The first line of his tweet is the headline of this week’s issue:
Here’s a link to the tweet so you can read it yourself if so minded:
https://twitter.com/fortelabs/status/1745325600045436991
Some of what Tiago says is valid, most is not (IMO). Here are 5 ideas to consider if you read the full tweet.
#1 “Self Publishing Is The Worst Scam On The Internet.”
Here’s the dictionary definition of ‘scam’ from Merriam Webster so we’re all clear:
Tiago is a decent writer, yet his usage of the word ‘scam’ is poor. (Think Mark Twain’s quote about lightning and lightning bug.) Maybe even just used as ‘click bait,’ as Tiago’s opinion expressed in the tweet is that traditional publishing is better than self publishing.
‘Scamming’ involves something being obtained from you be deceptive means. The majority of writers who self publish make that decision themselves, and do most of the work themselves. Some writers may have unrealistic expectations - e.g. “if I self publish my book I’m gonna sell tens of thousands of copies.” But that’s hardly being ‘scammed.’
And ‘worst scam’ on the interent?
Worse than credit card fraud, identify theft, crypto ponzi schemes, or malware viruses that freeze your computer unless a ransom is paid?
Not.
Even.
Close.
The worse case scenario from self publishing is that you publish a book that sells 5 copies. Or 10 copies. (Which, btw, can happen if you traditionally publish a book!)
Sidebar: there are companies that offer effectively self publishing services - the term ‘vanity presses’ is an umbrella term used for them - that could be called scammy. But this isn’t what Tiago is talking about.
If Tiago thinks self publishing is a scam, he’s deluding himself.
And if you want to look for scams in the publishing industry itself, here’s 3 to research and check out:
Most submissions to traditional publishers need an agent. Most agents take 10 to 15% of the royalty payments from your book sales for life. Also the traditional agent-author contract means the agent gets paid the author’s royalties, deducts their percentage, and only then passes that money onto the author.
Agents that charge a ‘reading fee’ to consider your book.
Contractual rights grabs.
Sidebar 2: talking about scams….the Kindle Version of BUILDING A SECOND BRAIN is $11.40 compared to $14 or so for the hardback version. No printing or shipping costs. No warehousing costs. Should be much cheaper. If Tiago was as bullish about getting his idea around the world to as many people as possible as he says, maybe he should get his publisher to lower the price of the Kindle version. Oh wait. He can’t.
#2 Survivorship Bias
Throughout Tiago’s tweet he argues that traditional publishing has greater benefits for an author than self publishing.
The main one is that publishing with a traditional publisher leads to greater revenues from the book because of greater sales. Despite the fact that you only get 10 to 15% of gross sales.
Unfortunately Tiago’s sales numbers are abnormal, he is an outlier. For some perspective, check out the screen shot below from a comment under a substack post entitled No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only A Dozen Copies. The screenshot is from Kristen McClean of Book Scan:
At time of writing, BUILDING A SECOND BRAIN (Tiago’s book) is selling approximately 16 copies a day in the US (based on an ABSR of 7249). Throw in another 14 copies a day on Kindle and that gets us close to the 10,000 mark in a year. (All numbers courtesy of Publisher Rocket and of course they’ll go up and down through the year.)
Based on the figures above that puts Tiago in the top 6 or 7% of authors based on Kirsten’s figures.
So he’s an outlier.
But even so he argues that the kind of sales he gets aren’t possible for self published authors. Hmmmm….let’s look at another outlier: Alex Hormozi.
I won’t get into the details from Publisher Rocket…but both of Alex’s books - 100M Leads and 100M Offers - are comfortably outselling Tiago’s books. Maybe by as much as a factor of 3 or greater.
Alex’s books are published by his company 'Acquisition.com.’ Whether he gets Amazon to print them, or whether he outsources the printing to a print company and then his team deal with the distribution….he’s self published.
And doing (substantially) better than Tiago.
#3. You get access to international audiences.
Tiago claims this is hard to do on your own.
As he’s self published books before Building A Second Brain, I’m sure he’s aware of the following fact:
The second your book is published on Amazon, it’s simultaneously available across the world in 12 different stores for physical and 13 or 14 for digital.
Since I’ve been publishing music books on Amazon I’ve gained students in territories I’ve never had before ranging from Singapore and Japan to Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Ecudor.
While those international sales only make up around 20% of my sales…those sales because (a few) people in those countries are searching for information of the kind that’s found in one or more of my books.
If I was in a bigger market re-publishing the books in a different language would be straightforward and cheap (maybe $500 per book) and doesn’t need anything more than a qualified translator.
If you want to go ‘wider’ than just Amazon….there are ways to do that too. And it’s straightforward as well.
#4 Tiago Gives Traditional Publishers Too Much Credit/Credibility.
Here’s a quote from the long from tweet linked - with my commentary afterwards:
…writing a book marks you as a public intellectual and thought leader. That's not just about status and vanity – it opens many doors to interesting people, places, events, and other opportunities
I agree with these statements.
They can apply equally to self published books too.
Do you think Alex Hormozi is not considered a thought leader because he self publishes his books? (BTW did you see the launch he did for 100M Leads….there’s not a publishing company in the world that would run something like that.)
For sure there are self published books that are shitty and have shitty covers. (But that also applies to traditionally published books as well.) But over the last 10 years publishing companies have been hollowed out and a lot of the talent is now outsourced…those editiors and cover designers are just as happy to work for you as they are for trad publishing.
Here’s a second quote:
I self-published 7 books before my traditional pub deal. In theory I had more control and upside with them, but in practice I didn't put in 1% of the same time and effort, and thus they weren't even 1% as good. The publishing process continually elevates your standards in dozens of ways, and I benefitted tremendously from the expert knowledge of the dozens of people who collaborated on it with me
Here’s the thing: readers don’t care about who publishes a book. They only care about the book. If Alex Hormozi’s next book was published by Penguin none of his hundreds of thousands of fans would care…they only want the next Alex Hormozi book. If Tiagowas speaking at an event I bet not 1 in 100 of his readers would know who his publisher is. (It’s Atria Books by the way, an imprint of Simon And Schuster.)
Tiago says his audience has grown by 10X since he published Second Brain, if he wanted to he’s now in a great position to self publish and sell to them. Maybe in the way Alex Hormozi has done.
Tiago also says this:
Side note: I know some of the above benefits are also available to self-published authors, but much less so, because they depend mostly on intangible factors like your credibility, authority, status, and visibility as an expert, which let's face it, is still nowhere near what a publisher offers
If a publisher automatically conferred all of those things on a book….why are there books published by a major publishing houses that sell less than 500 copies? Why doesn’t everyone published by a major publishing house sell the amount of copies that Tiago has sold? Or even better…the amount that Alex Hormozi has sold?
Also, if that was the case why is Second Brain outselling Tiago’s newer book The Para Method by a factor of 2?
#5 Financial Upside
Tiago talks about having a book being an opportunity to upsell to other products, courses and the like from within the book. And that publishers don’t take any of that income. He says:
Note that you keep 100% of all these monetization opportunities. The publisher, which fronted all the money and most of the risk, takes not a cent, even if you pitch your products throughout your book (as I did)!
He talks about publishing companies as if they are some kind of benevolent, almost charitable organization that exists solely to put quality works of art into the world.
Which is not true.
The 5 major publishing houses are all parts of multi billion dollar corporations. Ultimately they only care about the bottom line.
If you’ve read widely on the subject of publishing from people on both sides of the fence, (e.g. Kathryn Rusch’s Business Musings…sadly now defunt, but archive is still in place) you’ll know that over the last 15 years traditional publishing contracts have turned into naked rights grabs. They don’t want to be like the guy at Fox Movies who signed away the merchandising rights for Star Wars in perpituity for a half million dollar reduction in the fee Lucas got for directing/writing A New Hope.
So they’re trying to grab as many rights as they can.
Wouldn’t surprise me if at some stage that extended to percentages of upsells like this from within a book.
And while he acknowledges self published authors can do this (and I believe it’s turned out pretty well for Alex Hormozi!) he claims that if you are published by a traditional publisher these sales will be larger because of the increased credibility that publisher gives. If he’s got data that backs his claim I’d love to see it…
#6. A Better Indicator Of Whether To Go To Trad Publishers or Self Publish
Nicolas Cole wrote a twitter long form article on Self-Publishing versus Traditional Publishing. You can find that here:
That’s a much more nuanced take on which route you should go, though Cole is very numbers driven. His take is (IMO) much more compelling than Tiago’s.
#7 The Ride Out
Self Publishing is definitely not a scam. It’s also not the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket. All books take a deal of work. What you do with the book once it’s finished is up to you….but read Cole’s long form article for balance.
Issue 16
This Issue was only one day late - so work is getting back to normal. In Issue 16 there’s another article I saw recently that I want to take aim at. But I may get sidetracked by something else….so at this point we’ll see when we see!
Great article. Nice to see I am about to chip into the 0.7% with my self published book that is only relevant to the UK.
Tiago already had a massive following and great profile in the game.
I have studied his BASB book launch and it appears that it was mostly done by himself. The launch videos on YouTube are very good and a launch case study.
All the big trad publishers in the UK have battered down my door trying to get their hands on my books. Every time I say no.
I’ve been a self publisher for thirty years. Sales are made by strategic marketing, so you want to succeed, then nail that baby down!
Every single thing Tiago claims his trad publisher does for him, can be done by you, but some of those things can only be achieved with a shit ton of cash.
And his book, even though it’s published by trad, still isn’t anything special. The quality is so so.
To succeed you cannot be timid, you need to trust in yourself and have the balls to seize the market.
And that is where most authors fail. The marketplace can get pretty dirty and on the street, fights can break out. So you gotta be able to take some punches and throw some.
The timid might be better off going trad. Just don’t whine when you end up broke and they drop you after 3 months for their next love child.