George Kao argues that publishing a book rarely pays off unless you already have roughly 5,000 engaged readers. Instead, he recommends distributing work across Substack, Medium, Reddit, and X, using AI to automate posting and repurpose content into shorter pieces, visuals, and memes.
Is it still worth publishing books? Do people read them anymore? It's a very good question. And I haven't researched it. I haven't researched in, you know, in the past year whether it's worth publishing books, but my own feeling about it is no, unless you're famous. Obviously, if you're famous, people will still want to read your book, or if you already have an audience of at least thousands of readers, then I would say, yeah, maybe, maybe it's worth selling the book to them. You know, have thousands of avid readers. I would say I'm not, I'm like barely there. I have got, you know, 5,000 email subscribers. I have several Substack publications, each with over 2,000 subs, but I don't feel like I'm quite there yet to be worthy of selling books anymore. I've got 5 books. I published them before AI when books, when people, when human beings still read books. But yeah, I mean, I look at my own strategy now and I have not been motivated to publish a book for at least a year. So, and the other thing is if you publish a book, It's, it's, it's humans who are reading it. Uh, AI companies are unlikely to buy your book to, to, to, to, to train the data, um, unless you're famous. And so I want AI to— I think we should all want AI to train on our data because then AI is more likely to refer to us. Like, we're, we're in a world now where content is, is nothing. Now content is cheap. It's like air. And it's like, it used to be, oh, I wanna protect my content. Like, now it's like, please read my content. Like, I can't even get a single person to read anything. Like, it's almost like we're desperate for anybody to consume our content, you know? It's like, please, like having humans or even AI read our content is like, oh, thank you. Thank you. You know, like we're in that world now. Like, give it away. We can't give away enough content where people actually read it. It's like, oh, you read something? Oh my God, I'm so, Because you, you could have been talking to your AI the whole time. Like now we're competing with AI chats, right? So, so I would say if I, if you were my client and, and you're like, hey, I, I think I'd wanna write a book. I'm like, are you famous? Do you have at least, I'm gonna say at least, I'm just gonna ballpark it, at least 5,000, you know, readers of, of, of your blog posts. Regular, regular readers, not just random visitors, but like regular readers. Do you have at least 5,000? If not, I don't know that it's worth the effort to put together a book anymore, unless you can get a publisher to, you know, to pay you to write the book. That's wonderful. You have some certain connections or whatever. And so instead, it's better to put all that content on everywhere that you can on your website, because websites and Substack and medium.com That's where AI trains on the data, but also post everywhere to post it to Reddit, to X. You know, AI loves X and Reddit, but post it all over social media as well. But yes, now it's no longer an excuse that, oh, George, I don't like to click around. You don't have to be the one to click around anymore. You could post everywhere now. Just have your AI do it. You know, no longer an excuse not to be everywhere because it's now easy to be everywhere because you're not the one doing the admin work anymore, the technical work. So I hope this makes sense. Just post it everywhere and repurpose it into different formats. You might have long posts, have your AI do the post, but also have your AI do shorter posts. Have your AI do visual posts. AI turn it into videos. Have your AI turn it into memes, right? Like single images. So anyway, I hope this is helpful, and we just want to get our stuff out there and actually, hopefully, have some entity read it so that people can refer people to us. So I hope this is helpful.
