Nicolas Cole argues the publishing industry misunderstands books as physical products when they're actually vehicles for thinking. His book The Art and Business of Online Writing contains ideas freely available online, yet readers pay $20 for curation and organization. He repackages the same content into Ship 30 for 30, an $800 course that adds live teaching, community, and gamified challenges.
The publishing industry really only thinks of a book as a book. And the reality is that a book is really just a vehicle for thinking, and that thinking can get monetized in a zillion different ways. This book, The Art and Business of Online Writing, this is such a good example of this. Every single idea, 100% of this book, is available as free content on the internet. Why do you buy the book? Well, you buy the book because you don't want to spend 50 hours scrolling through my X and my LinkedIn and my YouTube trying to piece together all of the ideas. You'd rather just spend the $20 and have me organize all of the most important ideas for you here. This book was the foundation of the entire Ship 30 for 30 curriculum. Ship 30 was just, instead of reading this book, I will explain this book to you live over 8 live sessions over the course of a month, and we're gonna make it interactive with a community, and we're gonna gamify the whole experience. Every idea inside of Ship 30 was already explained in this book. So why would someone buy the book and then spend $800 on Ship 30? Because it's not just the information. It's that people wanted the information plus they wanted to hear me explain it to them plus they wanted to implement the information with everyone around them. They wanted to be part of a challenge plus they wanted the information in addition to more, more, more. They wanted the templates. They wanted the examples. They wanted the behind-the-scenes breakdowns.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
