The Bestseller List Is a Joke #substack #shorts

27 Mar 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:47

In this short YouTube monologue, the speaker advises aspiring authors to validate their book ideas before committing to a full manuscript. He suggests low‑effort tests such as publishing a blog post, sharing an outline, or asking a small group of friends for interest. He illustrates the approach with his own experience: over a year he wrote 100 blog posts, selected about 30 to form the chapters of his first book, "The Stoic Creator," effectively turning a blog series into a published work. The overall message is that authors should gauge audience demand early and use existing content as a springboard for a book.

Chapters

joke and that it's all bought and paid for. You know, what if before you wrote a book, you thought you wrote a blog post and see if 10 people are interested in what you want to talk about? What if you, before you even wrote a blog post, you talked to 10 friends and said, I've got this idea that I want to start to unpack. If I, you know, I thought of you when I was thinking about this, would you be interested in reading, seeing my outline or seeing my thesis or my premise or whatever? That's, those are all things that are doable. My very first book, basically I took, I wrote 100 blog posts over the course of a year. 30 went into chapters that became a book called The Stoic Creator. My first book was literally written blog to book.