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Comment by mryall | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR:

After being dissatisfied with his earlier publishing efforts, Shed Simove found a cheap printing house online and used Amazon to sell his books directly, rather than going through a traditional publishing house.

Once he had the book printed and available on Amazon, he enlisted the help of a PR firm to start convincing journalists to write about it and media to talk about it. Together with some good photos and a Youtube video, his sales ended up taking off.

Lessons for hackers: technology is helpful, but marketing is more important than you think it is. Get in touch with people who can help.

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Your TL;DR misses the most important part of the summary: the book was titled "What men think about apart from sex" and the blank pages were the punch line.

I don't think that's very important, though, is it? I've seen these books years ago, one example was a blank book called "What men know about women". His book wasn't even that original...

I was initially left with the impression from the link title that he was running some kind of a scam or was selling books with the brute force of his marketing prowess. So yes, it is an important part of the TL;DR in that this is the piece of information that would have saved me from clicking on the link.

I think it's rather important. It's the equivalent of spending years writing (say) a MMRPG that turns out to attract only a handful of customers, then giving up and writing a fart app that goes on to sell a whole lot.

lowest common denominator

Sure it is. His normal job is designing/selling novelties like the "Man Controller" which is a non-functional remote control.

This book is another novelty, really. So he got to the top of the charts by playing his strength - novelties.

What I took away from this was the rather specific info that the PR firm made up (so far as I can tell?) a story about students using these as notes books.

The reason this is interesting to me is that I can see why journalists would use that much more than a generic press release about a new book.

I used to have an agreement with a used book dealer who would sell me any unprinted, blank misprints that he got. They make good bound notebooks, with better paper than all but the best notebooks have, and they cost less than the cheapest notebooks.

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