Books and Startups

Even though books cannot have the explosive growth characterizing startups, they remain standalone digital products: we can approach both similarly.

Each time you publish an ebook, you increase your chances of success. If the probability of writing one successful book is 10%, publishing 7 books will increase this probability to 52% (because 1-(1-0.1)^7 = 0.52). 

You would need to release about 10 books to make your odds favorable (65%). It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when we imagine what it would take to write them, but let’s run the numbers first.

Publishing 100 words every day for a year gives you a solid 36,500 words. That’s already enough to package one non-fiction book. Some non-fiction books sell for just 10,000 words, so this is a generous upper limit.

If we were to mimic Stephen King and write 2,000 words every day, we would obtain 730,000 in a year. Or at least 12 non-fiction books in 12 months, to paraphrase the famous 12 Startups in 12 Months challenge. 

Taking into account the huge amount of research non-fiction books require, it would surely be an incredible feat to write that much. But if we instead document our lives and take extensive notes from the media we consume, I’m sure there is a way to write a good 1,000 words on any given workday. In other words, writing 10 books in a year is not as impossible as it sounds.