The Novelleist
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The New York Times caused a stir recently when, in an article about pandemic book sales, it disclosed that “98 percent of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.”
Though this statistic was shocking to many, it is not new information. People don’t read books and the ones that do aren’t buying them. To make matters worse, “books that publishers released” are only the “success stories” those books that scored hard-won Big-Four publishing contracts and those are already a small piece of the book publishing market.
According to Bookstat, which looks at the book publishing market as a whole, there were 2.6 million books sold online in 2020 and only 268 of them sold more than 100,000 copies that’s only 0.01 percent of books.
It’s the greatest performance hack of them all, and all it costs is a third of your time on this planet, give or take an hour or two. I’m talking about sleep, which over the past few years has become even more of an obsession among athletes and other strivers. Forget Thomas Edison and his four hours a night: the mark of a great athlete these days is “high sleepability,” which is the skill of falling asleep quickly and easily whenever the opportunity arises, even if you’re not sleep deprived.
With that noble goal in mind, I bring you a new review paper, published in this month’s issue of
Or find it on SciHub or Libgen
Hire someone to pentest/doxx you
Or put out a bounty for it, like Gwern used to
Hire a graphic designer to turn your appalling sketches into beautiful diagrams or slides
Host small gatherings or conferences on topics you care about
These are much easier to set up than you’d think, especially in the age of Zoom
If you can use the gathering to bootstrap a group chat or community, so much the better!
Hire a tutor
Wyzant and many other sites exist for general tutoring
For niche tutoring you can try general freelance sites like Fiverr or Upwork