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> Now let's look at ebooks.

In January, I haven't done a single bit of promotion. No touring. No signing. No interviews. I've basically sat on my ass this month.

Fallacy. The classic example is the successful individual who gets paid $50k or more for a single speech. They would not have been bookable at the rate had they not created enough personal value to be worth that much. This author busted his ass on the road for years. He is probably the best example of "1,000 true fans" that I've read of recently.

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fan...



He's certainly riding on his previous success, but only a tiny bit, if you look at the orders of magnitude increase in his sales.

How did many thousands of new readers find him and decide to buy his books almost without doing any promotion? Through much lower cost of books, instant delivery, easy discovery through search and auto recommendations. And now he has more time to produce more. Accelerating sales!

The 1,000 true fans analogy doesn't hold for him at all. He has at least 10,000 fans and that number is going up fast.


It seems pretty implausible that he has 1000 true fans who bought 18,000 books in one month when he didn't have any new releases.




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