Who here has written a book?
 

Beginning next week or so I'm going to be helping a friend of mine market his soon to be released book. It's largely autobiographical and discusses his investment strategy in going from $20K to $2 Million in 3 years. I can't say the title yet, but I will when the time is right. So, in reading the book and in having a vague idea of the effort that goes into writing a book, I can't help but being just as impressed with the fact that he wrote a book that is about to be published by a major publisher as I am with the fact that he turned $20K to $2 Million during the peak years of the financial collapse.

The only other time I've had a friend write and publish a book, it was a couple years after he had returned from Iraq and by then he had already started a 527 and made several TV appearances, so it just kind of seemed like publishing book was par for the course. Here's a link to that book. It's good.

http://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Ghosts...012904-2019260

Has anyone here written a book? How did you feel when you finished ? Was it more like elation or relief?

I just asked my friend and he said this upcoming book is about 60,000 words and that he worked on it for 8 hours per day over the course of seven months.

To put that in perspective, I did an SEO overhaul of my site in June and made a spreadsheet to help in tracking keyword density and various other things. The number count for pages, just pages not posts, are somewhat comparable

269 Pages
52,177 Words
194 Words/Page

That also includes titles and anchor text, so you'd have to take 10-20% off to compare apples to apples, but I can only imagine how difficult it would be to be put all that focus on one book.

Anyway, that's it. Just felt like rambling.

I was thinking of writing a book on how I went from $2 million to $20K in less than three years, but then I felt like shooting myself in the face - so I stopped.

Best of luck to you, though, Mr. Jimmy Cooper - and your brothers Austin, Healy, and Mini.

I havent written a book yet but i am planning on to write one about my last 3 years of life

wish you good luck

I wrote a short novel. Serial killer thriller.

lol. Thanks. I actually picked the name 'Jimmy Cooper' after watching The OC on the Soap Net right after I decided to start my site. I thought it was a very basic, unassuming alias.

If I ever write one, which I hope to at some point, it would be fiction largely based on me. Labeling it fiction would make it easy to have some fun when filling in the gaps. Kind of like what Hemingway did or what Bukowski did with Henry Chinaski, the main character inall of his books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski

Reminds me of one of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes.

"I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year.... It's very character-building." -- Steve Jobs

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/com...?currentPage=2

How long did it take? Have you sold many copies?

I recently finished my first book. Have an agent and a publisher. Had some legal issues with the past agent that is holding up the publication of the book, but it will happen sooner or later and I have started on a new book in the mean time.

My book is about 150K words. Took me a few years to write it because I was working full time on my sites and other stuff at the same time so writing the book was a part time thing for me.

When I finished it I had a sense of relief and joy. I had finally gotten through it and seen it through to the end. What was a bigger validation was getting an agent and publisher. This meant that not only did I do it, but other people in that business think it is good.

It was a hell of a lot of work and there is no way to know how much I will make off it. I could do well, I make make very little, but I enjoyed the process enough and have enough passion for it that I have started a new book so the process begins again.

Off topic, but I started the thread, so fuck it.

I've also been reading a bunch of old articles from eXile.ru, which was Matt Taibbi's website from way before he wrote for Rolling Stone. There's some really great writing all throughout the website.

Here's an editorial titled God Can Suck My Dick
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail....3&IBLOCK_ID=35

And here's the author page for Denis Salnikov, a fictional character that they made up to write club reviews. He's supposed to be the son of an oligarch. Some really funny stuff in there.

http://www.exile.ru/authors/detail.php?ID=2337

But your avatar is a Datsun (can't really tell as my eyes are fucked and the perspective anin't helping...)?

Wow. Nice work!:thumbsup

I have wrote reports on books, but never a book itself.

Just get a tape recorder and start talking. Send it out to a writter offshore and your book will be on press in 30 days. Who types these days...

Yeah, 240Z. Completely unrelated. I just think they're cool cars.

Close to a year. Unpublished. I did it for personal reasons. I then started writing another one and was halfway through it and still have it in my hard drive. My plan was to try and get the second one published but other opportunities got in the way and I could not find the time to keep writing. It's long and hard work, and a very lonely hobby.

any foo can self publish these days ever heard of lulu.com they isbn you and put you on amazon etc, print on demand. and btw nobody buys autobiographies unless/until you're newsworthy because frankly people are selfish and dont give 2 shits about what you think is cool or fuckedup in your life

write a page a day. in a year you have a book more or less.

A page a day is a lot harder than it sounds.

while everyone can get a book published now the real problem is cutting through the noise and getting notices. there is just too much distractions and info out there.

yes it's hard unless you are lucky to hit a nice groove for awhile.

yep. anyone can publish a book. Getting people to buy it is a whole different story.

I think Paul Markham wrote a book about magic or something recently

Oddly enough I got my name Jay from Chino in a very similar fashion...

Actually it had nothing to do with The O.C. and more to do with my middle name James and my dad's being moved to a corporate office in San Bernardino some 35 years ago...

I have written a few books. I have also written chapters in other peoples books, magazines and "zines".

My books centered around security, or better yet, the lack of it. Instead of hacking into Sony and telling the world about it I wrote manuals for admins to read and begin to think like a hacker.

I wonder if I've fresh any of your stuff or world's like to.