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NOTE Mises for the Masses: Publishing in the Austro-Libertarian Tradition

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So this is kind of a reflective talk like Roger's, and I don't know how many of the requirements for that I meet.

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At first, I'm supposed to be old, and I'm reminded of the scene in the Holy Grail.

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Old woman! Man! Man, sorry! I'm 37! What? I'm 37! I'm not old!

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All right, well, I'm 38. So it doesn't hold entirely.

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But the other thing is in terms of a measure of success, well, I have no t-shirt, okay, so I have something to strive for.

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What I'm going to do, though, nevertheless, is share just some of my experiences and see what we could maybe generalize from it.

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And you wonder, if I'm talking about my own life and my own experiences, why do I need a piece of paper?

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It's not that I can't remember these things, it's just that heaven forbid I should leave something out, right?

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So I've got all the things that I want to hit on.

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Well, the first part I want to do is just go through a few titles and just some of the

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things that happened as a result of them for me.

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And Joe mentions that I had done some scholarly writing, which is a polite way of saying that

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I wrote books that no one purchased.

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But that started to change a little bit in 2004.

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I had this book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and that sold really

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Well, I think in large part because the title is just so compelling and I wish I could take

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credit for that title, but I'm the worst title guy in history.

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So I would never have thought of a brilliant title like that.

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That was the publisher's idea.

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They came to me with this idea and said, we want somebody to write a book with this title.

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Would you do it?

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And I almost said, no, I'm just too busy.

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And I would have been like one of those record companies that told the Beatles, you know,

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Groups with guitars are on their way out, so we're not going to sign you.

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I mean, because if I hadn't done this, it would have just been horrendous, right?

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This was a great opportunity for me.

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So I did this, and it was really easy to do because I pretty much sat down and I just wrote the sort of things that I was already saying in the classroom anyway.

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Now, it turns out, though, that I was naive when I thought, and I did think this,

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that sure, I'm going to be saying some controversial things, but if I say them sincerely, then people, if they can't agree with me, they'll at least respect my position and we can have an honorable difference of opinion.

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And there's a teensy-weensy sense in which it didn't turn out that way.

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Now, for example, the book came out in late 2004.

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By January of 2005, the New York Times was writing about it.

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So you think, oh, I got a review in the New York Times.

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Not quite.

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I got a denunciation on the editorial page, not the book review section.

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So I was just that dangerous a little geek that I had to be on the editorial page denounced.

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So what was the nature of the denunciation?

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What was my big crime?

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What terrible things had I done?

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And the hilarious aspect of this little write-up was that they did not say, now Wood says such

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and such, and the reason this is wrong is da-da-da-da-da.

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No, it was sufficient to say, he says this, isn't that unbelievable, the nerve of this

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guy?

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And then he also says that, it's astonishing that he would say this.

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And I felt kind of uncowed, I hadn't actually said anything wrong.

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For example, can you believe he thinks the Marshall Plan was not really a central factor

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in the European recovery after World War II?

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And that was it.

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There was no argument.

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Can you believe he said it?

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This is the sort of thought control apparatus that we have in the media, that we're not

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going to bother refuting you because the very fact that we're attacking you already proves

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you're a crank.

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And as a crank, you don't deserve a refutation.

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We don't have the time.

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We're too busy making up propaganda for wars to have time to refute you.

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So I didn't get any refutation, or I actually said that I didn't think Franklin Roosevelt

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had done anything to get the country out of the Great Depression.

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Again, no attempt to refute this.

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They couldn't believe I had said it, so the whole review, such as it is, went that way.

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And I thought, well, this is kind of too bad.

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I guess my view that I'll just be treated nicely and so on doesn't seem to be panning

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out.

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It turns out that sales of the book really spiked after that because the average person thought,

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I don't know why the New York Times is so angry about this, but I have got to find out.

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So it was like I had won the Pulitzer Prize or something. It was the best thing that could have happened.

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And so what they've done in the future ever since then is I have a book come out, they just say nothing about it at all.

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But that book actually became a New York Times best seller for 12 weeks.

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It was partially because the New York Times strategy against it backfired, but also because

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I got some media for the book, and this is a theme I'm going to get to later, about how

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do you get your message out there.

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My publisher of this book, Regnery, is very plugged into sort of very traditional right-wing

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outlets.

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They're not really plugged into my traditional outlets, but I could always sort of reach

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those people already, but they could get me on to talking to Sean Hannity.

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And back in 2004, Hannity was on a program on Fox News called Hannity and Colmes. And

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it turns out Colmes is actually a much more genial guy than Hannity. I mean, I had been

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on TV before. This is like the first giant audience I'd been on. I step on the set during

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the commercial break and Colmes is striking up a conversation. Your book looks very interesting.

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Very glad to have you. And Hannity is like the ice man. Like, you know, I'm just, look,

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This is my job. I'm not going to do any more than is absolutely necessary. I'm not going to talk to anybody.

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Look, I don't care. I just want to sell some books and get out.

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But just before we went on, we had five seconds and he said,

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How's your book selling? I said, pretty well.

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All right, so that looked fair enough. All right.

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So then the thing starts going and it turns to we start talking about the Great Depression.

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Hannity has never heard the argument that the interventions in the 1930s

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may have caused the Depression to drag on longer than otherwise.

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He's never heard this before. He said, wow, actually I've never heard that.

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Now here he is like one of the top five right-wing media personalities.

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Never even heard, not that he doesn't know the details, never even heard the claim.

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Well, okay, that's an interesting thing to learn.

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But then the rest of the interview really was Colmes and I going at each other, you know, arguing back and forth.

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And it turns out that that's the best thing you can ask for.

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Ideally you don't want just softballs thrown at you. That makes for boring television.

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That's just absolutely unavoidable. You do watch it. They're lying if they tell you.

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I know other authors have sold a lot and that's the first thing they do in the morning is

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see how it's doing on Amazon. I don't do that anymore because after a while it just

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levels off. But it was... I remember the morning after I did Hannity and Combs, it was at...

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Oh, I don't know. I think it was at like number 21 and that includes fiction and cookbooks

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and things that I can't possibly compete with. And then later after I did Fox and Friends

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And there I continue to talk about, you know, themes that I felt like were left out or distorted in a typical textbook, or just things that I wish I had known when I was younger, so that I wouldn't have had to spend all this time finding it out for myself.

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for example, my father was a teamster so he was a union guy his whole life but he had this funny feeling that unions were probably anti-social institutions but he couldn't quite put his finger on the whole theory so I took it into my own hands with my false consciousness denouncing unions as a blue-collar son and I got stuff on that and on the Great Depression I wanted to talk about Austrian Business Cycle Theory and the Politically Incorrect Guide but no space they said 80,000 words is all you get

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I submitted $100,000 and I figured, well, they'll just take it. Who would turn down a free 20,000 words?

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They systematically sliced 20,000 words out of that book! Horrible!

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But it saw the light of day in 33 questions.

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But the key thing, though, for me, and that helped me to learn stuff about how this all works,

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was when Meltdown came out, because I thought in 2008,

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somebody's got to write some kind of Austrian take on what's happening here.

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The golden opportunity being handed to us, I was going to say on a silver platter, but then that kind of undermines the gold.

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But anyway, the point is, it's a great, super-duper opportunity. You know, we've got to seize this, right?

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You're not going to get a crisis like this that just, you know, hits you in the face all the time.

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You have to grab this opportunity. So my first thought was, Ron Paul needs to write a book on this

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because he's got credibility here because he's been warning about it, he's got a track record of warning about it,

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He's knowledgeable, he's a best-selling author, he's a person who's in a position of influence.

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He should do it.

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So I actually proposed this and said, I think you would be crazy not to write a book about

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this.

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And his response was, but I've already said everything I can say.

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I've given speeches and we've collected the speeches.

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I've said what I can say.

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I don't think there's anything more I could say.

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I thought, but yeah, but that's what makes the book so easy, right?

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Because you've already said it.

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You put it all together and that's how most academics make books.

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They take all their journal articles and they somehow come up with a common theme and there

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you go.

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You got a book.

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But he didn't want to do it.

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So I said, all right, well, what about if I do it, would you write the foreword?

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So I sort of guilted him into doing that.

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And so he agreed to do that and it was very nice.

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But if I tell you how much time I had to write Meltdown, I don't want to tell you because

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then you'll think it's a complete piece of crap that couldn't possibly be worth anyone's

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time.

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Let's just say it was a really, really short amount of time because Regnery said if you who are not particularly well known are going to write a book like this and everyone else in the world is going to write a book on the economy, the only way yours is going to stand out is if it's like the first one out.

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That's the only way. So you've got to get this thing out there and we will rush it out for you.

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for you. The normal time between you submit the manuscript initially to the publisher and

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it's sitting there on a bookstore shelf is roughly a year. That's roughly how long the

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entire process takes. That was not the case with this book. I submitted it to them in

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late November and it was on the shelves in early February. Now, in the internet age,

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that's horrendously slow, but in the publishing world, that's more or less unheard of. And

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And I'll say with my nullification book, I had the idea for that book in January of

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2010 and it was on the shelves in June.

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Like, that's the nice thing about Regnery, they don't publish that many books per year.

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There's a lot of major publishers who publish hundreds or thousands of titles a year and

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yours gets lost in the marketing shuffle.

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Regnery, you know, gives watchful care to each book because they publish two dozen titles

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And so I got the part of Vinnie, who's one of the card players and friends of Oscar and Felix.

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And I remember thinking, I kind of wanted to get the role of Oscar or Felix.

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I really had wanted one of those big roles, and I was kind of disappointed not to get it.

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But then I thought, well, okay, I haven't done this in a while.

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And then the director actually said, well, we actually talked about this and thought, well, this is a young guy,

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and he's got all these kids, and he'd have to spend a lot of time away,

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and maybe this isn't the best way to have him jump back into this.

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I remember thinking, yeah, but why couldn't you just give it a try?

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If I had had one of those roles, it would have been impossible to write Meltdown.

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I mean, I don't know how I did it otherwise. It was horrible.

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It was the worst time of my whole life, working on that.

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It was the worst. It was the worst.

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I mean, just falling asleep in front of the computer, exhausted all the time, in a crummy mood.

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It was terrible.

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And incidentally, nobody knows this, but I actually considered asking Bob to co-author it with me.

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And then I thought, I don't know, how does co-authoring work? Is this going to make, do we write individual chapters or are we both writing the same?

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I'm already getting a headache about this so maybe I'll do some other project with Bob in the future.

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And then it turned out we did a zombie video together and so all was well.

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But so anyway, the interesting thing though about Meltdown is that it is basically taking a pretty hard line Austrian view and the Austrian business cycle theory in it.

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And yet it got a reception that was much better than I think it would have gotten ten years earlier.

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because the ground had already been prepared by the Peter Schiff's and Ron Paul's who speak to a popular audience.

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So I was able to get away with this and also I learned that, you know, because I did a lot of radio and media

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and I learned that, of course, these radio hosts, they're never talking about the Federal Reserve.

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Their listeners couldn't care less about this.

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In fact, there was one time Rush Limbaugh tried to talk about banking and credit and money to his audience

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And he had it all wrong, but at least he was trying.

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And he was deluged with emails from people saying,

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stop talking about this boring subject, we want to know what you think about Caroline Kennedy possibly running for Senate.

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Which is an issue of zero importance, of course, but that's what people want to listen to.

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So you get on there, you talk about the Fed, you can get away with a lot,

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because the host doesn't know anything about it, the listeners haven't heard much about it.

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But if you portray it in terms of central planning versus the free market, well then you're speaking their language.

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Today I'm talking about interfering with the market economy and they know that leads to

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bad consequences. Again, this sold very well. New York Times and all that. So a great thing

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but it was at the right moment. It just came out at the right time. It wouldn't have done

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well a few years earlier. I mean, even if there had been a crisis. But basically the

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Mises Institute coupled with the efforts of Ron Paul, who when he talks about this, people

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The Mises Institute website had prepared the ground that suddenly there is this receptiveness to it.

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When I initially proposed this idea to Regnery, I said, I think there needs to be an Austrian school book on this crisis.

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They initially turned it down. They said, no, too inside baseball. We don't want to do it.

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I thought, all right, maybe this is a dumb idea. I genuinely thought maybe this is a dumb idea.

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I thought it over. I said, no, this is not a dumb idea. So I actually wrote back to them and said, no, I insist you rethink this. You're making a mistake. This has to be done.

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So then they came back with it and said, okay, but we'll give you a really lousy advance. How about that? And I said, fine. I'm perfectly okay with the lousy advance. Let's just get the thing going.

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And interestingly, when it came time for foreign language translations, I think there were

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a couple that are in the works, but I got four, and one of them was Czech, but three

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of them are Asian.

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Three of them are Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

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And I don't know, I find that interesting for a number of reasons.

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And then finally, this most recent title of mine, and then I want to sort of draw something

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out of all this, it's called Rollback, it has a terrible title, the packaging is terrible,

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the marketing is terrible, but basically it's a book about everything, kind of.

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Everything that annoys me, I'm going to somehow try and find a theme to it and just write

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a book about it.

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It's just everything.

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Every aspect of the regime that makes us think that if it weren't for the state, we'd all

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be helpless pathetic boobs, drowning in poison food and getting our limbs blown off by exploding

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consumer products and all that.

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If we didn't have people watching over us, we wouldn't have a good money.

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We wouldn't have any of these things.

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I'm just so sick and tired of this that I decided, well, look, here's the best response I can

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possibly give.

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But unfortunately here, I had this problem that this sort of phenomenon of libertarians

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and Austrian school sympathizers, this is not something the publishing world is still

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quite ready to believe exists.

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They still don't really believe that readers in this tradition are out there.

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So they're still in this mode of trying to package everything as the Republicans versus

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is the Democrats.

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So this book that I just described to you, which, you know, talks about the war on drugs

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and the foreign policy and the Federal Reserve and all these different sorts of topics, they're

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trying to make this into a book against Obama.

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I mean, like, come on, right, like, why are you doing this to me?

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So in other words, it makes, like, libertarians think, well, this is kind of dumb, like any

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idiot knows Obama is a bad president, I don't need to read some book about that.

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And the tea party people they're trying to pitch it to have never heard of me.

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So they're just going to buy Dick Morris's book.

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So in order to promote this thing, I have had to fight tooth and nail against my own

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publisher.

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I've had to fight against the title, against the packaging, against their marketing plan

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and basically tell you, no, no, no, it's the exact opposite of what you think it is.

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So that's been a little bit annoying.

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All right.

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Now, here's what I sort of want to tell people who are interested in writing, though.

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This is one of the things that I've learned after doing this.

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First thing, I wrote an article for Lew Rockwell a few months ago called, Nobody Sells Millions

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of Copies.

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Because you always say this, wow, you must have sold, quote, millions of copies.

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No.

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Nobody sells millions of copies unless you're Glenn Beck, unless you were on Oprah.

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That's not a joke, by the way.

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I mean, unless you're on Oprah or you have your own radio talk show, you can promote

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that book every single day.

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Nobody. It does not happen. And whatever amount of books you think a best-selling book has sold, divide that by ten. I'm not joking.

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And that's the figure. You would be shocked at how few it takes to get on the New York Times best-seller list.

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People do not buy books. And they certainly don't buy non-fiction books. They just do not buy them.

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So, for example, the last statistic I'm familiar with is from about 2005.

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In that year, Houghton Mifflin published 3,000 different books.

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Now, of those 3,000, how many of them sold more than 2,000 copies?

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About 200.

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Most books are complete bombs.

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But everybody sort of assumes that you write a book, you're a millionaire.

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And I'm going to write a book and I'm going to retire on the royalties.

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I mean, this is like the dictionary definition of delusion.

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This does not happen. So, you know, you do okay, but you're not going to do as well as you think.

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And you think, but my book is different. The problem is, everybody thinks his book is different.

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And again, the most recent statistic I know of is from about 2005.

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That year, there were about, just about 200,000 different books published in that one year.

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How are you going to get your book out before the general public?

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So the answer is that unless it's...

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Now, once in a while there's some quirky book that people just latch on to and there's no explaining how it did so well.

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That does happen.

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But by and large, you either need to be a celebrity or at least get a little bit of big media,

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like be on a big television show.

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And if you don't get that, it's very, very hard to do.

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So at this point, I'm actually...

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I don't expect to write another book ever.

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I mean, maybe someday 30 years from now, but first of all, I'm tired.

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And secondly, I feel like it's almost not worth doing and I feel like I should reproach

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myself for saying that because I mean, Murray Rothbard, not that I'm comparing myself to

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him, but he's a model in this sense.

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He didn't write his books thinking, well, I'm only going to write this if it sells X

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number of copies.

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He doesn't care.

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He just wants to tell the truth.

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And to an extent, I can appreciate that.

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But on the other hand, it's like you produce a product that you think is pretty decent

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that answers a lot of claims that your audience sort of wants answered, you know, like all

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the tea party people, they could reply to all these, you know, left-wing criticisms if

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they just flip through this thing, but I'm sitting here totally dependent on some TV

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guy having me on for four minutes, and if I don't get that, then that's it. I mean,

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you can use Facebook and use other things, but you're pretty much shut out. So if you're

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going to do this, if you're interested in writing for the general public, just bear

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Bear in mind that a lot of things have to coalesce, have to come together for your book

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to be like a big, big seller.

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You need that media support.

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You almost certainly need some type of news hook because the big shows aren't going to

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have you on just because, hey, here's some author who's got a book.

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Well, there are hundreds of thousands of people who match that description.

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This guy has a book on something we're talking about right now, so you've got to figure out

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what your news hook is.

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And that is necessary but not sufficient as a condition.

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Now, in terms of royalties, are you going to make a lot of money?

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Well, yeah, I mean, look, I've done well doing this, but not as well as people.

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I mean, I think people are looking at me thinking, you know, where are the buildings that you're going to endow with your name on them?

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Believe me, we have not done that well.

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But I'm going to actually tell you what you earn for royalties with a typical trade publisher.

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I'm not going to talk about academic publishers because I've had sad experience with them,

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that they're even stingier.

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But since you're not going to sell any books with Columbia University Press anyway, that's

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just for your CV.

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That doesn't really matter.

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But the way it works is the typical contract reads as follows.

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The first 5,000 copies of your book, you will earn 10% of the hardcover price.

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For the second $5,000, from $5,001 up to $10,000, you'll earn 12.5% of the cover price.

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And anything above that, you earn 15%.

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So anybody who thinks the author is making $10 a copy, I mean, the bookstores are already

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getting the book at 50% off.

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So unless the publisher doesn't want any profits, there's no way you're getting half the amount.

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So it's going to be like that, and then you have to figure this is going to be taxed.

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Although royalty income is not subject to self-employment tax, if that means something

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to me, being self-employed, and then if you have a literary agent, which I've had since

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2006, he's going to take his chunk.

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So you see, it's not, you know, you're not exactly swimming in revenue.

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People say, I bought two of your books, so I hope you had a nice dinner.

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Look, I'm glad people buy my books.

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I'm not going to make people feel silly for saying that, but I mean, where would I have

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dinner on the basis of that?

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So people think you're doing better than you're doing.

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So we try to be as generous as we can when possible.

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So if you really want to do this though, just go into it with low sales expectations and

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just know that people, if it's a good book, it'll get into the right hands eventually.

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Your friends will help you, they'll tell people this is a book you need to read and some people

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are going to read your book because they took it out of the library or they borrowed it

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from their friends and I have not yet figured out a way to stop people from doing this.

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This can't be avoided, but it does mean that your audience is larger than the sales figures

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would reflect.

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Anyway, so I've already talked about current events, Hook, you're at the mercy of the media,

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but it is important, as Mises said, we have to reach the academic audience but also the

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popular audience.

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Now the academic audience, a lot of you guys are focused in on that and just are going

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to be advancing the school, and that's great.

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We desperately need that and I think there are some people in this room, I won't mention

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so as not to embarrass them, who I think really have the potential to do exactly that.

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That's why this seminar is so wonderful.

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But for those of you who want to write more popular stuff or want to supplement your scholarly

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stuff with popular stuff, I would say that book writing might not necessarily be the

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best way to go about it.

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It can be.

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The fact that you have a book is more likely to get you some media attention than the fact

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that you have a blog.

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And now media attention is not an end in itself.

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If it were, I would cheerlead all the wars and get on TV, but I refuse to do it.

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But the point is that the media attention does get attention for the ideas.

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It does get people going to websites that you manage to utter some fugitive URL, domain

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of Money, The Theory of Money and Credit of Money and Credit of Money and Credit of Money

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to get your ideas out there and sure the first few videos you do you'll have 300

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views and you'll say well this isn't worth my time but you just keep doing

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this because here we've got this free medium to promote the ideas of the

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Austrian School and all it all you have to do is just sit there turn turn a

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button press a button and start talking about why Krugman's column this week is

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all wrong or or why Brad DeLong is all wrong about something and you talk for

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four to five minutes and that will get around to people who are not going to

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They're not going to read your article. They're not going to read your book. They will never have heard of you otherwise.

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And this has a snowball effect. Or again, right now, in the wake of this crisis, this is the best opportunity the Austrian School has ever had.

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And are we really rising to the challenge here? I mean, I exclude Bob Murphy.

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Because, you know, Bob, like every three seconds, he's got five more articles denouncing five more errors.

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It's fantastic. It's like the existence of errors is a make-work project for Bob Murphy.

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But I exclude Bob from this, but I want to ask, I'm going to introduce a Catholic term,

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which is the examination of conscience. You step back and you examine your own conduct

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and you ask yourself, where have I fallen short? Where could I be better? Alright, well, here's

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what we have to ask ourselves. How could we be promoting the Austrian School better? How

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How could we reach that, A, that popular audience or B, those grad students out there who need

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a little extra help, who need to know what is the refutation of this sort of thing or

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of that?

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We have the brain power in this room for everybody to have a YouTube channel and a blog and to

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be blogging at least once a week.

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Everybody in here should be blogging at least once a week because you're not going to have

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any problem finding some error to refute.

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But we need our best minds here.

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I mean, what opportunity are you waiting for? If not this one. If not now, when? When are

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we going to be a presence with all of our names out there vigorously? So I want you

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to pledge to yourself to do this, to do something like this. And I remember, Walter, I don't

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know if you'll remember this, but at Murray's memorial service, after the memorial service,

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I was talking about how just devastated I was when I got the news that Rothbard had

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Die, and I felt, and I know how unbelievably arrogant this sounds, but I was just a kid,

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and I remember thinking to myself what Boxer said in Animal Farm, whenever there was some

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obstacle, his response was, I will work harder.

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And here I am, some doofus grad student, but I thought, I will work, we don't have Murray

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anymore, I will work harder.

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That was my attitude, and I told that to Walter, and thankfully he didn't laugh at me.

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What he said was, you know, shortly after Murray died, I went to the video rental store

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and got a whole bunch of movies and I was just going to sit and watch them.

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He said, I got through, do you remember this?

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He said, I got through part of the first movie and then I said to myself, what am I, some

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kind of a bum?

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What am I doing here sitting watching a stack of movies?

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Murray just died, we have a million things to do, errors to refute, I got to get back

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to work.

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Now that's not to say you shouldn't watch movies, hey, look, you have to recharge, but

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That is the spirit every one of us needs, is that spirit of Walter Block, because what

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are we waiting for? If not now, when? Alright, thank you.