The Influential Author: How and Why to Write, Publish, and Sell Nonfiction Books that Matter

By Gregory V. Diehl and Tom Morkes

2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Gold Medalist

2020 International Book Awards Finalist

2020 American Book Fest Best Book Awards 1st Place Winner

• Language: English
• Publisher: Identity Publications
• Release date: Jan 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781945884672

Gregory V. Diehl

Gregory V. Diehl understands the transformative power of the right book in the right hands. He writes with the hopes that his work will make its way to those who need it: deep thinkers unsatisfied with ordinary approaches to important subjects. His work often deconstructs and challenges cultural narratives that keep people from establishing and embodying who they really are. When he's not writing, Gregory offers alternative education and mentorship informed by his wealth of diverse cultural experience across the globe. Residing now in a scenic village in Armenia, amidst a backdrop of books and felines, Gregory's preferred pastime is silent contemplation.

Book preview

livefreeretiree ebook

How and Why to Write,

Publish, and Sell Nonfiction

Books that Matter

By Gregory V. Diehl

Second Edition

Copyright © 2019, 2023 Gregory V. Diehl

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Any perceived slight against any individual is purely unintentional.

For permission requests, write to the publisher at [e-mail].

Ordering Information:

Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address above.

Orders by U.S. trade bookstores and wholesalers. Please contact Identity Publications: Tel: [phone] or visit www.IdentityPublications.com.

ISBN-13: 978-1-945884-65-8 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-945884-66-5 (hardcover)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018913387

Second Edition

Publishing by Identity Publications

www.IdentityPublications.com

Cover art: The Scholar’s Table (1905), John Frederick Peto. Public domain.

ALSO BY GREGORY V. DIEHL

Brand Identity Breakthrough: How to Craft Your Company’s Unique Story to Make Your Products Irresistible

Everyone Is an Entrepreneur: Selling Economic Self-Determination in a Post-Soviet World

Our Global Lingua Franca: An Educator’s Guide to Spreading English Where EFL Doesn’t Work

The Heroic and Exceptional Minority: A Guide to Mythological Self-Awareness and Growth

Travel as Transformation: Conquer the Limits of Culture to Discover Your Own Identity

BOOKS INCLUDED AS CASE STUDIES

The Destiny Book: Rediscovering the Mother of Spirituality by Helena Lind

Get Bail, Leave Jail: America’s Guide to Hiring a Bondsman, Navigating Bail Bonds, and Getting out of Custody Before Trial by S.J. Plotkin

A Guide to the Climate Apocalypse: Our Journey from the Age of Prosperity to the Era of Environmental Grief by Vítězslav Kremlík

Making Mental Might: How to Look Ten Times Smarter Than You Are by Bernard M. Patten

The Millennial Travel Guidebook: Escape More, Spend Less, & Make Travel a Priority in Your Life by Matt Wilson

Neurology Rounds with the Maverick: Adventures with Patients from the Golden Age of Medicine by Bernard M. Patten

Real Estate Realist: The No-Nonsense Guide to Rental Properties by S.J. Plotkin

Sadistic Pleasures: Silent Crimes of Azerbaijan by Ashkhen Arakelyan

Stories of Elders: What the Greatest Generation Knows about Technology that You Don't by Veronica Kirin

U.S. Taxes for Worldly Americans: The Traveling Expat's Guide to Living, Working, and Staying Tax Compliant Abroad by Olivier Wagner

Venus and Her Lover: Transforming Myth, Sexuality, and Ourselves (Volumes 1 & 2) by Becca Tzigany

Table of Contents

Introduction to This Book’s Structure and Purpose

Part 1: Philosophy

Chapter 1: The Historical Influence of Writing

The Social Power of Reading and Writing

Books as the Gold Standard for Ideas that Matter

The Evolution of Traditional Publishing into Self-Publishing

Chapter 2: Introspecting What to Write About

Why You’re Motivated to Write and Communicate

What You Dare to Become Known For

Where Passion, Experience, and Demand Converge

Part 2: Strategy

Chapter 3: The Market Ecosystem around Your Book

Category Conventions and Marketplace Trends

Positioning Your Book in Amazon’s Ecosystem

Following and Defying Category Expectations

Chapter 4: Designing the Meaning of Your Message

Focus, Scope, and Resolution

Educational Structure and Flow

The Right Types of Readers

Part 3: Creation

Chapter 5: The Qualities and Conditions of a Writer

Navigating Writer’s Block and Creative Inspiration

Learning to Write with Clarity and Conciseness

Discovering Your Personal Style and Creative Voice

Chapter 6: Writing Your First Draft

The Structure of a Nonfiction Book

Tactical Outlining and Drafting

Nontraditional Methods to Expedite Your Drafting

Part 4: Refinement

Chapter 7: Effectively Editing Your Message

Types and Functions of Editing

Editing Your Own Draft

Recruiting and Working with Beta Readers

Chapter 8: Proofreading, Pedantry, and Punctuation

Grammar Myths and Legends

Prevalent Errors in Punctuation and Spelling

Refining Your Draft with Professionals

Part 5: Presentation

Chapter 9: Book Appearance and First Impressions

Choosing the Most Effective Title and Subtitle

Choosing Your Ideal Cover Design

Writing Your Book Description

Chapter 10: Preparing Each Format of Your Book

Formatting for Paperback and Hardcover

Formatting for E-Readers

Narrating Your Audiobook

Part 6: Promotion

Chapter 11: Setting Your Book for Launch

Framing Your Author Brand and Bio

Effective Pre-Launch Outreach

Book Pricing and Royalty Strategies

Chapter 12: Maintaining Book Traffic and Exposure

Accruing Public Book Reviews Online

Generating Ongoing Readership

Foreign Book Markets and Translation

Part 7: Reward

Chapter 13: What Happens When You Publish a Book

Existential Fulfillment and Self-Investment

Social Reception and Impact

Ongoing Passive Financial Return

Chapter 14: Your Destiny as Author and Publisher for Life

Assessing Book Failure and Success

Writing Your Next Books

The Unknown Future of Self-Publishing

Conclusion

Appendix: Resources

Introduction to the Second Edition

The problem with expertise lies in taking the powerful ideas contained in one’s head and making them accessible to others by expressing them as words.

That’s not a problem I’ve ever had. I’ve always been very good with ideas and words. I know how to parse information from the first time I’m exposed to it. I could always see how thoughts formed concepts and connected in a logical structure, almost as though they were tangible constructs for me to manipulate by just thinking about them. I could learn what other people knew and explain it in simple, condensed terms even they had trouble using. I could also quickly spot when there were holes in the way someone else presented something, when their model for some aspect of how the world worked was incomplete. As you can imagine, this led to many heated arguments with teachers and reprimands for me as a child. 

As a young adult, I was naturally drawn to working in alternative education. No matter what subject or skill I was explaining, there was a consistent type of response from my students: I learned more from you in just one lesson than I did in three months with my last teacher. My strength lay in explaining and demonstrating what I knew so that others could quickly adopt a similar level of understanding. Now, my work in book production revolves around the base skill of organizing and articulating the knowledge of experts. I arrange the chaotic mass of their complex ideas. Due to an exceptional semantic memory, I can transfer meaningful, often difficult ideas from one mind to many.

The more experts I work with, the more surprised I become by how stilted they can be at explaining what they know. Teaching is its own skill. Most people don’t even realize they can’t do it very well until they endeavor to. Someday, I’d like to write a book called Unconscious Expertise: Why People Who Are So Good at Something Can Be So Bad at Explaining It. Or maybe it will be called How People Who Don’t Know How to Teach Things Teach Things. It’s unfortunate that having a valuable perspective doesn’t necessarily confer the ability to communicate it well to others. 

There is a certain point of expertise where conclusions become postulates in the mind that holds them. A postulate shows up in your head as a fully formed idea that makes automatic, unconscious, and intuitive sense to you. You forget that it took a long process to arrive there while you were still learning how everything worked. That’s why not everyone knows the same things by default, and things obvious to other experts might completely elude you. But once you start accepting something as true, you are biased toward expecting others to do the same. You cannot pass on what you know in any medium until you can reverse-engineer and verbalize your unique knowledge.

It’s why I stop listening to any guru who tells me I’m guaranteed to, at first, suck at anything new I attempt and that sucking a million times is the only way to get any good. The point of listening to an expert is for them to explain the principles they’ve learned through their own sucking a million times trial-and-error process that will enable me to minimize the amount of suckage required. I'm already qualified to suck on my own. They’re supposed to be putting the ideas in my head that will allow me not to. Expressing experience as words should expedite my path toward non-suckage. 

These unconsciously competent people easily flow into a state of high performance in their field. Their adeptness has become a type of second nature, nearly indistinguishable from instinct. They cannot analyze what they know or how they know it until they complement their silent proficiency with conscious and explicit competence. It’s part of a cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge. When you know something extremely well, it’s very difficult to monitor all the ways your knowledge affects your cognition. Until you’ve spelled out each logical step in your hierarchy of knowledge, you can’t see what you might be assuming to be true without confirmation. Writing out every pertinent detail makes it impossible to continue overlooking your blind spots. You may even realize that something you long assumed accurate simply doesn’t hold up. It’s much better to have these realizations during the writing process while you can still modify your views than after you have published something you cannot support.

Among the popular books that fall under the vast how to do a thing genre, it seems the majority share a consistent critical flaw. Too often, I read such a book written by a so-called expert, only to get to the end and realize that I probably could have written virtually the same book with the information I had when I started reading it, making only minor inferences and deductions along the way. There will almost always be a chapter, a section, or a mantra repeated throughout the text that could be summarized as Just start doing the thing. In other words, the author is expertly advising you to just copy how other people doing the thing do the thing. Then, you, too, will be doing the thing. If you’re lucky, their advice might be as specific as to just do the thing the way I happened to find success doing the thing. If it worked for them, it must mean that it’s going to work exactly the same for all other people under all possible conditions.

These people often learn just by acting or imitating what they see. They assess it in a limited way that applies to their specific strengths and situation. This means they can’t generalize the information to see how it would apply to other people and situations. They cannot think in principle or articulate their thoughts aloud. It’s not necessarily due to laziness. Some of these people are extremely proactive and hardworking. It’s just that their brains don’t function like teachers’ brains do. Some people are the opposite: hyper-analytical, assessing every thought that enters the mind in excruciating detail, seeking out its hidden epistemology and logical structure. They are much better at generalizing and rearranging information. These are the people who can explain anything to you (and often will without being asked to). 

Even if someone is good at explaining part of how something works, there might be a bunch of foundational background information that’s required before the explanation they’re giving holds any water. They have to unpack their unspoken premises: their own postulates. A good teacher is someone who doesn’t take knowledge for granted. They are not just someone who understands how something works. They’re not even just someone good at verbalizing. They have to be aware of everything required to be verbalized. They have to be able to figure out what they’ve overlooked in their own paradigm and instruction.

Imagine that the primary advice in a bestselling book about how to be successful as a self-published author amounts to: Well, just start writing and publishing books and see what works. How many unspoken premises are contained in that instruction? The author is expecting you to know what they mean by writing/publishing a book (which is very generic instruction if you think about it). How many possible outcomes could qualify as a book? In such cases, the author actually means something much more specific, but they fail to articulate it. They already have their own cultural understanding of and detailed expectations for what a good book is. They probably read popular books all day when they’re not busy making and marketing their own. They probably study what’s hot and trending in their free time. They have well-known authors and genres to use as internal references for how it all works and what’s expected. And because they are so accustomed to all this, they don’t think they need to explain it to you. Well, obviously, a good book is like these things that I and everyone’s mothers read all day long. Just copy what you see other successful authors doing. No further instruction required. 

That is not the way I help authors construct the messages in their books, and it’s not the type of advice you will receive in this one. I will never tell you to just start writing a book. In fact, I’ll pretty much do everything I can to persuade you not to write one unless you are certain you have something of unique value to say. Even then, I will explain in excruciating detail the importance of analyzing the meaning of your message from every angle before you jump right into drafting. I’ll teach you everything I know about how to structure ideas as words on the page and present them to the world as important and impressive books that can earn you a healthy living. With the right understanding under your hat, you won’t have to suck a million times before you finally get it right.

The first edition of The Influential Author was published in 2019. In 2023, I worked to overhaul it into the version you are reading by adding more interesting real-world examples of writing books and helping others bring theirs into the world. I also updated numerous references to the state of self-publishing, including the present policies of companies like Amazon and IngramSpark and the types of technologies available to aid the modern nonfiction author. I worked to refine my paradigm of meaningful authorship and how it is presented here. I filled the holes and trimmed the fat so that you will never be left wondering how I arrived at a conclusion or how you can apply a principle I espouse in your situation, tailored to your strengths and goals with nonfiction. 

First-time authors are often influenced into expecting the process to be easy and require relatively little time and deep thinking. And while it is possible to produce enough written content to fill the pages of a short book this way, the result will almost always be generic and lacking. Something more is needed to come away with a book of deep personal importance and that will stand out as uniquely valuable in the marketplace. Writing a book means investing hundreds of hours into strategizing, writing, and rewriting. To write a good book, one must become an exemplary communicator, using words as tools for a purpose. To become a respected author, one must have a purpose worth fulfilling and not be shy about promoting it. These are aspects of the book-producing process that most newbies (and the books that prematurely encourage them) will not take into account because they’re not particularly fun to talk about.

I don’t mean to be overly discouraging to anyone with these caveats. To write a book is not the path for everyone… but it may be the path for you. Non-fiction self-publishing was the best option for me to get my original ideas and organized knowledge out to the world. If you are determined to do the necessary work, it is possible to succeed as an independently published nonfiction author with a meaningful and original message.

Questions to Help You Get the Most from This Book

A book with a valuable message can feed a specific hunger held by thousands of readers for generations to come. It can be a medium of information that adds longevity to the most valuable products of its author’s life, even long after they are gone. So, if you think you desire to write and publish, you must ask yourself what your book will do that no other book already does. You must inquire about the reasons behind your desire and whether they are strong enough to bring order out of the chaos of your still-unprocessed thoughts.

Is the content of your book unique?

It’s possible you’ve had some special life experiences that the world would love to hear about. But that’s not always the case. Few people come up with wholly original ideas to communicate. Most just rework and popularize earlier ideas, connecting them in ways few before they have done. What novelty do you think you can add to humanity’s encyclopedia of knowledge? If you know the standards set by the other books on your subject, you can improve on them or combine them into some kind of novel structure.

Are your tone and presentation more effective than those of other authors?

Delivery can count for more than complexity or profundity. Different authors can convey the same information in distinct ways. Each approach will have a different type of influence. No two readers have the exact same background, personality, or goals. Some minds prefer numbers and diagrams, while others may learn best through humor, drama, or long-winded diatribes. Superior arrangement and style improve upon the works of giants before you. Through better framing, you will make the past more accessible to a wider range of readers. 

Why are you inspired to bring your message to the world?

Because writing a quality book is a major endeavor, your motivation matters. You will need the wherewithal to see the writing and publishing process to completion. If your heart isn’t in it, you will grow to resent your book for the demands it places on your time, mind, and finances. You may lose the strength to finish. An inspired message will be worth the effort it requires. 

Who needs to read your message and why?

A great book is one that answers questions aching for resolution. The inability to find these answers can lead to everyday practical problems or lifelong struggles. Your book can offer an end to someone’s malaise. The goal should not be to have everyone on Earth read your book but to reach those readers who will receive the full intended value because they need your insight. The better you understand your message, the easier it will be to envision who will get the most from it.

Will you still want to write your book if it makes little money?

When I got started, I had no way of knowing that what I spent countless hours writing would ever turn a profit. I wrote because I had something to say. Now I know that effective marketplace positioning can turn a decent book into sustainable passive income. However, a book written with revenue as its only goal will sacrifice its integrity. Decide where your priority lies and your purpose for writing. Commercial success will supplement the existential reward of communicating your knowledge and ideals.

How will your book change people?

The worth of all creative endeavors can be measured by their influence. Some authors set out to overhaul the way a reader perceives a topic. Some books plant seeds of thought that take time to germinate in new minds. Your book might outline a method by which to change the reader’s actions, offering a series of gentle suggestions for improvement. The most rewarding part of authorship for me has been seeing how my words have affected some readers, a portion of which have even felt inclined to reach out and let me know what my books meant to them. 

How will your book entertain readers?

Even if you think your message is strictly informative, its transmission depends on engagement. No one can absorb information perfectly. You must make it easy for your readers to consume hundreds of pages without losing interest. Each page represents time a reader could have spent on another activity, so work to earn every ounce of your readers’ attention by stoking curiosity, evoking empathy, and infusing wit and passion. This is part of why delivery and personality are so important to effective nonfiction. But still, many aspiring authors try to present their knowledge in a vacuum, totally detached from who they are. 

Are you prepared to earnestly promote your book?

Being a self-published author means much more than just being a writer. Promotion doesn’t require experience in sales or marketing (though it helps). What you need is an earnest willingness to tell people why your book is worth buying and reading. You need to believe this proposition at your core. Do not be content to put the message out there and hope for the best. Own its presentation and promotion. Know there are people who need to read it, as it could cure a specific ailment they carry. If you care enough to write down what you know, it follows that you should also care enough to talk about it. 

This Book’s Structure and Purpose

The Influential Author examines seven aspects of the relationship between an author and their nonfiction book.

Part 1: Philosophy

Your philosophy about your book is your understanding of what you want to say, why it matters, and its social and historical context. Although it may seem obvious that developing your philosophy—or your why—is foundational to everything that follows, it is the most often overlooked part of the creative process. 

● What it means to communicate meaningful ideas.

● How communication has evolved to our present time.

● Why books are still the best way to communicate with long-form depth, personality, and precision.

● The many ways self-publishing is better and worse than traditional publishing.

● Introspecting about what you care enough to write about and become known for.

Part 2: Strategy

Strategy consists of developing a viable plan for the form your message will take. You’ll need to understand the modern dynamics of self-publishing to know what is possible. You’ll need to study the marketplace to learn how other books have been received by readers. Good strategy requires you to think like an entrepreneur on a mission.

● The angle, style, and unique value of your book.

● The ideal readers and target audience.

● Structuring your message's ideal scope, length, and focus.

● Opportunities in your market where other authors have not fulfilled reader demand. 

● The search functionality, subcategory breakdown, and bestseller ranking systems of Amazon and other online book retailers.

Part 3: Creation

Creation is the process of turning thoughts into words and capturing them as static writing. You will need to become the kind of person who can achieve this transmutation without losing inspiration, sacrificing the clarity of your message, or succumbing to fatigue. 

● The importance of cultivating the ideal writing environment and internal state to suit your unique creative nature.

● Arriving at a large word count at a pace that makes sense for your lifestyle and material.

● The functions of a nonfiction book’s traditional structure.

● How to craft an outline that captures the essential parts of your message and keeps you focused until you’ve finished your first draft.

● Keeping your voice authentically yours and avoiding redundancies or omissions.

● Ghostwriters, pre-written content, artificial intelligence, dictation, and other nontraditional drafting tactics to ease the writing burden.

Part 4: Refinement

Refinement is how you optimize what you’ve written to fulfill its purpose through better structure, style, and presentation. Getting feedback and reassessing what you’ve done will help you overcome tunnel vision and self-bias. 

● The functions of developmental editing, line editing, and copyediting for nonfiction books. 

● Learning to love destruction for the sake of optimizing your message.

● Working with beta-readers and using their feedback to rectify your book’s shortcomings and enhance its strengths.

● Reconsidering the focus, scope, and purpose of what you have written.

● Why the pedantic parts of language and proofreading matter for every message.

Part 5: Presentation

The elements of your book’s presentation are the doorway to becoming fully invested in the message within. Your message must capture a specific, actionable kind of attention. Your book’s title, cover, description, and formatting must all contribute to a complementary and accurate impression. 

● Avoiding the many pitfalls that make your book look poor quality, cheap, or amateurish at first glance.

● Choosing a title, subtitle, and description that entice sales from your target audience without misrepresenting your message.

● Designing a cover that is conventional enough to be recognized but stands out from the crowd.

● Formatting the text of your book in paperback, hardcover, and e-book formats.

● Narrating your audiobook or hiring a professional to do it for you.

Part 6: Promotion

Promotion is how you spread your complete and attractive message. It will require you to position your book where it will get attention from the people who can appreciate it. If your book’s outreach is successful, readers will even begin to promote it on their own, creating a sustainable cycle of interest.

● Crafting your personal brand and bio as the author of your book.

● Preparing your book’s official launch date and getting the word out by sharing guest content on the platforms your audience frequents.

● How to determine the ideal retail price of each format of your book.

● Getting verified, positive online book reviews from readers during and after launch.

● Generating ongoing traffic for your book by running profitable ads.

● Preparing your book for foreign markets.

Part 7: Reward

As a published author, you will come to think of yourself differently. The world will see you in a new light too. Leveraging your book will create many new opportunities if you can see all the emergent ways to act on what you’ve put out into the world.

● Dealing productively with results that aren’t as good as you’d hoped and understanding the many forms success can take.

● Reframing your self-conception and social narrative as an authority on your subject.

● Recognizing the new levels of personal meaning that come with being the face and voice behind important ideas.

● How professional life changes with reliable passive income and the other opportunities a book makes possible.

● Repurposing your book’s content for videos, courses, and other mediums to expand your influence.

● Planning your next publications without letting your initial success (or lack thereof) become a creative trap.

Part 1:

Philosophy

Chapter 1:

The Historical Influence of Writing

The practice of targeted communication has been as essential to humanity’s sanity as it has been to our survival for as long as we have been social creatures. By putting our ideas about the nature of existence into words and images, we can create agreement among our tribes about our shared values. We can collaborate on projects beyond the scope of a lone actor (whether it be toppling a mammoth, erecting a skyscraper, or instigating a social revolution). Effective communication gives people a shared sense of identity.

It’s easy to forget that for most of human history and prehistory, the only way to communicate was through primitive sounds and pictographs. Absent the aid of electronic amplification, speaking was limited to listeners within natural earshot of the speaker. Any information accumulated over one human lifetime would be passed on through myths and stories from older generations to their offspring. Such enormous amounts of talking constituted a large demand on time and energy.

Early societies maintained their cultural identities through the values practiced among their inhabitants. Parents repeated to their children the wisdom of their parents before them. Political and spiritual figureheads commanded attention and dictated the lifestyle choices of their tribes. Such was the power of their words to influence those who would listen.

Throughout history, writing has been our most influential communication medium. Because of the written word, we have been able to draft a history and a narrative for humanity. Our story maintains its continuity across moments, generations, and ages. Primitive cave paintings, the development of the printing press, and the rise and fall of mass-market bookstores have all played vital parts in shaping society’s cohesion. 

Influence does not work differently in our world today, despite the modern trappings that differentiate ours from the primitive eras of the past. Today's difference is that our technology for transmitting ideas and their associated values is greater than ever and still growing. Through sounds, words, and moving or still images, we can better convey to other people what we know, believe, and care about. With modern power to influence come modern responsibilities.

The Social Power of Reading and Writing

The advent of the written word forever changed how we communicate and, thus, all civilization. Writing made keeping a record of history possible. On a local level, it allowed groups to maintain an impartial account of information beyond the biases of human memory over time. On a global level, writing has allowed anyone who can read to access information produced thousands of years before them or oceans away. 

Because of writing, communication no longer relied upon the double coincidence of both parties offering and desiring the same information in the same place simultaneously. Speaker and listener could be separated by time and space for the first time. Writing allowed information to spread independently of the mind of its originator. Writers could send out as much information as they wanted, but readers could only receive it at a different time from a distant source. Regardless, the written word has been the primary catalyst for the evolution of human society, understanding, and technology.

In the modern age, where it seems everyone in the developed world owns a personal computer and maintains an online persona, it is humbling to remember that for thousands of years, literacy was quite rare in the world. Both reading and writing have almost always been available only to the wealthy and educated, not the common people of any given society. Writing was power. Anyone who could write held more social influence than anyone who could not, for their ideas could spread to more minds. Those who could write persuasively held the most power of all.

Social Thought Policing

The written word has been so important to society (even before widespread literacy) that cultures throughout history have imposed approved thought patterns and barred incongruous ones by destroying books, scrolls, and other forms of documentation. The most powerful institutions on Earth have always been terrified by writing that contradicted what they wanted the people under them in their social dominance hierarchies to believe. For centuries, the Roman Catholic Church maintained its domination by approving for publication only books that would not harm correct faith or good morals with a special Imprimatur (let it be printed) license. 

Within the modern Chinese government, the General Administration of Press and Publication can imprison anyone who publishes or imports books or other written materials (physically or digitally) that contradict their officially sanctioned version of Chinese history or promote unapproved cultural values. Classics ranging from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss have been banned within China for the dangerous effects they might have on impressionable Chinese minds. To this day, public book burnings remain an accepted practice. In part six of this book, you’ll learn more about how this affects you as a self-published author seeking international distribution when I discuss foreign promotion strategies.

Because the world changes so quickly now, there is more wisdom to pass on to each generation. More is written than will ever be widely read. The more quickly information evolves, the harder a person must work to keep up with the standards of their culture. Without modern communication technologies, a single mind can only take in or put out so much knowledge. Left only to our organic faculties, we would never be educated enough to live a modern life. A child today consumes knowledge at a rate that would seem impossible to their ancestors. 

Social Power Expansion

When Johannes Gutenberg introduced a superior version of the printing press to the world in the 15th century, he revolutionized book production. Mass printing dropped the consumer price of books and other printed materials. For the first time in history, written information was becoming affordable and accessible to the masses, not just the elite. Economies of scale emerged in the information market. An original work could be reproduced countless times for a nominal additional cost. This opened the door for the common person to adopt cultural influences from endless new sources. The exchange of information was now limited only by transportation technology for physical pages. A global integration had begun. 

Today, ordinary people rely on handheld electronic devices for written, audio, and visual communication, surpassing the options of all prior generations. We take for granted invisible communication networks like cell towers and satellites that grant instant access to nearly the entire portion of civilization that participates in these networks. Communication interfaces like social media platforms have sprung up to facilitate humanity’s identity transition from the physical to the digital realm. Film, television, and recorded music can be streamed online to hungry minds around the world. Real-time local phone calls across town have evolved into live global video interactions in high definition. 

Books as the Gold Standard for Ideas that Matter

In 1686, at the insistence and expense of his friend, astronomer Edmund Halley, physicist