The Kindle Experiment

As you know your Captain wrote a book a couple years ago. It was titled "Behind the Housing Crash" and my own personal bias aside, it was a brilliant and foresightful book. Everyone who has bought it has liked it and it has very high ratings on Amazon.

Of course only about 2,000 copies sold. And though this is considered a "success" in the self-publishing world, let us be frank...

The Captain wants to make millions, not thousands of dollars.

The problem is quite simply the publishing industry itself. The industry is old, archaic, cronyistic and inept. You need to know somebody in order to get published. And like Dr. Seuss, William Faulkner, Stephen King and many other famous authors, these publishing houses lack the ability to see genuine skill and talent when it's sitting in front of their faces.

You ask, "how can publishing houses turn down the works of Stephen King, Anne Frank, Vince Flynn and Aaron Clarey?" The answer is a simple and economic one;

If you look at who is in charge of these publishing houses you will see nothing more than a bunch of elitists who all have masters degrees in "creative writing." In other words, the people who currently head not just the publishing houses, but the agencies that represent authors are not writers or readers themselves. Oh mercy no, not one of them have written anything, that would be dirtying their little fingies. They are middle management types who have NOTHING in common with the common reader. Ergo, they lack the judgment to discern or predict what is going to be popular amongst the "commoners."

It is here that you are witnessing the extinction of an industry that has proved itself to be self-serving and not a net-positive benefit to society. Much like the mainstream media has proven itself to be an arm of a political movement, the publishing industry is proving itself to be an exclusive club, not concerned about good writing that it can bring to the masses and thus joy to the people, but rather serving connected members favors in the publishing world.

What's brilliant though is the unstoppable forces of capitalism, free markets and economics. Enter the internet. Namely, Kindle.

Digital books, combined with the internet have largely rendered these traditional publishing houses irrelevant, obsolete, and unneeded. Sure, if you're a baby boomer that wants to be lied to about how you're 50 years and you're still going to find love and romance and riches, and you're too damn lazy to learn about the internet, you can find a book called "Eat Pray Love." But once the social security checks start running out and the last vestiges of "The Doors" fans die off, who is really going to want a physical book?

Regardless of what you think about the younger generations, they have made their decision. They prefer to be online over pretty much everything else. Their social lives, their dating lives, their career lives. And when given the choice to pay $22 for a physical book of 99 cents for a book, what do you think they're going to do?

It is therefore why your Captian is pursuing an economic experiment I like to call the "Kindle Experiment."

Your Captain loves to write. He would love nothing more than to have a life where he lives in a small mountain town, drives his motorcycle around, fishes, fossil hunts, tornado chases, polishes agates and salsas the night away all while financing this lifestyle with superior and engaging writing that gives his readers more value than what they paid for it. To achieve this though, the Captain cannot rely on a defunct and corrupt industry such as the traditional publishing houses in New York. It simply won't work. And it is here where the Kindle Experiment in economics begins.

"Behind the Housing Crash" is now available on Kindle.

It is 99 cents.

My business model is much based off of two things. One Amanda Hocking, the 26 year old self-published author who writes books about vampires and twilight and other such nonsense. And two, "Angry Birds" which has made a ton of money NOT because of the profit margins, but because of the volume of sales.

In short, I could charge the $22 for a book which results in 2,000 units of sales. Or I could charge 99 cents and sell millions of copies. The second of which would result in a lot more profit.

Of course, "Behind the Housing Crash" is a dated book. But this experiment is simply just that - an experiment. I don't expect to sell a ton of books. I'm just seeing how much more responsive and elastic demand is to a book that is essentially free and will base future publications on it.

So if you want to buy the book, it now costs you an irrelevant 99 cents.

If you know somebody who would like to read the book, it now costs them the 99 cents.

If you want to read books I have in the pipeline such as "Enjoy the Decline" and "The American Bachelors Guide to Happiness" and "The Battlefield Compendium for 14 Year Old Boys" and other great books, it now costs you 99 cents.

Or if you plain just want to stick it to the elitist commie snobs of the east coast publishing houses, it will cost you 99 cents.

So go forth and purchase, or simply recommend it to friends. Future brilliant works depend on it.