A PDF Version of My New Book Is Available!

I Have Decided to Say Goodbye To Amazon; There's No Reason To Have A Middleman Taking A Cut of an Ebook

Hi everybody.

I recently self-published a new book on Amazon: “And You Can Quote Me On That!”

However, now matter how I configured the royalty settings, the ebook could either sell for $9.99 and I’d make $3 or $20 for a $7 royalty. I didn’t like that. Where in the hell was $13 going when Amazon didn’t even have any real costs?

For the paperback version, it was even worse. They told me it would cost $10 to print a copy of the book, and the royalty I’d get wouldn’t climb above $5 unless I charged $30 for it.

Then earlier today I got hit by the thunderbolt. Why in the hell am I even using a middle man to sell an ebook? You can make a PDF of it and **email** it to people.

Amazon’s marketplace and visibility is the only real reason to stay there. But I already have visibility, so do I really need them to sell copies of my book?

I don’t think so.

Because the book is over 1,000 pages long and contains more than 200 columns I wrote between July 2018 and August 2021, I feel that $7 is a fair profit margin for the ebook version.

If you would like to purchase a copy of the ebook, send $7 to my Venmo account and include your email address in a comment, and I will send you the PDF.

Brian's Venmo Account

Now, I have been absolutely stunned at how fast this Substack has taken off. I expected to get maybe 20 paying subscribers the first month, 500 free signups or so.

We’ve blasted past those numbers in just over 2 weeks.

But what really amazes me is how many people are signing up to be Founding Members [$100] or Yearly Subscribers [$70]. An astounding 33 of 77 subscribers so far have gone beyond the $5/month subscription to opt for either a Founding Member or a Yearly Subscription.

I’m incredibly grateful for this, and I want to give something back. If you paid for a Founding Membership or a Yearly Subscription, I’m going to send you the PDF of my new book by email absolutely free. As a way of saying thank you for your support.

I’ll be emailing the book out all week, when I have time. Everybody wants Durham columns, Epoch, Uncover, X22, and of course I need to do several columns for my very own Substack readers right here, so it’s going to be a very busy week.

But you know I’ll get it done.

Thank you all so much for your support.

Our great journey together is just getting started!

God bless!

Brian