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

0:00So this is kind of a reflective talk like Roger's, and I don't know how many of the requirements for that I meet. At first, I'm supposed to be old, and I'm reminded of the scene in the Holy Grail. Old woman! Man! Man, sorry! I'm 37! What? I'm 37! I'm not old! All right, well, I'm 38. So it doesn't hold entirely. 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. What I'm going to do, though, nevertheless, is share just some of my experiences and see what we could maybe generalize from it. And you wonder, if I'm talking about my own life and my own experiences, why do I need a piece of paper?

0:47It's not that I can't remember these things, it's just that heaven forbid I should leave something out, right? So I've got all the things that I want to hit on. Well, the first part I want to do is just go through a few titles and just some of the things that happened as a result of them for me. And Joe mentions that I had done some scholarly writing, which is a polite way of saying that I wrote books that no one purchased. But that started to change a little bit in 2004. I had this book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and that sold really Well, I think in large part because the title is just so compelling and I wish I could take credit for that title, but I'm the worst title guy in history.

1:37So I would never have thought of a brilliant title like that. That was the publisher's idea. They came to me with this idea and said, we want somebody to write a book with this title. Would you do it? And I almost said, no, I'm just too busy. And I would have been like one of those record companies that told the Beatles, you know, Groups with guitars are on their way out, so we're not going to sign you. I mean, because if I hadn't done this, it would have just been horrendous, right? This was a great opportunity for me. 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. Now, it turns out, though, that I was naive when I thought, and I did think this, 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.

2:34And there's a teensy-weensy sense in which it didn't turn out that way. Now, for example, the book came out in late 2004. By January of 2005, the New York Times was writing about it. So you think, oh, I got a review in the New York Times. Not quite. I got a denunciation on the editorial page, not the book review section. So I was just that dangerous a little geek that I had to be on the editorial page denounced. So what was the nature of the denunciation? What was my big crime? What terrible things had I done? And the hilarious aspect of this little write-up was that they did not say, now Wood says such and such, and the reason this is wrong is da-da-da-da-da.

3:20No, it was sufficient to say, he says this, isn't that unbelievable, the nerve of this guy? And then he also says that, it's astonishing that he would say this. And I felt kind of uncowed, I hadn't actually said anything wrong. For example, can you believe he thinks the Marshall Plan was not really a central factor in the European recovery after World War II? And that was it. There was no argument. Can you believe he said it? This is the sort of thought control apparatus that we have in the media, that we're not going to bother refuting you because the very fact that we're attacking you already proves you're a crank. And as a crank, you don't deserve a refutation. We don't have the time. We're too busy making up propaganda for wars to have time to refute you.

4:09So I didn't get any refutation, or I actually said that I didn't think Franklin Roosevelt had done anything to get the country out of the Great Depression. Again, no attempt to refute this. They couldn't believe I had said it, so the whole review, such as it is, went that way. And I thought, well, this is kind of too bad. I guess my view that I'll just be treated nicely and so on doesn't seem to be panning out. It turns out that sales of the book really spiked after that because the average person thought, I don't know why the New York Times is so angry about this, but I have got to find out. So it was like I had won the Pulitzer Prize or something. It was the best thing that could have happened. 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.

4:56But that book actually became a New York Times best seller for 12 weeks. It was partially because the New York Times strategy against it backfired, but also because I got some media for the book, and this is a theme I'm going to get to later, about how do you get your message out there. My publisher of this book, Regnery, is very plugged into sort of very traditional right-wing outlets. They're not really plugged into my traditional outlets, but I could always sort of reach those people already, but they could get me on to talking to Sean Hannity. And back in 2004, Hannity was on a program on Fox News called Hannity and Colmes. And it turns out Colmes is actually a much more genial guy than Hannity. I mean, I had been on TV before. This is like the first giant audience I'd been on. I step on the set during the commercial break and Colmes is striking up a conversation. Your book looks very interesting.

5:51Very glad to have you. And Hannity is like the ice man. Like, you know, I'm just, look, This is my job. I'm not going to do any more than is absolutely necessary. I'm not going to talk to anybody. Look, I don't care. I just want to sell some books and get out. But just before we went on, we had five seconds and he said, How's your book selling? I said, pretty well. All right, so that looked fair enough. All right. So then the thing starts going and it turns to we start talking about the Great Depression. Hannity has never heard the argument that the interventions in the 1930s may have caused the Depression to drag on longer than otherwise. He's never heard this before. He said, wow, actually I've never heard that. Now here he is like one of the top five right-wing media personalities. Never even heard, not that he doesn't know the details, never even heard the claim.

6:36Well, okay, that's an interesting thing to learn. But then the rest of the interview really was Colmes and I going at each other, you know, arguing back and forth. And it turns out that that's the best thing you can ask for. Ideally you don't want just softballs thrown at you. That makes for boring television.

7:23That's just absolutely unavoidable. You do watch it. They're lying if they tell you. I know other authors have sold a lot and that's the first thing they do in the morning is see how it's doing on Amazon. I don't do that anymore because after a while it just levels off. But it was... I remember the morning after I did Hannity and Combs, it was at... Oh, I don't know. I think it was at like number 21 and that includes fiction and cookbooks and things that I can't possibly compete with. And then later after I did Fox and Friends

8:23And 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. 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 I submitted $100,000 and I figured, well, they'll just take it. Who would turn down a free 20,000 words?

9:12They systematically sliced 20,000 words out of that book! Horrible! But it saw the light of day in 33 questions. But the key thing, though, for me, and that helped me to learn stuff about how this all works, was when Meltdown came out, because I thought in 2008, somebody's got to write some kind of Austrian take on what's happening here. The golden opportunity being handed to us, I was going to say on a silver platter, but then that kind of undermines the gold. But anyway, the point is, it's a great, super-duper opportunity. You know, we've got to seize this, right? You're not going to get a crisis like this that just, you know, hits you in the face all the time. You have to grab this opportunity. So my first thought was, Ron Paul needs to write a book on this because he's got credibility here because he's been warning about it, he's got a track record of warning about it, He's knowledgeable, he's a best-selling author, he's a person who's in a position of influence.

10:09He should do it. So I actually proposed this and said, I think you would be crazy not to write a book about this. And his response was, but I've already said everything I can say. I've given speeches and we've collected the speeches. I've said what I can say. I don't think there's anything more I could say. I thought, but yeah, but that's what makes the book so easy, right? Because you've already said it. You put it all together and that's how most academics make books. They take all their journal articles and they somehow come up with a common theme and there you go. You got a book. But he didn't want to do it. So I said, all right, well, what about if I do it, would you write the foreword? So I sort of guilted him into doing that. And so he agreed to do that and it was very nice. But if I tell you how much time I had to write Meltdown, I don't want to tell you because

10:56then you'll think it's a complete piece of crap that couldn't possibly be worth anyone's time. 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. That's the only way. So you've got to get this thing out there and we will rush it out for you. for you. The normal time between you submit the manuscript initially to the publisher and it's sitting there on a bookstore shelf is roughly a year. That's roughly how long the entire process takes. That was not the case with this book. I submitted it to them in late November and it was on the shelves in early February. Now, in the internet age, that's horrendously slow, but in the publishing world, that's more or less unheard of. And

11:52And I'll say with my nullification book, I had the idea for that book in January of 2010 and it was on the shelves in June. Like, that's the nice thing about Regnery, they don't publish that many books per year. There's a lot of major publishers who publish hundreds or thousands of titles a year and yours gets lost in the marketing shuffle. Regnery, you know, gives watchful care to each book because they publish two dozen titles

12:48And so I got the part of Vinnie, who's one of the card players and friends of Oscar and Felix. And I remember thinking, I kind of wanted to get the role of Oscar or Felix. I really had wanted one of those big roles, and I was kind of disappointed not to get it. But then I thought, well, okay, I haven't done this in a while. And then the director actually said, well, we actually talked about this and thought, well, this is a young guy, and he's got all these kids, and he'd have to spend a lot of time away, and maybe this isn't the best way to have him jump back into this. I remember thinking, yeah, but why couldn't you just give it a try? If I had had one of those roles, it would have been impossible to write Meltdown. I mean, I don't know how I did it otherwise. It was horrible. It was the worst time of my whole life, working on that.

13:30It was the worst. It was the worst. I mean, just falling asleep in front of the computer, exhausted all the time, in a crummy mood. It was terrible. And incidentally, nobody knows this, but I actually considered asking Bob to co-author it with me. 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? I'm already getting a headache about this so maybe I'll do some other project with Bob in the future. And then it turned out we did a zombie video together and so all was well. 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. And yet it got a reception that was much better than I think it would have gotten ten years earlier. because the ground had already been prepared by the Peter Schiff's and Ron Paul's who speak to a popular audience.

14:21So I was able to get away with this and also I learned that, you know, because I did a lot of radio and media and I learned that, of course, these radio hosts, they're never talking about the Federal Reserve. Their listeners couldn't care less about this. In fact, there was one time Rush Limbaugh tried to talk about banking and credit and money to his audience And he had it all wrong, but at least he was trying. And he was deluged with emails from people saying, stop talking about this boring subject, we want to know what you think about Caroline Kennedy possibly running for Senate. Which is an issue of zero importance, of course, but that's what people want to listen to. So you get on there, you talk about the Fed, you can get away with a lot, because the host doesn't know anything about it, the listeners haven't heard much about it.

15:07But if you portray it in terms of central planning versus the free market, well then you're speaking their language.

15:42Today I'm talking about interfering with the market economy and they know that leads to bad consequences. Again, this sold very well. New York Times and all that. So a great thing but it was at the right moment. It just came out at the right time. It wouldn't have done well a few years earlier. I mean, even if there had been a crisis. But basically the Mises Institute coupled with the efforts of Ron Paul, who when he talks about this, people The Mises Institute website had prepared the ground that suddenly there is this receptiveness to it. When I initially proposed this idea to Regnery, I said, I think there needs to be an Austrian school book on this crisis. They initially turned it down. They said, no, too inside baseball. We don't want to do it.

16:28I thought, all right, maybe this is a dumb idea. I genuinely thought maybe this is a dumb idea. 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. 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. And interestingly, when it came time for foreign language translations, I think there were a couple that are in the works, but I got four, and one of them was Czech, but three of them are Asian. Three of them are Japanese, Chinese and Korean. And I don't know, I find that interesting for a number of reasons. And then finally, this most recent title of mine, and then I want to sort of draw something

17:11out of all this, it's called Rollback, it has a terrible title, the packaging is terrible, the marketing is terrible, but basically it's a book about everything, kind of. Everything that annoys me, I'm going to somehow try and find a theme to it and just write a book about it. It's just everything. Every aspect of the regime that makes us think that if it weren't for the state, we'd all be helpless pathetic boobs, drowning in poison food and getting our limbs blown off by exploding consumer products and all that. If we didn't have people watching over us, we wouldn't have a good money. We wouldn't have any of these things. I'm just so sick and tired of this that I decided, well, look, here's the best response I can possibly give. But unfortunately here, I had this problem that this sort of phenomenon of libertarians and Austrian school sympathizers, this is not something the publishing world is still quite ready to believe exists.

18:08They still don't really believe that readers in this tradition are out there. So they're still in this mode of trying to package everything as the Republicans versus is the Democrats. So this book that I just described to you, which, you know, talks about the war on drugs and the foreign policy and the Federal Reserve and all these different sorts of topics, they're trying to make this into a book against Obama. I mean, like, come on, right, like, why are you doing this to me? So in other words, it makes, like, libertarians think, well, this is kind of dumb, like any idiot knows Obama is a bad president, I don't need to read some book about that. And the tea party people they're trying to pitch it to have never heard of me. So they're just going to buy Dick Morris's book. So in order to promote this thing, I have had to fight tooth and nail against my own publisher.

18:57I've had to fight against the title, against the packaging, against their marketing plan and basically tell you, no, no, no, it's the exact opposite of what you think it is. So that's been a little bit annoying. All right. Now, here's what I sort of want to tell people who are interested in writing, though. This is one of the things that I've learned after doing this. First thing, I wrote an article for Lew Rockwell a few months ago called, Nobody Sells Millions of Copies. Because you always say this, wow, you must have sold, quote, millions of copies. No. Nobody sells millions of copies unless you're Glenn Beck, unless you were on Oprah. That's not a joke, by the way. I mean, unless you're on Oprah or you have your own radio talk show, you can promote that book every single day.

19:43Nobody. 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. And that's the figure. You would be shocked at how few it takes to get on the New York Times best-seller list. People do not buy books. And they certainly don't buy non-fiction books. They just do not buy them. So, for example, the last statistic I'm familiar with is from about 2005. In that year, Houghton Mifflin published 3,000 different books. Now, of those 3,000, how many of them sold more than 2,000 copies? About 200. Most books are complete bombs. But everybody sort of assumes that you write a book, you're a millionaire.

20:30And I'm going to write a book and I'm going to retire on the royalties. I mean, this is like the dictionary definition of delusion. This does not happen. So, you know, you do okay, but you're not going to do as well as you think. And you think, but my book is different. The problem is, everybody thinks his book is different. And again, the most recent statistic I know of is from about 2005. That year, there were about, just about 200,000 different books published in that one year. How are you going to get your book out before the general public? So the answer is that unless it's... 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.

21:17That does happen. But by and large, you either need to be a celebrity or at least get a little bit of big media, like be on a big television show. And if you don't get that, it's very, very hard to do. So at this point, I'm actually... I don't expect to write another book ever. I mean, maybe someday 30 years from now, but first of all, I'm tired. And secondly, I feel like it's almost not worth doing and I feel like I should reproach myself for saying that because I mean, Murray Rothbard, not that I'm comparing myself to him, but he's a model in this sense. He didn't write his books thinking, well, I'm only going to write this if it sells X number of copies. He doesn't care. He just wants to tell the truth. And to an extent, I can appreciate that. But on the other hand, it's like you produce a product that you think is pretty decent that answers a lot of claims that your audience sort of wants answered, you know, like all

22:06the tea party people, they could reply to all these, you know, left-wing criticisms if they just flip through this thing, but I'm sitting here totally dependent on some TV guy having me on for four minutes, and if I don't get that, then that's it. I mean, you can use Facebook and use other things, but you're pretty much shut out. So if you're going to do this, if you're interested in writing for the general public, just bear Bear in mind that a lot of things have to coalesce, have to come together for your book to be like a big, big seller. You need that media support. You almost certainly need some type of news hook because the big shows aren't going to have you on just because, hey, here's some author who's got a book. Well, there are hundreds of thousands of people who match that description. This guy has a book on something we're talking about right now, so you've got to figure out what your news hook is.

22:55And that is necessary but not sufficient as a condition. Now, in terms of royalties, are you going to make a lot of money? Well, yeah, I mean, look, I've done well doing this, but not as well as people. 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? Believe me, we have not done that well. But I'm going to actually tell you what you earn for royalties with a typical trade publisher. I'm not going to talk about academic publishers because I've had sad experience with them, that they're even stingier. But since you're not going to sell any books with Columbia University Press anyway, that's just for your CV. That doesn't really matter. But the way it works is the typical contract reads as follows.

23:41The first 5,000 copies of your book, you will earn 10% of the hardcover price. For the second $5,000, from $5,001 up to $10,000, you'll earn 12.5% of the cover price. And anything above that, you earn 15%. So anybody who thinks the author is making $10 a copy, I mean, the bookstores are already getting the book at 50% off. So unless the publisher doesn't want any profits, there's no way you're getting half the amount. So it's going to be like that, and then you have to figure this is going to be taxed. Although royalty income is not subject to self-employment tax, if that means something to me, being self-employed, and then if you have a literary agent, which I've had since 2006, he's going to take his chunk.

24:29So you see, it's not, you know, you're not exactly swimming in revenue. People say, I bought two of your books, so I hope you had a nice dinner. Look, I'm glad people buy my books. I'm not going to make people feel silly for saying that, but I mean, where would I have dinner on the basis of that? So people think you're doing better than you're doing. So we try to be as generous as we can when possible. So if you really want to do this though, just go into it with low sales expectations and just know that people, if it's a good book, it'll get into the right hands eventually. Your friends will help you, they'll tell people this is a book you need to read and some people are going to read your book because they took it out of the library or they borrowed it from their friends and I have not yet figured out a way to stop people from doing this.

25:13This can't be avoided, but it does mean that your audience is larger than the sales figures would reflect. Anyway, so I've already talked about current events, Hook, you're at the mercy of the media, but it is important, as Mises said, we have to reach the academic audience but also the popular audience. Now the academic audience, a lot of you guys are focused in on that and just are going to be advancing the school, and that's great. We desperately need that and I think there are some people in this room, I won't mention so as not to embarrass them, who I think really have the potential to do exactly that. That's why this seminar is so wonderful. But for those of you who want to write more popular stuff or want to supplement your scholarly stuff with popular stuff, I would say that book writing might not necessarily be the best way to go about it.

26:04It can be. The fact that you have a book is more likely to get you some media attention than the fact that you have a blog. And now media attention is not an end in itself. If it were, I would cheerlead all the wars and get on TV, but I refuse to do it. But the point is that the media attention does get attention for the ideas. It does get people going to websites that you manage to utter some fugitive URL, domain of Money, The Theory of Money and Credit of Money and Credit of Money and Credit of Money

26:59to get your ideas out there and sure the first few videos you do you'll have 300 views and you'll say well this isn't worth my time but you just keep doing this because here we've got this free medium to promote the ideas of the Austrian School and all it all you have to do is just sit there turn turn a button press a button and start talking about why Krugman's column this week is all wrong or or why Brad DeLong is all wrong about something and you talk for four to five minutes and that will get around to people who are not going to They're not going to read your article. They're not going to read your book. They will never have heard of you otherwise. 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. And are we really rising to the challenge here? I mean, I exclude Bob Murphy.

27:47Because, you know, Bob, like every three seconds, he's got five more articles denouncing five more errors. It's fantastic. It's like the existence of errors is a make-work project for Bob Murphy. But I exclude Bob from this, but I want to ask, I'm going to introduce a Catholic term, which is the examination of conscience. You step back and you examine your own conduct and you ask yourself, where have I fallen short? Where could I be better? Alright, well, here's what we have to ask ourselves. How could we be promoting the Austrian School better? How How could we reach that, A, that popular audience or B, those grad students out there who need a little extra help, who need to know what is the refutation of this sort of thing or of that?

28:32We have the brain power in this room for everybody to have a YouTube channel and a blog and to be blogging at least once a week. Everybody in here should be blogging at least once a week because you're not going to have any problem finding some error to refute. But we need our best minds here. I mean, what opportunity are you waiting for? If not this one. If not now, when? When are we going to be a presence with all of our names out there vigorously? So I want you to pledge to yourself to do this, to do something like this. And I remember, Walter, I don't know if you'll remember this, but at Murray's memorial service, after the memorial service, I was talking about how just devastated I was when I got the news that Rothbard had Die, and I felt, and I know how unbelievably arrogant this sounds, but I was just a kid, and I remember thinking to myself what Boxer said in Animal Farm, whenever there was some

29:27obstacle, his response was, I will work harder. And here I am, some doofus grad student, but I thought, I will work, we don't have Murray anymore, I will work harder. That was my attitude, and I told that to Walter, and thankfully he didn't laugh at me. What he said was, you know, shortly after Murray died, I went to the video rental store and got a whole bunch of movies and I was just going to sit and watch them. He said, I got through, do you remember this? He said, I got through part of the first movie and then I said to myself, what am I, some kind of a bum? What am I doing here sitting watching a stack of movies? Murray just died, we have a million things to do, errors to refute, I got to get back to work. Now that's not to say you shouldn't watch movies, hey, look, you have to recharge, but That is the spirit every one of us needs, is that spirit of Walter Block, because what

30:16are we waiting for? If not now, when? Alright, thank you.