Preorder Kakistocracy, Get One-Year Paid Subscription

I’ve been thinking about what I’ve been doing with this…<waves arms around> life thing here, and one thing that I know is that I’m happiest and most fulfilled producing long-form content. That means detailed essays and books over tweets and podcasts. Such work also brings intellectual prestige, which will make more people listen to me, putting my mind at rest by knowing that there is something resembling merit in the marketplace of ideas and therefore justice in this world.

I’d like to be able to get more book deals that publishers can be confident will lead to a lot of sales, and also have my books be at the center of the public discourse around my work. And for that, I need my books to be successful.

In recent years, I’ve learned a lot that is surprising about the book market. Most notably, how few books are actually sold.

What numbers come to mind when you think of a New York Times bestseller? How many books do you think someone needs to sell to make the non-fiction list?

To give some context, on a weekly basis, I regularly have multiple tweets that get millions of views. A well-performing post on this newsletter can easily receive hundreds of thousands.

But according to most sources, for nonfiction hardcover, the range is 5,000-10,000 purchases in a week to make the NYT bestseller list. It’s not purely about numbers, as there’s a formula that is not public, but that’s usually the ballpark. We can take that as a measure of a highly successful book.

You might think that reaching that level of sales should be easy for me. I’ve got 214K+ X followers, and 45K+ Substack subscribers. For my book to be a major success, I just need to convert about 3% of my X followers, or a quarter of my Substack subscribers. If only the people who read every post here preordered the book, that could be more than enough. To put it another way, if I sold as many books in a week as I got views on my worst-performing tweet of an average day, I would make the list.

So I’ve been spamming the X account and the Substack. I’ve pinned the article announcing the book’s release to the top of this newsletter. That essay is also usually pinned on the X account, and on a near-daily basis I add a new post directing people to the link or to the Amazon page of the book itself. And now on nearly every post on this newsletter, I include some variation of the message below:

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

Yet, despite all these efforts, we’re still not in “guaranteed hit” territory.

So here’s what I’m going to do. Preorder the hardcover copy between now and the release on July 7, and I will give you a one-year paid subscription to this newsletter, which has a normal value of $70. The hardcover is $26, so if you think you might ever become a paid subscriber, now is the time to do it. If you buy an ebook version, I’ll give you six months free. Just forward confirmation of your preorder to hanania.preorders@gmail.com, and tell me the email you want to use for your subscription.

This offer is only available to those who are not currently paid subscribers. Sorry, I don’t want everyone to cancel their subscriptions en masse so I end up making nothing from this newsletter. Still, if you’re already a paid subscriber and preorder the hardcover or ebook, I’ll give you a half-hour meeting for a discounted price of $50. Meetings for paid subscribers are usually $120, so that means you get $70 off, the same value as a year subscription. I’ll only do this for the first hundred people who request it, otherwise it would just take up too much of my time.

If you’re already a paid subscriber and already preordered the book, God bless you. You have something more important than money or free subscriptions: my never-ending gratitude.

Audiobooks I’ve learned do not count toward the NYT bestseller list but have their own less prestigious list, so there will be no deal for them. But if you buy the audiobook with the ebook, I’d be willing to treat that as buying a hardcover.

I hope that knowing how few sales it takes for a book to be a success can motivate readers to actually preorder. Timing is as important as pure numbers. Five thousand sales in one week are much more valuable than dragging them out over a month or two. This newsletter is large enough that it can make Kakistocracy a major success on its own. The effort just needs to be concentrated in this very moment.

The book is in large part a lament about how stupid political discourse has gotten. I argue that ultimately this is somewhat inevitable given the attitudes and preferences of the masses, combined with the rise of the internet and social media. But that doesn’t mean we’re completely helpless in pushing back. Books like Kakistocracy don’t have to reach as many people as a Sean Hannity broadcast in order to have major influence because they disproportionately reach smart elites. One way to look at it is that my direct competition is not large influencers talking about UFOs or pushing conspiracy theories, but other intellectuals who are woke or flatter populist ideas and sensibilities rather than push back against them.

So by preordering the book, you’re helping me. But you’re also voting with your wallet in terms of what ideas succeed and what intellectual discourse is like going forward. I don’t feel crazy saying that buying the book is part of the solution to the problems it describes.

Once again, here are the links to buy at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.