Now I know what it feels to have a best seller... for one day

Now I know what it feels to have a best seller... for one day

Do you know the feeling of success? Some will put it in monetary terms. Some, in career advancement. For me, January 24th was the measure of success like never before. My book, There Will Be Hell To Pay shot up to the top of a category in Amazon Kindle books.

Well, of course it is misleading. In our upcoming book, The New Employee Manual, Mark Chussil and I describe how companies use claims such as "market leader" and "innovative" very loosely, just picking the right set of conditions to make the claim not a total crock.

Amazon ranks book sales hourly. On January 24, all my wife's friends and followers- she has hundreds- and the few who follow me god knows why downloaded the book during a short window that it was free. Whether they read it is another issue, but clearly my book will not be a best-seller by next week. That is reserved to Michelle Obama's sage advice about one thing or another or a book about Trump.

It is also impossible for my book to be a best-seller because it is guaranteed to anger large swaths of the public.

Progressives, for example, will abhor my depiction of their underlying axiom as "the end ("social good" in quotes, yes) justifies the means. Religious conservatives will hate the book because it depicts god as an aloof CEO of an incompetent organization. You must agree god isn't very involved in our daily lives so I am not being blasphemous, just funny. Or not. They will think not.

Some women will love the book because it describes the most powerful woman in the Universe as the only celestial entity with real integrity, but many other will hate the book because it suggests that electing a woman to be president just because she is a woman but otherwise lack moral character is not morally right. Since women read books 4X than men, I am doomed to not have a best seller.

I am hoping Orthodox Jews read this book - secretly of course, they are not supposed to read "filth" (as in secular fiction) because it tells the real story how Heaven and Hell are managed "based" on the Kabbalah's initial and sketchy description. But the only segment in the population who will love this book are libertarians, all three of us, and the two others - the Koch brothers -are not inclined to read fiction and have never heard of me.

So I had a best-seller for one day. I am happy.




Hugh Stanley

Keeper of the HAnDL at Space and Missile Defense Working Group

5 年

You write well ...have you ever considered writing a book?? :) ...Of course, it gets worse - I heard a talking head on cable news the other day posit that it's just a matter of time before all books will go directly to large print versions due to the median age of those that still read.

Udo Hohlfeld

Intelligence Specialist @ INFO + DATEN | Corporate Intelligence | intelligence powers success

6 年

Ben, You deserve to be happy ... not only for one day but for a long time called "life" as actually all individuals deserve to. I have not known you are close to the libertarian thinking, but if I understand right (and forgive me if I am wrong, English is not my mother tongue) you are, Respect and in this sense "semper fidelis" ...?

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