Wisereads Vol. 70 — Kadavy's How to Sell a Book, Ilya Sutskever's talk, and more
Last week, we shared an excerpt of Leading to Thrive by former Siemens CEO Klaus Kleinfeld. This week, we're sharing an exclusive preview of David Kadavy's latest release, How to Sell a Book: What I've learned selling 100,000 self-published nonfiction books.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
Rick Steves Refuses to Get Cynical About the World
In an interview with The New York Times, beloved travel guide guru Rick Steves reflects on his career, his cancer diagnosis, and the lessons he’s learned along the way. "A lot of people try to avoid culture shock. And it occurs to me—culture shock is constructive. It’s the growing pains of a broadening perspective, and it just needs to be curated. You set up experiences, and then you provide a forum for people to share and compare notes."
What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know
Although we usually think of entropy as the universe's tendency towards disorder, physicists are converging on a new definition that centers on the observer’s lack of knowledge. "What entropy consistently measures is ignorance: a lack of knowledge about the motion of particles, the next digit in a string of code, or the exact state of a quantum system."
Parkinson's Law: It's Real, So Use It
James Stanier, Shopify’s director of engineering, advocates for deadlines—even if they’re self-imposed—to keep a project's scope, time, and resources in balance. "When wielded with grace, good intentions, and knowledge of what gets humans moving and feeling good, deadlines are a powerful tool. Parkinson's Law is real, and you will need to fight it harder the larger your organization is. If you can succeed in this fight, you can grow and still ship fast with an org size of tens of thousands. If you don't, then one day you'll look around and wonder why your startup turned into the software equivalent of local council's tax office."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
Ilya Sutskever: "Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks: what a decade"
A journalist reports on this year’s NeurIPS conference, where Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist at OpenAI, reviewed the last decade of AI and projected how the field might progress toward superintelligence—even with a looming data ceiling. "Pre-training as we know it will unquestionably end. Why will it end? Because while computers are growing through better hardware, better algorithms, and logic clusters... We have but one internet. You can even go as far as to say that data is the fossil fuel of AI. It was created somehow, and now we use it. We've achieved peak data and there'll be no more."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
11 of my favorite @paulg essays
Tools of Titans author Tim Ferriss shares quotes from his favorite Paul Graham essays, including Keep Your Identity Small: "The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you," and How to Think for Yourself: "Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you’re told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Clio: Privacy-Preserving Insights into Real-World AI Use
To analyze how their AI agents are used without compromising privacy, Anthropic introduces Clio. "Clio (Claude insights and observations), a privacy-preserving platform that uses AI assistants themselves to analyze and surface aggregated usage patterns across millions of conversations… we use Clio to make our systems safer by identifying coordinated attempts to abuse our systems, monitoring for unknown unknowns during critical periods like launches of new capabilities or major world events, and improving our existing monitoring systems."
Hand-picked book of the week
How to Sell a Book
Having sold over 100,000 self-published nonfiction books, David Kadavy is well-equipped to guide aspiring authors through choosing the right idea and getting their work into the hands of the right readers. In his latest release, How to Sell a Book, he shares tips on selecting a title, attracting reviews, setting a price, collaborating with influencers, and much more.
"Choosing the right idea for you as an author looks easy if you’re a world-renowned expert with credentials, like Daniel Kahneman was when he wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow. But if your journey is off the beaten path like mine, it takes a combination of exploring what you have to offer, along with being realistic about how much authority you have in a topic, and also realizing unique points of view you don’t notice you have because you are you. It’s really an exciting and often uncomfortable process of self-actualization."
This in-depth preview of How to Sell a Book is exclusive to Wisereads readers. If you enjoy it, you can purchase a full copy with the discount code "READWISE20". Pro tip: All of David's ebooks, including Digital Zettelkasten and How to Write a Book, are compatible with Reader.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Where's Your Ed At
Once a week, media relations expert Ed Zitron explores tech's impact on society. From Never Forgive Them: "It isn’t that you don’t 'get' tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane."