Book Industry Corruption

By Leo Gura - April 1, 2025

The book publishing industry is corrupt.

Over the last 30 years a deluge of corrupt marketing gurus have taught everyone in the business world that to become a respected expert in any field you must publish a book. So now everyone with any degree of ambition and aspiration to fame writes a book just because they need to in order to establish that they are somebody important. Today we have millions of people writing quick, shitty books with very low substance just as part of a self-promotion racket.

Notice how every celebrity now has their own book. Did they even write it? No. It’s written by someone for them just for the purposes of milking their fan-base. Writing books these days is no longer about serious intellectual contribution to mankind, it’s about milking your fan-base. The bigger your fan-base, the more needed a book is to milk them to the max.

In the past, being an author used to mean something, it was an honest signal of intelligence, meaningfulness, and originality of thought. This conferred legitimate authority and status to the author. Writing a book was hard because it was supposed to be a serious effort at intellectual contribution. But today, anyone can write and publish a book in 30 days. Many books today are vacuous, padded with fluff to meet page count, full of narcissistic and insignificant personal stories, and regurgitated wisdom simply because book publishing has turned into a corporate slop mill and self-promotion vehicle. It’s become so formulaic: publish a book, make it seem like you’re an expert in the field, use that to get on TV shows and podcasts, pay for fake reviews and fake sales, tout your “best-seller” status all over the place, build authority, milk and up-sell your followers. Today, every celebrity is a “besting author”. Best-seller lists are also corrupt and fake.

What the corrupt marketing gurus learned over the last 30 years is that the substance of the book is irrelevant to selling books, what matters is having a pre-existing fan-base to milk. Celebrities keep writing vacuous books because they know their fans are blinded enough by their celebrity to buy anything with their name on it. If Kanye West wrote a book about How To Be A Nazi, it would sell 20 million copies. That’s the low we’ve hit.

Many books today are not even written by the author, they are ghostwritten. And of course AI will make this 10x worse. The AI-written book slop has barely begun. This has diluted and corrupted the whole book industry. And the kicker is, book buyers are not aware that this corruption has happened. They just assume a book is a book, and an author is a serious person with serious ideas.

One time I was at a Vipassana meditation retreat and my roommate was an online business/marketing type. I was partnered up with him randomly to share the same room. When he found out I have a sizable YouTube channel, he told me, “Have you written a book yet?” I said, “No”. He said, “Why not? You should write a book, it only takes 30 days”. He told me the story of how he wrote a book in 30 days and used it to get himself invited to local TV shows and frame himself as an expert. I told him, “If I write a book it will take 10 years to write.” He laughed and said, “That’s all wrong, just write a book in 30 days and use it to get on TV.” I said, “No thanks, I don’t want to write a book like that.” He was baffled. He could not understand it. He keep insisting that I am making a mistake, that I must write a book in 30 days. This was exactly 10 years ago (2015) and my book is still nowhere ready. Only now is my understanding of reality deep enough to even begin writing a book.

There are books and there are Books.

Then again, perfectionism is also not healthy. At some point you just gotta sit down and write the fucking book, otherwise it will never get written.

But the lesson here is this: distinguish between books written for substance vs books written for self-promotion. Do not buy or read books written for self-promotion. Take your time carefully selecting the right books to read. Quality over quantity is more important than ever. Stop reading slop. If you find yourself reading what smacks of slop, don’t be afraid to stop and throw the book away. Really consider the substance, depth, and originality of the book you’re reading before you continue reading it. We have a bad tendency to be completionist when reading books, which is a mistake in this new era.

Toxic Orange has ruined books. The rot of Orange corruption continues to worm its way into every aspect of society. This is just one piece of the larger issue of the corruption of the epistemic ecosystem.

By the way, this issue is also known as the general pattern of the tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commons is when everyone shits in the public pool because there is no disincentive for it.

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