I will write a series of essays that extracts ideas from my published books. But I will start off with an essay about what I learned about the book m

My Books, Essay #1 - by Arnold Kling - In My Tribe

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2024-04-18 17:30:04

I will write a series of essays that extracts ideas from my published books. But I will start off with an essay about what I learned about the book marketing process itself.

My first book was Under the Radar: Starting Your Net Business Without Venture Capital. In 1994, I had started one of the very first Web-based businesses, a site focused on real estate and mortgage finance, as a solo entrepreneur. I folded it into a partnership with a relocation firm more than a year later, and we unloaded it onto one of the public Dotcom companies in 1999, which was a good time to sell a Web business.

The experience was intense. In those days, we talked about dog-years, where one year of being in business on the Net was like several years of being in business in the pre-Web days. So for me writing the book was to some degree therapeutic, a chance to pause and reflect back.

The book that I intended to write was my analysis of the significance of the Internet, both commercially and in general. But that is not what I ended up writing.