It's been five months since Timothy Ferriss launched his bold experiment in modern publishing. The best-selling author bypassed the "big six" publishers, signed with Amazon and, as if that weren't unconventional enough, partnered with BitTorrent to help promote his new book, The 4-Hour Chef. 

The whole thing seemed almost designed to generate press, which it did. But now for the important part: Did the experiment work?

It sure looks that way. Despite being boycotted by Barnes and Noble and other bricks and mortar retailers, Ferriss's book has sold over 250,000 copies and landed on all the major bestseller lists. 

Of course, Ferriss is a well-known and established author, which helps. So does signing with Amazon, which is powerful enough to send the U.S.'s biggest brick-and-mortar book retailer into a book-banning fury. 

But as mighty as Amazon is, being banned from big-box retailers is a serious handicap. To compensate, Ferriss had to forge some unexpected partnerships, such as with smaller retailers and Panera Bread, the sandwich shop chain. He also teamed up with BitTorrent, through which he published a 680-megabyte bundle of bonus content, including behind-the-scenes videos, a sample chapter and author notes. 

Can BitTorrent Actually Drive Sales? 

"To be honest, I was initially skeptical about how many sales would result from BitTorrent," says Ferriss.  "After all, that's where people go to get stuff for free, right?"

Indeed, most people associate the P2P filesharing protocol with pirating movies, music, software and yes, books. BitTorrent, Inc has been busy trying to shed that reputation, in part by partnering with well-known content creators like Ferriss, even if they're somewhat nervous about the idea. 

"It turns out that I couldn't have been more wrong," he says. "The click-through rates from BitTorrent to Amazon were higher than anything I've ever seen through paid advertising.  Orders of magnitude higher."

More than 880,000 people have clicked through to The 4-Hour Chef's Amazon landing page. Amazon doesn't offer its authors conversion metrics, so it's hard to say how many of those people actually purchased the book. But it's an impressive amount of exposure. BitTorrent also sent nearly 300,000 people to the book's video trailer on YouTube and over 327,000 to Ferriss' website. Not bad. 

The Piracy Question 

But there's an elephant in the room: piracy. Just as easily as they can grab Ferriss' 4-Hour Chef promotional bundle on BitTorrent, users can find pirated copies of all three of his books. 

"If someone is willing to spend time finding a legit bootleg source and reading a DRM-broken hard-to-read copy of my book on a computer screen not intended for reading, just to avoid spending $12 or so, they weren't ever my core audience to begin with," Ferriss says. "If I get them, it's nothing but bonus points."

So, the Amazon/BitTorrent publishing hack seems to be working, for Ferriss at least. There are lessons to be learned here, but with the usual dose of caution. In the same way that Radiohead didn't single-handedly make "pay what you want" a viable model for all musicians, Ferriss's example is going to be of limited value to new authors. 

Still, it demonstrates the potential of today's platforms and protocols when it comes to one-upping long-entrenched players and leveling the playing field a bit. We all can't be Tim Ferriss, just like we all can't be Justin Timberlake. But just as the Internet has opened a new potential path to success for YouTube pop singers, platforms like Amazon and BitTorrent could be where tomorrow's authors find their audiences. 

Prologue

We live in a world dominated by technological immediacy. In so many ways, the interest and ability to get lost in a long story that takes us away from this world is fading from our popular consciousness. 

Sometimes, we need to take a Pause. Pick up a book you may never have thought of reading before and get lost in a different world. You just might find something that becomes an integral part of how you live your life, away from the distractions of Twitter and Facebook, iPhones and Android.

My escape from technology (and all of the other tribulations of life) has come in the form of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. The 15-book series was 23 years in the making. Each book has been a New York Times bestseller. The final book, A Memory of Light, was released earlier this month and is already an Amazon bestseller. 

Below is a tribute to the series, told in the style of Jordan, which chronicles my journey through the Wheel of Time and how it has long served to put the real world into perspective. 

Book 1: The Eye Of The World

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one age, called the Modern Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose among the islands of the Gulf of Maine. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginning nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

Inland the wind blew. Cold and bitter, it whipped the trees on the coast and frothed the tops of blue-grey waves in to white caps. It blew through the sea walls and around small islands, casting icy tendrils of snow across the landscape lush with green pine trees. The wind followed a road, long with pavement broken by years of patching from the damage of excessive winters, towards a small two-story house that lay slumbering in the predawn light.

The wind rattled the windows of the house, causing a boy, midway through his 10th year, to pull his blanket closer around his shoulders. It was Christmas Day, or the Festival of Lights as the boy was beginning to think of it, and he had woken before the rest of his family to raid his stocking, bulging full next to those of his brothers and sisters. He was allowed to open his stocking when he woke up - but not yet the massive pile of wrapped gifts under a well-decorated and brightly lit tree next to the hearth. 

A pile of candy and small toys lay strewn around the boy. His mother, he was long past the concept of Santa Claus, always liked to stuff the stockings with goodies for the children, along with items that would likely prove useful in the year to come. A paperback book lay among the rubble, small but thick, with a picture of two people on horseback, one a tall man in majestic armor, the other a small woman garbed in white. The boy looked at the book and set it aside, moving on to more exciting discoveries among the stocking.

The title of the book read The Eye Of The World, the first book of The Wheel of Time, by an author named Robert Jordan. The boy did not know it at the time, but the book, and the series that followed, would consume his consciousness and inform his life for the next 20-plus years. 

Book 8: The Path of Daggers

The boy was growing into a young man. Not quite yet an adult, he sat in his basement bedroom in the new house his parents had just bought. It was late June and the boy was alone and angry. His parents had moved from that Maine house to one in mountain foothills of Virginia, taking him away from the friends he had known all his life, just as summer started. So, he turned to friends he knew would never abandon him, devouring the books that had become some of his most prized possessions. 

He was reading The Path of Daggers, the eighth book to the Wheel of Time. It had come out the fall of the year before, but the boy had not yet gotten around to reading it. He had a tradition that must be followed. When Jordan released a new Wheel of Time book, the boy would read every book in the series again before starting the new one. With every book nearly 800 to 1,000 pages, the tradition was beginning to take a long time. 

He followed the path of his friends. Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn. Mat Cauthon, the scoundrel, gambling son of battles. Perrin Aybara, the stolid blacksmith. Egween al’Vere and Nynaeve al’Meara, the stubborn but talented fledgling Aes Sedai. The people of the Two Rivers that fought to save the world and win Tarmon Gai’don, the last battle between the forces of Light and Shadow.

The books were the boy’s solace and his escape, especially through this summer, one of the most difficult and disappointing of his life. He had begun to associate himself with various characters' traits. He thought of the Two Rivers as his former home in Maine, a place he had been forced to leave. He did not know it then, but just like the characters of the Wheel of Time, leaving his Two Rivers would ultimately be the best thing for him. 

Book 11: Knife of Dreams

The boy was now a man, still young and full of the arrogance of a young adult who has tasted some early success. 

There was also pain. Deep, emotional pain. He did not know it then, but this pain was a thing that many people his age experienced. It was an existential rift, threatening to tear his soul apart. 

The young man swallowed the pain, allowed it to harden him and make him cold, calculating. He believed that allowing the pain to make his heart a stone gave him strength. He did not know how foolish he was.

The young man sat in his apartment, reading Knife of Dreams, the 11th book of the Wheel of Time, which had just been released. He was alone, except for his dog, and enjoyed the silence and solitude of his self-mandated exile to University. He had left his friends behind and looked to make a new life for himself.

It was hard not to notice the similarities between himself and Rand al’Thor. The Dragon Reborn also faced an existential crisis, allowing himself to become hard to the point of breaking. A darkness was consuming him, to the detriment of the world he was destined to protect. 

While the young man sympathized with the Dragon Reborn and saw the correlation in their predicaments, he thought himself more like Mat Cauthon. Mat was a gambler and a carouser, a world-class complainer, a scamp, a rogue and a scoundrel. These were traits that the young man could get behind. Mat was also brilliant and crafty and, while he complained about it, would always end up doing the right thing. Even if it was difficult.

Book 12: The Gathering Storm

It had been years since the man had thought of the Wheel of Time. Robert Jordan had died in 2007 and the man wondered if the series would ever be finished. Finally, a new book had been released, completed by Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy writer picked by Jordan’s widow Harriet McDougal to finish the series. 

The man had, more or less, passed his existential crisis. Reading The Gathering Storm, the 12th book of the Wheel of Time, the man hoped that the Dragon Reborn would as well. After all, the fate of the world rested on his shoulders.

The man, no longer a boy and past the angst of young adulthood, begun to think of himself like Perrin Aybara, the blacksmith turned wolfbrother, turned reluctant lord of his people, turned force of nature. Perrin, above all else, was responsible. Levelheaded and deep thinking, practical and meticulous, Perrin’s ability to think through all the aspects of a problem gave him power. Once set upon a task, Perrin would see it to the end and do it right. Though the man still embodied aspects of both Rand and Mat (especially Mat), Perrin was a guide through the heart of darkness.

By the end of the 12th book, Rand indeed had found his heart again. He learned how to laugh, to accept his fate while marshaling his skill and resources to the task in front of him. It had taken a long time for Rand to come to grips with himself and learn to smile again, to trust people. Just like it had been so many other times in their lives together, the man and the Dragon Reborn had reached the same point in their lives at the same time.

Book 14: A Memory of Light

The Last Battle was coming. The man could not wait. 

He took upon the massive undertaking in July to read all 14 books (including the prequel New Spring) before the 15th and final book, A Memory Of Light, arrived in January of 2013. 

It had been a long time since the man had read all the books. The longer the Wheel of Time series ran, the harder it was to re-read all the previous books leading up to the latest one. The man had taken to re-reading only the previous two or three before starting the newest release. 

It was like coming home. 

He relished the flight from the Two Rivers, having forgotten how engaging and exotic the first few books had been. He grew weary when the story dragged after the eighth book, when Jordan spent more time letting Aes Sedai argue than advancing the plot. He felt the tingle of anticipation reading the two Sanderson books before A Memory of Light, and respecting Sanderson for his brilliant stewardship of the beloved series. 

As the man moved through the series, all four million words of it, he recalled the path he had taken to this point and how the characters of the Wheel of Time had been his companions, his Light, through his life. It was a catharsis, the pain and joy, trials and tribulations of his teens and 20s put to bed through his journey, one last time, through the Wheel of Time. 

The series, like it had been so many times before, were his escape. His Pause. A respite from a life that had become dominated by smartphones and social media, the endless maw of his own writing, chronicling the world of technology in his day-to-day life. 

And finally, after so many years of waiting, the final chapter had arrived.

Epilogue

The man wept. Uncontrollable, body-shaking sobs ran through him. 

He had been up most of the night before. A Memory of Light, it turned out, was almost all he had hoped it to be. Characters he cared for fought and died, hundreds of pages of endless battle making up for the middle books that had been nothing but dialogue. The Last Battle grew desperate, the characters weary and exhausted from fighting the Shadow in a battle that seemingly would never end. The man, fighting his own exhaustion, fell asleep with the book in his hand.

When he woke, he could not simply put the book aside and start his daily work. After more than 20 years, he was not going to wait another hour to see if the Dragon Reborn would kill the Dark One.

The last 300 pages of the Wheel of Time were intense and chaotic, hope mixed with despair. The man’s weeping had much to do with the plight of the characters, but also the path of his own life reflected through them. In the end, he felt raw, tired but happy. He knew the Wheel of Time was more than just an epic fantasy series written by a talented author. It was part of him and he was part of it. He closed the book and sighed, wiping tears from his cheeks.

There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was an ending. 

Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time. 

Phil Parker is unlike any writer you've ever met - or read for that matter. That's because he doesn't write most of his books. Instead, the trained economist uses sophisticated algorithms that can pen a whole book from start to finish in as little as a few minutes. The secret is sophisticated programming mimicking the thought process behind formulaic writing. It can take years to create these programs, but once completed, new books can be churned out in minutes.

This method has led to Parker's company - ICON Group International Inc - auto-writing more than a million titles, mostly nonfiction books on very specific subjects. But there's poetry, too - see an example at right. (Parker says most poetry is governed by strict formulas.) He claims he's basically applying 19th Century Taylorism to the publishing industry, emulating the famous auto manufacturer's process.

Parker's work isn't publishing's first foray into auto-writing, but up until now, most, like companies like Chicago-based Narrative Science and North Carolina’s StatSheet, focused on short, formulaic sports and crime writing for newspapers, not full-length books.

When ReadWrite spoke with Parker this week, he gushed about how much press he's gotten of late - and how often they'd gotten his story wrong. 

Writing By The Numbers

ReadWrite: Tell me about the algorithm you created to auto-write books. 

Phil Parker: The non-fiction algorithms and methodology are not original at all... The whole field is called econometrics. All the algorithms we did was mimic what economists have been doing for decades.

In the 1990s I was working on reports where you had to do a lot of economic analyses and I realized that most of what an economist does is itself extremely formulaic in nature. With the advent of larger hard disks, Windows, RAM, a lot of that process could be reverse engineered and basically characterized by algorithms and be used in an automated fashion. The methodologies are extremely old, just like the methodologies of writing haiku poetry are very old. An Elizabethan sonnet is 14 lines - that is a line of code if you think of it that way. The code is constrained. So all genres, no matter what the genres are, are a form of constrained writing.

ReadWrite: What kind of restraints?

Phil Parker: There are constraints to the length of the book based on page formats and font sizes and the expectations of readers. There's natural constraints that exist in all forms of writing. In the nonfiction area, the constraints are fairly understood by the people in that area. 

Small businesses doing import-export businesses, they do it for very narrowly defined products. They don't do it for general products. That's why for Amazon and elsewhere, all these titles we created, very arcane categories, and that's because that's what people actually do business in. Nobody does business in hardware parts, they do it in 6-inch copper screws. So for those businesses, to hire a consultant firm to say 'Hey, can you give me a worldwide estimate of copper screws,' the firm would go out and spend a month or two basically doing the job an economist and a couple of researchers do. Those people then pass off the editorial analysis to a group of people who do formatting and copy editing and graphic design, who then pass it off to another group of people who do metadata, covers, spines, all that. All we did is reverse engineer that. But the methodology to do that already existed before the books existed. 

ReadWrite: So it's not a new form of writing?

Phil Parker: I have not created any new way of writing. All I'm doing is writing computer programs that mimic the way people write. Going back to the Elizabethan sonnets, Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries created the 14-line iambic pentameter poem, where the rhyming pattern was 'a-b, a-b, c-d, c-d, e-f, e-f g-g.' G-g being a couplet at the end. By line 9 there has to be a turn in the poem, so there has to be a phrase like 'yet' or 'but.' The first line is typically a question, which acts as a title. All of them are 10 syllables in each line... they have to go in the rhythm of that pattern. If you do an analysis of sonnets, you'll realize that about 10% of sonnets violate those rules. But they do it only in a very particular way. Even that formulation of violation is itself constrained... Once you have all of those rules you then write algorithms that mimic those rules. It's a very different kind of philosophy from artificial intelligence.

All About The Algorithm

ReadWrite: Tell us about that algorithm.

Phil Parker: We created a system which we think mimics the human mind... The truth is, if you step back far enough, all of literature is highly formulaic, not just romance novels. Some of the genres are so forumalic that the publishers of those genres tell the potential writers how to write the books themselves.

ReadWrite: What do you mean by formulaic?

Phil Parker: A genre is defined by formula. What's interesting across genres, often you find the same formulas taking place in little twists, which throw them squarely in a different genre. But the twist is minute. A romance book can become a thriller by rearranging certain components of it. In essence, formulas of genres have patterns in them which overlap with each other. Think of a Venn diagram, and the intersection between them. The more genres intersect with each other, the more likely that recurring patterns can be observed. 

We started using this graph theoretic approach to write dictionary definitions. I have this thing called Webster's Online Dictionary... I turned my algorithms on generating dictionaries... using cluster analysis and graph theory combined. It algorithmically mimicked what a lexicographer should do if they had access to such a large data base. The process involved first creating the linguistic graph that defines language and all of the relationships between words and the phonetics behind the language.

ReadWrite: Does it really take 20 minutes to auto-write a book?

Phil Parker: It could take 2-3 years to set up the algorithms, but once you've got it, the software has now been fully coded. Once you decide to write one on [a particular] topic, it only takes 20-30 minutes... I think the slowest one might take an hour or two, the fastest 4 to 10 minutes. 

ReadWrite: How much does it cost to produce?

Phil Parker: The cost could be the equivalent of 2-3 man years of programmer time, and maybe an analyst or editors that might be required on that project... could be $200,000 to $500,000 to set up a genre. 

ReadWrite:  How many books have you written by hand versus with the algorithm? 

Phil Parker: The ones I wrote by hand were academic books - they were like MIT press - it wasn't using algorithms. So 6 of them. And more than 1,000,050 titles using automation. It's a moving target by the hour... we put a lot out of print because they're dated after 2 or 3 years because they're statistical analyses... You cull the catalogue so to speak.

Humans Vs. Machines

ReadWrite: What's the big difference between human writing and machine writing?

Phil Parker: There's the classic turing test about a conversation with a robot: Can you tell the difference between a robot and a real human who's conversing with you? Is there something different about these topics? I don't think anybody would look at our crossword puzzle books and say, 'Oh my gosh, a computer wrote this,' because most crossword puzzles are so formulaic that you would expect it to be formulaic... If people find it useful to be in a formulaic format, so much the better. The goal isn't to sound better than an author. The goal is to deliver something useful to people. That's the end of it, no more. Otherwise, why bother doing it? 

ReadWrite: So are human authors replaceable?

Phil Parker: Bloggers that we talked about earlier who read 3 different articles, read a Wikipedia page... those people can be replaced with computer algorithms, because they're doing formulaic work. What you're doing right now is not formulaic. Because you're probing, you're going to the depths of it.

There's been in the last 2 weeks about 10 articles written about what I've done and none of them talked to me about it. They're all copy and pasting from each other. I think it's very a interesting observation that they're using a formulaic method to deliver content and put their name on a byline, when in fact they've done a formulaic cut-and-paste. I would call those kinds of articles low on the creativity front. 

 Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Last week, Guy Kawasaki joined us ReadWrite Editor-in-Chief Dan Lyons in San Francisco for the second ReadWrite Mix event, he shared the secrets of his new book: APE – Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. In the following clips, Guy discusses his unique writing process and how to leverage social media for promotion. Learn how he secured, within an hour of publishing, a bevy of five-star reviews on Amazon. Hint: You gotta trust people.

See ReadWrite Mix: Guy Kawasaki Talks Apple, Google & The Book Business

E-readers are screwed.

That's the main takeaway from Wednesdays ominously worded report from IHS, anyway. The numbers are pretty dramatic: By the end of the year, sales of dedicated ebook reading devices will have dropped 36% from 2011. Come 2016, says IHS, total e-reader sale volume will be just two-thirds of what it was last year.

Yikes. Is this really the death of e-readers? 

It makes perfect sense that e-reader sales are falling off a cliff. Tablets are eating their lunch. Not only has Apple sold 84 million iPads to date, but the companies who have dominated the e-reader market are themselves shipping tablets now. 

Consumers are quite naturally drawn to these multi-function, multimedia-capable gadgets that can stream movies, browse the Web, take photos, play Letterpress and do just about anything else app developers can dream up. And yes, those same devices - whose prices keep falling - let you read books too.  

My iPad Is Great, But I Really Want A Kindle

When Steve Jobs first unveiled the iPad, I thought it was absurd. Never would I need to supplement my laptop and iPhone with this giant iPod Touch, I declared.

Today, I use my iPad constantly. It serves as my alarm clock, morning newspaper, TV content provider, futuristic radio, bedtime magazine, digital cookbook and much else. It even helps me do my job. What an incredible gizmo. 

But you know what's the very top of my wish list? Amazon's Kindle Paper White. An e-reader of the very sort whose grave is allegedly being dug by my shiny new iPad. 

The thing about my iPad is that there's too much going on there. It's not quite as busy and distraction-prone as my laptop, but when I'm staring into the growing screen of my tablet, my brain knows about all the options it has. I can check Twitter, refresh my Gmail inbox one more time, page through Flipboard, catch up on my ever-overflowing Instapaper queue or see what videos are bubbling up on YouTube, ShowYou or Frequency. And I don't even play games or use chat apps on my iPad. 

Reading comprises the vast majority of what I do on my iPad. Probably 90% of all the words that my brain processes in a given month come from that glowing, 9.7-inch Retina display. I catch up on Google Reader and Flipboard, but I also delve into longer content on Instapaper, Longform and digital magazines. The thing I can never seem to make my way to is the Kindle app, where the books are waiting. 

The Underrated Value Of A Single-Use Device

That's why I want a Kindle. After a day of dinging notifications, multitasking and hopping from app to app, my brain could really use the respite of a device that does only one thing. 

Why, you might ask, don't I just pick up a paperback book and put the gadgets away?

I certainly do that from time to time, but the inescapable reality is that more and more content exists in digital space. Like analog records, I'll always have a physical bookshelf, but most of what I consume will be digital. There's just more new stuff there, and it's more easily accessible. Some big name authors are now going directly through Amazon, with or without a print edition. If I get a PDF copy of a new book or want to get a sample a chapter, I need to turn to a gadget to read those things. E-readers might be on the decline, but e-books aren't going anywhere. 

Perhaps I could just turn off my iPad's Wi-Fi, launch the Kindle app and, for crying out loud, exercise a little self-control. I do that from time to time, too. And it works. But sometimes I'd like to leave the backlit, multifunction gadgets at home and not even have the option to do other stuff. I'd also like to do read an e-book on the beach without squinting to see the text or risk dropping a $600 device in the sand. 

So the Kindle it is. I very much have room for both devices in my life, and I doubt I'm the only one.

All things considered, it makes complete sense that dedicated e-readers are selling less - and that that decline will continue as tablet prices drop. But I don't think we should write off e-readers off quite yet. At least, I hope not. I've got a hell of a reading queue to catch up on. 

If you've ever dreamed of becoming a published author, you could hardly have picked a better time to be alive. A full-blown revolution is afoot in the way books are written, published and distributed, and the playing field has practically been nuked. It makes for some feel-good, tech-democratizes-all type stuff, but just because the playing field is level doesn't mean it's easy to navigate. Guy Kawasaki wants to help. 

The entrepreneur and former Apple evangelist has published books using both the traditional and DIY routes, so he's familiar with the inner workings of both. He recently coauthored a book titled APE (Author, Publisher and Entrepreneur): How to Publish a Book, which is being released through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program. (He'll be talking about his book at a ReadWrite Mix event in San Francisco this week.)

APE aims to be a sort of field guide for self-publishers, surveying the current landscape and laying out recommended tools for writing, publishing and selling a book. As the title suggests, Kawasaki advocates an approach that requires wearing all three hats: not just of a writer, but as a publisher and businessperson as well. Doing so, says Kawasaki, is the only way the DIY set can begin to compete with traditional publishers. 

After all, it's still big publishing companies that sell most of the books and have the advantage when it comes to professional editing, distribution and marketing. Self-publishing platforms like Amazon's are beginning to chisel away at that dominance, but it's really the proliferation of tablets and e-readers that's fueling this shift. 

The Explosion of Tablets and E-Readers

"You can get a tablet for a hundred or two hundred bucks now," Kawasaki says. "It has so many advantages over trying to buy stacks of books. When you walk onto an airplane, even in coach, everybody's reading a tablet now." 

Apple is well on its way toward selling its 100 millionth iPad (if it hasn't already) and it's now joined in the tablet arena by the likes of Amazon's Kindle Fire, the Nexus 7, Barnes and Noble's Nook and the brand new Microsoft Surface. Then there's the whole category of e-readers, a pack which Amazon's line of non-tablet Kindles leads (even if they're not forthcoming about the numbers).  

As this list of players grows, there's a seemingly corresponding drop in prices, which further fuels their adoption by consumers. The more of these gadgets land in consumers hands, the most e-books they buy. Indeed, during the first quarter of this year, digital book sales revenue surpassed that of hard covers for the first time ever.

Self-Publishing Is Easier Than Ever - But Still Hard

Finding and buying books may be easier than at any point in human history, but publishing those books isn't quite as simple as tapping the purchase button. There's a cobweb of platforms, tools, formats and strategies, a path which Kawasaki and Welch attempt to illuminate. With authoring tools like Adobe InDesign and Apple's iBooks Author, the act of publishing is getting far more user-friendly.

But for self-publishers, writing the book is the easy part. Where much of the hardest works comes into play is with editing, distribution and marketing - you know, all the things a traditional publisher typically cares of. That is, if you can manage to get a book deal. 

"It is just a stark reality that if you're a self-published author, you are responsible for your own marketing," says Kawasaki, who acknowledges that established authors like himself and Tim Ferriss have a unique advantage on this front. Not every self-published author will make six figures, or even make a living from their writing at all, but the opportunity they have to give it a shot is one that never existed before. 

The entrepreneurial skills self-publishers need to hone can go a long way for authors using the traditional method, Kawsaki adds. That's because big publishing houses only put a limited amount of time and effort into marketing a new book before moving on push the next one. 

"Even if you're with the best publisher in the world, it always helps to have your own platform," he says. That's something self-published authors will have to work very hard to build. 

With self-publishing, the trade-off is clear: Sure, it's easier and more democratic, while authors have more freedom and they earn more money per book. But selling those books is much harder without the backing of a traditional publisher and the whole process requires much more of the author than just sitting down and writing. 

It's a concept Kawasaki refers to "artisanal publishing," wherein the creators play a more hands-on role throughout the process of crafting and selling the product. In other words, it's more work.