On Quickie Book Services

When you've been in the publishing world as long as I have, you've seen all types of actors. In the past, I've written about the charlatans of hybrid publishing. Today, I'll focus on quickie book services.

Compressed Timelines

I'm talking about folks who promise to ghostwrite and publish a book in an insanely short period of time—sometimes two to three months. In the past, these service providers typically interviewed their clients and summarized those conversations into chapters. In the past 18 months or so, some of these outfits have adopted AI-driven approaches. Clients provide content in the form of blog posts, podcast audio transcripts, white papers, interviews, slides, and other content. Out pops a morass of long-form content. A human being then curates that text into something resembling a book.

If you want to go that route, have at it. Your total cost will be a fraction of what you'd expect to spend at reputable hybrid publishers, including Racket. You'll spend far less time than you would as well. For the following reasons, though, the money and time saved from a paint-by-numbers approach are a classic example of the juice not being worth the squeeze.