Housel: 'The Psychology of Money' grew from 5,000 print run to 5M+ copies sold
Morgan Housel · Morgan Housel: Understanding Elon Musk, Jensen Huang and Other Outliers in Tech · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Apr 7, 2024 · at 5:25
Morgan Housel is a partner at Collaborative Fund and author of 'The Psychology of Money.' He is discussing tail-driven power law outcomes in creative work and startup investing.
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“The first print run of Psychology of Money was 5000 copies. And we did it because that's what we thought it was. If we sold 5000 copies, we would have been stoked. Like the book industry is not, it's not easy to get people to pay 25 dollars for a piece of content that they're used to getting for free. So it's very difficult to get people to pull out their credit cards and pay for content. And it's very difficult to sell books. And so there was absolutely no indication at all that it would go on to do what it did. We would have been happy with 5000. And when we up the print run to 10,000, that felt like so ambitious. And then we went to 20,000 and that just felt like, what are we doing? There's no way we're ever going to move all of these. And just recently crossed five million about three and a half years after it launched.”
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