In 1994, a whip-smart hedge fund employee moved to Bellevue, WA. He knew that the web was growing at an insane rate. Why not start a business to sell books online?

It worked, and Jeff Bezos’s revolutionized many an industry. Beyond selling books, the company sold CDs, board games, and just about every legal product. (There’s a reason that Brad Stone’s bestselling book is called The Everything Store.)

The Case for Author Experiments

Books and CDs

At a high level, Amazon embraced complementarity. CDs and DVDs aren’t that different than books. Of course, many Amazon inventions have nothing to do with written words. AWS and Alexa are two cases in point.

Authors would do well to think about the same principle. Blockbuster movie franchisees and rebooted TV shows prove that we’re suckers for series.

It’s hard enough to write one quality book. If you can, though, why not pen two or more about an adjacent topic? It worked for the Freakonomics guys.