| title | date | tags |
|---|---|---|
Rant: You Should Have Written a Book | 2025-04-17 08:07:00 +0200 |
I apologize for the rant; I have to vent my frustration with people whose quantity of opinions seems to be exceeding their experience (or maybe they're coming from an alternate universe with different laws of physics, which would be way cool but also unlikely). You've been warned; please feel free to move on or skip the rant part of the blog post.
Rant mode: ON
This is the (unedited) gem I received after making some of my EVPN videos public:
People can pay you for your books or subcription. if your real aim is to give more information to people you should share most of the things that you already have not piece by piece. but your aim is here your personal marketing by sharing couple of minutes of video that you already published long time ago. If you have an engineer perspective write some books that people can buy.
Let's forget for a moment that those videos were part of a subscription, and now anyone can enjoy them. Let's also forget that I'm too old to need "personal marketing." What triggered me was the implied idea that "making videos is cheap, and you should give them away anyway." That's exactly like saying, "the Hollywood studios should give the movies away for free; after all, that's all just personal marketing. If they wanted to be serious artists, they would have been writing books" Oh wait, I might have heard (the first half of) that bullshit before 🤦♂️.
As anyone who ever created a decent-quality video (not an "Inspector Clouseau investigates" dump of half-baked brain farts) knows, making them takes a lot of time, and it's not just due to the focus on technology and associated prep time. I'm pretty positive good Instagram or TikTok videos take a long time to create, and the moment you start editing them, the time consumption explodes.
All that would be utterly unknown to someone who never created any content, and most people with the "you should give your stuff away for free because you're inconveniencing me otherwise" ideas seem to be in that camp (at least none of them so far replied with a pointer to their work when challenged), and keep happily spreading their ideas from the high peaks of Mount Stupid.
Rant mode: OFF {#postrant}
However, I did decide to focus on presentations (and later turn them into downloadable videos) instead of writing books because that allowed me to bring more ideas to my audience. Creating slide decks still takes a lot of time (details), but it's much faster than putting the same ideas into a book form. Even editing the (automatically) transcribed videos after an AI cleanup pass (example) takes several times more than the video length if you want to structure your thoughts, remove the errors or random ramblings, and add information you forgot to mention during the presentation.
Unfortunately, I haven't found a good way to get AI to help me in these stages. Asking the AI to do a thorough cleanup (or a summary) results in a total loss of personal voice (aka: AI slop), and I can probably still write faster than wrestle with the AI prompts to get the results I want.
However, I would love to publish more of my video content as high-quality blog posts, so if you have any suggestions on how to speed up the process, please let me know.
