Friday, August 24, 2012
Book Notes
So, my book was finalized and appeared on the Amazon site on Friday. I'm self-publishing, so once approved I ordered a bunch of copies at cost that same day, and also ordered one via Amazon to see if it 'worked'. I received my Amazon copy on Tuesday, and got a partial shipment of my 'at cost' books yesterday (Thursday).
Interestingly, last Monday there were 'New' copies available at Amazon via independent booksellers for $1 less than the new price. They couldn't have any copies given to them by the publisher, because that's me. I have no idea how they got the books they were selling unless they ordered them when available (Friday) at $14.95, but then, why list them to resell on Monday at $13.58?
I asked my printer, they had no clue. I suppose they lose money on each book but make it up in volume.
BTW, a 'Look Inside' feature is coming. It takes time, for some reason.
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18 comments:
Hi Erik,
I think that they charge a posting fee, which would be actually more than their actually shipping cost.
I bought my copy here in London, UK (trough amazon). Got it on Tuesday. So far a small typo, the book "against the gods" is referred as "against the odds".
Dude,
It's a shipping scam. They charge $3.99 for shipping and handling when their actual cost of shipping is far less.
Don't worry about it. You are still getting full price sales.
Lester: Ack! Unfortunately, you read the thing over and over and still such mistakes get through. I'll fix it eventually, but I should wait a while to get all such issues.
When will the Kindle edition be available? Would order it right away! cheers
I'm a non-technical reader who's a few chapters in and, despite my familiarity with your arguments, feeling deep in the weeds...
FWIW, you might want to consider investing in a copy editor....or someone/anyone with expertise editing for clarity and concision.
Maybe Amazon sells them some of the books you sold to Amazon at wholesale price for a small - but not full retail - markup.
Todd: I had two professional copy editors review the book. It could always be better, alas.
OK, I hate your politics, and I think you're an elitist jerkoff, who's a b*stard jackass, and anti-working man. But I decided to get your book because your blog is educational and free and I semi-respect (when you're not using it to push false elitist Republican propaganda) your use of equations and finance theory.
What I wanna say is I REALLY f*cking hate you 75%, but the 25% of your personality that provides educational finance stuff for free is worth buying your latest book. Feel free to filter this comment (especially if it ALREADY helped you learn about the 75% of you that's a narcissistic b*stard.
If you think that's an easy confession, go buy the book of someone you HATE. CHEERS
Fantastic, congratulations. Three cheers for the democratization of publishing!
Well, Mr. Hater, like everyone else I am a multitude, so it's logically tenable to like and dislike certain parts of me. I mean well, if that makes a difference.
Found out about your book though an Abnormal Returns tweet. I've been following the no risk premium - minimum variance portfolio discussion/ implementation for a while. Quantivity blog implemented this strategy for sector rotaton in April 2011. Adam Butler has published articles using momentum to select your investment universe and allocating within that subset of the market with the minimum variance portfolio - rebalancing monthly - Adaptive Asset Allocation.
Enjoying your book, although for someone so comfortable with programming and algorithms, I'm surprised there is no index. There are off the shelf algoithms for that!
Another request for Kindle please.
yeah, that takes a couple of weeks, and is done subsequent to the hard copy. So, Sept 3 is the hopeful date for the e-book.
Enjoyed very much your book. A couple of question though. The last sentence sectiOn 4.2 (Minimum Variance Portfolios) states " as the returns to these low-variance portfolios are above the indexes, these portfolios should be most attractive to index investors.". The the last sentence of the first paragraph in section 4.14 (Equity Risk Premium) states: "Thus a modest equity premium to the indexes is consistent with my overall hypothesis".). Finally Table 4.10 "Gross Equity Returns" are listed as having positive risk premium (as stated in the 4.14 quote), but you list "Minimum Variance" as having a NEGATIVE risk premium,- which doesn't seem consistent with the quote from section 4.2. Can you clarify this? Thanks!
Steve:I guess I could have stated this better. The positive return premium to MVPs vs. the Indices is evidence of a negative beta premium, because in the CAPM, these low beta/covariance/variance portfolios generate higher-than-average returns. That is, to the extent a 0.75 beta portfolio has a higher return than the S&P500, it is evidence of a negative risk premium (higher beta/lower return <--> lower beta/higher return).
Well, if you think the guy cavorting with millionaires is a radical socialist who hates wealth and just wants to redistribute it to lazy moochers, you probably are pretty anti-working man. So that doesn't really work as a response.
As a non-Republican I find Eric's musings about politics ridiculous, but his writing about finance is intelligent and honest. He does contain multitudes.
When will there be a kindle edition published?
Yeah, that comes after the print, for some reason. It should be out anywhere from a couple days to a few weeks, as their are lots of errors created by the company that is doing this for me. Basically, equations and images are a nightmare.
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