Five Steps to Writing a Book as Funny as Earth

After a very thoughtful review of Earth, I’ve determined that I or anybody else could write an equally fun and interesting book by following a few easy steps…

1. Get really drunk and/or high.
2. Dig though dumpsters and trash bins at Daily Show headquarters for any scraps of paper that may be jokes that were considered for the show, but ultimately thrown out because they sucked ass.
3. Have an intern put them in some type of chronological order. No intern? That’s OK. This step isn’t going to make the book better so consider it optional. Maybe repeat step one before moving on.
4. Get an account at one of the big stock photo services and download any image that might be related to one of the scraps of paper you found during step two.
5. Skill Alert: Using some desktop publishing software, arrange the text of the “jokes” with the pictures. This is the most time consuming task. If there isn’t much text, just use a bigger picture or photoshop some pictures to distract the reader.

That’s about it, but it does need to be sent to a publisher for printing. If you slap Jon Stewart’s picture on the cover any publisher will certainly take care of the rest and send you checks quarterly.

Who wrote this? Nobody really wanted to take full responsibility so there are 17 names listed as writers. Five of those, including Stewart, claim to have edited it. However, editing could have been making sure the text wrapped around the pictures nicely. There’s a monkey on the cover with Stewart, and I think the monkey was involved in the production. Unfortunately, there’s no info on the cover photo so I can’t determine what the monkey’s name is or if it is a writer or writer/editor.

Publish Your Own Book for the Kindle

You’re definitely going to want to do this. Write a book and make it available for purchase from the Amazon Kindle Store. It doesn’t cost anything to get an account at Amazon or to upload books for sale.

You can write your book using any number of tools and then use a conversion service that will put it into an ideal format as an electronic book. Or, you can write your book using e-book friendly HTML (the language for web pages). Writing HTML is not tough and you could use a free tool like Notepad++ for the writing.

When a copy of your book sells, you get a percentage of the sale price as royalty minus the fees for wireless delivery. The fees depend on the size of your book in kilobytes. Definitely check the pricing information provided for the most accurate costs, but as of 10/5/10 an author would get about $6.25 for a book that was 410 kilobytes and sold in the US and UK amazon stores for $8.99.

Bet the House

Fillipi Pamplona (Flickr)

I read Richard Roeper’s book Bet the House last week and found it to be very interesting. I can’t say I’m much of a gambler considering I play a $.02/$.05 table of online poker maybe once every 2-3 weeks, but I do find the gambler lifestyle fascinating. I’m not talking about the famous poker players on ESPN. I’m curious about the person who is guessing numbers on the roulette wheel for several hundred dollars a spin. Are they playing with a scant percentage of their day’s income or did they just lose their mortgage payment?

Roeper is already a casual gambler but steps it up for this book in which he participates in all kinds of games and wagers, betting at least $1,000 per day. He explains the games well and weaves great narratives in amongst the “action” to make for a fun read.

If you head to the casinos, you might want to stick with high stakes video poker or slots, Pai Gow poker, and multi-deck blackjack as they have the smallest house advantage.