I have had many of these over the last five years: super-secret meetings with people in the back of some restaurant or shooting range where people want to talk. Only this one was 30 or so people who were fans of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and they wanted a little private class on the subject matter. I get the secrecy; I think of it as enslaved people learning to read during the Underground Railroad Period. People want to learn how to improve themselves in a world that doesn’t want them to accomplish such a task. These people were Chamber of Commerce types and were concerned about other people knowing they were meeting with me because it was a social taboo. But I was happy to attend the event and give a talk, which everyone enjoyed. But during the Q&A section at the end I learned something from the class, that my book was being offered on Amazon.com for $4.59, which is practically giving it away. Normally, most of the sales that I see come from the publisher’s website, is $16.99. When I get the sales report, it usually has a long list with all kinds of prices shown, and some of the lower numbers I had thought were likely Kindle downloads. So, I didn’t pay much attention to them. But at this little seminar, a fan told me about it, and sure enough, the book was listed by Amazon at that very low price, so low that it’s likely cheaper than what it cost to make the book. Yet I wasn’t surprised upon hearing this; it didn’t make me angry. I think it was meant to make me angry, to be very insulting to me. But my reaction is one that I’ll share here: if you can get the book for a cheaper price, then I’m happy to let you know about it.

I personally like Amazon; I get a lot of books through them. I also am a frequent visitor to bookstores all over southern Ohio, going as far north as Dayton and Columbus regularly to get books that I don’t want to wait for to arrive in the mail. I read three or four per week on average, so it’s a major priority for me to have access to new books. For books that I must have that afternoon, I go and get them at an actual bookstore, the old-fashioned way. And I prefer hard copies of books because I don’t like the bad guys out there to know what I’m reading or looking at on the internet, because I am watched by just about everyone who wastes time watching people. And the algorithms set against me are outrageously difficult, for getting visibility. I frequently get offers from IT people wanting to “fix” my foundation links because my Google score is so low that people searching for me don’t find me on the top picks because of all the blacklisting I am listed under. I typically say no to all those offers because most of them are likely the same people doing the damage, and they’d love for me to make it easier for them to rob the stagecoach. Amazon does not like me politically, and they’d love to make me feel that I’m at the bottom of a well nobody could hear me from. That is a common strategy for them, so I never expected a fair shake from Amazon. They offer the book because they are a prominent bookseller and want to say they offer such books. Even if they hate that people want to read from someone like me. So I put them out of my mind and never really took the time to see what they were selling my book for, or to check reviews because they set algorithms on their server against me that obviously were not encouraging. So, I put my mind elsewhere. The sales listings tell a different story, so much so that I didn’t even notice the Amazon pricing.

The book has been out for a few years now, so I don’t read it every day. When I wrote it, I had been thinking about the contents for a while, but after Biden was put in the White House and Trump wasn’t there anymore, admittingly, I needed to take a break from the world for a few weeks. My wife and I took our RV out into the desert of New Mexico to escape Biden and the COVID protocols that were such a dark period in American history. I knew the economy would take a hit and that corporations had been seduced by this World Economic Forum view of the world and would need a guidebook out of their wokeness. So I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, applying my favorite sport, fast draw, with a genuine love of history. I enjoyed touring all the John Chism and Billy the Kid sites in Lincoln County during the winter of 2021, which had a lot of snow on the ground, even in that part of the world. It was a very revelatory experience for me, and it shows up in the book, which, looking back on it after a few years, is very good. Like I said, I read a lot. I have just finished a few books by Johan Norberg which I think are great, but they aren’t as good in my mind as my own book. Not just because it’s my book but because the contents are revolutionary compared to the large amounts of Marxism that have taken hold in all corporations around the world. I wrote the Gunfighter’s Guide to give people a weapon to fight against that trend, which turned out great.

The book as I thought it would be, has been a slow burn. It’s not one of those books that makes a splash and then fizzles out. When I wrote it, I was thinking of a book I love called The Machine That Changed the World, which is about Lean Manufacturing and is filled with many assumptions about a Marxist world without ever naming the beast. I wanted to write an antithesis to that which businesses could use to improve their situations without destroying their essential character. I have read many hundreds of business books, and most of them make it a point to declare their hatred and unfairness of capitalism, which is quite obvious in the Lean Manufacturing movement, which seeks to centralize power to the people and is antagonistic toward management, which is consistent with the labor union view of the world, which is always socialist in origin. In 2020, with Trump out of the office and the world on lockdowns, corporations thought the best strategy was to play along to get along. But after three years of the Biden economy now, people are looking for answers, and many of those answers only come from a source like mine, who has made it a point to declare the answers in spite of the social poison that wants all such voices to hide for their lives under a rock somewhere. My point was never to hide but to engage the enemy as they present themselves, like a gunfighter. Fight the villains in a dusty street and gun them down metaphorically for their intentional destruction of the world. And to be proud of it in the process. As I gave my presentation to that audience, I couldn’t help but reflect on how good the book was. I’m very proud of it; it has helped people who have read it and applied it. I don’t just reflect on the times of the gunfighters during American expansion but also look to the future with AI and improved technology. It’s more of an attitude than a reverence. But the world for the next few decades is going to move much more toward capitalism and away from socialism, and already many corporate leaders see the writing on the wall. And they were looking for a translation, so we were all meeting secretly, not for my sake, but for theirs. But if I learn of a price break everyone can take advantage of to get the book, I’m happy to share it. It doesn’t hurt my feelings in the least. I like seeing people getting it, finding inspiration, and achieving success. That is, after all, the best compliment I can get and why I wrote the book in the first place, for people to enjoy and be helped by. So the more people who have it, the better it is in my mind. And at that price, it makes it very easy for people. I can’t promise that the price will stay that way, but when I hear of a price break, I certainly will pass it along.

Rich Hoffman