I'm sorry that you decided that "making my research transparent made the book much too long and unwieldy, with too many detours. I decided to make everything much sharper."
There are lots of short books that tell people how they ought to behave, think, etc. The evidence provided for the recommendations generally amounts to "I think it's a good idea". People often take the recommendations on board, presumably because they see the author as something between higher status and more informed than they are themselves, and therefore worth obeying and/or emulating.
Unfortunately, they don't agree with each other. Without evidence, the reader has no particular grounds for deciding that Rupert Cocke is (or is not) a better person to obey/emulate than Alex Jones. So they pick based on which one they already agree with, or their friends recommend, or similar. Or maybe which one has the more enjoyable writing style.
Obviously, I'm writing this without first reading your book. It may not have fallen into this particular trap. You didn't say that you'd omitted evidence, or footnotes - just your process of discovering that evidence. But the sentence I quoted leaves me fearing that those were also omitted, particularly given the length of the book.
Also, you might have misunderstood my comment. The new version still includes further reading notes so people can check my work if they really want to. I just avoided including lots of academic-style brackets with surnames, publication dates and page numbers, which break up the text.
So far, many more people have given me feedback on the short version than on the final chapters of the old one, so I guess my hunch was correct...
I'm sorry that you decided that "making my research transparent made the book much too long and unwieldy, with too many detours. I decided to make everything much sharper."
There are lots of short books that tell people how they ought to behave, think, etc. The evidence provided for the recommendations generally amounts to "I think it's a good idea". People often take the recommendations on board, presumably because they see the author as something between higher status and more informed than they are themselves, and therefore worth obeying and/or emulating.
Unfortunately, they don't agree with each other. Without evidence, the reader has no particular grounds for deciding that Rupert Cocke is (or is not) a better person to obey/emulate than Alex Jones. So they pick based on which one they already agree with, or their friends recommend, or similar. Or maybe which one has the more enjoyable writing style.
Obviously, I'm writing this without first reading your book. It may not have fallen into this particular trap. You didn't say that you'd omitted evidence, or footnotes - just your process of discovering that evidence. But the sentence I quoted leaves me fearing that those were also omitted, particularly given the length of the book.
Thanks for the feedback. You can still find the beta version of the book for free here: https://sharpenyouraxe.substack.com/p/sharpen-your-axe-beta-version
Also, you might have misunderstood my comment. The new version still includes further reading notes so people can check my work if they really want to. I just avoided including lots of academic-style brackets with surnames, publication dates and page numbers, which break up the text.
So far, many more people have given me feedback on the short version than on the final chapters of the old one, so I guess my hunch was correct...