After reading this chapter of Clive Thompson's Smarter Than You Think, I personally wasn't aware of what "pluralistic ignorance" was (still), but this nice little definition that Google gave me I think gives me a little more insight:

"In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance is a situation in which a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but incorrectly assume that most others accept it, and therefore go along with it. This is also described as "no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes."

This is sort of funny to me, and reminds me of those annoying people in high school who kept talking about how everyone was condoning animal cruelty because they didn't understand or appreciate vegetarianism.

The "harriest chapter in the book," or Chapter 13 of Kawasaki and Welch's APE, actually did seem pretty hairy (harry?) to me.

And I had to look up exactly what "hairy" meant here. And it wasn't an abundance of hair.
It apparently means "alarming and difficult."

This makes sense! I mean self-publishing, like we've repeatedly been told is in many ways a GREAT thing. But it is particularly quite hairy because there are so many ways to do it--and deciding which one to use is especially alarming and sometimes difficult for beginners in the world of self-publishing.

I really liked the story that Clive Thompson used in Chapter 3: Public Thinking of Smarter Than You Think when he talked about the successful blogger Kenyan-born Ory Okolloh and how she refused to write a book because she described herself as having "a very introverted real personality" (46).

HAHA. What?
Blogging is introverted? I guess I've never really thought of it that way, but I guess in a sense she is right--wanting to be published does involve having a little bit of an extroverted personality. You are basically putting your work out there for others to see. And blogging on the other hand is a little more private.

Have you guys ever noticed that the word authority has the word author in it? This is something that just occurred to me, I swear. But I feel like it is totally relevant to Kawasaki's points on traditional publishing, the self-publishing revolution, and the ascent of eBooks.

Something that certainly stuck with me was in Chapter 3--(The Three "D's" of Self-Publishing). Determination, Democratization, and something Kawasaki calls disintermediation. Which isn't really a word. I looked it up.

But democracy?
Honestly the last thing I'm thinking of when thinking about my potential career in publishing is anything remotely close to politics, but Kawasaki has a different way of looking at it.

Austin Kleon pretty much starts out his book with the concept by Honore de Balzac: "For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed" and I feel like this really applies to me and cheesily ties into Kleon's title Show Your Work. Just SHOW YOUR WORK. This is something that a lot of people have a hard time doing. I know for me specifically, I was always that person in the back of every creative writing class I've ever taken finding excuses like "It's not finished," "It's too short," "It's too long," or my personal favorite--"I don't think I did the assignment right."