The entire process is self-done. That's the beauty of publishing in the 21st Century--if you think a product is worth taking the time to create, no one is going to stop you.

The textbook project started in the summer of 2011. A friend of mine was telling me about Amazon's self-publishing platform and insisted I give it a try. I was skeptical at first, but I decided to go for it anyway. I figured I would be happy with my time investment if I could sell three copies of the original version per day for a year. When it started selling exponentially more, I spent a few more weeks to flesh out the material and publish a complete version.

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand why it was successful, and I have four explanations:

• Game theory sounds sexy. Whoever decided to give it that name was a marketing genius.
• It is cheap. The other textbook options in game theory are crazy expensive. The whole textbook publishing industry is absurd right now and does a complete disservice to its students. I'm going to win a lot of battles simply because my book costs $3.99 and the other one costs $39.99.
• YouTube is good marketing. My YouTube channel predated the textbook, so I leveraged some of my success from there on the book. That shot me up the rankings on Amazon, and I think that the momentum has kept its ranking going.
• I wrote it for learning. All the above aside, I also think I wrote a darn good textbook. Just about every other textbook reads like a reference manual. That's useful once you've learned game theory, but it's pretty worthless when you are first trying to learn the subject. So I intentionally removed all the unnecessary jargon and notation from the book. I also made sure to do things as step-by-step as possible to give the reader some practice in how one should go about solving games. Other textbooks just don't do that.