So, do you have a specific marketing plan for getting the word out there about these books?
More specifically, you have access to an entire community rooting for you... how can we help?
(Also, I've been convinced by other commenters here - I normally don't buy physical books anymore, but here I'll make an exception for '"fanboyism" and "gifting" purposes).
My advice to people who want to promote the sequences in their new form would be 'Try lots of things and report back about what works/doesn't.' Focus primarily on people who are already interested in science, philosophy, and math (or at least two of those three), and keep in mind that the book will criticize religions quite a bit (e.g., Religion's Claim To Be Non-Disprovable and posts from 'Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions') very early on.
Methods fans may be interested (since they already like Eliezer's writing style, and Methods itself is ending...
The Sequences are being released as an eBook, titled Rationality: From AI to Zombies, on March 12.
We went with the name "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" (based on shminux's suggestion) to make it clearer to people — who might otherwise be expecting a self-help book, or an academic text — that the style and contents of the Sequences are rather unusual. We want to filter for readers who have a wide-ranging interest in (/ tolerance for) weird intellectual topics. Alternative options tended to obscure what the book is about, or obscure its breadth / eclecticism.
The book's contents
Around 340 of Eliezer's essays from 2009 and earlier will be included, collected into twenty-six sections ("sequences"), compiled into six books:
The six books will be released as a single sprawling eBook, making it easy to hop back and forth between different parts of the book. The whole book will be about 1,800 pages long. However, we'll also be releasing the same content as a series of six print books (and as six audio books) at a future date.
The Sequences have been tidied up in a number of small ways, but the content is mostly unchanged. The largest change is to how the content is organized. Some important Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong posts that were never officially sorted into sequences have now been added — 58 additions in all, forming four entirely new sequences (and also supplementing some existing sequences). Other posts have been removed — 105 in total. The following old sequences will be the most heavily affected:
I'll provide more details on these changes when the eBook is out.
Unlike the print and audio-book versions, the eBook version of Rationality: From AI to Zombies will be entirely free. If you want to purchase it on Kindle Store and download it directly to your Kindle, it will also be available on Amazon for $4.99.
To make the content more accessible, the eBook will include introductions I've written up for this purpose. It will also include a LessWrongWiki link to a glossary, which I'll be recruiting LessWrongers to help populate with explanations of references and jargon from the Sequences.
I'll post an announcement to Main as soon as the eBook is available. See you then!