Whether it's valid or not, authoring a book on a particular subject usually qualifies someone as an expert on a subject. Especially if it is on an esoteric and modern subject like online socializing.
I know of someone who published a book on Golang in 2010. The rating of that book is sitting in the 3s out of 5 stars last I checked 6 years ago. Is he an expert at Go? Not in my most humblest opinion, is the content of the book good? Also a no in my honest, must charitable view. How far did he get with showing people how to program with Go? About as far as you'd get in 2 hours on the golang docs even considering a very poorly skilled college student doing the exercises. There's maybe 170 pages in the book. I'm almost certain the book has not reached even 200 sales at the highest.
Some people write a book to be able to self promote.
I was on a meetup, where 4 scrum master "experts" were doing some presentation and they gave out their book. It was around 100 pages with very big font :) written by 4 people. So basically 4 bad essays of 25 page each.
But hey, they could then tell to HR that they (co)wrote a book on agile methodologies. Also they (co)hosted lectures for meetup attendees.
The more interesting part, is that this wasnt even the worst book about agile / scrum that I have read...
Someone I know did that too. Published a blog post then started adding “author” to their credentials. Spoke at a local 10 person meetup about some node.js framework at the time and promptly added “speaker” to the list.
As I said, I don't necessarily think that writing a book is a valid criteria, but people that do so are often used as expert sources in journalism or even court cases. It's not like you can get someone who has a phd in 4chan to interview.
It's been years now that AI can write books. Writing a book nowadays doesn't mean anything.
"Doing your own research" is laughed at now, but this is actually used to be the job of journalists to do that.
That doesn't mean not using experts to help understand complex subjects.
But what journos like the NYT is fishing experts and using them as a "proof" is simply arguing from a conclusion.
