It's absolutely astonishing to me how bad these books are. Not simply the weak plot, two-dimensional characters, and cliched writing, but grammatical and punctuation errors, continuity errors and logical mistakes.
I really don't think I'm a snob or a pedant. I happily read cliche-drenched hard science fiction and horror. I don't think it's too much to ask for subject-verb agreement and proper punctuation. I don't think it's to much to remember what kind of vehicle the characters are traveling in within the same paragraph.
I suppose it bothers me because when a writer has that little respect for their own work, I feel like I've been scammed. I've been sold a product the manufacturer knows is defective and can't be bothered to fix.
Traditionally, books were sold to the relatively educated relatively literate middle classes.
Kindle opened up an area to the left of the bell curve, pulled in much less educated and much less literate readers, and created a new class of much less educated (etc) writers producing content for them.
These new readers are much less picky about essentials like grammar and continuity. There are also far more of them. Numerically, the literate+educated market is much smaller than the barely-graduated-high-school market.
There's also a big teen lit audience which hasn't learned enough about grammar or fiction to be horrified by writing that looks just plain incompetent to educated etc readers.
Publishing rediscovers these markets every few generations. Previous iterations were pulps, potboilers, and penny dreadfuls.
There's a solid core of wannabe writers of all ages with much lower literacy than average. It's a bizarre thing. Their FB and forum posts have the same mistakes their writing does, and their writing is full of the usual potboiler cliches - murder, torture, sex, violence, maybe some magic, lots of shouting and running around.
Some of them are doing okay commercially, so that's just where are now.
> I don't think it's to much to remember what kind of vehicle the characters are traveling in within the same paragraph.
I'm reading this and all I can think of is metadata. What kind of books could people write with the right tools?
I cannot imagine G. R. R. Martin holding all the knowledge of the universe he designed on his head. I imagine he built a whole on-paper encyclopedia of the world of GoT. I suspect even with all his notes he sometimes makes mistakes and introduces inconsistencies.
Are there any world-building tools for writers? (CAW? -- computer-aided-writing... :-p)
People are paying for the story, not the text. It is similar to how video games with bad graphics can sell millions of copies just because it is a good game.
I'm the indie developer of a marketing tool/community (https://storyoriginapp.com/) for self-published authors like the ones mentioned in this article.
Not necessarily related to the article, but for other interested in the learning more about the self-publishing world.
Courses and training for authors on how to use Amazon ads, Facebook ads, build an email list, etc. has become incredibly easy to find. Some of the bigger names in the space are Mark Dawson, Nick Stephenson, Joanna Penn, Derek Murphy, and the 20BookTo50K community.
Authors are now essentially internet marketers who also happen to write books.
> Authors are now essentially internet marketers who also happen to write books.
For better (anyone can get started from their bedroom with just a laptop and an internet connection) and worse (less time spent on actual writing, likely no correlation between being a good marketer and a good artist), isn’t that true of all creative endeavors nowadays?
Absolutely not! What an appalling and ridiculous thing to say. Even just to say it of writers. Let alone "all creative endeavors" (Maybe you didn't mean to cast such a wide net there. Maybe you just meant to include...the people who market themselves on the internet.)
That word 'essentially' is vague to the point of unfalsifiability - whatever I could say against that, you could say, "Yeah, but essentially.." - the word sounds objective but means 'whatever I think is the most important/central/defining feature'.
The artists/musicians/writers/etc who are good at getting work for themselves has always been very different from those who are good at the art. And the people at the top of whatever charts (pop music etc) would be the first to admit they're not the greatest.
Are you not saying a similar thing? Those are the top of whatever charts are simply good marketers who happen to create whatever media the chart is about.
I think you're primarily appalled at the user of the word "authors" to only refer to those people. Which I can understand, but in the context of the point being made I'd argue that's mostly just semantics.
Sorry for not being clearer, I was just responding to the parent and GP saying "Authors are now essentially internet marketers who also happen to write books."
I'm appalled at the use of the word 'authors' to only refer to those people? um. I didn't realize anyone used 'authors' only meaning that, so, no, it wasn't that. Or maybe I don't know what they were talking about, who knows.
Disagree. I'd even say creatives are late to the party. Almost all products and services are now driven by marketing, which has little correlation with quality.
At the risk of being downvoted again (and I don't know why; they didn't say. Maybe for finding something appalling and saying so?), I didn't understand any of those 3 sentences. (1. What do you disagree with? 2. Not sure what that means. It seems more to support what I was saying. ...They're not internet marketers but should be, should realize their 'essential' selves? 3. 'Almost all products and services' is again a very wide net, which it seems you're including all the output of the arts in. Depends what you mean 'driven'; and the 2nd half was I think what I said.)
Maybe it's mainly a different of perspective; mine is a musician/artist/writer perspective, I feel like I'm talking to people in marketing. (Who else would describe everything turning to internet marketing as a party, even metaphorically..)
[disclosure: musician/artist who's 100% failed at self-marketing]
> Who else would describe everything turning to internet marketing as a party
I think you've misunderstood - "late to the party" is a common English phrase, where late is the more important word, not so much party. Imagine arriving when everyone else has already gone home. The meaning here is that promoting your work online was profitable a decade ago, but authors & musicians are only discovering that now, when it has stopped being profitable.
People here agree with you - we want quality music and quality art! But we also need to hear about it & be inspired enough to even try listening to it. A musician or author has to learn "marketing" to be able to build an audience (unless they just want to make music for themselves, and that's fine too).
Don't think of it as "marketing", think of it as trying to find & make 1,000 friends. A lot of the music I buy is because the singer is actually a friend or someone I could email with a question. Marketing can also be writing about how you make your music, or being creative in how you distribute it (like Nine Inch Nails mailing their CDs out in bags of dirt that were stuck in customs, that gets people talking about it).
All people are saying here is that writing is important (it's the product being sold!), but if a writer wants to be profitable, finding an audience who will buy it now takes much more work & effort & time than the writing itself. And that's why authors are now marketers first, writers second. A bad song that people have heard about is more likely to get bought than an excellent song no one has heard.
(And for what it's worth, it's the same for indie software developers - I only spend a small part of my time making the software, most of my time is spent on customer support & talking to customers, accounting & tax compliance, administration and marketing.)
How has the market changed since 2011? Is there a current list of top trending authors with a way to calculate revenue? Is kindle still a strong ebook platform to publish on?
It is still the ebook platform. Unless you publish directly in the web like Worm author Wildbow, but then you'll make money from Patreon (Wildbow makes $70k a year).
You could probably say that the "goldrush" has ended. To keep the metaphor going, this is like saying you can't just walk into a river, pan for gold, and make it rich anymore. Now, it takes serious a serious amount of time and investment to do well in the self-publishing world. Is there money to be made? Heck yes! But now, it's also more costly to get it.
Indie writers are pretty big business in China, a lot of their works turn into shows. Also when I mean indie, I mean really indie as in they're known occasionally by internet pen names which resemble your normal Hacker News pen names.
I would have believed it if she sold her books in her own webstore.
But now I think it could just as well be a way for Amazon to trick more people into contributing to their platform, of course until they find out that they can hardly make a living that way.
I really don't think I'm a snob or a pedant. I happily read cliche-drenched hard science fiction and horror. I don't think it's too much to ask for subject-verb agreement and proper punctuation. I don't think it's to much to remember what kind of vehicle the characters are traveling in within the same paragraph.
I suppose it bothers me because when a writer has that little respect for their own work, I feel like I've been scammed. I've been sold a product the manufacturer knows is defective and can't be bothered to fix.