Spent several years writing and editing my first book before thinking the job was finished when I hit the publish now button. But it is literally only half the job done.
The hell now is unless you get friends and family or an agency involved to push it and market it it will languish on the 500th page of any Amazon search forever. Oh and did I say that there are thousands of books a day released and there is nowhere you can self-promote stuff if you do not have social media, HN and reddit will also immediately block self-promotion even if relevant to the audience (I guess I can understand why). I guess the only ones destined to read it are the AI training algorithms.
Still it wont stop me writing, having a book published, even if nobody reads it is very self-satisfying and leaves something of you in this world when you are gone.
Ten years ago I wrote a science fiction novel in Finnish, printed 300 hardcover copies at my own expense, and gave them away to people over the years. I would guess less than 10% of those copies have actually been read. (A few people claim they liked it, but of course that doesn't necessarily mean they read it.)
So, a waste of time and money? That's not how I feel about it at all. The creative process was illuminating. And as you say, it's satisfying to think that there's now a physical artifact of my mind that's longer and deeper than any other work I've produced, and it will probably stay for a while on somebody's bookshelf after I'm gone.
Exactly. Don't expect anyone to read what you wrote, much less commercial success, unless you were a Harvard undergrad English prodigy who joined Penguin publishing, or somehow wiggled into the circle of [City] Review of [Each Others'] Books. It's a one-way, time-traveling message in a bottle comprised of dead trees. Doing it for art is a wolf's howl that it lived and that it could.
Although, it's gradually shifted into over-reliance on the linkrot of spinning rust, floating electrons, and burning transistors such that used and new bookstores and libraries are endangered species. Perhaps another cycle similar to the early medieval period maybe gradually happening as today's "Romes" decline in slow-motion, accelerated by climate change decline unless and until we save ourselves through economic and ecological limits.
> It's a one-way, time-traveling message in a bottle
So too is DNA in children. You don’t get to choose the entirety of the message but you do get to choose the half of the lottery that they must receive.
And that message is likely to far outlive any message in any dead tree or electronic book.
Perhaps the assertion is true in the sense that an average, mediocre person will have a better chance of having his genetic line survive than writing something that immoratalises him in history, like Newton or Pascal. But But if one has the ability, the latter might be a safer option...
where there is increased opportunity there is usually increased risk; it's hardly a relative comparison.
also no one really chooses their offspring's 'half of the lottery', it's an accident of nature -- we only get to choose whether or not we try to propagate our own skew into the lottery roll.
and to be very real here for a second, 99% of sexual interaction has nothing to do with genetic time-traveling bottle-messages, and just as few people really give a thought about the genetic combinations resulting from their actions.
they just like to orgasm -- it's just not as poetic a concept to talk about.
> also no one really chooses their offspring's 'half of the lottery', it's an accident of nature -- we only get to choose whether or not we try to propagate our own skew into the lottery roll
In modern societies, most people choose their mating partner. That’s the lottery half that I am referring to.
Of course no one chooses specifically which half of each mate goes into the child. That would be absurd.
> and to be very real here for a second, 99% of sexual interaction has nothing to do with genetic time-traveling bottle-messages, and just as few people really give a thought about the genetic combinations resulting from their actions.
For the individual sure “it’s just deliberate sex” but for the genome, transmission of the message into the distant future is all there is.
Just look around you, you will likely see and hear more evidence of those billion year long message transmissions than anything else.
Not sure, but 100% of their contemporaries were diluted. At 100 generations (2500 years) any message has been diluted where random mutations are more influence than your genes.
My grandfather self published a memoir some 30 (ish) years ago. Unsurprisingly he never really managed to shift many of the thousand or so hardbacks I believe he paid to have printed. I think a lot of it was catharsis? I also know that the published versions leave out a lot of stuff that he thought was too sensitive or reflected badly on the Air Force etc.
He's long since passed, and I have a stack of 20 or so left (many were destroyed) from "inheritance". Our current strategy is to take one with us to every hotel/b&b we stay in, most of which have a library shelf, and leave one there. Maybe they never get read, maybe they do. Feels better than sending them to burn!
> A few people claim they liked it, but of course that doesn't necessarily mean they read it.
Reminds me of that Groucho Marx quote: "From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it." :)
There's also the classic Churchill quote, when a friend who had just published a book gave him a copy: "Thank you very much, I shall lose no time reading it."
> HN and reddit will also immediately block self-promotion even if relevant to the audience (
HN doesn't block self promotion if it comes up as part of a conversation, e.g. "I'm having this technical problem." Re: "I wrote a book about how to solve that!"
Also you can at least put a link in your profile!
Reddit has tons of self promos all the time, it just depends on the subreddit. Also it helps if you're a long time active member in a community.
My comment was because my last three submissions were blocked. I emailed the moderator the first time it happened, and he said the algorithm probably thought it was self-promotion as I cross posted it to medium.com which I now know everybody hates. By blocked, I mean the articles showed as normal on my browser but was hidden to anybody else. I did not use the "Show HN" option because I have had articles submitted in the past from my website without this issue.
I am not a prolific poster, maybe 2 or 3 a year, and appreciate HN efforts to keep the spam out, so I will give it another shot on my next original article using the "Show HN" option.
I suspect the suggestion was made due to you talking about books originally, which (given a sample chapter) are the one stated exception to written materials being out of scope for Show HN.
Right, I seem to get the same result on things I post from my medium publication - which started after I posted some links to some time travel stories I wrote in a post about time travel which seemed to me to relate and which got a few upvotes.
After that if I posted a link to an article I wrote it got shadow blocked (at least for a bit) the thing is I only post things here that I think fit the site, which is about 10% of what I write, and I am a relatively prolific poster.
Looking at my current submissions - in the last 30 submissions one was to an article I wrote. Why? Because I thought it fit HN, just like all the other things I post I think fit HN.
Personally I think that's being a relatively well-behaved user of the site, but evidently not.
Lots of people submit their own work to HN all the time to great success. If your post was flagged, it probably just wasn’t as relevant to the community as you might have imagined.
Perhaps take it as constructive criticism on your writing, rather than blaming the poor reception on the community.
it seems that a lot of my submissions over the past 7 months to my own stuff were with Medium's link shortener and that gets banned, mainly because if you follow a link from Medium's stats the url is the shortened form.
I noticed you mentioned Medium, perhaps your problems also stem from the same source?
the Show HN guidelines as I understand it says it is not for stories or articles, but for projects you are working on or have made? Am I misunderstanding that.
Reddit is a good guerilla promotion platform. You just can't be overt about it. The stereotypical version is to change "look what I made" to "look what I found" and all the ad complaints go away.
You see this a lot in r/gaming where people post clips of games all day, but if you mention that you made the game in the clip, you get inane comments about how it's an ad.
That said, books are hard to market no matter what. There's no visual hook like you have with games and movies. You can't just guerilla-shill it like a SaaS.
> I guess the only ones destined to read it are the AI training algorithms.
I'm imagining a lone genius toiling away at a novel and dying in obscurity, with his work gaining recognition only after his death, à la Herman Melville, except in this future the writing eventually enters the canon by deeply impressing not human but machine readers.
Melville was a prominent author, an early sex symbol even, owing to the success and popularity of his novels before Moby Dick. That novel was hugely controversial in its day -- perceived as blasphemous, overwrought -- and it ruined his reputation as an author. Also, he'd spent money he didn't really have during the writing of Moby Dick so that when it flopped he couldn't survive on the famine part of the feast/famine divide.
Point being, had Melville continued writing south pacific adventure novels he probably would not be remembered today but might have died a well-off man.
This doesn’t line up with what is written on his Wikipedia page at all, which claims it was his next novel that was more controversial, and he clearly wasn’t that poor because he did a grand tour of Europe and the Mediterranean a few years after
I can’t speak to the Wikipedia page as I have not read it but the biographical material in my Norton Critical Moby Dick and Delbanco’s Melville line up: Moby Dick was a flop and ruined his reputation in society, Pierre not selling further precipitated the crisis built from choices made while riding a high into The Whale.
Melville bought many things with debt: his farm, his rare books, clothes. I don’t find it unimaginable that he paid for the grand tour with debt spending either.
Extrapolating future technology from current technology is known to be a flawed method, this has been known for hundreds of years now, maybe longer.
For example, in the 1920's they also extrapolated their current tech into the future. It showed people walking around with phonographs strapped to their hips, having just been dropped off by their personal blimps. Predicting the future is hard, but extrapolating the current state forwards is almost always wrong, and shows a huge failure of imagination.
Another option is starting a newsletter, which feels more suited for a writer to gather readers (when compared to gather “followers” on any social media).
Full disclaimer: I believe that so much that (as a fellow beginner writer) I created a “newsletter” platform more suited for fiction writers to slowly form an audience of readers owning the mailing list.
You still have to keep writing constantly (essays, short stories, chapters of a novel, or even some communication of what you are doing) but it feels more natural for writers to write than to keep posting cute pictures, hot takes or creative short videos.
Also, I added the concept of “books” in my platform, so new subscribers to your newsletter start reading your old stuff (not only your future posts).
Having a newsletter also is very satisfying that you keep some contact with people that like what you write, no matter how few they are.
Financially successful writers embrace the sales and marketing game. Like you said, writing the book is only half (or less!) of the work required to get someone to read it.
That means constantly engaging their target audience, setting up booths at conventions, posting interesting content on social media, etc.
Writing for yourself is a wonderful thing. But if you do want more people to read your work, I would recommend scrapping the idea of avoiding social media and treat your social media presence like a business treats social media. For you it’s not a toxic doomscrolling app, it’s an app you use for your business during your business hours to market your business.
Let’s be real, so far you’ve basically talked about how you’ve been unwilling to do anything besides write.
> The hell now is unless you get friends and family or an agency involved to push it and market it it will languish on the 500th page of any Amazon search forever.
Sure, that will be the case if you just click publish and sit back doing nothing hoping for some sales. I sure hope my family and friends market my book for me, because I don’t want to be in social media!
And, hey, that’s fine, not everyone wants their hobby to be some kind of side business. But I sense a bit of disappointment in your comment almost like you tried everything and still haven’t gained traction, which doesn’t seem to be the case.
I am lucky enough to have a good programming gig which pays the bills so writing is and will always be a side gig. None of my friends or family are aware I am an author (though I occasionally drop a hint) and I have no interest in the marketing or social media side of making it a business so there is no disappointment and great satisfaction in the achievement.
I hope I did not make it sound like I was disappointed; I certainly am not, I got to play with 2048-bit graphene processors, zero-point energy and wormholes for a short while, and I am happily writing my second novel as we speak.
I'm glad to hear. And I can fully understand why one would not want to enter that grind. On top of that, being successful at marketing can depend on a lot of luck (just look at all the successful social media personalities fueled by a lucky break).
I agree on it being self satisfying. I wrote a short story on my blog once that I seriously doubt anyone ever read. It was a cyberpunk story, but the themes were really very much about how I felt about having my startup crash and burn early on. After finishing it I felt like I'd finally been able to express how I felt about everything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.
Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.
but if you make a blog post and you make a regular submission and those blog posts of yours get automatically pulled out...then what?
Why write a book as your first attempt? It seems like you would need to write a bunch of short stories and establish a name for yourself before anyone would commit to reading your book.
Not that you'll probably make money in any case but there's very little in the way of routes to market where short stories have even a hope of making beer money. This is even true of genres like SF that at least to have reasonable short story magazines as an entry point.
Not many people have read my novels because they are extremely dense and technical near future stuff, but I've made interesting friends from writing those books. In fact, one contact I made basically paid for the whole two year investment in writing the novel.
I know a very successful writer of thrillers and he said that the technical content of the books would have to be completely stripped down to maybe what's contained in a few chapters of my book in order for it to be mainstream accessible.
Since you asked: Here's my first novel: "The Undeserving Future" https://a.co/d/aQ1Nn4G which is basically 1984 and Brave New World but for a future dystopia based on eco-totalitarianism instead of Stalinism. It's also got a lot more jokes than those dour books. It has a completely novel economic system that might even work to implement permanent ecological sustainability in a less awful way than central planning everything.
The second novel draft is done and is being edited. It's about AI, Mars Colonization, and how humanity gets past the limits to growth and to the next stage of human history past the one we're currently in and takes place in the same universe as the first book. Here's an excerpt that describes a particularly soft and comfy AI doom: https://open.substack.com/pub/botsfordism/p/the-bot
Your comment resonates and I liken it to promoting when starting a business, which I have just recently done again.
Feels like there is a massive imbalance between quality outlets where eyeballs exist and the volume of people /content/businesses vying for attention at those outlets.
And, the idea that we need to all become influencers of some scale and amass our own audiences to get the word out about something is not practical or possible. Just creates a long-tail for the platforms. This leaves a relative handful of platforms and influencers through which everyone must flow.
It produces an all-or-nothing effect, with tons of failures and a few outsized winners (relatively).
I've solved this before, but things weren't as concentrated then. And, ironically, my latest business is intended to solve this for others. But, this startup phase is a beast.
> And, the idea that we need to all become influencers of some scale and amass our own audiences to get the word out about something is not practical or possible. Just creates a long-tail for the platforms. This leaves a relative handful of platforms and influencers through which everyone must flow.
>It produces an all-or-nothing effect, with tons of failures and a few outsized winners (relatively
The “it” you are referring to here is math, or just the way networks work when the barrier to entry is zero and the speed of information flowing through networks is almost instant.
Lots of things in nature follow a power law distribution because of it.
>The “it” you are referring to here is math, or just the way networks work...power law distribution...
These are more observations around the dynamics of the current state. I think we all understand network effects and other factors involved in where we are.
But, there's no natural law that prescribes precisely the current state of affairs.
>I guess we need to invent ads, so that we don't all have to become influencers?
It's almost as if you've never bootstrapped a business, self-published a book, or similar.
If you have, and had the resources to use paid ads to reach your desired scale, then congratulations. I think that does indeed entitle you to be smug and dismissive with everyone else.
So we're expected to feel sympathy for the broke bootstrapper?
What I'm reading is someone wants all the upsides with none of the downsides. No one is entitled to an audience, especially that of another, just because they've produced some good or service. Participating in capitalism requires either time or money, usually both, and even then you're not guaranteed success.
>So we're expected to feel sympathy for the broke bootstrapper?
No one is entitled to an audience... Participating in capitalism requires either time or money...and even then you're not guaranteed success.
Wow. It's like I'm talking with a real, live Rockefeller! My comment was exactly about requesting sympathy and demanding government mandates to buy my products, and those of every bootstrapper.
But, your brilliant, esoteric insight regarding the true nature of capitalism has shown me the light. Thank you!
You were complaining about platforms and influencer's gatekeeping their audiences and creating some sort of "all-or-nothing effect", whatever that means. Someone else pointed out that ads exist, and you got snippy and decided to attack the OP for "never bootstrapped a business, self-published a book, or similar".
I pointed out that you don't get an audience for free, and that seems to have further upset you.
Doesn't look like the issue is on my end. You could have used the opportunity to correct my understanding, instead you decided to be rude.
>Someone else pointed out that ads exist, and you got snippy
Right. Clutch your pearls now. People only pointed out some things and the bad man got so snippy.
What 'someone else' actually said was "maybe we should invent ads, so that we don't all have to become influencers".
Clearly a snarky comment, which I accurately identified as smug and dismissive.
>I pointed out that you don't get an audience for free, and that seems to have further upset you.
There's that "pointed out" phrase again. Yes, you "pointed out" a lot and your comments were just as obnoxious, dismissive and condescending, while imputing unstated sentiments in bad faith.
If it's really a discussion and understanding you want, then re-read your comments and see if you can figure out where you went wrong.
But, I feel no obligation to teach you how to talk to people.
You know well that you commented in bad faith on my original reply TO SOMEONE ELSE in agreement with him/her. I was interested in a discussion around the real challenges involved in self-publishing, starting a business and similar. These are challenges expressed by the OP, and which virtually everyone faces.
Then, you jumped in and, instead of engaging with the substance of my comment, decided that you'd make yourself look "smart" by dismissively condescending to me with a snarky comment. It was unwarranted and is up there for anyone to read, as much as you'd like to pretend that it's not.
So, I called you on it. As I said then, it was smug and dismissive. And, I'll add here, rude and trollish. Yes, you look bad. And, if you don't like looking bad, then the right thing to do is to own-up and apologize instead of doubling-down. The latter is the behavior of a spoiled child.
You want to offer up advertising as an alternative, then just say "What about ads?" or similar. Could've been an interesting discussion around the challenges there for startups. Instead, you snark, "someone should invent ads...blah, blah...".
It's not too late to acknowledge that you were wrong. But, if you truly don't see the difference, then I'll repeat here for you: it's not my responsibility to teach you how to talk to people.
So, I'm done replying to this silliness. If you want to accept responsibility and apologize, then I'll accept your apology. Otherwise, no need to waste your time.
You have to promote somehow. No one is going to do it for you for free. You can hire a publicist, take out advertising, speak at events, etc. and none of those probably count as "social media" but they're neither effort nor cost-free.
In theory, they limit self promotion so that people actually participate in the community, and don't just use it as a link dump. The ideal is that people discuss other topics more often, and share their own work only every so often.
A lot of forums and chat servers have similar rules for the same reason.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work very well on Reddit, since the smarter advertisers and astro turfers have figured out how to manipulate the system well enough that people don't suspect they're advertising.
Add this to how certain types of low effort content get a ton of upvotes anyway, and how popular creators don't need to care since their fans will promote them anyway, and well, the end result is less "participate in the community" and more "don't be unpopular or bad at pretending to be someone else"
Hacker News doesn't block self promotion. You are free to post your own stories linking to your own work, I've done it, people do it all the time. There's a whole section for it, 'Show HN' (although it's not required to post there). And you're free to post links to your work in comments when relevant.
Of course spam is unwelcome everywhere. Don't overdo it and don't be deceptive about it, and you'll be fine.
As a Reddit mod, I block most self-promotion because honestly it's mostly trash posted by people with no interest in the community.
These posts are almost always of low quality and designed to hook gullible people, and much of it driven either by influencers or sellers of snake oil. It's not just legit promotional posts, either; there's plenty of astroturfing trying to post recommendations for products etc. Even so I bet a lot goes under my radar.
In a very few cases I have allowed a promotional post when I have been convinced that it was for a good purpose. I support genuine entrepreneurs who look like they're building something of value. But those are extremely rare on Reddit. All of Reddit is rather bleak in that regard. So much content stealing, influencing, astroturfing, link farming, and outright spam.
As mentioned repeatedly, HN doesn't block self-promotion.
But reddit something else entirely. It so clear that all of the major subs are constantly being manipulated by firms working PR for large companies, but the second someone posts "I made this!" people get up-in-arms.
Of course who really knows how much of reddit is even real people anymore.
I'm currently starting a publishing company in a niche Canadian market.
What people in these comments (and really, most places on the internet) fail to grasp is the role of the publisher as a curator and editor.
Unlike your friends, the editor is not your friend. They don't have a stake in your ego, they won't sugarcoat it beyond the veneer of professionalism. You need an editor who is not your friend, too say no to you. No, you shouldn't start your book with this cliché. No, you shouldn't have your character meandering aimlessly. No, you shouldn't use whedonisms. Exceptions apply, of course, but when the editor is your publisher and not your friend, "shouldn't" becomes "can't". Usually that involves saying no to 99% of manuscripts coming through the door. And this is how an okay story becomes a great book. Your editor, having read more books than you in their segment, knows the difference... usually.
All manuscripts are at least a little bit bad, some books aren't. As you can tell, I'm no fan of self-publishing, I just don't believe anyone can be objective enough with their own baby.
Now... I've read my fair share of bad books, especially recently. The publisher/editor is to blame 95% of the time. My theory is that being rigorous takes time, which is always in short supply, and skill. I believe people tend not to stay in the same role for too long anymore, lest they lose out financially. Which is totally fair, but skill (and the chutzpah to say "no") takes a while to develop, years really. And no one has "years" for anything.
Except, of course, all the people in the industry who don't mind being poor. And people making bank, I suppose, but these are so few as to be statistically insignificant.
> Unlike your friends, the editor is not your friend.
It is true. I would like to qualify it by saying "At the beginning, the editor is not your friend." A friendship, even very strong one, can be developed along the time, based on mutual respect and appreciation, temperament match, etc. Even then, a good editor will still be professional and be honest when they edit the writer's draft.
A good book may not be a "successful" book, especially in literary fiction, since the post talks about novels. The reverse can be true as well. It happens often that the editor tells the author it is a good book, and the publisher allocates resources to marketing it, schedules book tours, etc. while at the same time both the writer's agent and the editor/publisher expect the book may sell only ~2,000 copies. The target audience are expected to be other writers, a subset of avid literature readers, etc. They don't expect it will earn back the advance paid to the author. The publishers have portfolios and long term visions. Of course, this doesn't apply to small publishers, most of which cannot afford it.
It's funny because I expect most of us do it for the art, but artistic merit doesn't pay the rent. This is why many smaller publishers have "locomotives" that are guaranteed to sell so they can publish "good" literature books that won't sell. Don't know about the big American ones, seeing as they're flooding the market I assume they're just playing a numbers game, let God sort them out...
True, I guess most artistic industries must work this way, since we all know that about 95% of all art is terrible (and that was before AI).
I feel like there's a difference between a company and an industry, though in the end I suppose it's all a sort of natural selection. Good (or rather, "fit") authors publish second books and third books, while good companies get to exist into second, third years etc.
If I were writing a book I’d definitely consider a real publisher but before that I’d be tempted to pay someone independent to be an editor and be bad cop. A student or remote worker with literary chops would do that as a first pass. Pay them to tell me what about my book sucks before wasting an editors time with a submission.
I'm not sure to what degree I'd trust a student or random online gig worker to give a really useful editorial option. Copy-editing or maybe technical edit? Possibly. I used an intern who worked for a magazine editor I knew to copyedit a book once and that worked fine. But I wasn't looking for substantive structural work. In fairness, I didn't really get that when I went through a publisher either. The second edition was IMO a lot better but that was because I personally came to see where the first edition was stronger and weaker.
The idea would be to get feedback from someone who isn’t partial to you and who hopefully has an eye for decent writing. You wouldn’t take what they say as gospel but it’d be enlightening.
It’s like letting someone tech savvy but not partial try the UI/UX of an app. They’ll see things you don’t and get confused in places you don’t.
Seems like almost every creative industry (music, video games, art, writing) is having the same issue: Creation & publication tools are getting cheaper & easier to use, which means a lot more people can publish their creative ideas. With such a huge number of choices, discovery is now the issue.
IMO discovery of what is truly high quality is still an unsolved problem. Seems like recommendation systems generally just recommend things that are already popular. For someone that has zero following, but an interesting creative product, there's not much they can do. You're kind of relying on either "going viral" or hoping that someone with a lot of followers takes notice of your work and draws other people in.
> With such a huge number of choices, discovery is now the issue.
It's frustrating if people don't see that this is almost always a manufactured problem, not some an inevitable outcome of simply having more choices. Platforms want to disable the ability for users to differentiate between organic, self-directed discovery vs advertised or promoted content.
Discovery needs to be just good enough so that users won't leave, and if there's no alternatives in a space, even that doesn't matter. Having poor discoverability directly increases engagement and nevermind that engagement is high because doing simple things is painful, the take-away for your stock-price here will just be that you're explicitly user hostile and no one leaves, so you must have a captive audience.
Every notice how when you're looking for something obscure, you can only find something popular, and when you're looking for something popular, you can only find something obscure? It's not random, it's just the platform working out what profits the company the most.
In the case of streaming content for platforms like spotify/amazon prime, some content is cheaper for them to offer. The perfect user is someone who wants low-royalty or completely unencumbered content, because it's cheaper for the platform to license, but the end-user sees the same number of ads for the same length of time. The average user is also someone who can be tricked into being a perfect customer. Suppose the user is searching for RoboCop, and it is missing from the catalog. Terminator might be a better recc, but why not just offer the user some shitty CyborgCopIII instead, just to cut your costs and bump your profits, just in case the user is a sucker? If the user is not a sucker.. great, they'll type more searches, engagement is up, and platforms win either way.
Think about how much more data FAANG has than say, GoodReads. GoodReads is small enough that people just rank stuff and it works fine, and people curate lists, and you find what you like that way. It's not working because GoodReads has AI super-powers, it's working because they don't sabotage it away from working.
> Platforms want to disable the ability for users to differentiate between organic, self-directed discovery vs advertised or promoted content.
It's not just that platforms don't want you to know if what they're showing you is an ad or an organic result/recommendation, if they made it easy for people to find what they want then companies wouldn't have to pay them for prominent placement in the first place.
There's still a real problem (that AI will only make worse) with really good things being drowned out by a sea of garbage, but people wanting to act as gatekeepers (and collect tolls) only make the problem worse.
The problem isn’t manufactured or conspiratorial, it’s just baked into sorting so much content on so few metrics. And needing to account for what the user is currently in the mood for something specific, something generic.
My point is that GoodReads isn't popular enough for it to be profitable to sabotage (yet). And there's still a threat of something more relevant coming along. If they actually wanted to improve discovery for something like prime video/shopping, then they could/would copy what works from GoodReads.
Trusted (human) reviewers and critics are more important than ever to me. Like you said, lists of whatever's popular or trending are just... things that are trending. For good reasons or otherwise.
Meanwhile if I read a Richard Brody review I get a sense of whether a movie might be worth watching—even though we don't have identical taste, I've learned a lot about his, and now I know how his taste translates into reviews. Curation is totally the name of the game now.
The problem with that arrangement is that it doesn't scale: a tiny number of popular critics become the gatekeepers. Success in the field then depends entirely on somehow gaining the notice -- and good reviews -- of one of these few critics.
Countless other pieces of art are never noticed by anyone, countless talented artists are forced into day jobs and eventually abandon art -- no matter how high quality (for whatever definition of "quality" you prefer) -- simply because they were not able to catch the attention of one of the elite critics, for a variety of reasons, almost all unrelated to the quality of the work itself.
Back in the day there were some movie critics who I felt I could generally rely on, some I either mostly aligned with or realized we had different tastes in specific ways, and a few who I could reliably count on to be a counter-indication of what I would like.
But it may be a reflection of the modern media landscape but I don't have critics that I gravitate to any longer. Admittedly I couldn't even name the critics at publications I actually subscribe to.
Good discovery wouldn't solve this problem. One one hand, you have an ever-increasing pile of good content (all of the games, books, blogs, videos, podcasts, films that were created in the past) but people only have 24 hours per day to consume.
For example I've spent a huge amount of time playing a game that's over a decade old. And I'm reading a book that's from 1952.
I can't know precisely how good of a filter it is but I'm not interested in finding out a definite figure.
I have read enough great stuff from picking up a book from 300 BCE or so and I've seen enough BS ghost written flavor of the month non-fiction to know it's good enough heuristics to suggest it in this forum.
A filter can be good in a couple of ways: it can filter out ~all of what you don't want, and/or ~none of what you do want.
Time is a good filter in the first way, which makes it a good filter. Because a filter which doesn't substantially do the first of these things isn't actually filtering: the null filter filters none of what you do want, by failing to reduce the data stream in any way.
Great point. Editors are filters for what the general public sees. The analog here is probably BookTok or whatever the social media version of book influencers is. They similarly can be expected to promote what they like, or eventually lose authenticity and viewership. Or just start including cartoon sounds into every video.
Sometimes nobody really tries. It doesn't help that there are a lot of perverse incentive systems out there. I'm approaching this from mostly an Internet-centric perspective:
One observation I've made is that any story I first see by advertising is probably bad, even if I later see it elsewhere - if it were actually any good, I would've seen it in one of the non-advertising-based mechanisms first. But sites have a strong incentive to promote advertisements to the detriment of quality (and the inaccuracy of "hot" lists).
The "zero-initial-following" problem can be solved by showing each story to a random small subset of active readers (since, as big as the supply of crappy stories is, the demand is always higher). This should be smeared across time-of-day, rather than having a "new" queue subject to gamification. There also needs to be a quick "I'm not interested" feedback, with reasons including "breaks site rules", "bad story", "bad grammar", "bad initial hook", "bad continuation", "I just don't like it" (featured prominently), and "this story is badly tagged" (because both positive and negative tag searches should be the primary way of using any reading site).
Some particular ways that tagging implementations can fail:
* categories and tags are different things, thus a tag is often missing
* no tagging for things like "this a fanfiction of", "this is translated from", "author is not a native English speaker", ...
* tag names are ambiguous, meaning completely different things in different contexts
* tag names are contextual, providing a different shade of meaning depending on other tags
* tags are not prominently displayed when actually looking at a work
* user-made tags are permitted, so duplicates and typos are common
* user-made tags are not permitted and essential tags that people wish to search for (or hide) are missing
* hierarchial (DAG, not tree) tags are not supported, thus a tag is often missing (or if present the list takes up too much space)
* no way to specify tag degree (does this just show up in the background, or is it the focus of the work?)
* number of tags is artificially limited to a very small number
* tag is applied but applicable content doesn't appear yet (mostly relevant for when published serially)
Obviously with outright malicious actors, simply fixing these won't fix everything, but they are absolutely needed to function at scale for the honest actors.
> One observation I've made is that any story I first see by advertising is probably bad, even if I later see it elsewhere - if it were actually any good, I would've seen it in one of the non-advertising-based mechanisms first
A similar observation I've been finding lately is that if something is highly rated by critics and lowly rated by audiences, it probably sucks
I think the current batch of book/movie/game critics out there writing reviews are largely out of touch with what many people enjoy. They don't write useful reviews for consumers anymore
There's always accusations of review bombing being the culprit of such skewed scores, but even after sites claim they've culled all of the bad faith reviews, the ratio almost always still exists
>A similar observation I've been finding lately is that if something is highly rated by critics and lowly rated by audiences, it probably sucks
Perhaps there is less skew today given that film critics are probably less a high-brow big city newspaper thing overall. But certainly I wouldn't expect the average Friday night young cinema-goer to have the same tastes as the film critic for the New York Times.
I would expect the New York Times film reviewer to be able to deliver a review that would give the average Friday night young cinema goer a good idea if a film is worth their time, even if they aren't a film snob
From my readings of many film reviews lately, a lot of them really talk down towards people who are not as into cinema as they are
There certainly are review-bombing campaigns, which can be known with certainty when caught at the same time and from the same source as review-boosting campaigns.
Most bad reviews are well-deserved, even if they make the author feel bad. In particular, "people shouldn't downvote if they've only read 5 chapters" is an invalid complaint - as an author, your duty is to write a strong start! (I suspect some of these are actually tagging/description failures, but that's also the author's responsibility)
My long retired parents met and worked in publishing. The continued deterioration of the industry is a source of deep sadness for them. I personally however recently found my own ray of hope. By chance I started reading something I really liked, found it was published by a tiny house that has a subscription plan- which is different from an aggregator having a book of the month kind of thing- and publishes super niche unique voices, mostly translations into English. Have read 6 of their books this year, every single one has been just great. Think the breakdown of the big house and homogeneity of the star model leaves space for new shoots to find their audience.
What you said reminded me of this Royal Road (https://www.royalroad.com/home) website I came across. It is not physical publishing (at least I don't think so), but it is a large collection of different authors who release books / work incrementally. The work mainly seems to be fiction of different varieties.
Royal Road is a place for a lot of folks to get audiences seeded before they inevitably move on to some combination of Patreon, Amazon Kindle Unlimited, and Audible.
One very notable example of this is Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. He's even just announced that he managed to sell publishing only rights to Ace for large scale distribution which to my knowledge is a first (from authors that started on Royal Road).
Also, I'd highly recommend reading Dungeon Crawler Carl if you enjoy anything close to Douglas Adams-esque comedic sci-fi. Its definitely trends a lot more "adult" than Douglas Adams, but that's about as close as I can think of off the top of my head for comparison. And I'd very much recommend the Audible versions narrated by Jeff Hayes for anyone that does audio books. The Sound Booth Theater production is also good but I'd only recommend that if you're doing a re-listen.
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series' first 4 or 5 books (it's been a little while) were excellent. Carl's tone reminds me of a detective novel, while the setting is more reminiscent of Ready Player One and The Matrix. The genre is a LitRPG novel (admittedly a genre I'd never known existed until reading DCC), heavily doused with comedic elements. Lots of mature themes and references to sex, drugs, politics, and violence, but with some of the allegorical or illustrative critique (to the point of absurdity) you'd find with Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett when discussing serious topics with parallels to real life, in an imagined scifi/fantasy setting. I'd recommend the series if for those who haven't picked up a book in a while and who would appreciate those elements.
* there's a significant conflict between "this is a place to read stories" and "this is just a place to advertise for Amazon"
* the effective site rules are unwritten and quite arbitrary (one unwritten rule: you are not allowed to say anything positive about real-ish religions, only negative things)
* way too much pedophilia, including in site-promoted stories. Unlike religion, it's clearly not something they put effort into removing.
Another problem is the ratings. Everything there seems way overrated. You'll see a ton of 5-star or 4-star ratings for things that are barely readable.
Wasn't the case before, but RR allows banning readers from rating author stories. So, usually authors have become smarter and immediately ban readers whose review history looks critical. You cannot rate a story from which you have been banned.
Of-course readers have also gotten smarter, many now leaving 0.5 stars for all new stories. If they are banned later, you can still adjust your rating. So now many new stories get a surge of 0.5 ratings.
When you've spent many a year reading machine translated chinese xianxia then indeed many stories on RR are 4/5 star worthy in comparison.
Royalroad is not a place you go to find objectively good stories, it's the place you go to enjoy your particular blend of delicious trash because in the end you'd rather read chapter 1600 of the long running braindead litrpg than you would whatever just won the hugo's.
I am very glad that you find your own ray of hope. I understand the sadness that you parents feel. I know some people in publishing. The industry was in an mode of existential crisis when Amazon Publishing was launched. It then went through social media, Goodreads, etc. It seems the industry survives, although the future is still murky.
The industry indeed needs J. K. Rowling, Sally Rooney, Colleen Hoover, celebrity biographies & memoirs etc. to survive. Good books will find their way to be published, and get discovered, maybe dozens of years later. I happened to read a novel by an English author published ~100 years ago. It is a good book, IMO. The publishing house had only one person. The entire office was one room in his apartment.
Mammoth, Inland, Down The Rabbit Hole, Open Door, Zbinden's Progress, The Luminous Novel, I Don't Expect Anyone To Believe Me. Actually that is 7. All very different, but arresting.
Purity, All Dogs Are Blue, and Lightning Rods are next up for me, not sure which one will grab me, probably Purity.
Many many years ago a friend did a stint at a major publishing house. Whenever she'd show up to parties she would bring in a small stack of unpublished manuscripts, we'd all get into the wine or beer or whatever and start reading particularly terrible passages to each other. Had she sought out especially bad manuscripts? No! She just grabbed whatever was on the "will read, maybe, someday" shelf in the editor's work area.
I learned about Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) during these events. Most people think what they've written is interesting, or unique, or worth publishing. However, publishers have to make money, so they curate very carefully, edit the hell out of the raw manuscripts, and then only actually commit to publishing what they think there's a market for. Nearly zero of the random manuscripts that are sent in by unknown authors ever make it into this funnel, and the honest reason why, at least from what I have personally read, was because most of it was completely terrible -- in as many ways as you can think of terrible to be.
Three other thoughts:
1. The great videogame crash of '83 happened because the dominant platforms at the time did not have a lockdown on curation, so anybody and everybody flooded the market with garbage. Consumers decided it was better to not buy anything than to chance spending the equivalent of nearly $200 in 2024 money and get trash.
2. A few breakout, self-published, authors are making it through the piles of junk, but they are few and far between. Andy Weir (the Martian) and Hugh Howey (Silo) come to mind. The "secondary" film and TV markets are so starved for good new ideas that their works are getting converted into non-print media almost as fast as they can get sets built and costumes sewed.
3. There's probably a new market for solid, well known, curators. People who make money sifting the dreck to find the Weirs and Howeys and surfacing the cream to the top. The creators are self-publishing, and the publishing houses aren't doing well these days. But the curation function is still wildly important and finding the right way to do it, and the business model around it, is perhaps the future.
> The "secondary" film and TV markets are so starved for good new ideas
There's a long list of very good scifi that has never been made into a movie.
Instead, we get the Mandalorean which rehashes every spaghetti western trope. The character even sounds like Clint Eastwood. It has the hero breaking in the horse while the old ranch hand leans on the corral fence, for example. And training the village to defend itself from the bandits. And so on.
In the specific case of Star Wars, that’s exactly how you make something decent within the Star Wars framework: pick a few elements, including characters, plots, shots, scenes, lines, whatever, from a broad set of genre media, mash them together, and apply Star Wars lipstick. The first film basically defined the genre pastiche film, and it’s still the straightest path to making something Ok within Star Wars. Most failures (and there are so many) are creatives failing to appreciate this, or not leaning into it hard enough.
Mandalorean has one episode that’s about 50% The Wages of Fear and I bet the other main element of accidentally finding some officer you’d really like to get revenge on but while in the middle of committing another crime is also from something else, but I’m not sure what. The AT-ST episode is basically a Conan the Barbarian story plus any of a few westerns (the training-the-town-folk thing—even the woman who’s an uncannily good shot for no reason ever explained is lifted from westerns). That show got how to do Star Wars.
More broadly, yes, more original (at least, not based on an existing visual-media franchise) sci fi movies would be cool to see.
I wish I could describe the near physical pain I feel that "Rendezvous with Rama" isn't yet a great Denise Villeneuve movie, and the "Night's Dawn Trilogy" isn't yet a multi-season series on Apple TV.
Planet of The Apes remakes are not movies, they're just a way to reliably turn 200 million dollars into 300 million dollars - similarly to all the American comic book crap. As long as the multiplier stays above 1.0, the process will continue.
In fairness, IMO the latest Dune(s) were the first that weren't deeply flawed. I do agree that The Mote in God's Eye--and perhaps associated shorts would make a fine basis for a series--hopefully one that ignored the sequels.
Rendezvous with Rama is basically a travelogue. I enjoyed it well enough but there are probably 100s of SF books/stories I would choose to adapt to film before that one. But we'll see. I may well be wrong but the necessary adaptations probably won't be loved by fans.
My local bookstore dedicates a large part of their fiction section to "local authors". Maybe 30 or more authors there, some with several published books. Once, I went through all of them, randomly choosing a couple chapters and reading a few pages, hoping to find a hidden gem. Eating a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup would have been more satisfying.
Aside from Andy Weir (who got picked up by a publisher and properly edited), the self-published books I've read have been remarkably awful, including some stuff that was widely recommended.
The fundamental truth of creative work is that if you make something genuinely great, you'll probably have a smooth path to success. I see a lot of anxiety among indie game developers about the sheer quantity of games being released, and yes bluntly, if you make a merely average game nobody will care. Make something great.
Hindsight Bias is blinding here. Judge whether something is "genuinely great" before you know its success or failure, and then we'll see if that's a true statement.
Indie games are interesting because you'd think given the nature of their development they'd do more interesting things, but stunningly they've mostly stayed within a few codified genres (roguelike/ deckbuilder/platformer galore). There aren't many successors to the giants of the old like Terrarria or Dwarf Fortress.
I'd have to chalk it up to a lack of vision (I don't genuinely believe someone grows up wanting to make a roguelike deckbuilder), but then that begs the question of why are they in game dev in the first place.
Indie means low budget (although even that is getting perverted), not hobby like development done as a labour of love.
The latter are few and far between, but they have always been.
Can a game historian count the Doom clones that showed up after Doom? Does anyone remember any of them with the exception of Hexen and Rise of the Triad?
You don't think it's because the audience is already familiar with those types of games? It's like asking why studios are all producing super hero movies instead of avant guard indie films.
> The fundamental truth of creative work is that if you make something genuinely great, you'll probably have a smooth path to success. I see a lot of anxiety among indie game developers about the sheer quantity of games being released, and yes bluntly, if you make a merely average game nobody will care. Make something great.
Not necessarily, I've seen plenty of good or great works go unnoticed. In movies and gaming that's often a timing thing (releasing too near popular works, releasing at a bad time of year, releasing on a console that's on its last legs, etc), but for other types of works it can simply be a failure to market said work at all, or the subject not immediately catching people's attention.
Discoverability sucks, for almost everyone, but especially for new authors. And that was before ai started flooding out “content.”
Even if you get a publisher, great authors sometimes sell only a handful of copies. You find amazing books on goodreads by award winning authors with only 5 reviews. And that’s people who can get their novels manuscript even looked at by an editor. Lots of self published authors end up with 0-1 reviews
This is why you see these massive advances for known names. The only thing publishers seem to know is that authors who create their own publicity sell copies, and those that dont have an audience dont.
The problem is that book publishing hasn't really been disrupted for a very long time. Amazon just switched it to selling online, but think about how much more you can engage with a book that you just read. Somehow no apps or ereaders allow for anything beyond reading the book text.
It is being quietly disrupted, just probably not in the way people want.
Webnovels on sites like royalroad.com monetised via patreon and then published on Kindle Unlimited & Audible offer a different publishing model to that of traditional books and one that works really well for the right genres.
The audience that reads them is reading purely for entertainment, has vastly lower standards and is willing to directly support their favourite authors to the point where the most successful authors who started 5 years or so ago are now millionaires.
But this is mostly an anathema to the traditional publishing industry and for the most part they're pretending it doesn't exist because they literally cannot compete with it in the niches it now dominates.
This is correct. I give $3/month on patreon for 2 chapters a week to this one author. $36/year isn't a lot, but it takes these authors' years to finish these books at this rate, and any author would kill for the amount of amount I sunk into 1 book. Multiply it out, and it becomes a livable wage if you can get enough people to support your patreon. I have a friend I personally know who did this. He's not even a good writer. He just found an underserved niche and made a livable wage $1from somebody at a time. His writing improved and I'd say it's passable, but no one would pay $10 at all once for any book he wrote. Apparently over a year is fine though.
This is the interesting thing about this entire thread. There are a lot of opportunities for authors to make a living, even potentially become wealthy writing but they actually have to write in niches people want to read.
Instead I get the sense that the people writing these "debut novels" are really looking for fame/acceptance within the kind of social circles that value "great intellectual novels".
Write something someone wants. Literary fiction was art that discovered and expressed the essential, where cultural production today explicitly militates against anything that could be percived as essential(-ist). New novels are failing because the culture has no eros.
Readers have become too socially poor to risk investing in ideas that could compromise their cultivated homogeny, and it's just too hard to care with any sincerity what someone brand safe for public radio writes about. I guess I'm saying novels would sell better if the people selling and publishing them produced something people actually wanted instead of churning out what they are being told by their granting agencies is good for their readers.
I'd wager most books are content someone wants. A lot are even content a lot of people want. This is not good enough. Reaching the audience is the problem.
Also, writing a book can take years. Writing for what people want today is how you fail, as people will have moved on in the five years it took to write, edit, sell and produce the work. If you can reliably predict market desires in 5 years time, you have a lot more than a best selling novel on your hands.
There are more than enough free books on various sources to say that. Most show clear need of a good editor, but still more good books of any fiction genre you care to read than you have time for. Sometimes they are hard to find, but that is a different issue. Even pre internet (say 1960) publishers got more submissions that with some editing could be good than they had time to work with.
sounds like you might like to read books from independent presses. this distributor is a good place to find stuff: https://asterismbooks.com/
> Write something someone wants.
i don't think we should apply a VC-isms to art. so many great pieces of art were overlooked because the market didn't want them at the time, only to be discovered and appreciated later.
There are lots and lots of well-written, relatively obscure books. I don't think that has much to do with being "brand safe". It has to do with discoverability, network effects (people are more motivated to read books people they know have liked), and the vast number of books.
I used the public library to get a lot of books that I'd never want to waste my money on. You can call it "market research."
Verdict: there just isn't a market for serious fiction like there was 70 years ago, say. J.D. Salinger considered himself a failure until he finally got a story in The New Yorker. How many writers dream of that nowadays?
My impression is that a good novel today being turned into a series or screenplay is what huge scale novel success used to be. Huge scale success with just a book is very rare, though there are some writers who find a niche audience.
The thing I decry is the worthless idle attention suck of “social” media. That competes with all forms of quality art and content. Instead of watching good movies or listening to music or reading a book people are scrolling TikTok, Xhitter, Instagram, etc.
I'm not as familiar with the book scene as I am with the music scene, but I see a lot of similarities. Discovery is a huge issue, and takes a lot of effort.
I listen to a specific sub-sub genre of metal that gets no mainstream (even from "big" metal publications) attention. The best way I have found to come across new albums is to subscribe to really small labels that specialize in the genre of music.
Many of these labels are hobbies or part time jobs for their owners, but I find they do an excellent job curating music I'll be interested in.
The problem, is often subscribing and keeping up to date with these labels is really tough. Fortunately, for music, we have bandcamp.com which does a pretty decent job of this (although it takes some additional work [1]). If bandcamp.com went away, I don't know how I'd discover most of my new music.
There is a great podcast called the publishing rodeo where they talk about this. One of their episodes covered a minimum viable threshold where if there isn’t enough marketing points (a viral tweet, a lot of followers, marketing money, etc) there is no way for a book to succeed regardless of quality.
I would argue that those works are at least decent or at least on some level competent. They might not have too much some vague artistic merit. But they are unlikely be completely unacceptable. Like no major consistent spelling or typographical issues, mostly coherent and consistent plot and so on.
We rarely see or interact with truly below mediocre medium. Or filter it very quickly. Looking for example at Steam and your nth asset flip with poor 3d graphics and so on.
You’re a social influencer with a non-fiction book out? Let me just watch your clips for 15 minutes and you’ll deliver all of the information in your three hundred page book. There’s no substance in most of them.
This is why Amazon can’t supplant bookstores because they, and publishers, act as curators for the deluge of creative works out there. (Not saying they are always right in their choices and certainly good stuff gets written that is never submitted to a publisher, but I would rather browse the shelves of my local bookstore—especially an independent one run by someone who cares very much about literature (as booksellers do as they’re otherwise not in that difficult business), than scroll through Amazon.
Reminds me of Diddy Squat, the farming show by Jeremy Clarkson. Farming, just by itself, is not profitable, so they need to do all kinds of things to make profit.
Likr setting up a store, making a branded product, Ie making beer from the wheat, or social media on farm life.
The tragedy is all the time required not farming.
In the case of books, to first debut, you must already be successful or perish. Even getting accepted to a publishing house requires insane stats, and they're just beginning.
And it helps to know people. The one time I went through a publisher it was pretty much by accident because I had dinner with the appropriate acquisitions person and the managing director and then we ironed out details when I was in London a couple months later.
I was intending to write the book anyway but wasn't planning on going through a publisher.
Didn't make any material money but it was very useful professionally.
The total supply of good books and good content in general increases every year but the amount of time people spend consuming content is roughly constant.
New books are not just competing with all of the books that were written in the past, e.g. East of Eden, but also YouTube, podcasts, movies, computer and mobile game - and the total supply of those increases every year.
One thing that saddens me about the perceived necessity of new authors going on Twitter, BookTok, etc. to “build an audience” is that it seems to prevent anyone who wants to separate their literary life from their private life from ever again being supported by a publisher. Many authors over the years have felt the need to do this, for personal or professional reasons: J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, James Tiptree Jr., John le Carré, Joe Klein, Isabel Fall. I doubt that all those authors will be considered part of the canon in 100 years, and very possibly none of them will be, but I think the world would be poorer if they’d all been unable to become successful writers.
I don't know. This is sort of arguing that a world in which publishers were gatekeepers/PR agencies/etc. meant that authors could sort of hide behind that front--at the cost of putting their fate in the hands of their publisher.
But I'm not sure how widespread/true that ever was. Authors went on book tours and TV shows all the time to promote their writing. I'm not sure how common the pseudonymous/reclusive successful author ever was.
There’s a pretty huge overproduction problem in the arts, literature, and music, and it’s being made worse by spam and hustle culture shit at least in the short term.
All the spam and hustlecrap is ironically making good works more special but at the same time harder to find.
I’d say first and foremost: don’t make art unless it’s burning a hole in your head and it must be made. That helps solve the overproduction problem. As for the spam and junk problem that’s a discovery issue.
I’ve actually gotten back into reading lately. Good new stuff is as hard to find as it is to get it found. Of course like most readers I have a backlog… hence the overproduction problem.
I hope that AI improves discoverability. It would be great if an AI agent can give me a list of books which I am likely to enjoy, based on the books I have enjoyed in the past. Even better if some of those picks are obscure.
I think this is a really underexplored use case for LLMs. LLM embeddings are really good at encoding rich semantic information that’s easy to query and hack around with in a variety of ways. Retrieving primary sources that correspond to one or many thematic dimensions is one such case for embeddings, but most applications that do this portray it as a driver of RAG chatbots, when it could be an end in and of itself.
I have an app that does your book recommending idea but with Wikipedia articles. I am trying to release it soon, once I get past my perfectionism, if anyone is interested. Expanding to non Wikipedia sources is an eventual goal.
I basically never want to read chatbot output for pleasure. I want to read primary sources.
A debut novel that's not published is not necessarily a wasted effort. It can be adapted into a screenplay, which can be submitted to a variety of outlets, and the novel might be published later if successful.
How can someone write an article on that theme without ever mentioning self-publishing? It may not be super big in mainstream books yet, but it is getting pretty common for genre literature to first publish and build an audience on something like RoyalRoad, then self-publish, and then get picked up by something bigger. And it also ties very much into some of the themes of the article to cooperate and do shout-outs to other authors, as that is super common in those circles.
I think the answer is very short: marketing beats quality. We are paying too much attention to the content itself but the root cause is the distribution. It is the same with startups.
This is already studied at nauseaum in search economics, long tails, the medium is the message, etc.
Because Barnes and Noble has 14 checkout shelf positions devoted to Taylor Swift magazines. James Patterson (Enterprises) has about a quarter of the new novel space, and Tom Clancy (RIP) has maybe a tenth. It's all about the brand.
> James Patterson (Enterprises) has about a quarter of the new novel space, and Tom Clancy (RIP) has maybe a tenth. It's all about the brand.
There's an obvious reason for that: far and away the primary determinant - often the sole determinant - of whether you will like a novel, is the author.
That's sad, because once an author achieves some notoriety, they are basically stuck into writing the same thing for the rest of their career, for fear that they will lose their existing audience.
Not at all. Like I said, the determinant of whether you will like the book is the author. If they write something radically different from their previous work, and you liked their previous work, the odds are very high that you'll like the new book too.
Hello, my friend. I enjoyed 1491, and I've been working my way through The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking which is an economic analysis of the boom/bust cycle as it exists in modern fiat/debt based economies. Both are very different, but also very engaging and interesting.
John Aristotle Phillips, founder of political data-analytics firm Aristotle, graduated from Princeton University with a degree in aerospace engineering in the class of 1978. Known as the “A-bomb kid,” Phillips is known for a project he did in a physics seminar in 1976: designing a cost-effective and relatively small A-bomb. While the cost of creating an atomic bomb can vary greatly, most estimates place the cost at well over $1 million; Phillip’s project posited that it was possible to do so for roughly $2,000 and the actual bomb would fit in the size of a U-haul trailer.
A project with frightening connotations, Phillip’s work was confiscated by the FBI, despite the fact that Phillips was able to design his bomb using only his nuclear engineering textbook and two unclassified government documents.
Phillip’s professor has said that the design would likely work, but his design was not actually built. Moreover, in comparison to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, this bomb design has been said to be more sophisticated and complex, implying how easy it would be for political terrorists to make such a devastating weapon. Nevertheless, though Phillips has said, “any other physics major could do this better,” his project was the only one in that seminar to get an A.
The thing about modern publishing is that it is too much driven by genre, so if you read a few dozen novels of a particular genre there are no surprises left. I am similarly unimpressed by new books, so I either read old ones or just don't.
Children of Time is a standout sci-fi novel. I’m currently reading the second book, and it seems to be very good as well. It’s a unique take on an alternate/alien civilization.
But, I have for many years been drawn to non-fiction books, typically about WW2, such as the battle of midway (Shattered Sword) or the Guadalcanal campaign. I have also listened to a lot of civil war audio books, including Battle Cry of Freedom and the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.
I almost exclusively read fiction, in particular science fiction. Why? Because the authors often spend a great deal of time thinking about new, interesting technology and ideas. It is all based on reality, the ideas are new combinations of existing concepts, and could be applied in the real world to inspire innovation.
I get enough of the real world in the real world, when I read, I want see something new
I'm very much in the same boat. Fiction books haven't gripped me in nearly a decade. History, on the other hand, has become more and more interesting to me as I've aged.
Hmmm. FWiW that was another literary jest, you know, what with Dickens famously:
Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon that sparked Pickwick merchandise and spin-offs.
...
His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.
Whilst reality bite and all said is the truth, there are odds. How about on a lady with kids on social welfare and had no name tried to publish a book about young witch growing up in a boarding school. And tbh I do not recommend her book for young kids, as it is very dark.
Anyway, as said in another epic, there is always hope.
I assume I read far more than the average person (though possibly just average for HN) but I see clickbait headlines like "10 Best New Hard Sci-Fi Novels Released This Month" that just make me feel anxious as a reader that there's more content out there than I can possibly comprehend. Must feel even worse as a writer.
I find that to be an awful attitude... self-absorbed people with nothing interesting to write about will assume it doesn't apply to them because they are so interesting, and people not so sure of themselves but having an actual unusual idea or story they are passionate about, could easily be discouraged from sharing something valuable.
I say, if you have something to say that fits well in a book, write it. Let other people decide if it is worth reading or not. A lot of the best books ever written were kept private, or were not well received at first.
It is not an awful attitude if you are on the receiving end of submissions by wannabe authors. I have a friend who regularly attends writers' workshops and she tells me there is a lot of bad writing being presented. Some people take feedback on board and improve, some decide the world is against them and refuse to listen. Both go the self-publishing route when rejected by traditional publishers. There are also syndicates of writers writing series of books under the same name hoping one of them sticks and sells the others in the series. There is a lot of crap out there.
50 Shades of Grey is smut with a stamp of approval of a large publisher. They allow it once in a while as a way to monetise human sexuality otherwise repressed and controlled by various powers.
50 shades of hot garbage, unironically, is one of the books that brought smut back into the mainstream. As much as I have no interest in reading the series, have to give credits to the author for making something incredibly popular. We can hate it, but there are millions of people who read and write fanfic on a daily basis, and targeting that audience is respectable.
But I agree, being on bestsellers list nowadays doesn’t even as much as it used to. Everyone’s up there to game the system, whether through extreme SEO-boosting or buying their ways into shortlists and recommendations.
50 shades is laser targeted. To the point that I tried reading it and abandoned it before 25% because the laser targeting is extremely precise and missed me :)
Just because it's not depressing oscar bait or space opera it doesn't mean it doesn't have some merits.
Although i find it hard to believe it was done as a "labour of love".
Wow, what a clueless article. Or maybe a deliberately biased article.
The majority of sales and debut authors are ebooks, and traditional publishers aren't involved. This has been true for years. Read publishing is pretty much pointless if you aren't a celebrity. Yes, there are a few that make it, but a handful, compared to the numbers that make something significant self publishing. And the trad publishing process is so slow. You can write and market several books in the time is takes to get one book to reads the old way.
If you aren't a celebrity, self publishing is the way to go.
Not that publishing an ebook is easy, but the process of much more controllable by you. And the payback is much higher.
But nothing here solves the problem of going from zero audience to some meaningful audience in a content saturated environment with a low attention span
The market is dominated by large publishers. They do not need to compete, they have already won. At the same time, they don't want to loose the marketshare, which makes them less likely to bet on an unknown author.
The market is dominated by ebooks. Trad publishing gets a few home runs, but overall can't compete with the sheer volume of new independent books that come out each year.
i think that books, movies, music are just becoming noise at this point. they are completely ephemeral. they are basically free, or ar least they would be if the markets were allowed to do what theyre supposed to do without copyright. and now with AI, the effect is only growing stronger. paying for media feels closer and closer to paying for air. it just doesn't make sense. its ephemeral and so abundant that its basically free. i think this might be our new reality. being an artist as a profession might not be a thing for much longer
The hell now is unless you get friends and family or an agency involved to push it and market it it will languish on the 500th page of any Amazon search forever. Oh and did I say that there are thousands of books a day released and there is nowhere you can self-promote stuff if you do not have social media, HN and reddit will also immediately block self-promotion even if relevant to the audience (I guess I can understand why). I guess the only ones destined to read it are the AI training algorithms.
Still it wont stop me writing, having a book published, even if nobody reads it is very self-satisfying and leaves something of you in this world when you are gone.