[HN Gopher] Why are debut novels failing to launch?
___________________________________________________________________
Why are debut novels failing to launch?
Author : Caiero
Score : 30 points
Date : 2024-06-07 19:57 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.esquire.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.esquire.com)
| jonahbenton wrote:
| 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.
| rudyfink wrote:
| 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.
| davisp wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://x.com/mattdinniman/status/1780998536529883622
|
| 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.
| carabiner wrote:
| Naturally, you mustn't mention the name in order to keep it
| exclusive.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| The publisher is And Other Stories, UK based.
|
| Not a pitch. Just my experience.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| What are the names of these books?
| jonahbenton wrote:
| 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.
| boznz wrote:
| 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.
| pavlov wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| So it's either a hobby--which is fine!--or it's an adjunct to a
| day job which can be very profitable--which is very fine!.
|
| But, yes, publishing a book that you think will be a bestseller
| with or without exceptional promotion is probably a lost hope.
| xhevahir wrote:
| > 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, a la Herman Melville, except in this future the writing
| eventually enters the canon by deeply impressing not human but
| machine readers.
| troutwine wrote:
| 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.
| devbent wrote:
| > 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.
| modeless wrote:
| HN doesn't block self promotion in stories either. There's a
| whole section for it, "Show HN".
| er4hn wrote:
| 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I don't understand why Hacker News and Reddit block self
| promotion.
|
| "Hey, look at a thing I made!" is a lot more interesting than a
| lot of the other drivel that gets posted.
| modeless wrote:
| 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.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| 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.
| laurex wrote:
| Isn't "Show HN" a thing that exists for self-promotion? It
| doesn't guarantee anyone will upvote it, but seems like it's
| fine?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Because there are way too many books being written.
| surfingdino wrote:
| "Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where it
| should, I think, in most cases, remain." -- Christopher
| Hitchens
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| 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.
| japhib wrote:
| 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.
| namaria wrote:
| Time is a great filter. That's why it's commonplace to complain
| about 'art these days' and to be nostalgic about past books and
| music.
|
| Some of the greatest, most interesting books I've ever read are
| thousands of years old.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| 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.
| photonthug wrote:
| > 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.
| StrangeDoctor wrote:
| Goodreads is faang?
|
| The problem is manufactured or conspiratorial, it's just
| baked into sorting so much content on so few metrics.
| surfingdino wrote:
| 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.
| johnea wrote:
| Even though I still retain an entire bookcase of novels (mostly
| sci fi) from my youth, I now find fiction to be, well... boring.
|
| Personally I'd rather read about something that actually
| exists...
| pfdietz wrote:
| How do you feel about history?
| medion wrote:
| Publishers only want to publish authors with large social
| followings. The first question they ask is a list of your
| socials.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-07 23:00 UTC)