[HN Gopher] Why are debut novels failing to launch?
___________________________________________________________________
Why are debut novels failing to launch?
Author : Caiero
Score : 112 points
Date : 2024-06-07 19:57 UTC (1 days 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.
| murphyslab wrote:
| 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.
| o11c wrote:
| RoyalRoad has at least 3 major problems:
|
| * 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.
| Narishma wrote:
| 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.
| dageshi wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| Eww that's not just a problem. The last two tell me
| something about the community. Hard pass.
| 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.
| lachaux wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| 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.
| psadri wrote:
| Digging the phrase "wolf's howl".
|
| I distinctly know this phrase is part of song's lyrics -
| but can't think of the name.
| frutiger wrote:
| > 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.
| serf wrote:
| 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.
| frutiger wrote:
| > 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.
| archon1410 wrote:
| > And that message is likely to far outlive any message
| in any dead tree or electronic book.
|
| Berkeley News: Bottlenecks that reduced genetic diversity
| were common throughout human history
| (https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/06/23/bottlenecks-that-
| reduce...)
|
| 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...
| stocknoob wrote:
| After 10 generations your message is diluted to 0.1%.
|
| We still read Shakespeare and listen to Mozart.
| beej71 wrote:
| > 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." :)
| pdonis wrote:
| 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."
| bruceb wrote:
| Have you thought about translating it to English (using cheap
| or free means)?
| 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.
| bowsamic wrote:
| 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
| troutwine wrote:
| 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.
| malux85 wrote:
| I wonder if the machines will be more impressed by elegant,
| efficient, bug-free code
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| given what I see they put out when prompted - I suppose
| not.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The machine wept.
| 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".
| boznz wrote:
| 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.
|
| Ironically my last submission that was rejected was exactly
| about this https://rodyne.com/?p=1400
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| joenot443 wrote:
| 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.
| raydev wrote:
| Funny to call it "constructive" when the reasoning for
| the flag is absent.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| so I wrote
|
| >After that if I posted a link to an article I wrote it
| got shadow blocked
|
| and you responded
|
| >If your post was flagged
|
| please take that as constructive criticism (explanation
| if you don't get my point: I did not use the word
| "flagged")
| jsnell wrote:
| You shouldn't use Show HN for an article or blog post.
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
|
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Hacker News does block self promotion as stated by a mod
| elsewhere in this thread
| pvg wrote:
| I can't find such a comment in this thread, can you link
| it?
| 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.
| CM30 wrote:
| 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"
| atombender wrote:
| 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.
| 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?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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?
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| 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.
| latentsea wrote:
| I guess we need to invent ads, so that we don't all have to
| become influencers?
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _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.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| 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.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _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!
| tomnipotent wrote:
| It's always humorous when people turn nasty and throw ad
| hominem's rather than actually addressing the topic.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| The point is that you missed the point. Entirely.
|
| I said none of the things you want me to "address".
|
| Maybe re-read what I actually wrote and respond to that,
| if it's really a discussion you're seeking.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| 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.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| > So we're expected to feel sympathy for the broke
| bootstrapper?
|
| Yes.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > 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.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _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.
| ido wrote:
| there is nowhere you can self-promote stuff if you do not have
| social media
|
| Isn't the solution (I know it's not that easy) to have social
| media?
| Draiken wrote:
| I believe social media [with a big following] is implied.
| Otherwise it's useless too.
| desert_rue wrote:
| there is nowhere you can self-promote stuff if you do not
| have social media [with a significant following]
|
| They forgot the last bit.
| soneca wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://writer.confabulists.com
|
| 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.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Same experience for me in another domain (indie apps).
|
| I'm okay with getting better at marketing, and allowing for the
| possibility of lack of product market fit.
|
| I'm less okay with believing I have to become Extremely Online
| to "build my personal brand," just to have a chance at
| launching things successfully.
|
| That's some bullshit that they peddle to justify their own
| addiction. It's learned helplessness to platforms.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Yeah. So my journey's figuring out the way that works well
| for me. The goal of indie dev for me is to use the computer
| less ultimately.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Consider reading your book as chapters into a limited series
| podcast.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Why not sell physical copies of your book from out of the trunk
| of your car?
| narrator wrote:
| 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.
| nothercastle wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I encourage you to read some random self-published e-books
| on Amazon.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I encourage you to read some random publisher published
| books, that have been on the top of best seller lists. 50
| shades of hot garbage comes to mind.
| kredd wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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".
| surfingdino wrote:
| 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.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| The problem is those people aren't going to read that
| advice and follow it. Most of the people it's going to
| discourage are those who "should" write.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I do! I have some niche hobbies and have read, and really
| enjoyed several self published amazon ebooks that had
| zero reviews.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| And way too many books already exist. The total supply
| increases every year but demand for consuming books is constant
| or in decline.
| 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.
| rixed wrote:
| You can't know wether time is a good filter without assessing
| the value of what's been lost forever, can you?
| namaria wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| hierophantic wrote:
| Time works wonderfully for books. It is a different problem
| with music though because I want to find newer stuff than
| Debussy and Miles Davis.
| 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.
| pjlegato wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| 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 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.
| Ruthalas wrote:
| Goodreads is a subsidiary of Amazon.
|
| Edit: I realize I misread your comment. Disregard!
| photonthug wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| > 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.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Goodreads shot past the point of being too small to be worth
| bothering sabotaging years ago, and is now very heavily
| manipulated.
| badpun wrote:
| It's pretty good for dead authors though.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Amazon bought goodreads and crippled its discoverability
| features.
| idontknowtech wrote:
| 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.
| o11c wrote:
| > discovery of what is truly high quality
|
| 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.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > 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
| o11c wrote:
| 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)
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| _tom_ wrote:
| 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.
| richardatlarge wrote:
| Supporting evidence?
| surfingdino wrote:
| Trad publishers + a savvy agent will make the author rich. A
| successful ebook will make Amazon rich.
| 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?
| thfuran wrote:
| There's hardly anything new there.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Yogi Berra? I thought you were dead.
| pfdietz wrote:
| No one reads history anymore, it's too popular.
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I know what you mean. I have turned to reading history books,
| that are far more interesting stories.
| all2 wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm currently reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". It's
| the best scifi I've ever read, except it's true!
| sib wrote:
| Great book! Sadly, I don't think the sequel (about the
| H-Bomb) is quite as good.
| richardatlarge wrote:
| Read: The Curve of Binding Energy (McFee)- will blow your
| mind for sure, NPI
| all2 wrote:
| 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.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Maybe you should read something that isn't sci-fi or genre
| fiction. Go back and read Middlemarch or Lolita
| defrost wrote:
| Social Realism and Lolicon aren't genres ?
| bowsamic wrote:
| 1. No, they aren't forms of genre fiction
|
| 2. Middlemarch isn't social realism. If you had to put a
| label on it, it would be psychological fiction a la Stephen
| King
|
| 3. Lolita is DEFINITELY not lolicon (if anything it's the
| opposite) and it's quite offensive to suggest it is
|
| The point is, OP is complaining about not liking reading,
| but if he's only read sci-fi, he hasn't read the classics
| defrost wrote:
| Oddly enough _Middlemarch_ is often cited in literary
| courses as being the template for social realism ... eg:
| This avowedly humanist world-building would come to be
| called realism. Middlemarch is often cited as a template
| of that now familiar mode.
|
| ~ https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/06/George-
| Eliots-...
|
| but I'm more than happy to leave the bunfight of opinions
| to those more invested.
|
| > Lolita is DEFINITELY not lolicon
|
| Well I wouldn't take that suggestion too seriously
| although it seems that you have.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The point is that they're classics, not genre fiction.
| The person I was replying to would be well served reading
| great classics
| defrost wrote:
| Classics like Charles Dickens and not some pulp genre
| trash pumped out for weekly social media installments?
| bowsamic wrote:
| Sure, whatever old stuff that is loved by non-idiots that
| he hasn't tried. Odyssey, KJV Bible, Shakespeare, Moby
| Dick, Dostoevsky, Dickens, etc.
| defrost wrote:
| 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.
| bowsamic wrote:
| How are any of these lame jests actually helping the OP
| who is impoverished in his joy of reading? Keep them to
| yourself.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| In regards to 3, It might as well be. It's a sick novel
| for sick people, and I can't believe that it's read in
| high schools.
|
| Somehow we still read Marquees De Sade too even though
| everything he wrote is more depraved than most of what
| goes on 4chan today.
| bowsamic wrote:
| What? Have you even read it? It's extremely tame and
| satirical, far far more tame than most modern shock porn
| writing like "A Little Life"
|
| In fact there's not even a single graphic sex scene in
| Lolita
| metabagel wrote:
| 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.
| mr_world wrote:
| 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
| medion wrote:
| Publishers only want to publish authors with large social
| followings. The first question they ask is a list of your
| socials.
| vundercind wrote:
| ... and lots of those are _kinda bad_.
|
| But it sells almost as well as a decent book, and you don't
| have to spend as much promoting it, so it's still what they
| want.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| 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.
| _tom_ wrote:
| But, boy are they fast to write!
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| richardatlarge wrote:
| False: never had any publisher ask my agent about this,
| although no doubt it can be a factor if you have a huge
| following
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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?
|
| Then there's Esquire, of course :
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/376430.Esquire_s_Big_Boo...
|
| The urges that led people to read fiction then are now directed
| to TV, movies, and serials. We could decry it, but that's how it
| is.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Yep. Reading "the current thing some imbecile said" instead
| of "the best that has been thought and said."
| BarryMilo wrote:
| 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 cliche. 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.
| lachaux wrote:
| > 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.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| Good points all around!
|
| 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...
| api wrote:
| Loads of industries use hits to pay for the entire rest of
| the industry with the "for the art" stuff often at best
| making small returns.
|
| It's even true in tech. Most VC backed companies fail but
| the few mega-successes fund the entire ecosystem.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| All it takes more courage than most of us have after writing
| our first book!
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| bane wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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.
| vundercind wrote:
| 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.
| bane wrote:
| 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.
|
| The list goes on.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've had enough of the Dune remakes, too. The world doesn't
| need more Planet That Went Ape remakes, either.
|
| The Mote in God's Eye would make a fine miniseries.
| badpun wrote:
| 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.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Glad to see this stuff called out for being low quality
| here. I prefer the term "capeshit".
| auggierose wrote:
| I want "Gateway".
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| currymj wrote:
| Villeneuve is actively working on Rendezvous with Rama,
| it's likely to be one of his next projects.
| ghaff wrote:
| _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.
| TillE wrote:
| 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.
| corimaith wrote:
| 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.
| morkalork wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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?
| CM30 wrote:
| > 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > if you make something genuinely 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.
| afpx wrote:
| 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.
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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.
| adamc wrote:
| 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.
| stubish wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are more good books than time to read. That is why
| reaching an audience is hard, you are not better than the
| other choices.
| grugagag wrote:
| You can't say that until people could reach you, read you
| and move on.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| As a reader, but how about as a publisher, will you take
| the risk? :)
| richk449 wrote:
| Is that why John Irving keeps writing about bears and high
| school wrestling?
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| 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
|
| How do you stand out in that swamp?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| 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.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| "Step one: hype the human, step two: publish their books"
| reminds me of being a senior in college and seeing and
| despairing at job postings saying
|
| "MUST have 5 years experience in [tech that came out 9 months
| ago]"
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| 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.
| dageshi wrote:
| 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.
| iteria wrote:
| 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.
| dageshi wrote:
| 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".
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| 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.
| metabagel wrote:
| 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.
| gfourfour wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| On one hand, that's a good idea.
|
| On the other hand, do you really want to get stuck in a bubble
| and only read the same thing that you've read before and
| nothing new?
|
| If it's bad when Facebook does it, it's bad with book
| recommendations too if you ask me.
|
| And on the gripping hand...
| RivieraKid wrote:
| 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.
| wslh wrote:
| 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.
| _tom_ wrote:
| 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.
| richardatlarge wrote:
| 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
| yxhuvud wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| mikemitchelldev wrote:
| 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.
| naveen99 wrote:
| Looks like I found a debut hn comment.
| richardatlarge wrote:
| Almost never happens; legal issues keep unsolicited screenplay
| submissions to zero
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| intuitionist wrote:
| 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 Carre, 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| l72 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Does the book scene have anything similar?
|
| [1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-
| email...
| beemanF wrote:
| 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
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