11–20 of 27 posts
Quick search says indie authors make up 40% of kindle sales.
Couldn't find how many share those numbers but I would assume it's definitely way more than what it was in 2011!
It's absolutely astonishing to me how bad these books are. Not simply the weak plot, two-dimensional characters, and cliched writing, but grammatical and punctuation errors, continuity errors and logical mistakes. I really don't think I'm a snob or a pedant. I happily read cliche-drenched hard science fiction and horror. I don't think it's too much to ask for subject-verb agreement and proper punctuation. I don't thi…
How has the market changed since 2011? Is there a current list of top trending authors with a way to calculate revenue? Is kindle still a strong ebook platform to publish on?
It is still the ebook platform. Unless you publish directly in the web like Worm author Wildbow, but then you'll make money from Patreon (Wildbow makes $70k a year).
E.g. Worm: https://parahumans.wordpress.com/
It's absolutely astonishing to me how bad these books are. Not simply the weak plot, two-dimensional characters, and cliched writing, but grammatical and punctuation errors, continuity errors and logical mistakes. I really don't think I'm a snob or a pedant. I happily read cliche-drenched hard science fiction and horror. I don't think it's too much to ask for subject-verb agreement and proper punctuation. I don't thi…
I'm reading this and all I can think of is metadata. What kind of books could people write with the right tools?
I cannot imagine G. R. R. Martin holding all the knowledge of the universe he designed on his head. I imagine he built a whole on-paper encyclopedia of the world of GoT. I suspect even with all his notes he sometimes makes mistakes and introduces inconsistencies.
Are there any world-building tools for writers? (CAW? -- computer-aided-writing... :-p)
It's absolutely astonishing to me how bad these books are. Not simply the weak plot, two-dimensional characters, and cliched writing, but grammatical and punctuation errors, continuity errors and logical mistakes. I really don't think I'm a snob or a pedant. I happily read cliche-drenched hard science fiction and horror. I don't think it's too much to ask for subject-verb agreement and proper punctuation. I don't thi…
Kindle opened up an area to the left of the bell curve, pulled in much less educated and much less literate readers, and created a new class of much less educated (etc) writers producing content for them.
These new readers are much less picky about essentials like grammar and continuity. There are also far more of them. Numerically, the literate+educated market is much smaller than the barely-graduated-high-school market.
There's also a big teen lit audience which hasn't learned enough about grammar or fiction to be horrified by writing that looks just plain incompetent to educated etc readers.
Publishing rediscovers these markets every few generations. Previous iterations were pulps, potboilers, and penny dreadfuls.
There's a solid core of wannabe writers of all ages with much lower literacy than average. It's a bizarre thing. Their FB and forum posts have the same mistakes their writing does, and their writing is full of the usual potboiler cliches - murder, torture, sex, violence, maybe some magic, lots of shouting and running around.
Some of them are doing okay commercially, so that's just where are now.
It's absolutely astonishing to me how bad these books are. Not simply the weak plot, two-dimensional characters, and cliched writing, but grammatical and punctuation errors, continuity errors and logical mistakes. I really don't think I'm a snob or a pedant. I happily read cliche-drenched hard science fiction and horror. I don't think it's too much to ask for subject-verb agreement and proper punctuation. I don't thi…
> I don't think it's to much to remember what kind of vehicle the characters are traveling in within the same paragraph. I'm reading this and all I can think of is metadata. What kind of books could people write with the right tools? I cannot imagine G. R. R. Martin holding all the knowledge of the universe he designed on his head. I imagine he built a whole on-paper encyclopedia of the world of GoT. I suspect even w…
It's absolutely astonishing to me how bad these books are. Not simply the weak plot, two-dimensional characters, and cliched writing, but grammatical and punctuation errors, continuity errors and logical mistakes. I really don't think I'm a snob or a pedant. I happily read cliche-drenched hard science fiction and horror. I don't think it's too much to ask for subject-verb agreement and proper punctuation. I don't thi…
People are paying for the story, not the text. It is similar to how video games with bad graphics can sell millions of copies just because it is a good game.
Without a good story or a good text what is left to be good? Probably the price and the marketing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Authors are now essentially internet marketers who also happen to write books. For better (anyone can get started from their bedroom with just a laptop and an internet connection) and worse (less time spent on actual writing, likely no correlation between being a good marketer and a good artist), isn’t that true of all creative endeavors nowadays?
Absolutely not! What an appalling and ridiculous thing to say. Even just to say it of writers. Let alone "all creative endeavors" (Maybe you didn't mean to cast such a wide net there. Maybe you just meant to include...the people who market themselves on the internet.) That word 'essentially' is vague to the point of unfalsifiability - whatever I could say against that, you could say, "Yeah, but essentially .." - the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely not! What an appalling and ridiculous thing to say. Even just to say it of writers. Let alone "all creative endeavors" (Maybe you didn't mean to cast such a wide net there. Maybe you just meant to include...the people who market themselves on the internet.) That word 'essentially' is vague to the point of unfalsifiability - whatever I could say against that, you could say, "Yeah, but essentially .." - the…
Disagree. I'd even say creatives are late to the party. Almost all products and services are now driven by marketing, which has little correlation with quality.
Maybe it's mainly a different of perspective; mine is a musician/artist/writer perspective, I feel like I'm talking to people in marketing. (Who else would describe everything turning to internet marketing as a party, even metaphorically..)
[disclosure: musician/artist who's 100% failed at self-marketing]