Writing books is not really a good idea • Hacker News Board

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#101

Post by iNate2000 » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

arsome wrote: post #75

sremani wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re-reading Pop-Psy and Airport literature is not the recommended reading. How about reading Hayek, Strauss for second time? How about reading man's search for meaning for the third time? You re-read great works, not NYT best shiller! (sic).

Why would you re-read them when you could read something new? Do you find you're actually getting a significant amount of value or joy from it the second time around? I ask because I think a good portion of the reason I enjoy software development is the absolute and total hatred I have for repetition in my life.

1. It’s totally easy to miss things when reading: certainly little delightful details, or even whole ideas or plot points.

2. It’s not like there are millions of great books out there. Some entertaining ones, some informative ones, a few that are both, and a very few life changers.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#102

Post by pochamago » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

GekkePrutser wrote: post #73

> As the going wisdom states: it only takes 1,000 true fans spending $100/year for a creator to earn a salary of $100,000/year—and there are 83,397 books every year that have at least 1,000 true fans. Theoretically then, an author could release a new chapter every week, charge subscribers $8 or $9 a month, and earn $100,000 a year—from only 1,000 readers. She's basically proposing an episodic model for books, with ea…

Web novels seem to do just fine releasing chapter by chapter in Korea and Japan.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#103

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #85

KittenInABox wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know offhandedly that at one point it was possible to live on one's short fiction but now that's been entirely squeezed out. (Unless you're Ted Chiang.)

That is sad. :( In happier news, I wonder if you can look at things in terms of "creators of entertainment" rather than just authors and get a happier picture. Like, for example, let's just consider authors and video game creators. Let's suppose that in the fifties, before video games, there were, say, 100,000 full-time fiction authors in the US. (That number sounds awfully high to me, but maybe.) Today, according to…

People “working in the videogaming industry” aren’t comparable to “fiction authors” but to “people working in the slice of the publishing industry involved in publishing fiction”.

And the slice of the videogaming industry that is analogous to authors is probably a vastly smaller proportion than of print fiction publishing because there is so much more non-authorial stuff to do.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#104

Post by wfleming » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

GekkePrutser wrote: post #73

> As the going wisdom states: it only takes 1,000 true fans spending $100/year for a creator to earn a salary of $100,000/year—and there are 83,397 books every year that have at least 1,000 true fans. Theoretically then, an author could release a new chapter every week, charge subscribers $8 or $9 a month, and earn $100,000 a year—from only 1,000 readers. She's basically proposing an episodic model for books, with ea…

Serialized novels used to be common, though. Many of Dickens's novels were famously serialized weekly. Alexandre Dumas' famous novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers were also published as serials. There are plenty of other examples. More recently, apparently In Cold Blood and Bonfire Of The Vanities were both initially published as serials.

Even today, comic books are effectively serialized narrative stories that are pretty reliably published on schedule and have writers who have to keep up for months at a time.

> Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between.

Different writers have different approaches to work. Some writers work in highly productive sprints with long fallow periods, and you're right this model probably wouldn't work well for them. But some novelists do work steadily (Stephen King I believe still tries to write for a couple hours every single day and only takes relatively short breaks between novels), and the fact that this model used to work for a number of books that are now considered classics seems to indicate it can still work in at least some cases.

I'd actually be more worried about the consumer side - the death of magazines makes this model tougher. A given author can reliably produce a novel over the course of a year or two, perhaps, but probably not indefinitely (comic books solve this problem by having writing teams do arcs and then swap out the writer). Magazines used to bundle multiple authors, so subscribers weren't affected by the break period of a single author. In a world where people subscribe to individual authors on Substack and there's no bundling of many authors writing, yeah, it's a tougher sell.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#105

Post by Minor49er » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

sidibe wrote: post #62

AS_of wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you get older, you should read fewer new books, and revisit the ones that have you the most joy. Vacation sounds like a great place for that! Edit: why? Because you believe in the leverage algorithms can provide https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Deci... There are probably a lot of single people here that would benefit from that book as well (the stopping problem) We all "know" the algos. But…

I'm always surprised when people talk about rereading books. I get absolutely nothing out of books I've already read. Do you also rewatch TV series?

Rereading a book, one could pick up on things that were missed previously or that have been forgotten about. Also, one might be in a different life situation or mindset from one read to the next which could alter the perception or enjoyment of what's being read. Not to mention that some prose can be appreciated for its beauty.

TV shows, movies, and albums are often revisited by people who enjoy them. Even as I write this, I'm listening to an album right now that I've heard dozens of times before. I may not always be in the mood to listen to it, but my enjoyment of the music has not been eroded by how many times I've already heard it. Rather, being familiar with it, I appreciate both how it's composed, played, and the nuances that are now apparent to me that I certainly missed on my first listens.

One of my favorite books when I was younger was "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" by Scott McCloud. It was visually appealing to me at the time, but after several readings, I started to really grasp its concepts as an educational art book.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#106

Post by sumtechguy » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

arsome wrote: post #66

AS_of wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you get older, you should read fewer new books, and revisit the ones that have you the most joy. Vacation sounds like a great place for that! Edit: why? Because you believe in the leverage algorithms can provide https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Deci... There are probably a lot of single people here that would benefit from that book as well (the stopping problem) We all "know" the algos. But…

Maybe it's just me, but I find marginal joy drops exponentially by repetition.

It has been about 15+ years since I had watched TOS star trek. I recently started watching them again. I recently went back and am watching 1 a week, same with Stargate. I find them very enjoyable again. Some books/movies/shows work better at a particular pace. I found that binge watching them makes them decidedly less enjoyable. Other shows are basically designed to be 10 hour movies. So those are OK to do that with (westworld being an example of that).

Sometimes it is worth taking a break and give it a decent amount of time. Then watch it again. I have a few dozen shows I know I liked when I was younger. I could even give you a 'outline' of one of the shows that I could make up. Yet for the life of me I could not tell you exactly what 1 episode was about without looking it up. I know I liked them. Yet I no longer really remember them. Those are ripe for revisiting. But sometimes it is best to leave them as 'fondly remembered' and my older sensibilities do not match what I had years ago.

But yeah watching the same thing every other day and you will grow bored with it.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#107

Post by zelienople » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:55 PM UTC

dudul wrote: post #69

dovrce wrote: post #57

Most new books aren't very good, and there's so much noise that only reading old books is a perfectly good strategy. The only recent stuff I buy and read is technology related, if I'm going to read a narrative book it's going to be > 1 year old

> Most new books aren't very good I don't know if this is true, but I do struggle with finding recent interesting books. The choice is often "Do I take a chance with this thing published last year? Or do I just pick up one of the 'classics' that I haven't read yet?" I usually end up going with the latter simply because I don't want to spend many hours reading something that ends up being "meh" and I assume that going…

Most new books are about people. A few good new books are about things. Very few great new books are about ideas.

The decline has affected both fiction and non-fiction. Almost every book is a big disappointment these days.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#108

Post by joebob42 » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

dudul wrote: post #69

dovrce wrote: post #57

Most new books aren't very good, and there's so much noise that only reading old books is a perfectly good strategy. The only recent stuff I buy and read is technology related, if I'm going to read a narrative book it's going to be > 1 year old

> Most new books aren't very good I don't know if this is true, but I do struggle with finding recent interesting books. The choice is often "Do I take a chance with this thing published last year? Or do I just pick up one of the 'classics' that I haven't read yet?" I usually end up going with the latter simply because I don't want to spend many hours reading something that ends up being "meh" and I assume that going…

Plus, for whatever it's worth the classic is already guaranteed to be culturally significant. Other people will have read it and you can talk to them about it, which can be a fun exercise and may not be true for whatever random book you could otherwise read.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#109

Post by kingsuper20 » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #35

How many of these were politically oriented and had sales bolstered by political organizations to get them on a best seller's list?

Good point. More than a few I would wager. It's also a way to pay a politician in a backdoor way.

Having said that, I'm amazed that so many of those titles are actually bought, they do appear to be at least somewhat popular. Any thrift store has piles of Presidential biographies and outraged-about-a-President books, they're over by the microwave cookbooks.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#110

Post by klelatti » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #97

GekkePrutser wrote: post #73

> As the going wisdom states: it only takes 1,000 true fans spending $100/year for a creator to earn a salary of $100,000/year—and there are 83,397 books every year that have at least 1,000 true fans. Theoretically then, an author could release a new chapter every week, charge subscribers $8 or $9 a month, and earn $100,000 a year—from only 1,000 readers. She's basically proposing an episodic model for books, with ea…

> I don't think this'll work. Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between. The pressure of the next episode would lead to 'phoned in' chapters. Not just from the author's side. From a reader's perspective this would also not work. I don't want to start reading a book a chapter at a time. I don't even like reading books that are part of an unfinished series. For me, as someone who reads quite a lo…

The effort of picking a story up again is a fair argument against. There are some genres (crime fiction) where I think that the anticipation of waiting for a chapter could genuinely add to the experience.