131–140 of 630 posts
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Bookstat didn't share the list of 268 books with me, but they did share the one book that sold more than a million copies in 2020: it was a Kindle-exclusive Thomas & Mercer title called “If You Tell” by Gregg Olsen…
Wouldn’t have guessed! Thanks, and really interesting article :)
> 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…
It seems sort of overly complicated to me in that Amazon will sell "tokens" to readers in batches with discounts for volume. The tokens can then be spent on episodes on Vella at the rate of 1 token per 100 words in the episode.
Apparently this is a thing they're copying from elsewhere, and it's supposedly huge in China.
> 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…
Martha Wells does this with her Murderbot Diaries books [1]. The series is fantastic and the latest book was great, but £8 for something that I finished in less than an hour felt a bit steep. Especially for an ebook with literally 0 marginal cost. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Martha-Wells/e/B000APZA1O?ref=sr_nt...
And if the larger books are artificially padded, I actually enjoy them less.
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…
Sturgeons law definitely applies.
Reading (or watching, or whatever) only older stuff is basically using survivor-ship as a curation filter. It's a viable approach, although will definitely miss good stuff.
If you don't do this, you need some other way to discard most of the crap.
No mention of Patreon either.
Charles Dickens wrote most of his work as a weekly or monthly serial, and that's why his stories rip along with regular cliffhangers. His single volume works were mostly less popular and less well known today with the exception of A Christmas Carol.
He wasn't alone either - his success with The Pickwick Papers led many others to follow, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes stories originally serialised in The Strand magazine.
This model of quality fiction being in magazines never really entirely went away in terms of a mark of quality - even though they now print short stories rather than serialisation, it's likely much harder to get your fiction into the New Yorker than it is to get a publishing contract - so it's interesting to me that it's making a return.
As somebody who has wanted to write fiction for some time, but could not conceive of sitting down and writing a book in the traditional way, this appeals to me.
As a keen reader, I'm excited to see what comes out of it, too.
I wonder how serializing a novel would mesh with most author’s work flow. I guess most would want to write it first and release monthly an already finished product?
It can produce some strange incentives: For one thing, they start getting reader feedback after every single chapter, if they want it. Some writers develop really fast-paced styles.
For another, they often start releasing chapters as they are written - meaning they can't have an editor who reads chapter 20 advise them to go fix an inconsistency back in chapter 4.
Also, some writers realise the moment they bring the story to a conclusion, they stop getting paid. That's OK for comedy/slice-of-life/X-of-the-week content - The Simpsons has no need for character growth or overarching plot lines - but works poorly for other genres: What good is a romance where the characters can never kiss, or an epic fantasy where the one ring can never be thrown into mount doom?
Of course, some of these incentives are hardly new: Other media have been subject to them for years.
Luckily I moved very quickly from that question to "my" answer which was "no" and mirrors your thought:
> If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best case scenario is having it sell a couple hundred copies on Amazon, perhaps it’s time to face the music and realize that writing books—like knitting or playing the harp—is nothing more than a hobby. Something I can do for fun on the weekends but should never hope to earn a living from.
It seemed very obvious to me that I was neither a good enough writer nor a dedicated enough self-promoter to ever make it work. Twelve years and 16 novels later I am happily churning out 1-3 bad novels every year and loving every minute of it.
All the best as you continue to chase the dream!
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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?
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?
If you read more dense books of philosophy, literature, or otherwise you’ll get a lot more value out of re-reading since you likely have missed things upon first read. Same thing with tv shows that contain a complicated plot vs. ones that are churned out for quick consumption.