171–180 of 630 posts
Power law distribution. You have to assume no one will read the book and you won't necessarily get rich but make it good for your own work ethic and prepare just in case it were to blow-up. It's sad that fewer and fewer people read books anymore, most people are too glued to screens looking for notifications, swiping, or playing games. (I almost ran-over a guy glued to his phone who nearly avoided being ran over by a…
Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies.
If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best case scenario is having it sell a couple hundred copies
Isn't the best case scenario here that you are the top-selling author, selling over a million copies? I feel like the author of this post is just assuming that they are not that great a writer, that they cannot reach the top 1% of their profession.
Writing books is like making video games. Many people dream of creating one, and the vast majority of them are pretty bad. Nevertheless, some incredible books and video games are created, and the stars make a lot of money. Writing books may not be a good idea if your plan is to write some average books and make an average amount of money, but if you think you can write an amazing book, then what else can really compare?
> 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 it's completely impossible: - I've paid $50 for an e-book with content that I thought was really valuable (and it was worth every penny). - In the 2020s the book could be accompanied by supporting material (webcasts etc) which would increase the perceived value. - Some people would be prepared to pay more for early access and to support an author they really like. I think that part of it is a change in…
I think by the time you took your scalpel to a typical business book, you might be left with 50-100 pages. The core idea is probably a magazine article but there are usually useful examples, context, etc.
The problem is that publishing industry economics demand something more like 250 to 300 pages (and truth be told a lot of readers would feel a bit ripped off if they paid a typical book price for a 75 page book).
It would be interesting to have a timeseries plot of this sort of information. Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? Presumably there was some point at which the ease of making a living as an author peaked. This article suggests that time is in the past, but how far in the past? Has the absolute number of people who can make it as an author decreased, or just the relative fraction of the human popul…
Here's some other things he said on making a living as a writer: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/vonnegut-writing-i...
Note that he got paid $750 for his first short story in 1949! I don't know how many places are paying first time authors that much today, and then you remember to calculate inflation.
Computers and the Internet have democratized culture in a way never seen before. This is both good and bad. Newspapers are dying. Television is dying. Hollywood is dying. Books are dying. Now we have people co-creating on blogs, YouTube, self-publishing, and fan-fiction websites. The production quality is certainly down from the peak of professional culture, but software tools are helping individual creators gain an…
The key skill for creatives (in any medium) will be marketing. Being good at the thing you do is table-stakes. Being good at marketing to create the audience will be the key divider between profitable artist/musician/writer/etc and aspiring amateur.
So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a great creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows the creative to focus on creating.
This is basically what publishing houses & record labels do, but they're still so caught up in the actual physical production of stuff. Now everything is digital there's no actual need to make books or records.
There'll be a new set of "promoters" who handle the hottest new talent. Getting signed with one of them is the guarantee that you've "made it" and you might actually be able to make a living from this.
Then the promoters will be publishing their own collections of stuff, or creating their own subscription services, or finding some other way of cross-promoting their creatives to the audience of the other creatives they manage. Then it becomes a matter of choosing which promoter(s) you want to follow.
And then we're back to where we were, with gatekeepers for content.
this is somewhat misleading. It includes tiny publishers, niche publishers, niche non-fiction, and so on. Such as "top 100 hiking trails in the Bay Area" and niche stuff like that. Fiction debuts by top publishing houses tend to be much more lucrative for the author and sell way more copies. Most aspiring authors tend to write fiction for a general audience, not niche non-fiction.
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?
Good ones, with a lot of depth, absolutely.
I also look at paintings more than once in my life, consume my favorite meals more than once and so on. For those without a perfect memory, re-reading a good book can often teach us new things.
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?
I helped a writer friend move a writing workshop online last summer. This was one of the topics. The crowd seemed evenly split between: - write it at once and release in chunks. - release it as you write. - And the most interesting (in my opinion), release it as you write and then if it’s popular, do a full round of edits based on crowd feedback and self publish the ‘definitive, crowd edited edition’.