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

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#411

Post by edgartaor » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:02 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #384

Theoretically then, an author could release a new chapter every week, charge subscribers $8 or $9 a month I'm not paying > $40 to read a single book over the course of multiple months, even for authors that I absolutely love. With my reading habits, I couldn't even afford to pay that much across the volume of books I read if most of my favorite authors switched to such a model.

>I'm not paying > $40 to read a single book over the course of multiple months

Me neither. Maybe I would buy the book in a presale, but that's it. This kind of selling just work for early adopters, the kind of people who stand in line for hours to buy a new product.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#412

Post by peterarmstrong » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:03 PM UTC

mritchie712 wrote: post #364

peterarmstrong wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks :) Ironically, I've been talking about the relationship between lean publishing and serial fiction for a long time (for example, this video from a conference talk I did in 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA ), but Leanpub has never hit anything close to product-market fit for fiction. We do well in our niche of computer programming / data science / business types of books, but we have essential…

My wife has toyed with the idea of writing romance novels. Do you have many romance writers on Leanpub? Her thinking is to keep the "trashiness" of most romance but improve on the story and writing. She keeps saying "I need a publisher", but I was thinking there must be a simple way to publish straight to Amazon, looks like that's Leanpub!

Regardless of what type of book your wife is writing, if she uses Leanpub she needs to do the upload to KDP herself: Leanpub doesn't currently do anything here.

There are other companies like BookBaby which do the "publish to Amazon for you" type of thing; Leanpub currently does not do that. We are just a toolchain to make ebooks plus an optional storefront to sell them. You can sell the ebooks you produce using Leanpub on any storefront such as KDP; you own your work. We do not have many romance writers on Leanpub, and a simple look at our homepage will explain why: our storefront looks like a place for computer programming books, not romance novels.

Also, most romance novels are written in Word, not Markdown, and our Word support is a hidden feature, kind of like the secret menu at In-N-Out burger. The way our Word support works is that you write in a Dropbox folder (or using GitHub or Bitbucket), and you make your Book.txt file list one or more Word files (instead of Markdown files) as the manuscript content. Then when you click the button to preview or publish the ebook, we generate the PDF, EPUB and MOBI based on those Word files, and you can do whatever you want with them. It's actually pretty smooth once you set it up, but it sounds really complicated, and we don't market it at all: hence another reason we don't have many romance writers on Leanpub!

Anyway, if that sounds like a useful thing then we may be worth a shot. Leanpub book landing pages look nice and professional, but in terms of attracting an audience of readers for a romance novel, we are not going to be much help. This is why places like Wattpad do well in this regard. (Leanpub does help attract an audience for our computer programming books and similar types of books, of course, primarily through our weekly and monthly sale newsletters.)

Frankly, my recommendation for any aspiring first-time novelist with a small social media following would be to publish in-progress on Wattpad first to see if they get traction, and then to consider Substack and Amazon KDP for places to monetize if they do. Then once they've gotten to that point, if they're looking for tools to produce a nice ebook to sell on KDP, Leanpub is one of the options they can use as a toolchain.

(On the other hand, if they have a reasonable social media following, they could skip Wattpad and go directly to Substack, KDP or even Leanpub and point their followers at the appropriate landing page for their book...)

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#413

Post by peterarmstrong » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

cultofmetatron wrote: post #405

mritchie712 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife has toyed with the idea of writing romance novels. Do you have many romance writers on Leanpub? Her thinking is to keep the "trashiness" of most romance but improve on the story and writing. She keeps saying "I need a publisher", but I was thinking there must be a simple way to publish straight to Amazon, looks like that's Leanpub!

you can publish directly. no need for leanpub. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/

Agreed! We don't do anything to help with that part of the process: you need to use that page either way :)

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#414

Post by synergy20 » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

I thought about writing books (technical stuff) but then realized there is nothing I can do about piracy, pdf/epub/etc are just a few clicks away. unlike music and movies that you have some leagues to enforce IP laws once a while, for books there is essentially none. It's hard to get motivations considering writing books are so demanding.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#415

Post by ghaff » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #377

ghaff wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Frankly too many (non fiction) books are essays spun out to book length. 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…

I've been told that business books are 7 pages of content, and 242 pages of story so to get people to read the content pages.

Well, and to convince you that the content pages aren't some made up BS as supported by real customer experiences, academic research, etc. I could probably summarize a lot of business books (e.g. Crossing the Chasm) in a few pages with a couple drawings. But it would be missing a lot of nuance and, yes, would probably lack the story to make it stick.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#416

Post by tonyp2121 » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #370

rikroots wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. When I started to treat my writing endeavours as a hobby rather than as a path to fame, glory, riches and world domination, I also started to enjoy the writing process a lot more. Nowadays I only write when I want to write, and I only write what I want to write. It's a freedom I've come to cherish.

Do you finish anything though? A lot of writers find that the effort of finishing the story is a lot more work than writing the early parts and so they have half-finished novels in their files that realistically they will never finished. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if that is okay or not. For me, I know I have too many unfinished projects and so my stories will remain dreams that never get written down.

Thats most of everything though. The hardest part of finishing your programming project is the last icky bit that you really didn't want to do yet, or bug fixing, or polishing. The last part of painting is the touch ups, and thats also the longest part. Its much easier to just come up with a sketch of a piece of art (or any project) than it is to get into the nitty gritty painstaking details that it requires before you can say its finished.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#417

Post by coldtea » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #212

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #47

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…

> Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? One of the dominant subjective experiences of living today is the sensation that any possible amazing kind of life is right there and it is only up to us to reach out to pluck it. You go on Instagram and see people living blissful lives of travel in gorgeous locales while talking about how affordable it is. That random dude who wrote a series of posts on some…

>The dark side of this is that many of us won't. And, in particular, in many areas, the total number of brass rings is relatively fixed and we can't all get them. A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author.

It's worse: a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more succesful authors.

Now it's more people (350 million vs 100 million in 2021) AND less absolute people reading books (perhaps as today they also compete with tv, the web, youtube, netflix, social media, videogames, and so on as everyday entertainment options).

So it's much much harder to make a living as an author today than in 1921.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#418

Post by rossdavidh » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

synergy20 wrote: post #414

I thought about writing books (technical stuff) but then realized there is nothing I can do about piracy, pdf/epub/etc are just a few clicks away. unlike music and movies that you have some leagues to enforce IP laws once a while, for books there is essentially none. It's hard to get motivations considering writing books are so demanding.

I believe most authors of technical books get most of their payback from it in the form of enhanced status for consulting gigs, being as they are the person who "literally wrote the book" on topic [x]. I have heard that has been the case for quite some time.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#419

Post by DanielBMarkham » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

Goals are very important to acknowledge. If you're only interested in income and are writing fiction, the numbers are against you. In general, as the author shows, writing isn't a great source of direct income.

If, however, you've accumulated a lot of research on a personal topic and want to gather the threads together and reach some personal conclusions, long-form non-fiction is probably the only tool that's going to work, whether you publish or not.

There are many more indirect benefits for various niche genres. If you reduce it all to money, you're not going to be happy. Everybody can publish now and as a result of that, most books are not that great. One wag said that the great majority of books published today shouldn't be published at all. I tend to agree, at least in terms of publishing for a wide audience. It's just that book publishing doesn't have to be like that.

I'm starting on another book this year. Each of my previous books has had less than 1,000 readers and I'm happy as a clam. In fact, I really don't want to start publishing to a mass audience. In my opinion, looking at writing only in terms of a mass audience is the best way to start writing a lot of highly-targeted trash. Everybody is already trying to write the next version of serialized pulp fiction. That's why, in my opinion, no matter how well you write for any sized audience at all it's only going to end up being mediocre (by comparison). If, however, you write reasonably well on a laser-focused extremely small niche that you have great passion for? You win even if you get only seven readers.

Beat the game by not playing by the rules they give you.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#420

Post by dang » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

All: large threads get paginated so to see all the comments you need to click More at the bottom, or on links like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27106055&p=2

It's a good thread; I recommend it.

(Comments like this will go away once pagination does—it's just a performance workaround. Sorry for the annoyance.)