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Writing books is not really a good idea

ellegriffin.substack.com

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Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#461

Post by richardwhiuk »

ellegriffin wrote: post #448
toomuchredbull wrote: post #330

Hasn't this always been the case? It's like being a playwright or any artist really. A very few successful ones, and lots of people who do it as a hobby. Even some of the successful ones are only successful in death, not life.

This is true, the creative arts have always been volatile as a career choice. And it's true that some of those artists become successful as a fluke or as an accident of their death. But it's also true that many of the successful creatives intended to be successful, or at least tried very hard to be, and those were the seeds that set up for some kind of "big break." For example, in the case of Dan Brown, one of the mo…

Yes, but there's also probably a mass of people who did what Dan Brown did and sold < 10k copies.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#462

Post by cortesoft »

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…

This makes a lot of sense.

In the past, the big hurdle to becoming an author (or a musician, or a model, etc) was getting past the gatekeepers. You had to convince a publisher, or a label, or a modeling company that you were worthy and then you were in.

This seemed like an impossible task to most people, and many people gave up without even trying. But for those who did persist and attempt to get past the gatekeepers, there was a very clear goal, and the gatekeepers were very clear to you when you didn't make it.

The traditional gatekeepers to a lot of professions are being bypassed these days, so at first it seems like it should be easier now. You don't have to have any connections or convince a single person your stuff is worthy.

However, in reality that game is even harder now. The demand for the content hasn't changed much, and it is still just as rare to succeed in these fields as before. However, people never get the clear 'pass/fail' response from a gatekeeper, so people who will never make it are likely to pursue the career longer than they might have with a more clear rejection.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#463

Post by Tycho »

Another thing about books is: why take the chance of reading a book that is new? There’s thousands of classics to occupy yourself with as a reader, or even books from 20 years ago that have stood some test of time.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#464

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

ellegriffin wrote: post #395
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I never said that it was greedy to want a $100k salary. It's a perfectly rational and ordinary thing to want. I wondered about how reasonable to was to expect to attain that level of financial success in writing.

Well reasonable is a whole other thing. And I'm definitely not being reasonable! :)

"Never tell me the odds?" :) I wish you the very best of luck.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#465

Post by autarch »

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.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. If I paid $8/month to every author that I like enough to buy most of their books, that'd easily end up at $500+/month, and maybe $1,000/month. Compare that to buying all their books (even in hardcover), which is around $1,000 per year.

Plus I have no interest in reading things a chapter at a time. I read one book or series from start to finish at a time. I don't like jumping back and forth between many different novels.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#466

Post by deckard1 »

gnulinux wrote: post #281
CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #254

Unlike movies/TV shows, books tend to 'age' relatively slowly. Many books that were written 30 years ago are still immensely enjoyable today. Not only that, but there are a literal ton of books out there that have been read by hundreds of thousands of people and reviewed extensively. I have found my personal enjoyment of a book to be loosely correlated with the goodreads / B&N scores. This gives me at least some sign…

When I read books, I enjoy it a lot more when I read a "known great" book. It's easier to just pick up a Dostoyevksy, Kafka, Saramago, or Murakami or whatever. Chances are I'm gonna like it, or it'll be entertaining enough. When I try to explore my own likes, it ends up being frustrating because it takes a lot of trial and error. Consequently, I have no insensitive to read books that are recently published. It makes…

Time is an excellent filter of quality.

Back when I was a kid my mom had a box of 7" vinyl records she gave me. For every Elton John or Hendrix she had, there were dozens of absolute garbage records. People often make the claim that music was better back then. No, it has just been filtered for you.

For books I tend to do the same as you. I have a finite amount of time on this planet and so little time to read in the first place. I usually reach for something older than 20 years.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#467

Post by whimsicalism »

snet0 wrote: post #233
kpwagner wrote: post #99

In the month it will take me to finish reading Storm of Swords, I will watch ~10 movies. Plus, I'm reading Storm of Swords, which needs no additional support from readers to be discovered or validated--though I still want to read it. Plus, I digitally loaned it from my local library. I own a number of books (~200) and have probably owned x4 that total in my lifetime. Maybe 1/3 of those I paid full price for new. The…

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but my assumption is that buying second-hand books gives no money to the author. I don't know, morally speaking if this should be the case. It does feel wrong for people to get the experience without paying the price of admission. Can this be solved logistically, though? And do publishers factor this into their RRP?

No, because second hand markets influence the first hand price.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#468

Post by floren »

vidarh wrote: post #339
kevinmchugh wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vonnegut I remember writing somewhere that radio and especially TV had killed the market for short stories in magazines, which were a great way for authors to get started. 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 author…

In the US, for scifi, the SFWA requires a market to offer 8 cents a word or more, I believe, to be considered a "professional market" for the sake of counting towards membership criteria. That means most of the bigger scifi magazines are exactly at 8c (a very few above) Very few genre magazines will accept more than 10k words. A handful will accept 20k-25k (Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld for example, last I checked).…

> the editor of a relatively minor scifi magazine mention on Twitter that their typical slush pile per issue was 1400-1500 stories.

That's surprising; I subscribed to Asimov's for about 6 months back in 2015 and based on what I was reading, I assumed they must be publishing everything that comes in the door.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#469

Post by glaberficken »

Follow me on a naive exercise here: Zoom out from books only let's look at some media that are competing for people's attention in 2021.

(not exhaustive:)

- Video-games (including mobile)

- Social Media (fb, tiktok instagram etc)

- Video streaming services (youtube, netflix, etc)

- Music (single purchase and streaming)

- TV (yup still going)

- News (TV, and online mostly)

- books (print and ebooks)

Let's state that most of these industries have seen the amount of content published increase exponentially in the last 15 years.

Assuming that premise to be true is it really that much of a surprise that the average income of each content author is decreasing?

The only way that would be surprising is if the number of available attention hours was increasing at an even faster rate (which i guess would not be impossible if you could measure the masses of digital consumers who entered the "attention market" in that same time period).

My guess is that the scales tip a lot to the supply side though. We simply have too much stuff being produced now and not enough people to consume it.

Then there is the fact that in the open publishing models we have now the market does get flooded with a lot of below par quality stuff.

The way we deal with it now is typically by some sort of popularity based algorithm that aggregates attention on a few winners and produce a huge long tail of "looser" content.

I don't know if i have the right "picture" here but it is certainly my gut feeling that there is too much stuff out there for it to retain the same value.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#470

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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…

> But today, media is more than happy to show us all possible dreams. Our social media aggregators filter out all of the lives you're likely to lead and show you only the best ones

Ironically it's those same social media aggregators that make the stars these days.

You can literally be an overnight success if you get lucky.

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