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Writing books is not really a good idea

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Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#481

Post by floren »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #477
floren wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I can imagine they get a lot of submissions that are just absolutely wrong for their editorial purpose. There's a lot of hobbyist authors online who would love to get paid, and I bet a lot of them are submitting their fanfiction (or narrowly reworked fanfiction) to a magazine with no interest in it. Also probably many people probably submit the same pieces over and over. Btw if you find an outlet that seems to have n…

That makes sense... I suppose if I was trying to pick a dozen stories out of 1500, I'd start by looking for people I've published before, and even if their current submission isn't very good it beats wading through the dross. After that it's probably a matter of rolling up your sleeves, throwing out everything that's obviously unhinged or unusable, and slogging through the rest.

I assume editors don't get paid nearly enough.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#482

Post by peterarmstrong »

yesenadam wrote: post #474
swyx wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

totally. I basically do blog + stripe, selling 1.5k copies with an ASP of $90, and I keep 97% of it. it was a pretty productive use of 2 months (altho i do spend about 2-3 hours a week continuing to market it and to serve the book community) would have loved to use leanpub but it had issues, as already reported to leanpub support :)

> but it had issues What were they? (Particularly if they're still issues)

We treat all author support issues to hello@leanpub.com as confidential, of course. For author support issues which are fine to discuss in public, you can see our author forum at https://community.leanpub.com/c/authors ... If you look there, you can see a representative sample of the issues people have had recently. (I don't want to turn this HN thread into a Leanpub author support forum thread, of course! However, our authors typically seem pretty happy with our service...)

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#483

Post by MisterBastahrd »

selimthegrim wrote: post #371
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, for example, the Republican National Committee spent over $300K on Donald Trump Jr.'s book, which it then turned around and gave to donors, and $100K more on one of his other books. It spent over $400K on Dan Crenshaw's book and almost $100K on Tom Cotton's book. When Herman Cain was running for President, his campaign committee bought up pallets of his book that happened to be on sale at the same time as his p…

So the ex-mayor of Baltimore should have had the Maryland Democratic Party buy her children’s books instead?

Either that or her own campaign committee. If she got her campaign to buy the books and give them away to campaign contributors, it's totally fine as far as the FEC is concerned.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#484

Post by swyx »

yesenadam wrote: post #474
swyx wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

totally. I basically do blog + stripe, selling 1.5k copies with an ASP of $90, and I keep 97% of it. it was a pretty productive use of 2 months (altho i do spend about 2-3 hours a week continuing to market it and to serve the book community) would have loved to use leanpub but it had issues, as already reported to leanpub support :)

> but it had issues What were they? (Particularly if they're still issues)

i dont wanna air their dirty laundry but go try them out and if you like them then great. they certainly seem to work for most people. they struggled greatly with my 500 page book and after about 6 hours of wrestling with it i just gave up.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#485

Post by fsckboy »

coldtea wrote: post #473
cortesoft wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it's much much harder to make a living as an author today than in 1921. And much easier to make it as a television screen writer. The mediums have shifted

Well, it's not the same thing, just because it still involves writing and fiction. That there are new jobs of a different kind is not much consolation when one likes the old jobs.

When agriculture was invented, it put a bunch of hunter gatherers out of business. They weren't happy about it, they liked being hunters and gatherers.

But that surplus workforce found jobs in other areas, creating whole industries where there had been nothing. Can't have Post-mates without workers and restaurants. Can't have restaurants without more workers and food distribution. Can't have food distribution without more workers and food processors... etc.

Ivy league english majors get jobs writing TV and movie scripts. Mass electronic distribution means that many many people get to watch the creative output of a small number of people. All the other people who used to write are available to fill new niches in the economy.

Yep, the transition is difficult, and they'll complain about it, but society as a whole benefits.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#486

Post by nly »

Semiapies wrote: post #456
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…

From TFA: "There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month". $1000 * 12 But I get that HN isn't a place for usefully discussing this sort of issue, because it's packed with the people who are absolutely certain they'll be one of those 25.

Those authors could have other sources of income than Patreon though

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#487

Post by Semiapies »

nly wrote: post #486
Semiapies wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFA: "There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month". $1000 * 12 But I get that HN isn't a place for usefully discussing this sort of issue, because it's packed with the people who are absolutely certain they'll be one of those 25.

Those authors could have other sources of income than Patreon though

Yes, what's commonly called "day jobs".

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#488

Post by nly »

ghaff wrote: post #240
snet0 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That same logic presumably applies to libraries. Books are physical objects at the end of the day just like a piece of pottery someone made. First sale doctrine explicitly allows the owner to lend or resell it to someone else.

Interestingly enough, this is something some NFT systems are actually addressing...

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#489

Post by nly »

snet0 wrote: post #360
jogjayr wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying a house from a homeowner gives no money to the original builder, or the first human being to inhabit that piece of land. Do you feel guilty about getting shelter without paying the price of admission?

I think this is a disingenuous comparison. Builders get paid to build houses. Authors, to my knowledge, do not frequently get paid to write books, they get paid when they sell books. When you resell a house, you are not denying the builders anything. When you resell a book, you are (possibly) denying the author a sale.

Builders don't necessarily get a dime until the house sells either. Lots of property development is fueled by credit

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#490

Post by hellbannedguy »

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!

I don't know if I should give any advice.

But there are so many publishers/companies that prey on people who want to write, or think they are good enough to publish.

They are called Vanity Publishers.

It's a huge scummy business. It all seems kosher because the customer agrees to the deal.

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