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

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#511

Post by alektorophobiae » Tue, May 11, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

munificent wrote: post #396

JKCalhoun wrote: post #91

> 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 I've approached every creative endeavor in this way. I see no reason writing should be any different. I'm not trying to be overly cynical, I'm just not surprised that writing is any different than music, painting, etc.

I look at the question of money and art at two levels: 1. As an individual, what is the right mindset to have about my creativity? At this level, I agree with you. Looking at the economic trends, the only sane way to create and feel good about it is to do it in my free time, focus on the intrinsic reward and have some other job that pays the bills. I'm very fortunate in that my other job takes good care of me. But th…

This is well said and puts into words something I have struggled to articulate for a while.. Thanks. Always nice to see other people value the arts in the tech sphere. :)

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#512

Post by I-M-S » Tue, May 11, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

KittenInABox wrote: post #71

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…

I know offhandedly that at one point it was possible to live on one's short fiction but now that's been entirely squeezed out. (Unless you're Ted Chiang.)

Does Ted Chiang live off his writing though? AFAIK he makes his living as a technical writer! (this might have changed in the last couple of years though...)

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#513

Post by nemo44x » Tue, May 11, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

Sebb767 wrote: post #410

> Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies—which is paltry when you consider that the 10 best-performing Netflix films saw more than 68 million views. Reading a book takes far longer than watching a movie. Assuming ten hours for a book, that's 5 million "read hours" compared to 102 million "watch hours" (assuming 90 min) for the top movies. Plus, movies can be watched in the b…

But you can’t possibly make a work like “Gravity’s Rainbow” or “infinite Jest” into a movie. Hell, most adaptions of Hemingway are awful (original “Old Man and the Sea” not withstanding) because literature is not easily adapted to other mediums. It can only exist as writing because it is writing that challenges what reading is.

Lots of non-literary fiction, like “Game of Thrones” translates well and having read the books and watched the show I’d probably agree with your assessment here - optimize for time. But real literature is only good as literature.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#514

Post by nearbuy » Tue, May 11, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

prewett wrote: post #498

nearbuy wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more successful authors. Are you sure there were more successful authors? There weren't that many notable books published in 1921. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_in_literature

We won't know for a hundred years how many of the books that will be published in 2021 will be notable enough in 2121 to be on the 2021_in_literature wikipedia page.

I didn't mean to imply that we should compare it to the 2021_in_literature Wikipedia page.

There are many thousands of successful authors living today. I'm wondering, how many were there in 1921?

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#515

Post by kevinmchugh » Tue, May 11, 2021, 1:57 AM UTC

floren wrote: post #481

kevinmchugh wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For sure. My guess is that the slush pile count is exclusively of unsolicited, unfamiliar authors. Someone they've published before probably skips the pile.

I think they might be publishing stuff their core audience really likes, btw. It's just that audience is probably a niche.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#516

Post by nemo44x » Tue, May 11, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

It’s probably worthwhile to consider both fiction and non-fiction and literature. I’d imagine fiction in particular is dying but literature and non-fiction are selling as well or better than historically, which means not mainstream but sustainable to the (very) limited count of authors capable of making it, literature in particular.

I’m not concerned if we don’t uncover the next Stephen King (he’s got a few great books though!) so long as the next Pynchon is published.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#517

Post by dorchadas » Tue, May 11, 2021, 2:17 AM UTC

markwisde wrote: post #424

peterarmstrong wrote: post #315

One thing to consider is royalty rate. If you sell 5000 copies for $20 and earn a dollar per copy, you've earned $5,000. (This math is based on 10% royalties on the publisher's portion, which is about half of retail. And no, fiction books don't sell for $20 typically, but I'm using this number to make the math easy.) Now, if you sell 5000 copies of an ebook for $20 and earn 80% royalties, you earn $16 per copy, and e…

Indeed. Royalties are the issue. I just published a book with a well-known editor and I’m making 10% per copy (ebook or print). The book is priced at more than 50$ and yet I’ll only make this amount by selling 10 copies (of course this is before tax). Interestingly, if your editor has an affiliate program you can make as much money by advertising some link that leads to purchases. So as a writer, if you do both you e…

Can I ask how you went about self-publishing and selling via a website? I'm considering this with a couple of short guidebooks I've written for learning a specific language, among other things, and am very curious how you got started and set it up with Stripe checkout and manage delivery, etc.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#518

Post by muzani » Tue, May 11, 2021, 2:36 AM UTC

Siira wrote: post #325

andi999 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a scalable product there is usually no middle ground. Either you are getting rich or just getting by, or even not getting by (last one the most likely one)

Isn’t software a big exception to this?

Well you have this at roughly $2000 total: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sarasarasa...

And this at almost a million dollars: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.modelmaker...

I'm not sure if these are outliers, and my "random" sampling is just picking out highly visible apps. But I've made good money off an app built in a month, and I've made relatively little from a book written in 3 months.

Software has a lot more variety. You can make say, a communist themed productivity app vs a forest themed one and these will appeal to different people.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#519

Post by Sebb767 » Tue, May 11, 2021, 2:55 AM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #513

Sebb767 wrote: post #410

> Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies—which is paltry when you consider that the 10 best-performing Netflix films saw more than 68 million views. Reading a book takes far longer than watching a movie. Assuming ten hours for a book, that's 5 million "read hours" compared to 102 million "watch hours" (assuming 90 min) for the top movies. Plus, movies can be watched in the b…

But you can’t possibly make a work like “Gravity’s Rainbow” or “infinite Jest” into a movie. Hell, most adaptions of Hemingway are awful (original “Old Man and the Sea” not withstanding) because literature is not easily adapted to other mediums. It can only exist as writing because it is writing that challenges what reading is. Lots of non-literary fiction, like “Game of Thrones” translates well and having read the b…

I'm not saying one should optimize for time - I fully agree that movies and books can be quite distinct in what they accomplish.

My point is that you can not stack up movies and books 1:1 for sales, as people have limited free time and one person watching exclusively movies, for example, would generate far higher watch numbers than a person only reading books would buy books (everything else being equal). While not ideal, I think comparing them by time spent gives a far better comparison of what is currently popular than simply comparing sales numbers.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#520

Post by flukus » Tue, May 11, 2021, 3:04 AM UTC

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…

Sometimes they even improve, recently I was reading an old Stephen King where he spends a couple of paragraphs describing the rotary dialing process. When I first tried to read this book 30 years ago that was the sort of mundane detail that made the book such a slog, now it feels more like the attention to detail you appreciate in a period piece.

I think a lot of TV shows have reached the point where they're aging a lot slower too. If you launch a new sci-fi show today for instance, you're competing for eyeballs against Star Trek: TNG which hold up well in the modern day. When TNG came out old shows hadn't aged as well and the were unavailable to most people. DVD's and now streaming have given TV the equivalent of used book stores and creators now have to compete against the back catalogues.