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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

#521

Post by garbagetime »

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…

>Murakami

In what world is he a "great" writer?

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#522

Post by nemo44x »

Sebb767 wrote: post #519
nemo44x wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I’d isolate literature from this though. Literature has always been a medium with a limited audience. In the past due to most people being illiterate compared to modern times where it isn’t accessible to many people due to literary complexity.

The last 100 or so years has been an anomaly in that for the first time in history we had a highly literate population that could read fiction. And for much of this era movies and TV were not as accessible to create or consume. But today it is both affordable to create, distribute, and consume fiction via the motion picture therefore making written fiction niche as the audience for it isn’t interested in the literary aspect of it so much as the story telling element. So as we’ve had cumulatively more content disseminated at at accelerating pace it has made most written fiction as obsolete as the parlor singer or traveling news reader. Implanting the stories would do to TV what TV has done popular books.

May be it time or effort, modern story dissemination technology allows people to consume more fiction per hour. I only think most people weren’t reading because they liked to read. They wanted to consume stories and now fiction books are just not able to compete with TV streaming. But literature should be continue on as it has.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#523

Post by tidenly »

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…

I beg you, please - add padding-left:0; to that Table of Contents section ul

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#524

Post by MereInterest »

nearbuy wrote: post #493
coldtea wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 l…

> 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

1921 is shortly after copyright became effectively infinite, and falls in the gulf of books that were lost because they were snatched away from entering the public domain.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-m...

Edit: I'm a bit off with my dates, as 1922 was the year after which works effectively didn't ever enter the public domain.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#525

Post by markwisde »

panopticon wrote: post #479
la_fayette wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok cool, congratulations to the security handbook! I have checked prices for printing books, because I am in the process of writing a regional mountain bike guide book. Although, I only find deals for 3-5$ per book... 1$ seems quite cheap to me.

It's hard to tell based on the material available on the website, but it looks like their book isn't physical. If you go through the checkout process, it doesn't gather shipping information. I assume the <$1 figure was just the Stripe transaction costs.

Yes indeed! It is an ebook. I should probably write that in the landing page :)

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#526

Post by markwisde »

dorchadas wrote: post #517
markwisde wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

- Create a landing page via Github and use Github pages or Cloudflare pages to automatically update your domain when you push to your repo

- set up stripe checkout on the client side only (so you dont have to deal with server logic)

- simply send the book by email when you get a customer

This was my MVP as I didn’t get the time to automate things on the server side. As it’ll get more tedious I’ll find the time to implement that, but so far it’s worked well!

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#527

Post by markwisde »

tidenly wrote: post #523
markwisde wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I beg you, please - add padding-left:0; to that Table of Contents section ul

You mean text-align: left?

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#528

Post by consciouskernel »

I-M-S wrote: post #512
KittenInABox wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

Someone at Microsoft could probably check to see if he's still an employee, but I highly doubt he's still working a day job. Though maybe he is. He's surprisingly not that prolific for someone who's so successful with his writing.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#530

Post by nearbuy »

MereInterest wrote: post #524
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

1921 is shortly after copyright became effectively infinite, and falls in the gulf of books that were lost because they were snatched away from entering the public domain. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-m... Edit: I'm a bit off with my dates, as 1922 was the year after which works effectively didn't ever enter the public domain.

Interesting.

I really don't see any good argument why copyright should last longer than, say, 20 years.

Would any potential authors decide it's not worth it to write books if copyright only lasted 20 years? What benefit to society does ~100 years of copyright provide?

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