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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

#531

Post by tuatoru »

fsckboy wrote: post #485
coldtea wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but society as a whole benefits.

If only Ivy League English majors get to be writers, then I think society as a whole has lost a lot.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#532

Post by khawkins »

lumost wrote: post #59

Is this the natural outcome of having larger retailers? In the era of small local book stores, the store owner had large discretion on what to stock. Different book stores would naturally stock different books and cater to different preferences. The customer would have options to discover new books, but would also have popular books sometimes "hidden" by the book sellers preference. If every book reader is hooked int…

It's the natural outcome of publishing being cheap and supply of aspiring authors being much higher than the demand for novels. The money which used to be concentrated in the hands of the few who could convince publishers to do business with them is now spread thin among many niche authors.

Further, every modern author is competing with every author who ever lived. I could read the science fiction you wrote last year or I could read Asimov, Herbert, Card, etc. and they're often cheaper and more socially relevant.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#533

Post by Rerarom »

jholman wrote: post #459
Rerarom wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please name one.

If you particularly wanted books that "didn't make it", I don't know anything about that. But maybe you just wanted books that are like HP but better than HP. I read the first few HP, and thought they were dreadful, and thus never read the later ones, so maybe I'm not the person you want advice from, but here are some recommendations of novels/novelists in the same genre (fantasy novels, written for children, that ho…

Thanks for the answer!

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#534

Post by paxys »

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.

> Books are physical objects at the end of the day

Disagree with this. There has been a very short period in human history (roughly from the invention of the printing press till the rise of ebooks/audiobooks) where books were primarily physical objects. Stories were told and preserved orally for thousands of years, and who knows where the future of the medium is.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#535

Post by nicolas_t »

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.

The numbers the author gives for patreon are blatantly false though. There's a few posts down in the thread of people like me who are wondering where those numbers come from.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#536

Post by atseajournal »

NoOneNew wrote: post #290

I have one big issue with the book industry... many actually... but related to the article, all this whining is self imposed. Literary books are marketed far heavier than genre. This is the equivalent to arthouse films vs what actually makes money as a movie/show. Let's take one similar plot. A chemistry teacher is diagnosed with cancer, cant get treated and eventually dies. Literary and arthouse will do a discovery…

I know the following will sound like something only a sock puppet would say, but I created an account just to agree with the level of rancor you've got towards the boring-by-default literary world. I got serious about writing as a teen, and being a serious writer meant aping the great literature I was reading -- ie an emphasis on fine prose and emotional weather reporting -- which led to an acute lack of juice in my fiction. Trying to remedy that now, and always looking to hear more from people working on that same project.

Have you got a blog or anything like that?

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#537

Post by vidarh »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #515
floren wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is an ongoing challenge. You see it with comics as well, where Marvel and DC have gotten really good at knowing what sells to their niche audience. But their audience has been in lengthy decline, in part because they've focused on selling to their niche audience rather than figuring out how to broaden their base.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#538

Post by spoonjim »

sidibe wrote: post #62
AS_of wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you get older, you should read fewer new books, and revisit the ones that have you the most joy. Vacation sounds like a great place for that! Edit: why? Because you believe in the leverage algorithms can provide https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Deci... There are probably a lot of single people here that would benefit from that book as well (the stopping problem) We all "know" the algos. But…

I'm always surprised when people talk about rereading books. I get absolutely nothing out of books I've already read. Do you also rewatch TV series?

"Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book."

--Vladimir Nabokov

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#539

Post by bambax »

Vvector wrote: post #169
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 do also think that the expectation/standard of a $100k/year salary is a bit high. Agreed. Most writers do it because they love writing, not because they expect $100k/year. The money comes after the success. I wish her luck

> Most writers do it because they love writing

The funny thing about writing is that writers mostly hate writing. Writers like being writers. They also like having written books. But the process, they despise.

This is very different from other arts. Musicians enjoy playing music a lot. Performers, in general, love to perform. Even painters, I think, like to paint.

Not writers.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#540

Post by cmsefton »

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…

> For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions

As someone who likes to write fiction myself, the idea of publishing in-progress feels incredibly alien. Typically, if I finish writing something, it's a first draft that I would revisit a few months later and rework. How are authors handling this aspect of wanting to re-edit if they're publishing chapters on the go? I seem to recall Stephen King describing locking his manuscripts away for six months before revisiting them. The in-progress model seems to work against this type of workflow, or are there ways of dealing with that?

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