Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Writing books is not really a good idea

ellegriffin.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 630 posts

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#551

Post by randomswede »

vidarh wrote: post #347
ellegriffin wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am basing that off the research I did for this article: https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth "Most books peak in the first 10 weeks after their debut, then exit the market." This is "most" so of course there are exceptions. And it sounds like you are one of them. That is amazing! Did it have a big bump at front, and then decrease over time? Or have you seen other bumps later on? I do wo…

I think that is largely because most writers don't know how to or don't care about marketing. I published a novel in late november, and it's sales are low but steady to slowly increasing. A key aspect is that to "survive" past the initial bump you need to invest effort into building word of mouth and getting reviews, and that is a slow process. The people I got to help with marketing even actively advised against doi…

I know at least a few that will not buy any book in a series until it is completed, due to the number of book series that simply have petered out part-way though.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#552

Post by vidarh »

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…

A lot of the worst writing will also often circulate to many places because nobody takes it off the market...

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#553

Post by randomswede »

pier25 wrote: post #144
tarr11 wrote: post #23

I used to read a lot more books 10-20 years ago. Now, I mostly read books on vacation. I think I have an unspoken budget of “words read daily” that is consumed by work and my mobile devices.

> I think I have an unspoken budget of “words read daily” that is consumed by work and my mobile devices. I agree. Considering word count, I read more now than ever but I read a fraction of the books I used to read 15-20 years ago.

For me, the main reason for lowered annual books read is "no commute" (it IS possible to set time aside just to read, but over the decades, I have gotten used to read on buses, tubes, trains, planes... and thus frequently forgetting that I can actually just read whenever I want to).

Pre-COVID, I usually managed 120 to 150 books per year. Now, it is probably down to about 40.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#554

Post by marcus_holmes »

ghaff wrote: post #264
marcus_holmes wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see this going round in another circle. The key skill for creatives (in any medium) will be marketing. Being good at the thing you do is table-stakes. Being good at marketing to create the audience will be the key divider between profitable artist/musician/writer/etc and aspiring amateur. So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a great creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows the cre…

>So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a great creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows the creative to focus on creating. Well, that's basically what you hire a public relations person for. The problem is that now you're having to invest , perhaps significantly, in making a bigger impact.

There's a misalignment of incentives, though. Hiring a PR person is different from signing a contract with a promoter/publisher/marketing partner.

The PR person wants to be noticed by journalists. They get paid the same regardless of how much money the creative makes. But their next gig depends on being noticed by journalists.

The marketing partner wants to sell lots of whatever it is that the creative makes. They're on a % of sales (or more usually, it's the other way around and the creative earns royalties based on sales). They need to build an interested audience that they can then market to for other creatives.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#556

Post by ripe »

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…

Thank you for the link to Alain de Botton's Ted talk AND for summarizing in text! Wish more people did this.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#557

Post by OldTimeCoffee »

nearbuy wrote: post #530
MereInterest wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How do you solve the Mickey Mouse problem? E.g., you have a character that has created an "empire" that an organization has the means (cultural/monetary) to prevent their creation from entering the public domain. You have to figure out what to do about those rare situations because they're the driving force for extending copyrights.

My ideal is like the old system (initial registration plus fixed term renewals). That actually worked well to balance interests and we should go back to it. Just make the renewals an increasing cost so that your 'Mickey Mouse' hits can continue to have effectively infinite protection while most won't renew and drop into the public domain.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#558

Post by Joker_vD »

inglor_cz wrote: post #541
cmsefton wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This was incredibly common back in the early 1900s. Whole books were at first published in one-page installations in newspapers. Including the most famous Czech novel, Good soldier Švejk. Prior to the advent of radio and TV, this was the best way how to hit a huge audience at once. And for the newspaper, it was a way to entice people to buy the next issue.

That was also common in the XIX century as well: that's how Alexander Dumas and Charles Dickens were published.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#559

Post by offtop5 »

selimthegrim wrote: post #399
offtop5 wrote: post #157

I've actually seen a boon in interactive fiction. Maybe authors can pivot to that. But I fear with the very low barrier to entry, most creatives won't be making money.

What boon do you see in it?

Visual novels, games like 80 Days or Sorcery

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#560

Post by cmsefton »

inglor_cz wrote: post #541
cmsefton wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This was incredibly common back in the early 1900s. Whole books were at first published in one-page installations in newspapers. Including the most famous Czech novel, Good soldier Švejk. Prior to the advent of radio and TV, this was the best way how to hit a huge audience at once. And for the newspaper, it was a way to entice people to buy the next issue.

Right, so it's basically serialisation. Interesting, I always saw serialisation as releasing an already finished novel bit by bit, but just reading about the history of serialisation, it seems that was not always the case. Thanks for giving me the pointer.
Post reply on HN