Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is self promotion done well. Provide insight into the problem you solve and explain where you fit into this story. Nice job.
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…
Writing books is not really a good idea
621–630 of 630 posts
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions If you are into Chinese webnovels you'll be familiar with the subscription predatory practices that big companies like Qidian have, where the real cost of a whole 1500-chapter novel (inflated because of the perverse incentives of subscription-based revenue) ends up being close to 500USD It is sad watching the transition from fan translation…
What's that in word count, and how often are the chapters coming out?
Usually 2-3k words per chapter and two daily chapters
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fair enough, but commercial viability is the point of copyright. I strongly disagree with this statement. The point of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". The commercial viability is the means through which that point is achieved. If at any time copyright isn't functioning to promote the arts, and instead hinders, then it isn't fulfilling the point. While I do agree that the tropes ar…
You should really read up on the history of copyright, because it's the genuinely the exact opposite of what you're saying. Copyright initially enforced restrictions on printing press operators and was used as part of the censorship mechanism. There's an argument that copyright actually slowed progress and countries with weak copyright advanced faster. It logically follows because allowing unlimited copies of works t…
Thank you for the link, and that is some very good background that I had been unaware of. There are some other interesting examples, such as Hollywood becoming the motion picture capital of the US by virtue of being farther away from Thomas Edison, and therefore harder to sue.
I definitely agree that copyright can, and frequently does hinder progress. My statement is perhaps limited to the US, where patents and copyrights are given an explicit goal in Article 1 of the Constitution, stating "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." The "to promote the progress" wording is important, as it tells a goal, and not just a legal capability.
A thought experiment I like is to consider the best way to promote progress in the arts and sciences. Suppose there were a magic box, which could instantly tell the full value of any invention or artwork or writing. You put something in, and it tells you how much it benefits society. Then there could be a program set up to reward authors and inventors for making things. They come up to the box, put the work in, and get paid the amount that the magic box tells you. In exchange for contributing to society, there is some compensation for doing so.
Of course, no such magic box exists, nor can it. We could have some sort of a poll to determine the overall worth of a new book or a better can opener, but that would have a lot of overhead. So instead, for a limited time, we reward authors and inventors by giving them a temporary monopoly over making copies of what they wrote, and that can become a monetary reward by selling those copies. Because we don't have an objective measure of a book's worth, we fall back to subjective measures. But this is still fundamentally a restriction on society as a whole, not to reproduce something that they have purchased, and that restriction requires some ongoing basis. It cannot be forever, and it must always be in service of promoting the arts and sciences, because that is the only reason why the offer of a legal monopoly in exchange for open publication exists.
(As a tangent, I don't understand any basis for legal protections of trade secrets, beyond civil penalties for breaking a contract. Companies using trade secrets have decided not to accept the bargain offered by patents, and therefore should also not have the benefits of legal protections.)
(And a second tangent, I don't think that computer programs released without source code should be eligible for copyright protection. The authors have not fulfilled their side of the bargain by releasing a work in a form that can be built upon and expanded by society once their limited-time monopoly has expired, and so they should not receive the legal monopoly offered in that bargain.)
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#624It 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…
It’s funny to me how you think the reading amount hasn’t increased. I agree, yet what is the point of all those college degrees afforded - presumably as correlative of more literacy? I think this speaks further to your point about what people’s aspirations have turned into: mere fantasies.
Don’t get me wrong, I fantasize too, but I manage in eating a balanced breakfast. I think the obsessive component is completely disregarded in the realization of most “self-actualizing” aspirants. I can think of a recent read of Angus Black of AC/DC and how he turned his first guitar’s fretboard rotten from all the sweat. Focusing more on finding that obsession rather than fantasizing about becoming something you likely are not tooled for - say an author - will lead to a more satisfactory course through life. Otherwise, one is simply blindly and madly stabbing in the dark to achieve what someone like Bukowski will starve to do. It must come from within, not from without.
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not always about the wealthy, but often at least through the lens of the wealthy . Rich people write about poor people differently than poor people would write about poor people. But also, yes, often about the wealthy. Here's synposes of four of the five current NY Times Bestsellers: > Over twenty years ago, the heiress Patricia Lockwood was abducted during a robbery of her family's estate, then locked inside an isol…
> You may argue "Well, sure, but people like reading about the rich and powerful because they are more exciting to read about." But that is in itself partially a result of a culture we've built that says that your story is less meaningful if you aren't successful or powerful. There is something to what you say, but perhaps less than you think. Stories about unjustly downtrodden members of the elite overcoming adversi…
The "about rich people" part is probably a distraction now that I think about it. With regards to culture building, I think it's much more important to focus on who is telling the story, not what the story is about.
Poor people telling stories about rich people still enables the poor to have agency in culture building. (And, in fact, it is probably most effective to have them tell stories about the rich so that the rich can be seen from an outsider's perspective.)
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes! Exactly! Right now the ebook library model is based off the physical book library model where the library purchases a certain number of ebooks (say 10) and the author only gets a portion of the royalties on those ten copies, and then the library loans those copies out to an unlimited number of people. It should be managed more like Spotify- where books can be read unlimitedly, but the author gets paid royalties…
That sounds horrible, and should it occur I'll be in my bunker with my ebook plex server.
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
If something has long-term public appeal, fantastic. Then the creators should be glad to have contributed something that lasted so long. But when you say "viable", I hear an implication of "commercial viability". I think that's a poor framework in which to understand copyright duration. The public domain isn't meant to be a dumping ground for forgotten properties. Rather, the public domain is a wellspring from which…
Fair enough, but commercial viability is the point of copyright. It's an exclusive distribution right of a creative work. We've carved out tons of exceptions for copyright for things like parody, educational purposes, etc., but at it's core it's a distribution right and nothing else. Instead of working in an existing property, it's better to create something new, even if you're inspired by the other thing. The entire…
> Fair enough, but commercial viability is the point of copyright.
Yes, and that point is that it's not for ever.
> It's an exclusive distribution right of a creative work.
Exactly. For a limited time.
Most of us only live for a single lifetime, so anything longer than that is effectively forever: If something is locked away by copyright when you're born, and still is when you die, then you don't ever get it free of copyright.
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Disney's control over copyright law has been greatly overstated because it makes a better story. Yes, they lobby in favour of longer copyright. But they're spending a measly ~$4 million per year on lobbying (total, not specifically on copyright) [1]. The boring truth is politicians in Congress were in favor of copyright extension (at least in 1998). Two reasons given were: 1) copyright industries give the US…
I don't think that sounds like the "boring truth". The Sonny Bono Act had wide support from the copyright industry [1]. Supporters also said that since perpetual copyright is constitutionally forbidden, that it should be "forever less one day". That the extension was done under the guise of harmonization only shows that the lobbying was done one country at a time. That there is "only" $4 million/year doesn't show tha…
Isn't it kind of a given that the copyright industry supports pro-copyright legislation?
> That there is "only" $4 million/year doesn't show that Disney has a small effect, but rather how unbelievably cheap it is to buy a congressional vote.
It doesn't show that. You're speculating that Congress supported copyright due to Disney's lobbying and dismissing the possibility that members of Congress who supported it actually supported it for the reasons they stated. The tricky thing with this kind of speculation is it's impossible to prove or disprove. Maybe it was Disney that convinced them. But you don't seem to have any evidence.
If it's so cheap to buy Congressional votes, why hasn't Disney been able to extend copyright again in the past 20 years? They've been lobbying every year since Sonny Bono. The copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire.
If votes are so cheap, why can't we just buy votes to shorten copyright? Or at least prevent extensions?
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a little different. I think there has long been a thing were many people dreamed of spending a fraction of their retirement writing their memoirs, or something along those lines. It was a dream in roughly the same category as owning a sailboat or moving to the islands. Kind of a "one of these days" leisure aspiration. Today—because we are all so intensely culturally obsessed with financial success—"being a write…
> Today—because we are all so intensely culturally obsessed with financial success—"being a writer" means writing stuff right now and doing it well enough to make a living off of. This is something I've thought about a lot lately. It seems like if you show any hint of artistic talent or skill in some craft, everyone around you starts encouraging you to monetize it. You draw so well, you should have a patreon. You mad…
What does it say about our world, when the casual display of creativity uncoupled from the desire for monetary gain is something remarkable?
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think about this all the time when it comes to archeological finds. How do we know this wasn't one of their worst works?
Many writings from the ancient world survive only because of quotes in other books. It's likely that works that were heavily quoted were among the best. But of course, that doesn't preclude the fact that there may have been much better works that didn't make it to us.
Of course, I wouldn't doubt many excellent works died and will die in obscurity in drawers and caves.
Popularity seems almost arbitrary with elements of promotion (ads, influencers, celebrities, etc.), timeliness, and virality.