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Why are debut novels failing to launch?

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Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#141

Post by hierophantic »

namaria wrote: post #28
japhib wrote: post #7

Seems like almost every creative industry (music, video games, art, writing) is having the same issue: Creation & publication tools are getting cheaper & easier to use, which means a lot more people can publish their creative ideas. With such a huge number of choices, discovery is now the issue. IMO discovery of what is truly high quality is still an unsolved problem. Seems like recommendation systems generally just…

Time is a great filter. That's why it's commonplace to complain about 'art these days' and to be nostalgic about past books and music. Some of the greatest, most interesting books I've ever read are thousands of years old.

Time works wonderfully for books. It is a different problem with music though because I want to find newer stuff than Debussy and Miles Davis.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#142

Post by lotsofpulp »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #44
boznz wrote: post #4

Spent several years writing and editing my first book before thinking the job was finished when I hit the publish now button. But it is literally only half the job done. The hell now is unless you get friends and family or an agency involved to push it and market it it will languish on the 500th page of any Amazon search forever. Oh and did I say that there are thousands of books a day released and there is nowhere y…

Your comment resonates and I liken it to promoting when starting a business, which I have just recently done again. Feels like there is a massive imbalance between quality outlets where eyeballs exist and the volume of people /content/businesses vying for attention at those outlets. And, the idea that we need to all become influencers of some scale and amass our own audiences to get the word out about something is no…

> And, the idea that we need to all become influencers of some scale and amass our own audiences to get the word out about something is not practical or possible. Just creates a long-tail for the platforms. This leaves a relative handful of platforms and influencers through which everyone must flow.

>It produces an all-or-nothing effect, with tons of failures and a few outsized winners (relatively

The “it” you are referring to here is math, or just the way networks work when the barrier to entry is zero and the speed of information flowing through networks is almost instant.

Lots of things in nature follow a power law distribution because of it.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#143

Post by serf »

frutiger wrote: post #135
hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Don't expect anyone to read what you wrote, much less commercial success, unless you were a Harvard undergrad English prodigy who joined Penguin publishing, or somehow wiggled into the circle of [City] Review of [Each Others'] Books. It's a one-way, time-traveling message in a bottle comprised of dead trees. Doing it for art is a wolf's howl that it lived and that it could. Although, it's gradually shifted i…

> It's a one-way, time-traveling message in a bottle So too is DNA in children. You don’t get to choose the entirety of the message but you do get to choose the half of the lottery that they must receive. And that message is likely to far outlive any message in any dead tree or electronic book.

where there is increased opportunity there is usually increased risk; it's hardly a relative comparison.

also no one really chooses their offspring's 'half of the lottery', it's an accident of nature -- we only get to choose whether or not we try to propagate our own skew into the lottery roll.

and to be very real here for a second, 99% of sexual interaction has nothing to do with genetic time-traveling bottle-messages, and just as few people really give a thought about the genetic combinations resulting from their actions.

they just like to orgasm -- it's just not as poetic a concept to talk about.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#144

Post by jsnell »

boznz wrote: post #57
modeless wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN doesn't block self promotion in stories either. There's a whole section for it, "Show HN".

My comment was because my last three submissions were blocked. I emailed the moderator the first time it happened, and he said the algorithm probably thought it was self-promotion as I cross posted it to medium.com which I now know everybody hates. By blocked, I mean the articles showed as normal on my browser but was hidden to anybody else. I did not use the "Show HN" option because I have had articles submitted in…

You shouldn't use Show HN for an article or blog post. See https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

I suspect the suggestion was made due to you talking about books originally, which (given a sample chapter) are the one stated exception to written materials being out of scope for Show HN.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#145

Post by [deleted] »

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #134
photonthug wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With such a huge number of choices, discovery is now the issue. It's frustrating if people don't see that this is almost always a manufactured problem, not some an inevitable outcome of simply having more choices. Platforms want to disable the ability for users to differentiate between organic, self-directed discovery vs advertised or promoted content. Discovery needs to be just good enough so that users won't leav…

Amazon bought goodreads and crippled its discoverability features.

[deleted]

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#146

Post by bowsamic »

defrost wrote: post #139
bowsamic wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. No, they aren't forms of genre fiction 2. Middlemarch isn't social realism. If you had to put a label on it, it would be psychological fiction a la Stephen King 3. Lolita is DEFINITELY not lolicon (if anything it's the opposite) and it's quite offensive to suggest it is The point is, OP is complaining about not liking reading, but if he's only read sci-fi, he hasn't read the classics

Oddly enough Middlemarch is often cited in literary courses as being the template for social realism ... eg: This avowedly humanist world-building would come to be called realism. Middlemarch is often cited as a template of that now familiar mode. ~ https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/06/George-Eliots-... but I'm more than happy to leave the bunfight of opinions to those more invested. > Lolita is DEFINITELY n…

The point is that they’re classics, not genre fiction. The person I was replying to would be well served reading great classics

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#147

Post by defrost »

bowsamic wrote: post #146
defrost wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough Middlemarch is often cited in literary courses as being the template for social realism ... eg: This avowedly humanist world-building would come to be called realism. Middlemarch is often cited as a template of that now familiar mode. ~ https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/06/George-Eliots-... but I'm more than happy to leave the bunfight of opinions to those more invested. > Lolita is DEFINITELY n…

The point is that they’re classics, not genre fiction. The person I was replying to would be well served reading great classics

Classics like Charles Dickens and not some pulp genre trash pumped out for weekly social media installments?

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#148

Post by bowsamic »

defrost wrote: post #147
bowsamic wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that they’re classics, not genre fiction. The person I was replying to would be well served reading great classics

Classics like Charles Dickens and not some pulp genre trash pumped out for weekly social media installments?

Sure, whatever old stuff that is loved by non-idiots that he hasn’t tried. Odyssey, KJV Bible, Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Dostoevsky, Dickens, etc.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#149

Post by joenot443 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #103
boznz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment was because my last three submissions were blocked. I emailed the moderator the first time it happened, and he said the algorithm probably thought it was self-promotion as I cross posted it to medium.com which I now know everybody hates. By blocked, I mean the articles showed as normal on my browser but was hidden to anybody else. I did not use the "Show HN" option because I have had articles submitted in…

Right, I seem to get the same result on things I post from my medium publication - which started after I posted some links to some time travel stories I wrote in a post about time travel which seemed to me to relate and which got a few upvotes. After that if I posted a link to an article I wrote it got shadow blocked (at least for a bit) the thing is I only post things here that I think fit the site, which is about 1…

Lots of people submit their own work to HN all the time to great success. If your post was flagged, it probably just wasn’t as relevant to the community as you might have imagined.

Perhaps take it as constructive criticism on your writing, rather than blaming the poor reception on the community.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#150

Post by api »

There’s a pretty huge overproduction problem in the arts, literature, and music, and it’s being made worse by spam and hustle culture shit at least in the short term.

All the spam and hustlecrap is ironically making good works more special but at the same time harder to find.

I’d say first and foremost: don’t make art unless it’s burning a hole in your head and it must be made. That helps solve the overproduction problem. As for the spam and junk problem that’s a discovery issue.

I’ve actually gotten back into reading lately. Good new stuff is as hard to find as it is to get it found. Of course like most readers I have a backlog… hence the overproduction problem.

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