Why are debut novels failing to launch? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#151

Post by grugagag » Sat, Jun 08, 2024, 1:00 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #140

stubish wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wager most books are content someone wants. A lot are even content a lot of people want. This is not good enough. Reaching the audience is the problem. Also, writing a book can take years. Writing for what people want today is how you fail, as people will have moved on in the five years it took to write, edit, sell and produce the work. If you can reliably predict market desires in 5 years time, you have a lot mo…

There are more good books than time to read. That is why reaching an audience is hard, you are not better than the other choices.

You can’t say that until people could reach you, read you and move on.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#152

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, Jun 08, 2024, 1:00 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #113

thaumasiotes wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> James Patterson (Enterprises) has about a quarter of the new novel space, and Tom Clancy (RIP) has maybe a tenth. It's all about the brand. There's an obvious reason for that: far and away the primary determinant - often the sole determinant - of whether you will like a novel, is the author.

That's sad, because once an author achieves some notoriety, they are basically stuck into writing the same thing for the rest of their career, for fear that they will lose their existing audience.

Not at all. Like I said, the determinant of whether you will like the book is the author. If they write something radically different from their previous work, and you liked their previous work, the odds are very high that you'll like the new book too.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#153

Post by defrost » Sat, Jun 08, 2024, 1:35 PM UTC

bowsamic wrote: post #148

defrost wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmmm. FWiW that was another literary jest, you know, what with Dickens famously:

    Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon that sparked Pickwick merchandise and spin-offs.

...

    His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#154

Post by bowsamic » Sat, Jun 08, 2024, 1:40 PM UTC

defrost wrote: post #153

bowsamic wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hmmm. FWiW that was another literary jest, you know, what with Dickens famously: Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon that sparked Pickwick merchandise and spin-offs. ... His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for nov…

How are any of these lame jests actually helping the OP who is impoverished in his joy of reading? Keep them to yourself.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#155

Post by langsoul-com » Sat, Jun 08, 2024, 1:40 PM UTC

Reminds me of Diddy Squat, the farming show by Jeremy Clarkson. Farming, just by itself, is not profitable, so they need to do all kinds of things to make profit.

Likr setting up a store, making a branded product, Ie making beer from the wheat, or social media on farm life.

The tragedy is all the time required not farming.

In the case of books, to first debut, you must already be successful or perish. Even getting accepted to a publishing house requires insane stats, and they're just beginning.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#156

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jun 08, 2024, 1:49 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #87

o11c wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> discovery of what is truly high quality Sometimes nobody really tries. It doesn't help that there are a lot of perverse incentive systems out there. I'm approaching this from mostly an Internet-centric perspective: One observation I've made is that any story I first see by advertising is probably bad, even if I later see it elsewhere - if it were actually any good, I would've seen it in one of the non-advertising-b…

> One observation I've made is that any story I first see by advertising is probably bad, even if I later see it elsewhere - if it were actually any good, I would've seen it in one of the non-advertising-based mechanisms first A similar observation I've been finding lately is that if something is highly rated by critics and lowly rated by audiences, it probably sucks I think the current batch of book/movie/game criti…

>A similar observation I've been finding lately is that if something is highly rated by critics and lowly rated by audiences, it probably sucks

Perhaps there is less skew today given that film critics are probably less a high-brow big city newspaper thing overall. But certainly I wouldn't expect the average Friday night young cinema-goer to have the same tastes as the film critic for the New York Times.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#157

Post by mikemitchelldev » Sat, Jun 08, 2024, 1:50 PM UTC

A debut novel that's not published is not necessarily a wasted effort. It can be adapted into a screenplay, which can be submitted to a variety of outlets, and the novel might be published later if successful.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#158

Post by currymj » Sat, Jun 08, 2024, 1:51 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #76

WalterBright wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "secondary" film and TV markets are so starved for good new ideas There's a long list of very good scifi that has never been made into a movie. Instead, we get the Mandalorean which rehashes every spaghetti western trope. The character even sounds like Clint Eastwood. It has the hero breaking in the horse while the old ranch hand leans on the corral fence, for example. And training the village to defend itself…

I wish I could describe the near physical pain I feel that "Rendezvous with Rama" isn't yet a great Denise Villeneuve movie, and the "Night's Dawn Trilogy" isn't yet a multi-season series on Apple TV. The list goes on.

Villeneuve is actively working on Rendezvous with Rama, it's likely to be one of his next projects.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#159

Post by CM30 » Sat, Jun 08, 2024, 1:55 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #64

bane wrote: post #55

Many many years ago a friend did a stint at a major publishing house. Whenever she'd show up to parties she would bring in a small stack of unpublished manuscripts, we'd all get into the wine or beer or whatever and start reading particularly terrible passages to each other. Had she sought out especially bad manuscripts? No! She just grabbed whatever was on the "will read, maybe, someday" shelf in the editor's work a…

Aside from Andy Weir (who got picked up by a publisher and properly edited), the self-published books I've read have been remarkably awful, including some stuff that was widely recommended. The fundamental truth of creative work is that if you make something genuinely great, you'll probably have a smooth path to success. I see a lot of anxiety among indie game developers about the sheer quantity of games being releas…

> The fundamental truth of creative work is that if you make something genuinely great, you'll probably have a smooth path to success. I see a lot of anxiety among indie game developers about the sheer quantity of games being released, and yes bluntly, if you make a merely average game nobody will care. Make something great.

Not necessarily, I've seen plenty of good or great works go unnoticed. In movies and gaming that's often a timing thing (releasing too near popular works, releasing at a bad time of year, releasing on a console that's on its last legs, etc), but for other types of works it can simply be a failure to market said work at all, or the subject not immediately catching people's attention.

Re: Why are debut novels failing to launch?

#160

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 08, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

serf wrote: post #143

frutiger wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-messag…

[deleted]