101–110 of 215 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My point was that you're not Douglas Adams and don't already have a degree of success. What happens when you try it?
He wasn't successful when his first book was pulled out of him by Simon Brett (described as HHGTTG's "co-midwife") and others.
The book was practically guaranteed to be a best-seller.
I've once talked to a semi-successful author. His day job was Mechanical Engineering at the local university. He eventually quit once he had his formula worked out. He writes crime novels. Doesn't even like them, but if you want to sell, you either write smut (big gamble) or crime novels (less crowded). Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel. You also have to keep your pr…
> He writes crime novels. Doesn't even like them, but if you want to sell, you either write smut (big gamble) or crime novels (less crowded). Reminds me of Chuck Tingle, who is an author but also a troll, writing books like "Pounded In The Butt By My Handsome Sentient Library Card Who Seems Otherworldly But In Reality Is Just A Natural Part Of The Priceless Resources Our Library System Provides".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel. Isaac Asimov figured that out!
What do you mean? All I read was foundation, some non fiction, and robot short story collections.
(I've forgotten the title--I read the book nearer 50 than 40 years ago.)
I've once talked to a semi-successful author. His day job was Mechanical Engineering at the local university. He eventually quit once he had his formula worked out. He writes crime novels. Doesn't even like them, but if you want to sell, you either write smut (big gamble) or crime novels (less crowded). Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel. You also have to keep your pr…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Job
> "The Book Job" is the sixth episode of the twenty-third season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on November 20, 2011. In the episode, Lisa is shocked to discover that all popular young-adult novels are not each written by a single author with any inspiration, but are conceived by book publishing executives through use of market research and ghostwriters to make money. When Homer hears this, he decides to get rich by starting work on a fantasy novel about trolls together with Bart, Principal Skinner, Patty, Moe, Professor Frink, and author Neil Gaiman.
In the collection of Rilke's letters "Briefe an einem jungen Dichter", he writes what I think one of the best advice about writing a book or not: "This above all: Ask yourself, in your night’s quietest moment, Do I have to write? Dig deep down into yourself for the answer. And if it is yes, if you can meet this solemn question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life around that necessity." It's harsh,…
e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@dsand00
Nowadays, you don't have to write the boring parts, just write the interesting bits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel. Isaac Asimov figured that out!
What do you mean? All I read was foundation, some non fiction, and robot short story collections.
(I've forgotten the title--I read the book nearer 50 than 40 years ago.)
Edit: I see from Wikipedia that it was The Death Dealers, later republished as A Whiff of Death.
I've once talked to a semi-successful author. His day job was Mechanical Engineering at the local university. He eventually quit once he had his formula worked out. He writes crime novels. Doesn't even like them, but if you want to sell, you either write smut (big gamble) or crime novels (less crowded). Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel. You also have to keep your pr…
In fact all publishing is write-to-market now.
Most traditionally published books are picked to chase trends. There's also a huge market for ghost-written titles with a celebrity on the cover.
It's a shamelessly conservative industry. It's unbelievably hard to pitch a fresh fiction franchise, even if it's wildly creative and incredibly well-written.
On the flip side, converting my tutorials to ebooks saved me from having to look for a job again. Been selling them for 6 years (with the last two years spent just to update them to newer software versions, improve examples, new cover images, etc). Of course, I have the advantage of living in a developing country but selling to an international audience (just $200/month to pay my bills).
The main reason not to write a book is that the topic doesn't need a book-length treatment, and would be better as an article. Fiction of course is one thing, but even then, some fictional ideas and personality combinations are better as short stories. Personally, as a reader, I find a lot of book ideas interesting (especially in the realm of popular science), but I can stomach very few of them because they are exces…
Books often overextend simple ideas but for some this is the way to understand maybe
I have this idea. Let's say I want to bring two words (AI and Apocalypse, Yud's thesis ) closer in some semantic space of ideas. How would I do it? I would write thousands of stories bring those two concepts together. Sort of like warping the space of ideas. Like a horseshoe. Subconsciously, if I want to guage the weightage of a particular thesis, my mind does it informally if it can pull many emotionally weighted instances in support of that thesis. The same applies to societies and groups.