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

Why to Not Write a Book

gwern.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 215 posts

Re: Why to Not Write a Book

#151

Post by hengheng »

andai wrote: post #127
hengheng wrote: post #52

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…

If I'm reading this right, the proofreading process massively improves the quality of the work? Could you expand on this?

Beyond what u/ghaff mentions, I believe the early editing work was about pacing, whether to include or kill dead-ends and expositional pieces, character arcs and biographical details that could change, choice of setting, time of day, locations, etcetera. I believe he had one change where a different character became the murderer.

Anything that would get sidenoted, he would do in second stage proofreading only. Not even worth fixing a typo if the whole page could still be axed.

The guy does a lot of scaffolding and prototyping, and some heavy refactoring.

Re: Why to Not Write a Book

#152

Post by newqer »

water-data-dude wrote: post #129
mewse wrote: post #55

I can't stop thinking about this throwaway parenthetical at the start of the blog post: > [...] for many writers, writing a book is about the last thing they should do (unless they feel a book bursting out of them, much like a facehugger). Now, as we all know, the aliens that burst out of people in the Aliens franchise are called 'chestbursters'. "Facehuggers", by comparison, are hatched from alien eggs. So in this m…

Are you saying everyone would be better off not reading my Starship Troopers fan fiction where they get it on with the Arachnids?

Where is this fanfiction located? So you know.. I can avoid it at all costs of course.

Re: Why to Not Write a Book

#153

Post by techjamie »

sph wrote: post #122
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most drama today sucks" --- "This is called write-to-market" Yes. I doubt you disagree, but I needed to point that out. These two, along with writing-by-formula, are intricately related. There's nothing wrong with writing being a racket. If you want to feel depressed and lack a sense of optimism in humanity, spend some time learning about the publishing industry. Woof. It's nothing but formulaic conservative market-…

> "She's a gay little person goth time-traveling alien, he's an autistic left-handed incel Quaker. They live in Portland, and together they solve crimes." I'm pretty sure a Netflix executive would have signed on this concept based on this sentence alone half a decade ago. Now it seems the entire world is waking up to these formulaic data-driven products that have been pushed by media conglomerates for a decade. This…

I would say that a reasonable person could have foreseen Concord failing. Perhaps not necessarily as hard as it did, but there were a number of red flags before it released. The character designs were bland and bad, which is worse than just being bad. They drummed up a whole bunch of controversy, and the marketing outside of that controversy was basically non-existent. Almost nobody had heard of the product until it already had failed. Even when it was in beta for free, they only garnered about a couple of thousand players at any given time.

Then you add on that they already missed the train for hero shooters by about eight years and their modern competition is all free to play and has already sucked up the entire market for the most part. I saw an analysis by a former game producer that thought that perhaps they had a work environment that stifled criticism and commentary from developers and I think that that might have been an accurate assessment; The entire product was released in a way that myself and a number of other people that I've seen online simply can't believe that nobody was throwing their hands up and saying that this was a bad idea before release.

Re: Why to Not Write a Book

#154

Post by sph »

guitarlimeo wrote: post #139
sph wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "She's a gay little person goth time-traveling alien, he's an autistic left-handed incel Quaker. They live in Portland, and together they solve crimes." I'm pretty sure a Netflix executive would have signed on this concept based on this sentence alone half a decade ago. Now it seems the entire world is waking up to these formulaic data-driven products that have been pushed by media conglomerates for a decade. This…

> "And now, in the current era of the remake, which still has to reach the film industry" You haven't heard of the Disney live-action remakes of the old classics? It's already starting to happen.

I am not at all surprised. It's pure exploitation of a bias of human psychology: we do not like to leave our comfort zone, that's a fact. Why should they try to risk making something original, when remaking stuff that already exists guarantees you an audience and packed theatres? We had the decade of superhero flicks, we're entering the decade of remakes and re-imagining of beloved franchises of the past 100 years.

Re: Why to Not Write a Book

#155

Post by ghaff »

rusticpenn wrote: post #80
beacon294 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? All I read was foundation, some non fiction, and robot short story collections.

Are you being sarcastic? The Robot novels are basically crime novels with robots...

Also the Black Widower stories. I'm sure others as well.

Re: Why to Not Write a Book

#156

Post by saalweachter »

ghaff wrote: post #143
sundarurfriend wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you imagine a world without HGTTG? Yes. Maybe an unpopular opinion here, but the book form of HGTTG is a mess. You can tell that it was converted from an episodic weekly-gag-based radio show into written form with very little effort to make it into a coherent whole. It's popular because it has brilliant one-liners, but as a book it's not nearly as good as its popularity would suggest.

Adaptations of loosely-connected episodic material to book form is tough even with editing. I did it once and it didn't really work very well. Look at most compilations of newspaper columns too.

You actually see something similar today with web serials.

An author starts a story, writes a few chapters, and then presents it to the Internet. They acquire a following, and keep putting up chapters.

But even if they start with a solid outline and a world building bible and a binder full of character secrets, the story rarely follows a smooth plot arc -- they have new ideas as they write, and some things don't work the way they'd hoped, and maybe they are not sure how to move from point A to B and spend a few weeks putting up chapters where both they and their characters go in circles for a bit.

And then it's finished, the next logical step is to republish it as a book. They could treat the web serial as a first draft, and rewrite it now that they have the whole thing figured out. Throw away some of the meandering, save a few disjointed chapters for short story anthologies, fix some of the character drift that isn't development, drop the plot lines you never finished, and add a bit more foreshadowing to the early chapters for things they didn't figure out until later.

But well, the book's already been published, right? And people liked it well enough? So why write the same book twice, and not just clean up the spelling and grammatical mistakes and publish it as is?

Re: Why to Not Write a Book

#157

Post by asicsp »

chr15m wrote: post #109
asicsp wrote: post #24

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).

Would love to know more about this. Do you have a link?

I have written a few blog posts: https://learnbyexample.github.io/tags/career/

Re: Why to Not Write a Book

#158

Post by sph »

techjamie wrote: post #153
sph wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "She's a gay little person goth time-traveling alien, he's an autistic left-handed incel Quaker. They live in Portland, and together they solve crimes." I'm pretty sure a Netflix executive would have signed on this concept based on this sentence alone half a decade ago. Now it seems the entire world is waking up to these formulaic data-driven products that have been pushed by media conglomerates for a decade. This…

I would say that a reasonable person could have foreseen Concord failing. Perhaps not necessarily as hard as it did, but there were a number of red flags before it released. The character designs were bland and bad, which is worse than just being bad. They drummed up a whole bunch of controversy, and the marketing outside of that controversy was basically non-existent. Almost nobody had heard of the product until it…

> I would say that a reasonable person could have foreseen Concord failing.

> Then you add on that they already missed the train for hero shooters by about eight years

There's an analysis video I saw on Youtube which touches upon this fact: data-driven production suffer from two major problems: when they register a signal (i.e. people like hero shooters), it's already too late. It is impossible to catch a growing trend, just one that has already reached its peak.

The second problem is that the data is misleading in the first place. Using social media sentiment, for example, is pure nonsense because social media personas are not real people. They don't buy toilet paper, they don't talk (or Google) about 99% of their boring existence, and the signal is manipulated by bots and malicious agents. It is absolutely crazy that companies still haven't learned that you cannot hire a bunch of data scientists and predict the next major hit. They have tried for the past 20 years, but human ingenuity (and the chaotic human psychology) is totally elusive to their silly models.

Re: Why to Not Write a Book

#159

Post by grecy »

_tom_ wrote: post #100
grecy wrote: post #88

I’ve self published three books now, with another in the works. Amazon print on demand makes it incredibly easy. They’re about my adventures around the world, with some lessons I learned and observations about whatever part of the world I’m in sprinkled throughout. The process was immensely satisfying, and I’ll never forget the feeling the first time I held the printed book in my hands. “Holy shit, I wrote a book!” M…

I don't see a date the article. The web has taught me to never waste time with an undated article. Odds are very good it's obsolete.

Huh, I never noticed the wp theme I’m using doesn’t put a date on “pages” , only “posts”.

I wrote that in 2020, and I’m doing the identical thing right now for my next book. Not out of date at all.

Post reply on HN