Earlier quoted context omitted.
isn't this how it already works?
Designers* will know all about how it is all supposed to work *personally prefer the term “designists”, but YMMV on that one
UPDATE:
Designori, as in Hesse’s magnum opus
Why to Not Write a Book
201–210 of 215 posts
Re: Why to Not Write a Book
#202Sad. I did $403k last month as an independent writer. All analog publishing. None of it from KDP. Be careful what advice you listen to.
That's awesome. As an author myself, I'd love to hear more. Also note, that you are an outlier. (Congrats!) Folks listening to you should not expect those results.
Pretty sure it's just fantasy, it's easy to find his book from his comments. He has Any conversation I've found in related subreddits seems negative.
Re: Why to Not Write a Book
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it’s almost impossible to find an audience Follow the path of those who have written many successful books, and you'll find that it's not almost impossible to find an audience e.g., William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde et al.
> Follow the path of those who have written many successful books, and you'll find that it's not almost impossible to find an audience e.g., William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde et al. You’re contradicting yourself: if it were so easy, you wouldn’t cite only five names that span five centuries. It’s like saying music is easy, just do like Mozart or Beethoven. There are 3 millio…
Oh, I am contradicting myself.
First, I said try to build a strong online presence so that you have a large active following base from which you'll find an audience for your book. You try to hide behind "large active following base" is the key here, and it's almost impossible to find an audience otherwise.
Then, I said follow the path of great writers, you again hide behind "I only mentioned five names, and they all span across five centuries which I can't study or research how they became great writers". Should I write here the names of every great writer in history or the names of Mark Manson, James Clear, Tim Ferriss et al. of this era.
You brought up your music analogy (I don't know where you found it) and who said anything about what is easy? You said, I didn't use that word anywhere in our conversation.
I presented two keys to find an audience, and you came up with a third key by saying I'm contradicting myself.
If 3 million books are published in the US every year (over 8k per day), what does that have anything to do with me or you? Next time, please first digest what others are trying to convey, then respond (if necessary).
Re: Why to Not Write a Book
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Follow the path of those who have written many successful books, and you'll find that it's not almost impossible to find an audience e.g., William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde et al. You’re contradicting yourself: if it were so easy, you wouldn’t cite only five names that span five centuries. It’s like saying music is easy, just do like Mozart or Beethoven. There are 3 millio…
Oh, I am contradicting myself. First, I said try to build a strong online presence so that you have a large active following base from which you'll find an audience for your book. You try to hide behind "large active following base" is the key here, and it's almost impossible to find an audience otherwise. Then, I said follow the path of great writers, you again hide behind "I only mentioned five names, and they all…
All I’m saying is that it’s really not as easy as your comments make it sound like. The problem with citing successful writers is the selection bias: you see only the successful cases and not the millions of failures.
If it were easier than before to sell books, we would see it in the data, but it’s the opposite: the market is oversaturated, and it’s harder now than before. There are 10 times more books published today than 20 years ago, and yet the overall profits made by book industry declined by almost 40% since that time (source: link in previous comment).
Re: Why to Not Write a Book
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Living in a high income country, where $200 is well within monthly fluctuation, this situation makes me wonder if a little more telepresence might lead to us bifurcating into a world where the Eloi will know a tiny amount about how all of it works, and the Morlocks will know all about how a tiny amount of it works?
isn't this how it already works?
It does seem to be already moving in that direction, yet there are still some discrepancies:
(a) living in a highly developed country (and having grown up in one almost as developed), according to this theory I ought to be going full Eloi and mechanical Turk'ing out (AI as "actually, indians"?) all the schlep work in my life to telepresent Morlocks, yet the little of my washing which I do send out goes (to the best of my knowledge) mostly to the historically-developed world.
(b) also to the best of my knowledge, current proto-Morlocks very rarely (or even never) eat current proto-Eloi.
Re: Why to Not Write a Book
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I am contradicting myself. First, I said try to build a strong online presence so that you have a large active following base from which you'll find an audience for your book. You try to hide behind "large active following base" is the key here, and it's almost impossible to find an audience otherwise. Then, I said follow the path of great writers, you again hide behind "I only mentioned five names, and they all…
All I’m saying is that it’s really not as easy as your comments make it sound like. The problem with citing successful writers is the selection bias: you see only the successful cases and not the millions of failures. If it were easier than before to sell books, we would see it in the data, but it’s the opposite: the market is oversaturated, and it’s harder now than before. There are 10 times more books published tod…
Maybe you are right. My comments make it sound like it is easy to do, but actually I said it was not as difficult as before. You don't have to travel far and much to get a worldview, now the world has become a global village thanks to the internet.
Market is oversaturated because of awful books being published every year and it will surely become supersaturated with AI authors.
That's why I gave the example of Pieter - link in the parent comment. He self-published his e-book to bypass the oversaturated market and was recently invited by Lex Fridman on his podcast.
Re: Why to Not Write a Book
#207Earlier 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...
There's actually a significant corpus of robot stories. However, I did forget that "I, Robot" does have a lot of crimes, investigations, and such.
Re: Why to Not Write a Book
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you being sarcastic? The Robot novels are basically crime novels with robots...
There's actually a significant corpus of robot stories. However, I did forget that "I, Robot" does have a lot of crimes, investigations, and such.
I am talking about these for example
The Caves of Steel (1954) - first Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel
The Naked Sun (1957) - second Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel
"Mirror Image" (1972) - short story about R. Daneel Olivaw and detective Elijah Baley
The Robots of Dawn (1983) - third Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel Robots and Empire (1985) - fourth Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel
Re: Why to Not Write a Book
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
In manga aren't click bait titles, but because there are so many published, you pick basically a title that explains the premise, otherwise it's harder to get users to read your manga. I suppose that also could work with novels, I'm not a book person, but I suppose you read a review or watched some video that recommended you a book, and if the title is self descriptive, then would easier to go to the book store and b…
It's common for romance novel titles to include the major tropes, e.g. The Scandal of the Duke’s Secret Baby . Here are some example titles from the Amazon Top 100( https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Romance/zgb... ). • Truly Madly Deeply: A Grumpy x Sunshine Romance • Temptation Trails: A Small-Town Romance • Phantasma: a Dark Fantasy Romance • Madness: a Dark Revenge Romance • Meant For Gabriel: A sma…
That suggests a game in which to goal is to come up, for any two-word phrase, with a suitable romance novel title, eg
• Ultraviolet Catastrophe: A Band Gap, Single Quantum Romance
What about:
• Hacker News: ???
Re: Why to Not Write a Book
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was depicted in The Simpsons. 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 inspirati…
There was also a wonderful little throwaway gag, with a sign outside a bookstore reading “James Michener $3.99/lb”
Mostly we rate authors by readability, but in this century it's also possible to judge them by how well their books serve as impromptu laptop stands.