Why are debut novels failing to launch?

Post by bruceb » Sat, Jun 08, 2024, 9:55 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #8

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…

Ten years ago I wrote a science fiction novel in Finnish, printed 300 hardcover copies at my own expense, and gave them away to people over the years. I would guess less than 10% of those copies have actually been read. (A few people claim they liked it, but of course that doesn't necessarily mean they read it.) So, a waste of time and money? That's not how I feel about it at all. The creative process was illuminatin…

Post by frutiger » Sun, Jun 09, 2024, 1:50 AM UTC

stocknoob wrote: post #214

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.

After 10 generations your message is diluted to 0.1%. We still read Shakespeare and listen to Mozart.

Post by defrost » Sun, Jun 09, 2024, 2:16 AM UTC

bowsamic wrote: post #154

defrost wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by lenkite » Sun, Jun 09, 2024, 3:58 AM UTC

Narishma wrote: post #162

o11c wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RoyalRoad has at least 3 major problems: * there's a significant conflict between "this is a place to read stories" and "this is just a place to advertise for Amazon" * the effective site rules are unwritten and quite arbitrary (one unwritten rule: you are not allowed to say anything positive about real-ish religions, only negative things) * way too much pedophilia, including in site-promoted stories. Unlike religion…

Another problem is the ratings. Everything there seems way overrated. You'll see a ton of 5-star or 4-star ratings for things that are barely readable.

Post by bluefirebrand » Sun, Jun 09, 2024, 5:04 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #156

bluefirebrand wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.