Show me an actually good book and I will pay for it. Until then you can keep your pulp fiction and trashy romance novels.
Writing books is not really a good idea
491–500 of 630 posts
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
a great book can have much more social impact than any movie, tv show, or other medium. Books allow for detail and development that is unrivaled by other mediums
I think this is very open to debate. How many people in the world have seen Star Wars? I would argue that no book short of the Bible has had a higher impact.
"Buck Rogers is a science fiction (and later, particularly space opera) character created by Philip Francis Nowlan in the novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., subsequently appearing in multiple media".
Star Wars is basically that, as a movie, tuned and optimized. It's a complicated question, but I think it's quite possible Star Wars would not and could not exist in the absence of the original, pre-Star-Wars, novella.
Which became all sorts of things such as comic strips… but started as a book.
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? One of the dominant subjective experiences of living today is the sensation that any possible amazing kind of life is right there and it is only up to us to reach out to pluck it. You go on Instagram and see people living blissful lives of travel in gorgeous locales while talking about how affordable it is. That random dude who wrote a series of posts on some…
> The dark side of this is that many of us won't. And, in particular, in many areas, the total number of brass rings is relatively fixed and we can't all get them. A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author. It's worse: a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more succesful authors. Now it's more people (350 million vs 100 million in 2021) AND l…
> a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more successful authors.
Are you sure there were more successful authors? There weren't that many notable books published in 1921.
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#494Stephen King's book on writing is really good: https://stephenking.com/works/nonfiction/on-writing-a-memoir...
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#495The hardest job i ever had was writing taxonomies, bibliographies and chapter 3 of CLASP. It later became OWASP. Anyone who writes books for a living is doing the worst job ever in my humble opinion
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#496I am planning on writing a book but only to say I did for my professional career. Money from it would be nice but its ultimately just an investment into furthering my main source of income. People really trust your opinion on something if you say you literally wrote the book on it... for some reason.
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? One of the dominant subjective experiences of living today is the sensation that any possible amazing kind of life is right there and it is only up to us to reach out to pluck it. You go on Instagram and see people living blissful lives of travel in gorgeous locales while talking about how affordable it is. That random dude who wrote a series of posts on some…
> The dark side of this is that many of us won't. And, in particular, in many areas, the total number of brass rings is relatively fixed and we can't all get them. A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author. It's worse: a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more succesful authors. Now it's more people (350 million vs 100 million in 2021) AND l…
[deleted]
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The dark side of this is that many of us won't. And, in particular, in many areas, the total number of brass rings is relatively fixed and we can't all get them. A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author. It's worse: a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more succesful authors. Now it's more people (350 million vs 100 million in 2021) AND l…
> a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more successful authors. Are you sure there were more successful authors? There weren't that many notable books published in 1921. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_in_literature
We won't know for a hundred years how many of the books that will be published in 2021 will be notable enough in 2121 to be on the 2021_in_literature wikipedia page.
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? One of the dominant subjective experiences of living today is the sensation that any possible amazing kind of life is right there and it is only up to us to reach out to pluck it. You go on Instagram and see people living blissful lives of travel in gorgeous locales while talking about how affordable it is. That random dude who wrote a series of posts on some…
> The dark side of this is that many of us won't. And, in particular, in many areas, the total number of brass rings is relatively fixed and we can't all get them. A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author. It's worse: a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more succesful authors. Now it's more people (350 million vs 100 million in 2021) AND l…
It’s older books not Netflix that’s the real competition. Amazon’s unlimited bookshelf holds a lot more than just Lord of the Rings. That said, residuals are also much easier to capture now days than back when book stores had extremely limited shelf space so it’s not all bad. There is a real trade off of fewer sales in year one but more sales in year 2-20.
On the numbers side people have a lot more disposable income, capturing a larger share of revenue per person can completely flip the equation. Patreon, etc don’t have to individually provide enough to live off of as long as all revenue streams add up to a living wage. I suspect if the objective threshold is say 50k USD inflation adjusted, today is relatively speaking a much better time to be an author than most people here are assuming.
Of course that’s ignoring all the vanity books being published. Simply having an ISBN number doesn’t really mean anything in today’s world.
Re: Writing books is not really a good idea
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The dark side of this is that many of us won't. And, in particular, in many areas, the total number of brass rings is relatively fixed and we can't all get them. A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author. It's worse: a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more succesful authors. Now it's more people (350 million vs 100 million in 2021) AND l…
> a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more successful authors. Are you sure there were more successful authors? There weren't that many notable books published in 1921. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_in_literature
I'd imagine there's a lot that just hasn't made it to Wikipedia:
https://springfieldmuseums.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/In...
