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Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

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Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#61

Post by mcguire »

ben_w wrote: post #16
coldbumpysparse wrote: post #5

> for many reasons too boring to get into here, and no, it’s not just cheaper to do ebooks, either Guessing he's not counting kindle publishing here, but regardless I'd love to know all the little details of why publishing e-books are so difficult

Charlie Stross detailed this in a blog post (which I can’t easily find). Basically, printing a book is easy in comparison to editing, typesetting, and marketing.

I may have mentioned this before, but that's not what publishers said in the '90s, when book prices were increasing rather quickly. Then, it was "paper is costing more and more!"

And, of course, editing and typesetting are done once and should be a flat fee, not a percentage of profits.

Finally, "marketing" is something that doesn't seem to happen to most authors.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#62

Post by learc83 »

coldtea wrote: post #47
learc83 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a near perfect score on the verbal part of the SAT, but I don't see how good reading comprehension and a large vocabulary are particularly important to being a good storyteller. Reading comprehension is mostly about subject knowledge and vocabulary is something you can learn. If you can craft an engaging story and you have the motivation to write, an editor (or a thesaurus) can help with vocabulary.

> Reading comprehension is mostly about subject knowledge Actually reading comprehension is about everything _besides_ subject knowledge. It's about the pure ability to understand something you've read -- e.g. to understand tone, intent, turns of phrase, idioms, writing styles, patterns, argument building, etc -- not about having some particular domain knowledge. In other words if you read an article about a physics…

Yes you can define reading comprehension to mean that. But that's not what the SAT is measuring. Reading comprehension as measured by most tests is largely about background knowledge.

https://www.education.com/reference/article/prior-knowledge-...

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/building-background-kn...

Here's a few articles on the topic with very relevant reference sections if you'd like to know more.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#63

Post by pnathan »

Has anyone just farted around self published books or fanfic a bit?

Let me tell you: there's a lot of writing that is nearly unreadable. Sure, you can do it. It's probably best written down and then gently carried over to the archives, only taken out for a good laugh down the road.

Writing well is like programming. You have to spend some time doing it before its really ready for public consumption. Then you get to be educated in how the sausage is made and then you have a start.

The marathon example is a good one. You need to put in preparation, work, training, sweat, and then you can do the finished product.

Writers have workshops and critiquing circles. They have editors. Review, review, review. Draft, draft, draft.

The author is critiquing the idea that some genius will hike up their skirt and drop out a diamond, which the agent will then pick up and make the genius rich. Takes ten years of sweat to have a 3 minute hit.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#64

Post by batiudrami »

l9k wrote: post #55
bartread wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I could run a marathon if I put in the effort. The reason I "can't" is truthfully that I can't be arsed . If you want to run a marathon what you're saying is that you're happy for training for that marathon to take over your life for, probably, about a year, and I'm not motivated to do that. With that being said Eddie Izzard, with little training, ran 43 marathons in 51 days. He didn't break any records or wi…

If you need to be "arsed" to write a book and you can't be "arsed" to write a book, then, logically, you can't write a book.

"Can't be arsed" is just an expression, mate. I'm sure you can understand the point they were making.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#65

Post by learc83 »

paulpauper wrote: post #45
learc83 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a near perfect score on the verbal part of the SAT, but I don't see how good reading comprehension and a large vocabulary are particularly important to being a good storyteller. Reading comprehension is mostly about subject knowledge and vocabulary is something you can learn. If you can craft an engaging story and you have the motivation to write, an editor (or a thesaurus) can help with vocabulary.

generally, good writers are good readers. Competent writers have a varied vocabulary which does not come across as forced (which is often the case when someone relies on a thesaurus). I don't think too many are surprised that mathematicians get perfect scores on the math part of the SAT, so I dunno why writers scoring equally well on the verbal is different. Yeah obv. being a mathematician is a lot more involved than…

>I don't think vocab can be taught. The reason is, vocab is very highly correlated with IQ, which is stable thought life and cannot be boosted.

The fact that IQ and vocabulary are correlated across a population doesn't imply that, and it's clearly not true unless you don't think someone can learn a new language later in life. Or you think that a person can learn 10k new words in a new language, but not an extra few thousand in their existing language?

>Competent writers have a varied vocabulary which does not come across as forced

Yes competent writing requires some minimum vocabulary. It doesn't require a vocabulary sufficient to score near perfect on the SAT. Most writers limit the vocabulary they use to match their target audience, so having a much larger vocabulary than your target audience isn't going to be that useful.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#67

Post by vortico »

mcguire wrote: post #59
vortico wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A print book costs less than $1 to print, $0.5 to handle/ship, and $0.5 to sort/shelve. Books cost around $10, and printing companies aren't growing unboundedly, so the money has to go somewhere. It goes to the process that is shared between print books and e-books.

The weird part about it is that all of the costs that are not per-copy, like editing, don't go down as the number of copies goes up. The author gets 10-15% of the first copy as well as the billionth copy. (Modulo the "advance", which is actually what most authors are payed for their book.) In other words, JK Rowling's editor made bank .

Well, probably a more accurate way to say it is from the article

>very successful authors (your JK Rowlings and James Pattersons) help pay the bills for the less successful books

The editors don't just take home the money. They're paid a normal salary, and the publishing company uses the money to make additional risks. But these risks are mostly spent on editing costs.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#69

Post by pm90 »

pnathan wrote: post #63

Has anyone just farted around self published books or fanfic a bit? Let me tell you: there's a lot of writing that is nearly unreadable. Sure, you can do it. It's probably best written down and then gently carried over to the archives, only taken out for a good laugh down the road. Writing well is like programming. You have to spend some time doing it before its really ready for public consumption. Then you get to be…

> Writers have workshops and critiquing circles. They have editors. Review, review, review. Draft, draft, draft.

Sure, that is probably how "professional" writers get good. But we've had good writers before there were all these tools , didn't we? I find it hard to imagine e.g. Bukowski attending a writing workshop.

Some people just have the talent. Others are mediocre and get better with effort.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#70

Post by ken »

bartread wrote: post #12
syndacks wrote: post #6

>I put it like this: I have been running since I was about a year old. Almost 40 years! But I cannot for the life of me run a marathon. I am not physically capable of it, even though I can run a few miles in a row. Yes, you are. You just tell yourself that you are not. And yes, you can write a book. Whether it gets published or not is another story. I don't understand why someone whose job it is to find the next best…

Agreed. I could run a marathon if I put in the effort. The reason I "can't" is truthfully that I can't be arsed . If you want to run a marathon what you're saying is that you're happy for training for that marathon to take over your life for, probably, about a year, and I'm not motivated to do that. With that being said Eddie Izzard, with little training, ran 43 marathons in 51 days. He didn't break any records or wi…

> training for that marathon to take over your life for, probably, about a year

Nowhere near that long. There's actually a great book ("The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer") which takes you, quite conservatively, from "I can run a few miles" to your first marathon day in 16 weeks.

With runs on only 4 days a week -- only one of them a long run -- it hardly "takes over your life", either.

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