61–70 of 83 posts
The 90s aren't coming back to publishing. The audience who reads multiple books a month is going the way of the classical symphony attendee.
The opera, symphony, and ballet sell out every performance where I live. Me, my friends, wife, etc all read multiple books per month. To me it feels like the problem is in the supply-side - there's just endless content being constantly published - more than could ever be read.
by a human...
Interesting history but what's going on now is so crazy as a reader. Amazon kindle publishes 7500 new books daily. There's no longer gatekeepers like in the article. About two years ago I was searching for a new sci-fi book to read - I routinely rotate genres. I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I wen…
I think the old publishing model is dying. self-publishing is routing around it.
As a reader, it is sort of amazing. I've been reading more than I ever have before in my life.
If I like a book, I can read the next in the series, and there's a good chance there are 8 other books in the series. When I was younger, scifi novels would rarely have follow-on books, and if they did, maybe max 3 at that.
The hard one for me is continuing a book after I see a typo.
The author posts a collage of litfic novel covers and wonders why they're all so similar, but to me the answer seems obvious: litfic is a genre, whether its devotees want to call it that or not, and so it needs a consistent visual language to guide people's eyes in increasingly genre-ified bookstores. He says "every title I see" is like this, but I strongly suspect he'd agree that this is only true because he spots the romantasy section from a mile away and averts his eyes before he has to learn anything about the adventures of Violet Sorrengail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody takes Product Hunt seriously now. That's putting it mildly. I'm not normally about doing this sort of thing, but I went out of my way to find and install an extension to block google results for producthunt and alternative.to specifically.
Was Product Hunt ever taken seriously by anyone? Since day1 it was an obvious target for influence hacking
Everyone knew it was gamed a little, but there was some organic traffic.
Then it steadily got worse and worse until the front page was just random products that nobody actually used.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Influencers, and people with zero talent, but who have a public audience, are the new target for publishers, so expect a fuck-tonne more rubbish to be pushed by the usual channels and algorithms. This is not a good time to be an indie author (I should know) writing the book is only the start of the journey, if you want people to now read it you have to fight a system dead set against your success. Word of mouth event…
What about finding indie authors on traditional recommendation systems such as Gnod?[0] The less utilized and forgotten parts of the internet are probably a good set of places to push. [0] https://www.gnod.com/
Interesting history but what's going on now is so crazy as a reader. Amazon kindle publishes 7500 new books daily. There's no longer gatekeepers like in the article. About two years ago I was searching for a new sci-fi book to read - I routinely rotate genres. I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I wen…
Publishers served a really valuable purpose of curation and keeping good authors productive. Now we have the double whammy of a consolidated publishing system pumping out whatever James Patterson’s assistants churn out and and a long tail of drivel, both AI and regular slop.
As somebody whose first book came out last month from a (very) small indie press... yeah. In trad publishing, once you've got an agent (not an insignificant step), you only have a handful of shots at the Big Five publishers with your manuscript. If they don't want it? It's small press or self-pub, and good luck getting your book above the sea of mediocrity. The novel I've got out is urban fantasy, but what I _really_…
As somebody whose first book came out last month from a (very) small indie press... yeah. In trad publishing, once you've got an agent (not an insignificant step), you only have a handful of shots at the Big Five publishers with your manuscript. If they don't want it? It's small press or self-pub, and good luck getting your book above the sea of mediocrity. The novel I've got out is urban fantasy, but what I _really_…
Please post your books here, rough draft / advance copies welcome, I'd love to read more things from the tiny subset of people who contribute to interesting topics like this on HN
Interesting history but what's going on now is so crazy as a reader. Amazon kindle publishes 7500 new books daily. There's no longer gatekeepers like in the article. About two years ago I was searching for a new sci-fi book to read - I routinely rotate genres. I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I wen…
Looking at award shortlists and nomination lists is also a good filter providing you know a little about the award (I wouldn’t go to the Clarke Award shortlist for mil sf stuff, for example).
One medium where this isn’t really true is video games. Why hasn’t Steam or Itch fallen in this trap? Because they are honest stewards? Or because the software plane isn’t as large? Only news publishing and written word and movies. In fact movies even have a set number of prestige “risk” directors so they never have to reach too far out of the norm, see Yorgos Lanthimos.
The article doesn't apply to Steam because Steam is a marketplace, not a publisher. Valve takes on no financial risk in accepting a new game into Steam. And there has been a fair bit of consolidation going on among publishers. IIRC there are only about a dozen giant corporations left that finance AAA games and they have been losing appetite for risk over the past year, cancelling many games in development and shutter…