I had this discussion with Jerry Pournelle and he had a similar take. I think William Gibson was famous for saying, "Nobody is going to pirate you book or steal your work, hell if they read a chapter while sitting in the library you are ahead of most authors!"
Sean Fagan (@kithrup@wandering.shop) on Mastodon, periodically buys and then gives away Kindle books. I grabbed "Eric Carter: Dead Things" when he did than and ended up buying the whole 9 book series by Stephen Blackmoore! I can also recommend the whole "go to the library and check out a book that has arrived" to see if you like the author or not. But that does take more work.
Most US libraries now seem to offer ebooks or audiobooks through Libby, which significantly reduces the effort required to try a bunch of new books. The new arrivals stuff often has a long hold period but it’s not really a problem when you’re just populating a “check this out” feed.
As someone who reads a lot, it's actually hard to find interesting things to read. I'm a picky reader. I have a kindle and I use it a lot, typically late at night and on the weekend. I do most my reading in bed. Every day.
Most book sites are recommendation bubbles where once you get stuck in one you only get recommended things that you've already read or that you are not really interested in reading. Breaking out of these bubbles is super hard. So, I can see how it is hard for new authors to break into these bubbles.
And then of course there is the notion that a lot of authors are not attractive to a broad audience; which means reaching such an audience is quite hard. Some of the stuff I read is pretty niche. Most of that is in English instead of Dutch (my native language) because a lot of that stuff just is a hard sell in the tiny Dutch market. Entire genres are excluded from being translated for this reason. E.g. most of Neal Stephenson's work has not been translated (except for some of his earlier novels). Including several of his best sellers. Forget about anything similar from smaller authors. I'm not aware of any Dutch science fiction authors. I'm sure there are a few. And of course this works both ways of course. It's very rare for Dutch authors to get translated to English. The ones that do have to be successful in the Dutch market first. Which means they need to appeal to a broad audience.
If I were to become a novelist and would try to write some science fiction and do it in Dutch, I'd stand no chance getting any audience. And while I'm comfortable writing in English, I'm not a native speaker and it probably shows. Getting from alright to good is a lot of work and the bar is extremely high.
I have a hunch that AI assisted translations are going to revolutionize the literary world in the next few years. There's a huge opportunity for publishers to broaden their markets for already proven authors to essentially the entire planet. Of course that won't make things any easier for new authors.
You might enjoy subscribing to a book review journal like the London Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, or New York Review of Books. They all have their biases but I’ve found them to be useful for learning about recently released books that I want to read.
(I am a former subscriber of all three and thought the LTLS was the best and least biased.)
Ah, but those publications (also The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books) are interested in scholarship and literature, rather than page-turning stories; high art, not popular entertainment.
> And while I'm comfortable writing in English, I'm not a native speaker and it probably shows. Getting from alright to good is a lot of work and the bar is extremely high
For what it's worth, at least from this comment, I don't think I'd have any way to distinguish your writing from that of a native speaker (as a native speaker). I'm also not sure that mastery of English is the most important skill of a novelist. Obviously I'm just a random commenter on the Internet, but I don't think you should let English being a second language dissuade you. Might even be an advantage if it discourages you from using flowery prose.
> advantage if it discourages you from using flowery prose.
I've always said that "flowery prose" is something that needs to make a comeback. I really miss that style of writing. What fun to read! The 'modern' impulse for 'efficient' writing is at least a contributing factor to the decline in reading I daresay.
I suppose "flowery" is open to interpretation, but generally I mean those occasions where it looks like someone is randomly choosing from a thesaurus for every other adverb.
Anyway, I don't think it's in any danger of disappearing – it's pervasive and popular – but I've never been able to complete a book with too much of it.
> As someone who reads a lot, it's actually hard to find interesting things to read.
I cannot relate to this at all. The more I read, the more topics I get interested in, and the more I'm part of various communities of book readers (mostly watching BookTube or listening to podcasts), the bigger the list of books I want to read grows. My "want to read" list, of books that I actually wrote down in a file somewhere, is 1,000 books long, and that doesn't include many other books that I never wrote down.
That you read a lot might well make you an outlier in terms of what you're willing to read.
I read a lot too, in bursts, and I find that while I do have some strong preferences where it's hard to find stuff I really like, I'm flexible enough that I certainly can find a neverending stream of books that are "good enough".
But a lot of people have really high thresholds for how interesting a book need to sound to them for them to even consider it.
> I have a hunch that AI assisted translations are going to revolutionize the literary world in the next few years. There's a huge opportunity for publishers to broaden their markets for already proven authors to essentially the entire planet. Of course that won't make things any easier for new authors.
They're already good enough for a tiny language like Norwegian, that I've considered using it for my own books (I'm Norwegian, but write in English, to my editor's chagrin - my English is good but I still make many stupid mistakes especially when tired). They're not good enough not to have a native reader read through the result and edit, hence why I'd only consider using it for my native Norwegian so far. I wouldn't dare try to use it for French or German, even though I read both, as my command of those languages isn't good enough that I'd trust myself to catch more subtle problems.
But I agree with you - it won't take much before they'll at least drastically cut the cost of translations even if you need a translator to clean up the result.
There's no way translating my novels to a smaller language would pay off at current prices - I'd need English sales several times higher before I'd consider it realistic for it to break even in most other languages. I don't much care about making money from them, but I'm not going to do it if I can only expect to lose money. If I can get translations at, say 1/10th of current costs, I might well end up having them translated to 10-20 languages or more.
> As someone who reads a lot, it's actually hard to find interesting things to read. I'm a picky reader.
I have 70+ plus books on hold at my local library (though the holds have been 'paused' so that they will arrive in a staggered fashion). The library has a limit of 100 books being on hold at a time, but it does have a "bookmark" feature so you can save them for later: I have over 2000 books earmarked for future putting-on-hold.
There's plenty to read.
(I read a bunch of non-fiction on academic-leaning topics (history, economics, science), and often get new things to read from the references of the book I'm currently going through. There's a bunch of fiction too: put a hold on Shogun because of the mini-series.)
>As someone who reads a lot, it's actually hard to find interesting things to read.
Why hard to find interesting things, because too much choice and/or market saturation of low quality?
>I'm a picky reader.
Is this part of the reason you find it hard to find interesting things? I've read the rest of your worthwhile reply but I'm finding it hard to reconcile the opening sentences.
>I have a kindle and I use it a lot, typically late at night and on the weekend. I do most my reading in bed. Every day.
You wrote a book about a topic that you are very much into, and although it's only 60 pages, you were all about the contents, not the process or the readers. Often, authors just want to "write a book" or "be a writer". That rarely results in interesting books in my opinion.
> What stops authors doing what I did? Plenty of people want to read, to blame lack of readership is just completely wrong.
Because for three months of writing and it sounds like numerous hours of marketing you’ve made almost $8000. While I imagine that puts you ahead of the curve for the average self published author, The hourly return on investment sounds pretty low, especially for a job that sounds marketing heavy, which is not everyone’s cup of tea
- gained an engaging audience on X
- multiple inbound leads that turned into long term collabs
- a discord community of my best readers where we meet once a week
What stops authors doing that is that most authors struggle to sell 50 copies at far lower price point no matter how much effort they put in because most books just aren't interesting enough to enough people to be easy enough to sell without it turning into gruntwork paying far below minimum wage.
Congratulations, you're a massive success as an author, having sold more than most authors will. That's amazing.
But consider that most authors have no interests in writing business / self help books, and most who do still fail spectacularly because having success with those kinds of books tends to happen primarily if you already have an audience and a track record in the field you're writing about. E.g. the perceived value of your book is 99% your story about your track record, and most would-be authors don't have that track record.
So just to clarify I didn't have an audience when I wrote the book. I took the time and told people my story over the past 6 months, and while I did that - sold books.
I think good storytellers should be able to build an audience regardless of the format - highly recommend any aspiring author to try it.
The thing is, most storytellers don't have nearly as compelling a value proposition. E.g. the best value a fiction writer can provide is a good story. Your value proposition is selling at least the hope of learning ways of bringing in money. It doesn't need to have a very high chance of success before it's perceived net present value is higher than the cost of your book, while fiction writers are competing with enormous amount of free or already paid for entertainment and fiction from a writer you don't know is often seen as having a sufficiently high risk of being a waste of time that the perceived risk adjusted value for a lot of people is negative.
Getting people to take unknown fiction even for free is an uphill battle.
You're describing self-publishing a business-related e-book. TFA describes the harsh reality of traditional paper publishing of fiction. It also has a section on self-publishing, incidentally.
I find your site and sales pitch interesting but honestly, I can't help but feel like a schmuck for giving you 20 USD for this. It feels akin to giving money to Tai Lopez or some other guru selling a pipe dream.
No offense to you, I want to like what you're offering, but I can't excuse it. Do you have a PDF of the first chapter or the intro at least? I want to see a bit before I send you 20 bucks.
It is a good baseline to start with the expectation that no one will read your book, no one will see your art, no one will listen to your music, no one will watch your videos, no one will listen to your presentation, no one will use your software, no one will buy your product etc.
As someone who works at an art school, the thing that differenciates a beginner from a successful graduate isn't that they can physically do a thing — it is that they go one of two ways:
1. They have a good and current knowledge of what people would find interesting and do things among those lines
2. They have a precise idea of what they themselves find interesting and by their arts manage to make others interested
Both can work pretty well, I like the latter more, because it often leads to more interesting and unique takes. But that means when you do a book, music, video, presentation, etc. it should be a thing that you yourself would find useful, interesting and good even if it was made by your worst enemy.
The problem with the art of many amateuer artists is that they think their stuff is already good or interesting because they made it or because they had a great time/extremely deep thoughts doing it. But those are all things someone from the outside won't see.
You won't be able to make a good presentation if you have never given it a thought what you think a great presentation is and you never asked yourself where your presentation would land on that scale. And now do that times a hundred and you might get good.
> “If you ask people how many books they read in the past year, they’ll say four. Or two,” she says.
This is so sad. Depending on length and style, I might read 2 books in a month. Or maybe not really sad, because not everyone might get the enjoyment out of books that I do, but I’ve loved reading my whole life, being known to walk to school/the store/within school/etc. while reading (I very rarely do that, nowadays, it’s a bit weird for an almost 40-year-old man. Though the last time was not much more than a year ago, the bus ride was over, but the book was too gripping, so I continued reading while walking from the bus stop)
I understand where you’re coming from but don’t think it’s sad personally. Why should it be? It’s the same as if someone doesn’t do any other activity.
I rarely read or finish books but spend all that time doing myriad other things which give meaning and have relevancy.
Not to say there aren’t books which are important to me I would just generally rather do other things.
This makes me think of the bit from Bill Hicks about “what you reading for?”
You could say the same thing about movies -- some of these large comfortable theaters are empty sometimes. People aren't watching movies.
but they are.
I read a lot when I was young, and now I have few (physical) books.
But I read lots more books books than I ever did when I was young.
I also listen to audiobooks. When I was young they were at first unavailable. Then they were expensive and cumbersome to change tapes.
Then it was change a stack of CDs, then they were large downloads, and now it is relatively frictionless. You can even get through a book by ping-ponging between the book and the audiobook if you want.
This is so sad. I meet my friends for beers and banter every week. And traveling for concerts. Raising kids, gardening, doing a photography course, teaching tricks my new dog, how about y'all stop being so judgemental about those who don't partake in your hobby/fixation/whatyoucallit? Unless you were sarcastic - but the OP definitely wasn't.
After I started my first startup, I had dreams of an inbox full of love from users, wild tech crunch reviews, and a bank account trending exponentially up.
Alas, that’s all it is. A dream.
No one will use your startup's products or services.
“One of the biggest ironies about this business is that there are lots of people who want to start companies, but that doesn’t necessarily equate with the number of people who are voracious users of new products or services,” says Ben Dover, news director at Startups Weekly.
The only thing a founder can do
Chris P Bacon first launched Sofa So Good as a side hustle using his own blog, then as a bootstrapped business seeling on Amazon, then as a traditionally VC backed company.
There is no algorithm that suggests that sofas with built in motivational coaches cheering on you will be successful. Even Big Tech are unable to predict which products users will love and which they won’t.
In his final advice to me, Bacon offers this: “I would say to try the traditional route first. If you can’t get traction with angels or VCs, then consider doing it small scale self funded. If your startup does well from word of mouth, you can go back to angels or VCs and say ‘look, it’s a proven seller.’”
I sent my family member a pirated version of their book and they quickly responded, "how did you get that? I don't even have a pdf of the book yet." It made me feel like they made it when I saw the book to download.
yeah, my book is on torrents and on illegal file / book sharing sites. once I even saw a translated arabic version. still selling a few editions per month, not too bad for a 6 year old SEO book.
Given the easy availability of so many titles, we clearly need better ways to find what to read. We don't want to be at the mercy of big publishers' marketing machines telling us what to read. I spend a lot of time looking at Amazon and Goodreads recommendations, word of mouth, and books mentioned by authors I like, etc.
as someone who has written books ... essays like this can be both mostly correct, and an excuse not to finish your next book, put it on the market, and keep it on the market until sold. So beware them!
I think it's good advice to have out there to make it clear to people that if your primary, or only, motivation for writing is money you're effectively investing your time in a lottery ticket and you ought to consider if you're comfortable spending that much time paying for a lottery ticket.
For some it will mean they won't write. For others it will mean that they adapt to try to bring down the investment and increase the chance of success. E.g. submitting shorter works to magazines or taking editing or smaller writing jobs are both far more likely to pay off, and far lower investment.
But if you're working on a novel because you want to write, then you should ignore the numbers in the article and write anyway, and see it as a sobering view of how little it takes to be a relative success as a writer. E.g. you're already doing better than most once you're selling in the low thousands, even if that isn't paying the bills.
The first thing I would love to see is Borges. Specifically, his Library of Babel.
I love listening to Borges audiobooks while on heavy doses of mushrooms, so I have a pretty vivid visualization of all of them already, but it would be great to see them so I could point at the screen and be like "whoa, yup, that's it!"
You may end up being a great film director in the near AI future thanks to your studies in psychedelia :) I'm most excited to see what people who would otherwise never make a film might come up with
The distant future of generative AI is essentially a Star Trek holodeck.
As an intermediate step I can imagine a future VR headset that coupled to an AI accelerator that can output 8K per eye in real time based on the context of an entire novel, TV series, or collected extended universe works of fiction.
In another thread I likened the current era of AI to playing with PovRay in the 1990s to render "Amazing raytraced 3D graphics!" at a snails pace, with pixels crawling across the screen left-to-right, top-to-bottom over hours or days. Some of use got very excited even back then, because it gave us a peek at a likely future or real-time photo-realistic 3D graphics. We're there now, a mere three decades later.
I expect the pace of AI research to be vaguely similar. In three decades, we'll have interactive generative VR for sure. In the meantime, we'll hit a lot of fun milestones too. I suspect the first games that are real-time AI generated are not that far off. It's surprisingly easy to train AIs when there's simulation available as the ground truth, especially when that simulation can be modified to output per-pixel embeddings, not just noisy RGB sensor measurements like with video input training data.
I wrote a trilogy, literally nobody read it. I couldn't even get my partner to read it.
The main character, 3d printer, maker, programmer, discovers an electric engine that brings him to space, but then as he gets stranded in orbit due to various breakdowns. Aliens save him and this unlocks space for humans, but this occurs at basically the same time as a major space war begins. The main character tries to inform Earth, but being a nobody, he's taken as a crackpot. Basically a long adventure and lots of bad decisions.
Second book, independently and mostly unaware of the main character. The US government went ham trying to get us a ship and such into orbit of jupiter to investigate the aliens. But unknown to the US gov, the intention of the ship was to never return, to become a self-sustaining space station in jupiter orbit. Then all the drama around doing that. Including an invasion by 2 of the hostile alien birds.
Third book, Earth's first space war. This independent station in jupiter orbit is no longer the only interests. There's mars, venus, and other colonies. A major world war is occurring on earth but for the most part the space fleet were staying out of it. The losing side on earth orders their space fleet 'to do something' but they just end up sparking the space war. The main characters get drawn into the battle unintentionally because they arent as stealthy as they think.
I got the first book in the Vorkosigan saga free (from Humble Bundle, I think). I then proceeded to buy each of the next ~20 books in the series. It was a very effective marketing move.
That guy surely loves to rain on everyone's parade.
I self-published my first book in 2018. Eight others followed, 35 thousand books sold so far, in a language community of 10 million.
Didn't make me a millionaire, but it is possible to become a fairly known author even today and even without connections in the publishing industry. My tenth book is due to arrive from the printing shop on May 31st and there are about 700 pre-orders waiting.
And a lot of Hacker News folks dream of joining a startup which becomes the next Google, which is less likely than making a living as a novelist! There are thousands of professional novelists in the USA but only a handful of those really successful startups in the past ten years.
I really relate to that line that few Americans really read, at the level you would expect. I mean it’s true: she has the stats to back it up. And all those consequences are really downstream of that. The real problem is at the top: too few readers.
Processes where rate of change proportional to the amount present* are a bitch. This mostly explains the long tail or power law distribution of popularity, attention, resources, and success.
Then there's the various [major city] Review of [each other's] Books. Bless them but publishing and literati circles have bifurcated further way from other circles, along with many others by the narrow interest Cambrian Explosion the internet brought.
Exceptions happen. When I decided I wanted to be a novelist I wrote ten books in one year and only released the ones I liked. I'd write a book then read a book on writing and try to improve. I'd give my books away to anyone who asked and turned them into free podcasts.
A year later I was one of the top ten best-selling indie writers on Amazon, I had my first movie deal and representation from an amazing agent who stuck by me through the rough parts.
Luck and timing were big factors. I also locked myself in my house for 12 months straight and did nothing but focus on being a better writer and create as much output as I could to get traction. I spent a tremendous amount of psychotic energy at building my writing business. Most people give up. I was 37 and desperate to make it work.
When I went with a traditional publisher it was frustrating at first. I was getting critical nods (I was a finalist for the Edgar and the Thriller Award) but the sales numbers weren't the same as when I was independent.
Eventually I found a great publisher (an imprint with Amazon Publishing) and it was a perfect match. My first novel with them (The Naturalist) spent six weeks in the number one spot (even outselling Harry Potter.) I now do two books a year with them.
I don't have the quite the sales or name recognition of a James Patterson or Stephen King, but I became a millionaire from publishing and investing on those earnings before I started working in AI.
I can't speak to the part of the article about advances. They're based very heavily on your sales history. I had to work my way up to six-figure advances. If you have John Scalzi sales numbers you can pick your terms. David Baldacci doesn't ask for an advance. He just splits the profits with the publisher. People like him are in a whole different league.
tldr: Luck and timing matter, but so does being an absolutely focused psychopath who gives up a social life, television, games and everything else to get what you want.
Fair question. In my anecdotal experience everyone I know who had persistent energy, focus and a mechanism for improving their craft achieved something interesting. Sometimes it was ended up in screenwriting or an adjacent field, but something came of it.
My friends who produced excuses became really good at that. My friends who produced real works and continued to improve became good at that instead.
Cormac McCarthy published 5 or 6 novels before he published one that sold more than 5,000 copies. He spent most of his life writing, often living in poverty. He was almost 60 when he achieved success.
As they often say in the online writer's forums: You write because you want to, because you feel compelled to, because you enjoy it.
Was there a version of this article but focused on Web novels? Specifically in Asia?
Chinese Web novels have an interesting model, paid for word counts, release frequency and per chapter.
Honestly, I think such formats might be best for new authors, quickly gain money without needing to spend months without knowing if It'd even work. Although, it does have consequences on writing quality.
I write fast when I do sit down to write, and so I looked into them to see if it felt like it'd be worth it. There are some people making lots of money that way, but personally, I concluded it sounds like torture.
My son reads lots of them, and he complains if an author doesn't push a new chapter at least once a day, and it's clear a lot of these authors have no buffer because while it may not sound like a lot - a chapter can be anything from 500 to ~3k words or so and my "record" was 11k in a day - most people struggle to maintain an output anywhere near that high on average, and my own average is also too low in large part because I need to be in the mood to write. I've self-published two novels, and wrote the last in three weeks, but I've now been at the half-way point for my third novel for many months.
I could probably force it, but then I wouldn't enjoy it, and to do something I wouldn't enjoy and still likely end up earning far less than in my day job would not be worth it to me.
It might be something more would-be authors might want to try to see if they can do it, if they'll enjoy it or at least find it tolerable, and if they'll do well, but that market is also heavily skewed towards very specific niches that you may or may not find you can stand writing in.
Sounds like they want people to fund their romantic idea of what an author is.
> ... and our dreams of being an author will be realized. Alas, that’s all it is. A dream.
You wrote a book, you published it (?), you're an author. If you mean a famous and/or well-off author, then say that instead. I write because I love writing.
> “But advances are not earnings—they are a guess on the part of the publisher what an author will earn in book sales.”
Not really. An advanced is a loan you don’t have to pay back. If you get a $5000 advance, you won’t get paid for any of the books sold until they surpass a $5000 net of royalties.
That is a well-researched and sobering article. Kept unfolding to reveal more nuances right up until the end. Listing exceptions carefully and why they are. I couldn't help thinking about comparisons with all artistic endeavours as income, especially music. I wondered if, given the software leanings of the average HackerNews participant, there is a general consensus here that art is now (mostly) in the hands of algorithms and programming, and therefore, somehow, now thought of (here) as a futile or at least an entirely pastime pursuit?
I had this discussion with Jerry Pournelle and he had a similar take. I think William Gibson was famous for saying, "Nobody is going to pirate you book or steal your work, hell if they read a chapter while sitting in the library you are ahead of most authors!"
Sean Fagan (@kithrup@wandering.shop) on Mastodon, periodically buys and then gives away Kindle books. I grabbed "Eric Carter: Dead Things" when he did than and ended up buying the whole 9 book series by Stephen Blackmoore! I can also recommend the whole "go to the library and check out a book that has arrived" to see if you like the author or not. But that does take more work.
Most US libraries now seem to offer ebooks or audiobooks through Libby, which significantly reduces the effort required to try a bunch of new books. The new arrivals stuff often has a long hold period but it’s not really a problem when you’re just populating a “check this out” feed.
As someone who reads a lot, it's actually hard to find interesting things to read. I'm a picky reader. I have a kindle and I use it a lot, typically late at night and on the weekend. I do most my reading in bed. Every day.
Most book sites are recommendation bubbles where once you get stuck in one you only get recommended things that you've already read or that you are not really interested in reading. Breaking out of these bubbles is super hard. So, I can see how it is hard for new authors to break into these bubbles.
And then of course there is the notion that a lot of authors are not attractive to a broad audience; which means reaching such an audience is quite hard. Some of the stuff I read is pretty niche. Most of that is in English instead of Dutch (my native language) because a lot of that stuff just is a hard sell in the tiny Dutch market. Entire genres are excluded from being translated for this reason. E.g. most of Neal Stephenson's work has not been translated (except for some of his earlier novels). Including several of his best sellers. Forget about anything similar from smaller authors. I'm not aware of any Dutch science fiction authors. I'm sure there are a few. And of course this works both ways of course. It's very rare for Dutch authors to get translated to English. The ones that do have to be successful in the Dutch market first. Which means they need to appeal to a broad audience.
If I were to become a novelist and would try to write some science fiction and do it in Dutch, I'd stand no chance getting any audience. And while I'm comfortable writing in English, I'm not a native speaker and it probably shows. Getting from alright to good is a lot of work and the bar is extremely high.
I have a hunch that AI assisted translations are going to revolutionize the literary world in the next few years. There's a huge opportunity for publishers to broaden their markets for already proven authors to essentially the entire planet. Of course that won't make things any easier for new authors.
You might enjoy subscribing to a book review journal like the London Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, or New York Review of Books. They all have their biases but I’ve found them to be useful for learning about recently released books that I want to read.
(I am a former subscriber of all three and thought the LTLS was the best and least biased.)
Ah, but those publications (also The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books) are interested in scholarship and literature, rather than page-turning stories; high art, not popular entertainment.
There's some intersection between the two camps, but it's largely due to intervention by influential personalities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprah's_Book_Club
> And while I'm comfortable writing in English, I'm not a native speaker and it probably shows. Getting from alright to good is a lot of work and the bar is extremely high
For what it's worth, at least from this comment, I don't think I'd have any way to distinguish your writing from that of a native speaker (as a native speaker). I'm also not sure that mastery of English is the most important skill of a novelist. Obviously I'm just a random commenter on the Internet, but I don't think you should let English being a second language dissuade you. Might even be an advantage if it discourages you from using flowery prose.
> advantage if it discourages you from using flowery prose.
I've always said that "flowery prose" is something that needs to make a comeback. I really miss that style of writing. What fun to read! The 'modern' impulse for 'efficient' writing is at least a contributing factor to the decline in reading I daresay.
I suppose "flowery" is open to interpretation, but generally I mean those occasions where it looks like someone is randomly choosing from a thesaurus for every other adverb.
Anyway, I don't think it's in any danger of disappearing – it's pervasive and popular – but I've never been able to complete a book with too much of it.
I mean it in the Dickensian sense
> As someone who reads a lot, it's actually hard to find interesting things to read.
I cannot relate to this at all. The more I read, the more topics I get interested in, and the more I'm part of various communities of book readers (mostly watching BookTube or listening to podcasts), the bigger the list of books I want to read grows. My "want to read" list, of books that I actually wrote down in a file somewhere, is 1,000 books long, and that doesn't include many other books that I never wrote down.
And I read a lot, compared to most people.
That you read a lot might well make you an outlier in terms of what you're willing to read.
I read a lot too, in bursts, and I find that while I do have some strong preferences where it's hard to find stuff I really like, I'm flexible enough that I certainly can find a neverending stream of books that are "good enough".
But a lot of people have really high thresholds for how interesting a book need to sound to them for them to even consider it.
> I have a hunch that AI assisted translations are going to revolutionize the literary world in the next few years. There's a huge opportunity for publishers to broaden their markets for already proven authors to essentially the entire planet. Of course that won't make things any easier for new authors.
They're already good enough for a tiny language like Norwegian, that I've considered using it for my own books (I'm Norwegian, but write in English, to my editor's chagrin - my English is good but I still make many stupid mistakes especially when tired). They're not good enough not to have a native reader read through the result and edit, hence why I'd only consider using it for my native Norwegian so far. I wouldn't dare try to use it for French or German, even though I read both, as my command of those languages isn't good enough that I'd trust myself to catch more subtle problems.
But I agree with you - it won't take much before they'll at least drastically cut the cost of translations even if you need a translator to clean up the result.
There's no way translating my novels to a smaller language would pay off at current prices - I'd need English sales several times higher before I'd consider it realistic for it to break even in most other languages. I don't much care about making money from them, but I'm not going to do it if I can only expect to lose money. If I can get translations at, say 1/10th of current costs, I might well end up having them translated to 10-20 languages or more.
> As someone who reads a lot, it's actually hard to find interesting things to read. I'm a picky reader.
I have 70+ plus books on hold at my local library (though the holds have been 'paused' so that they will arrive in a staggered fashion). The library has a limit of 100 books being on hold at a time, but it does have a "bookmark" feature so you can save them for later: I have over 2000 books earmarked for future putting-on-hold.
There's plenty to read.
(I read a bunch of non-fiction on academic-leaning topics (history, economics, science), and often get new things to read from the references of the book I'm currently going through. There's a bunch of fiction too: put a hold on Shogun because of the mini-series.)
>As someone who reads a lot, it's actually hard to find interesting things to read.
Why hard to find interesting things, because too much choice and/or market saturation of low quality?
>I'm a picky reader.
Is this part of the reason you find it hard to find interesting things? I've read the rest of your worthwhile reply but I'm finding it hard to reconcile the opening sentences.
>I have a kindle and I use it a lot, typically late at night and on the weekend. I do most my reading in bed. Every day.
Are paper books out for you? Thank you.
find a good independent bookstore. recommending books is one of their greatest strengths.
So I don't consider my self an author but I wrote a 60 pages ebook in 3 month on a topic I consider am pretty savvy in.
I've marketed and sold 400+ copies of it at $19 so far and about to raise the price to $39, near 100% margin minus stripe fees.
What stops authors doing what I did? Plenty of people want to read, to blame lack of readership is just completely wrong.
How did you market the book and how much did you spend on marketing?
Imo marketing is the biggest road block.
On X and Reddit, for free.
I basically gave bits and pieces of each chapter away as content - then funneled interested readers into DMs and profile visits with link to my ebook.
You wrote a book about a topic that you are very much into, and although it's only 60 pages, you were all about the contents, not the process or the readers. Often, authors just want to "write a book" or "be a writer". That rarely results in interesting books in my opinion.
Agreed. Much like a founder building a company for the sake of being a founder.
Rarely makes good products.
> What stops authors doing what I did? Plenty of people want to read, to blame lack of readership is just completely wrong.
Because for three months of writing and it sounds like numerous hours of marketing you’ve made almost $8000. While I imagine that puts you ahead of the curve for the average self published author, The hourly return on investment sounds pretty low, especially for a job that sounds marketing heavy, which is not everyone’s cup of tea
True in strict monetary senses.
But through this process I've
- gained an engaging audience on X - multiple inbound leads that turned into long term collabs - a discord community of my best readers where we meet once a week
Worth the investment
What stops authors doing that is that most authors struggle to sell 50 copies at far lower price point no matter how much effort they put in because most books just aren't interesting enough to enough people to be easy enough to sell without it turning into gruntwork paying far below minimum wage.
Congratulations, you're a massive success as an author, having sold more than most authors will. That's amazing.
But consider that most authors have no interests in writing business / self help books, and most who do still fail spectacularly because having success with those kinds of books tends to happen primarily if you already have an audience and a track record in the field you're writing about. E.g. the perceived value of your book is 99% your story about your track record, and most would-be authors don't have that track record.
You nailed it.
Thank you.
So just to clarify I didn't have an audience when I wrote the book. I took the time and told people my story over the past 6 months, and while I did that - sold books.
I think good storytellers should be able to build an audience regardless of the format - highly recommend any aspiring author to try it.
The thing is, most storytellers don't have nearly as compelling a value proposition. E.g. the best value a fiction writer can provide is a good story. Your value proposition is selling at least the hope of learning ways of bringing in money. It doesn't need to have a very high chance of success before it's perceived net present value is higher than the cost of your book, while fiction writers are competing with enormous amount of free or already paid for entertainment and fiction from a writer you don't know is often seen as having a sufficiently high risk of being a waste of time that the perceived risk adjusted value for a lot of people is negative.
Getting people to take unknown fiction even for free is an uphill battle.
You're describing self-publishing a business-related e-book. TFA describes the harsh reality of traditional paper publishing of fiction. It also has a section on self-publishing, incidentally.
They had entire section on substack as well, which is basically what I'm doing.
Stat seems like only 15(?) authors on substack makes $1,000/m or more. Which is wild.
I find your site and sales pitch interesting but honestly, I can't help but feel like a schmuck for giving you 20 USD for this. It feels akin to giving money to Tai Lopez or some other guru selling a pipe dream.
No offense to you, I want to like what you're offering, but I can't excuse it. Do you have a PDF of the first chapter or the intro at least? I want to see a bit before I send you 20 bucks.
Absolutely get what you mean and that's ok!
Send me an email, I'll share you the first chapter
How are you “publishing”?
Is it just an ebook?
Do you sell paper bound? If so what service are you using? Would you recommend it or choose differently next time?
I have a site, user can pay and get an email with the pdf/Epub link.
No paper.
I write in notion, export to markdown, then compile to pdf / Epub with pandoc
It's super easy, highly recommend
Link to your book?
500k.agency
It is a good baseline to start with the expectation that no one will read your book, no one will see your art, no one will listen to your music, no one will watch your videos, no one will listen to your presentation, no one will use your software, no one will buy your product etc.
As someone who works at an art school, the thing that differenciates a beginner from a successful graduate isn't that they can physically do a thing — it is that they go one of two ways:
1. They have a good and current knowledge of what people would find interesting and do things among those lines
2. They have a precise idea of what they themselves find interesting and by their arts manage to make others interested
Both can work pretty well, I like the latter more, because it often leads to more interesting and unique takes. But that means when you do a book, music, video, presentation, etc. it should be a thing that you yourself would find useful, interesting and good even if it was made by your worst enemy.
The problem with the art of many amateuer artists is that they think their stuff is already good or interesting because they made it or because they had a great time/extremely deep thoughts doing it. But those are all things someone from the outside won't see.
You won't be able to make a good presentation if you have never given it a thought what you think a great presentation is and you never asked yourself where your presentation would land on that scale. And now do that times a hundred and you might get good.
> “If you ask people how many books they read in the past year, they’ll say four. Or two,” she says.
This is so sad. Depending on length and style, I might read 2 books in a month. Or maybe not really sad, because not everyone might get the enjoyment out of books that I do, but I’ve loved reading my whole life, being known to walk to school/the store/within school/etc. while reading (I very rarely do that, nowadays, it’s a bit weird for an almost 40-year-old man. Though the last time was not much more than a year ago, the bus ride was over, but the book was too gripping, so I continued reading while walking from the bus stop)
I understand where you’re coming from but don’t think it’s sad personally. Why should it be? It’s the same as if someone doesn’t do any other activity. I rarely read or finish books but spend all that time doing myriad other things which give meaning and have relevancy. Not to say there aren’t books which are important to me I would just generally rather do other things.
This makes me think of the bit from Bill Hicks about “what you reading for?”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BwkdGr9JYmE
I came to the same conclusion right after the first sentence:
> Or maybe not really sad, …
Evidently no one will read your second sentence!
The comments here really now make me think that it is sad, because reading comprehension is sorely lacking.
Directly contradicting your opening sentence, no less.
You could say the same thing about movies -- some of these large comfortable theaters are empty sometimes. People aren't watching movies.
but they are.
I read a lot when I was young, and now I have few (physical) books.
But I read lots more books books than I ever did when I was young.
I also listen to audiobooks. When I was young they were at first unavailable. Then they were expensive and cumbersome to change tapes.
Then it was change a stack of CDs, then they were large downloads, and now it is relatively frictionless. You can even get through a book by ping-ponging between the book and the audiobook if you want.
> “If you ask people how many marathons they have run in the past year, they’ll say one two,” she says.
This is so sad. Depending on length and style, I might run 2 marathons in a month.
This is so sad. I meet my friends for beers and banter every week. And traveling for concerts. Raising kids, gardening, doing a photography course, teaching tricks my new dog, how about y'all stop being so judgemental about those who don't partake in your hobby/fixation/whatyoucallit? Unless you were sarcastic - but the OP definitely wasn't.
This is so sad. Depending on length and style, I might do 12 lines of cocaine in a day.
I wonder what the distribution looks like. I hardly read at all, and then will binge 3-5 books. So, fewer than 10 per year.
A friend of mine reads two books per week.
Maybe most are between. Or maybe not.
One of your binges a year would bring you to or near the median, at least for the US.
In 2016, Pew Research found 28% of Americans had read zero books the previous year[1]. The median number of books read by Americans was 4.
The mean was 12, heavily pulled up by people like your friend.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/01/book-reading...
After I started my first startup, I had dreams of an inbox full of love from users, wild tech crunch reviews, and a bank account trending exponentially up.
Alas, that’s all it is. A dream.
No one will use your startup's products or services.
“One of the biggest ironies about this business is that there are lots of people who want to start companies, but that doesn’t necessarily equate with the number of people who are voracious users of new products or services,” says Ben Dover, news director at Startups Weekly.
The only thing a founder can do
Chris P Bacon first launched Sofa So Good as a side hustle using his own blog, then as a bootstrapped business seeling on Amazon, then as a traditionally VC backed company.
There is no algorithm that suggests that sofas with built in motivational coaches cheering on you will be successful. Even Big Tech are unable to predict which products users will love and which they won’t.
In his final advice to me, Bacon offers this: “I would say to try the traditional route first. If you can’t get traction with angels or VCs, then consider doing it small scale self funded. If your startup does well from word of mouth, you can go back to angels or VCs and say ‘look, it’s a proven seller.’”
Guess I’ll get to work.
One of my happiest moments as a writer was discovering that my book is on torrents. With seeds!
And people liked it enough after pirating to come back, hit the buy button, and tell me there’s pirated versions out there. <3
I sent my family member a pirated version of their book and they quickly responded, "how did you get that? I don't even have a pdf of the book yet." It made me feel like they made it when I saw the book to download.
How is that possible? Who had access other than the author?
Probably just by scanning a physical copy and OCRing the scans or something.
yeah, my book is on torrents and on illegal file / book sharing sites. once I even saw a translated arabic version. still selling a few editions per month, not too bad for a 6 year old SEO book.
Given the easy availability of so many titles, we clearly need better ways to find what to read. We don't want to be at the mercy of big publishers' marketing machines telling us what to read. I spend a lot of time looking at Amazon and Goodreads recommendations, word of mouth, and books mentioned by authors I like, etc.
as someone who has written books ... essays like this can be both mostly correct, and an excuse not to finish your next book, put it on the market, and keep it on the market until sold. So beware them!
I think it's good advice to have out there to make it clear to people that if your primary, or only, motivation for writing is money you're effectively investing your time in a lottery ticket and you ought to consider if you're comfortable spending that much time paying for a lottery ticket.
For some it will mean they won't write. For others it will mean that they adapt to try to bring down the investment and increase the chance of success. E.g. submitting shorter works to magazines or taking editing or smaller writing jobs are both far more likely to pay off, and far lower investment.
But if you're working on a novel because you want to write, then you should ignore the numbers in the article and write anyway, and see it as a sobering view of how little it takes to be a relative success as a writer. E.g. you're already doing better than most once you're selling in the low thousands, even if that isn't paying the bills.
Exactly. I'm very glad I ignored this kind of thinking.
Think of all the books that will be watched when we have text-to-film models. Thousands of years of content to be depicted in a number of ways.
The first thing I would love to see is Borges. Specifically, his Library of Babel.
I love listening to Borges audiobooks while on heavy doses of mushrooms, so I have a pretty vivid visualization of all of them already, but it would be great to see them so I could point at the screen and be like "whoa, yup, that's it!"
You may end up being a great film director in the near AI future thanks to your studies in psychedelia :) I'm most excited to see what people who would otherwise never make a film might come up with
The distant future of generative AI is essentially a Star Trek holodeck.
As an intermediate step I can imagine a future VR headset that coupled to an AI accelerator that can output 8K per eye in real time based on the context of an entire novel, TV series, or collected extended universe works of fiction.
You just made me realize how slow our LLMs are today - we're like in the vintage years!
That's an incredible vision... and not too far away.
In another thread I likened the current era of AI to playing with PovRay in the 1990s to render "Amazing raytraced 3D graphics!" at a snails pace, with pixels crawling across the screen left-to-right, top-to-bottom over hours or days. Some of use got very excited even back then, because it gave us a peek at a likely future or real-time photo-realistic 3D graphics. We're there now, a mere three decades later.
I expect the pace of AI research to be vaguely similar. In three decades, we'll have interactive generative VR for sure. In the meantime, we'll hit a lot of fun milestones too. I suspect the first games that are real-time AI generated are not that far off. It's surprisingly easy to train AIs when there's simulation available as the ground truth, especially when that simulation can be modified to output per-pixel embeddings, not just noisy RGB sensor measurements like with video input training data.
I wrote a trilogy, literally nobody read it. I couldn't even get my partner to read it.
The main character, 3d printer, maker, programmer, discovers an electric engine that brings him to space, but then as he gets stranded in orbit due to various breakdowns. Aliens save him and this unlocks space for humans, but this occurs at basically the same time as a major space war begins. The main character tries to inform Earth, but being a nobody, he's taken as a crackpot. Basically a long adventure and lots of bad decisions.
Second book, independently and mostly unaware of the main character. The US government went ham trying to get us a ship and such into orbit of jupiter to investigate the aliens. But unknown to the US gov, the intention of the ship was to never return, to become a self-sustaining space station in jupiter orbit. Then all the drama around doing that. Including an invasion by 2 of the hostile alien birds.
Third book, Earth's first space war. This independent station in jupiter orbit is no longer the only interests. There's mars, venus, and other colonies. A major world war is occurring on earth but for the most part the space fleet were staying out of it. The losing side on earth orders their space fleet 'to do something' but they just end up sparking the space war. The main characters get drawn into the battle unintentionally because they arent as stealthy as they think.
Maybe 75 years ago, in the golden age of SF, you could have found a publisher willing to pair you with an editor to help you get your story out.
Video killed the print star.
This is why Baen used to give away books for free: they said discovery was the biggest obstacle to a good book getting read.
"First one's free" works very well for good series
I got the first book in the Vorkosigan saga free (from Humble Bundle, I think). I then proceeded to buy each of the next ~20 books in the series. It was a very effective marketing move.
That guy surely loves to rain on everyone's parade.
I self-published my first book in 2018. Eight others followed, 35 thousand books sold so far, in a language community of 10 million.
Didn't make me a millionaire, but it is possible to become a fairly known author even today and even without connections in the publishing industry. My tenth book is due to arrive from the printing shop on May 31st and there are about 700 pre-orders waiting.
And a lot of Hacker News folks dream of joining a startup which becomes the next Google, which is less likely than making a living as a novelist! There are thousands of professional novelists in the USA but only a handful of those really successful startups in the past ten years.
He's not saying it's impossible. Just extremely difficult based on the statistics.
I really relate to that line that few Americans really read, at the level you would expect. I mean it’s true: she has the stats to back it up. And all those consequences are really downstream of that. The real problem is at the top: too few readers.
Processes where rate of change proportional to the amount present* are a bitch. This mostly explains the long tail or power law distribution of popularity, attention, resources, and success.
Then there's the various [major city] Review of [each other's] Books. Bless them but publishing and literati circles have bifurcated further way from other circles, along with many others by the narrow interest Cambrian Explosion the internet brought.
* Modellable as differential equations
I wrote a book And people are actually buying it, not sure if they read it through
But I get good reviews: https://a.co/d/etdEGSZ
That's a nonfiction book, outside the field covered by the post, but good attempt to promote your book
Exceptions happen. When I decided I wanted to be a novelist I wrote ten books in one year and only released the ones I liked. I'd write a book then read a book on writing and try to improve. I'd give my books away to anyone who asked and turned them into free podcasts.
A year later I was one of the top ten best-selling indie writers on Amazon, I had my first movie deal and representation from an amazing agent who stuck by me through the rough parts.
Luck and timing were big factors. I also locked myself in my house for 12 months straight and did nothing but focus on being a better writer and create as much output as I could to get traction. I spent a tremendous amount of psychotic energy at building my writing business. Most people give up. I was 37 and desperate to make it work.
When I went with a traditional publisher it was frustrating at first. I was getting critical nods (I was a finalist for the Edgar and the Thriller Award) but the sales numbers weren't the same as when I was independent.
Eventually I found a great publisher (an imprint with Amazon Publishing) and it was a perfect match. My first novel with them (The Naturalist) spent six weeks in the number one spot (even outselling Harry Potter.) I now do two books a year with them.
I don't have the quite the sales or name recognition of a James Patterson or Stephen King, but I became a millionaire from publishing and investing on those earnings before I started working in AI.
I can't speak to the part of the article about advances. They're based very heavily on your sales history. I had to work my way up to six-figure advances. If you have John Scalzi sales numbers you can pick your terms. David Baldacci doesn't ask for an advance. He just splits the profits with the publisher. People like him are in a whole different league.
tldr: Luck and timing matter, but so does being an absolutely focused psychopath who gives up a social life, television, games and everything else to get what you want.
But how many are absolutely focused psychopaths who give up social life, television, games and everything else, and still don't make it?
Fair question. In my anecdotal experience everyone I know who had persistent energy, focus and a mechanism for improving their craft achieved something interesting. Sometimes it was ended up in screenwriting or an adjacent field, but something came of it.
My friends who produced excuses became really good at that. My friends who produced real works and continued to improve became good at that instead.
Cormac McCarthy published 5 or 6 novels before he published one that sold more than 5,000 copies. He spent most of his life writing, often living in poverty. He was almost 60 when he achieved success.
As they often say in the online writer's forums: You write because you want to, because you feel compelled to, because you enjoy it.
Was there a version of this article but focused on Web novels? Specifically in Asia?
Chinese Web novels have an interesting model, paid for word counts, release frequency and per chapter.
Honestly, I think such formats might be best for new authors, quickly gain money without needing to spend months without knowing if It'd even work. Although, it does have consequences on writing quality.
I write fast when I do sit down to write, and so I looked into them to see if it felt like it'd be worth it. There are some people making lots of money that way, but personally, I concluded it sounds like torture.
My son reads lots of them, and he complains if an author doesn't push a new chapter at least once a day, and it's clear a lot of these authors have no buffer because while it may not sound like a lot - a chapter can be anything from 500 to ~3k words or so and my "record" was 11k in a day - most people struggle to maintain an output anywhere near that high on average, and my own average is also too low in large part because I need to be in the mood to write. I've self-published two novels, and wrote the last in three weeks, but I've now been at the half-way point for my third novel for many months.
I could probably force it, but then I wouldn't enjoy it, and to do something I wouldn't enjoy and still likely end up earning far less than in my day job would not be worth it to me.
It might be something more would-be authors might want to try to see if they can do it, if they'll enjoy it or at least find it tolerable, and if they'll do well, but that market is also heavily skewed towards very specific niches that you may or may not find you can stand writing in.
(2021)
Original url: https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27032590)
More current related:
No one buys books (from the same author as OP)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119958
Yes, People Still Buy Books: How a viral post got some key statistics wrong
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40288047
Sounds like they want people to fund their romantic idea of what an author is.
> ... and our dreams of being an author will be realized. Alas, that’s all it is. A dream.
You wrote a book, you published it (?), you're an author. If you mean a famous and/or well-off author, then say that instead. I write because I love writing.
> “But advances are not earnings—they are a guess on the part of the publisher what an author will earn in book sales.”
Not really. An advanced is a loan you don’t have to pay back. If you get a $5000 advance, you won’t get paid for any of the books sold until they surpass a $5000 net of royalties.
(2021)
That is because an updated version of the same statement but from a sales perspective (2024) was criticized by a Slate article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40288047
I'm not sure what to make of the difference in number of comments on the two posts. That piece is an excellent counterpoint.
That is a well-researched and sobering article. Kept unfolding to reveal more nuances right up until the end. Listing exceptions carefully and why they are. I couldn't help thinking about comparisons with all artistic endeavours as income, especially music. I wondered if, given the software leanings of the average HackerNews participant, there is a general consensus here that art is now (mostly) in the hands of algorithms and programming, and therefore, somehow, now thought of (here) as a futile or at least an entirely pastime pursuit?
is there an extension or something that will let me automatically block links to substack sites?
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