Comment by true_religion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by true_religion | Hacker News Reader

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> Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me.

The costs of modern day e-books are real, but for many genres markets its possible that buyers are simply willing to tolerate a book that's objectively worse (more errors, worse design, illustration by total unknowns, fonts free sources instead of foundries).

Rather than continuing to participate in the traditional industry, I think a lot of authors will have to self-publish and realize that if they can't give their book the love needed to not "make your eyes bleed" then their work will fail in the marketplace. They can't rely on someone else to take a manuscript and clean it up to a publishable version anymore.

There's just not space for those middlemen and helpers in a lot of genres market, unless you are a best seller.

Actually, most of my experience is from the science fiction/fantasy genre. Genre buyers are willing to tolerate sub-par production---and let's be honest, the pulp paperbacks of yesteryear were not exactly going to give Edward Tufte a designgasm, so this isn't a new trend, just an old trend which has found new life in a new medium.

That said, the market for freelance book production people is actually much better than it was a few years ago, for precisely the reason that there's just more money in the market now.

They probably need at least a copy editor. (Typos are really annoying and you just can't deal with those without help.) But, yeah,for some genres, people with at least a niche following may do better with cutting out a lot of expensive "middlemen" who provide incremental improvement.

Why can't one deal with typos, without help?

It seems to me that a combination of technology and time should be sufficient.

I know I have read books that seem to have missed spell check... Really annoying.

Speaking as an occasional author, by the time I've finished the however-many drafts and several rounds of edits, I'm completely blind to the manuscript's mechanical flaws, and need someone else to point out to me the Spoonerisms, unfortunately euphemistic word choices, or even just that I've dedicated my book to "My parents, Ayn Rand and God."

Also, I say again: copyeditors and proofreaders are cheap. Doing that work myself makes about as much sense as doing anything else I could outsource cheaply.

But i think the point is that you have to outsource it. There is no space for you "outsourcing the outsourcing" to publishers, because there is not enough fat in the market for them to survive anymore (or so they say). Authors will increasingly have to take charge of managing their creations, like it happened with musicians.

I used to think so, but in industries where supply is abundant, publishers provide not only "post-production", but distribution and more importantly marketing and branding - social proof. The biggest benefit may be setting oneself apart from the fray.

Source: I'm a smalltime author and publisher.

If publishers die, such social proof will simply come from other venues, be it dedicated marketing outfits or some sort of community (goodreads etc). In music, major labels are increasingly irrelevant.

And then successful dedicated marketing outfits starts vertically integrate to beat out competition, offering editorial services, distribution, etc.... becoming a publisher.

What will happen is that some publishers fail to adapt to a digital economy and are replaced by upcomers who are perfectly adjusted to it. Publishing companies will not disappear because they fill a function in the industry.

A "publisher" in the digital world will be a very different beast and it will be hard to call it such. Most of it will likely be automated. Their core-competency might not even be book-publishing.

Are Amazon and Netflix "studios"? No, but they do produce high-quality video content. Is Louis CK a "studio"? No, but he's producing a TV series.

Publishers' functions (content editing, packaging, distribution, marketing and merchandising) are being split and reorganized in different ways. Verticals built on the new production chain will look very different from current publishers.

>Are Amazon and Netflix "studios"?

They pretty much are in today's sense of "studio." The days of MGM having a bunch of actors under contract and cranking out movies on their backlots and sound stages is pretty much ancient history. Studios are mostly the moneymen for independent production companies--which is the case whether the studio's name is Fox or Netflix.

Exactly.

A computer can process text, it cannot read and it cannot write because it cant think. There is no automating taste.

Publishers' function will be close to exactly the same, just built on top of a digital infrastructure and organization.

Netflix and Amazon are studios when they do the same work as a studio.

> There is no automating taste.

Recommendation engines are real and are improving. Spellcheck fixes typos and some decent neural-network training can be pushed into literary land (already MS Word "dares" here and there, and that's not even centralized). Would a "digital editor" be foolproof, or particularly good? No, but it would likely do a lot of the grunt work fairly reliably, so you can shrink the workforce or increase output (more books, argh). When I hear of the "slush pile", I cringe. That's a job for a machine and not a very smart one at that.

> Netflix and Amazon are studios

No, they are content distributors who happen to produce content because of supply failures up the chain. The middlemen upstream are failing to see opportunities, so downstream is taking charge. The minute this changes, they will go back to being content distributors because that's what they do.

This is just hand waving. It's impossible to replace editors with computers, you even say so yourself.

Netflix is a studio; you're trying to change the meaning words because the facts don't fit you.

Amazon and Netflix both operate studios. I think in both cases as distinct subsidiaries -- e.g., Amazon Studios.

Managing production and outsourcing is its own skillset. Division of labour between a specialist "producer" and the person who does the actual writing ought to make sense in terms of efficiency.

Yes, but nowhere is set in stone that such skillset cannot be automated (and hence more efficient, in aggregate). Webapps will appear that will manage such production, once demand emerges, not unlike they appeared in the music business.

Automating the production of a book might be as hard or harder than automating the writing though.

> My parents, Ayn Rand and God

That's the proper way to write it. If you want the other meaning, it's "My parents - Ayn Rand and God". You English people really should learn proper punctuation - most of the world has been using these things called dashes, colons, etc. for quite a while now. They help immensely to disambiguate.

What kevinr says. At some point, you start reading what you expect to read rather than what is actually on the page--including typos with red lines under them. You basically cannot publish something significant without having another set of eyes on it at a minimum. A decent copy editor will also help fix up some things (in my case excessive wordiness). Tools like spellcheck help but only to a degree. Also as kevinr says, basic copyediting is pretty cheap. I paid about $400 for my last book.

But As Charlie Stoss says he doesn't want to do that middle mans work as it takes time from writing.

Which, for someone who can establish a good relationship with a good publisher, is a perfectly reasonable position to take. Publishers are like any other service. If they provide good value, authors should use use them and otherwise not use them.

On the other, other hand, editing, etc., is a one time cost. And, as far as I can tell, <$10,000 per book.

Publishers, however, take their share per-copy. And, IIRC, the final profits are divided about 50/50 between author and publisher.

Charlie may be leaving a significant chunk of money on the table, given his popularity.

I wonder how much more work it would be to get a good relationship with a single priced editing service over a traditional publisher. Hey, maybe you could even get your agent to do that.

Maybe. On the other hand, I suspect that, precisely because he is a popular (at least by genre standards) author, he probably also gets some benefit from the publisher in terms of sales, promotion, etc. I've heard from a number of sources that one of the issues with going to a traditional publisher for a new author today is that you have all the publisher overhead while not getting much of an advance or much in the way of marketing and promotional support.

But I don't know how the relative economics work for an established author like Charlie. Empirically, most known authors seem content to stay with publishers so I'm guessing it makes economic sense for them. But I don't really know.

It is mildly hard to find a copyeditor, especially for technical books. I tried recently and did not figure out where to find a quality person (for math), and gave up after not trying very hard. (If you have any suggestions let me know!)

This used to be the selling point of publishing through Springer, for instance. But now it seems very little editing or copyediting is done. I am reading "Novelty, Information, and Surprise" put out by Springer in 2012 (math/stats/information theory) and there are two typos in the first paragraph of the introduction. It doesn't feel like the rest of the writing saw an editor either.

I'm looking for the rise of a more streamlined process for hiring your own editor as people realize that publishing through the mainstream doesn't get you editing or royalties (although it still does give a lot of street cred or something to put on your CV!).

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