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Comment by mikecane | Hacker News Reader

Ideas are useless in the sense that at any one time, many people could have the exact same idea. Ideas do "get in the air." So in that respect, ideas can be seen as commodities. It's getting the idea out there as something people can buy/use that matters. All writers understand this. It's not the story that was never written or never published that matters -- it's the story people can read or buy.

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Let's take "The Da Vinci Code" as an example. How many people had the idea behind that book? Not that many. Yes, Dan Brown had to sit down and write it, but it's the storyline (the "idea" behind the book) that got millions of people hooked worldwide.

From what I have read, it seems Dan Brown isn't that good of an author anyway. Thousands of other writers could have written the story better than he did, if he had commissioned them to do so.

There are tons of excellent writers out there that would write "the Great American novel" if only they could figure out what to write about. So, it's not the execution but the great idea that is a more rare resource.

A lot of luck and marketing took place to make The Da Vinci Code a success.

If it hadn't made money, and sat on the shelves today, would it still have been a great idea? We can really only tell looking backwards.

The tools and tricks of marketing are well known. They can be applied to any book. But they cannot help every book become a runaway hit. The content of the book matters too. (Yes, great books without good marketing will fail, but that just shows that both ingredients are necessary)

The same is with startups. The tools and tricks of marketing and execution are well known. They can be applied to any startup. But they cannot help every startup become a runaway hit. The idea behind the startup matters too.

>>>Let's take "The Da Vinci Code" as an example. How many people had the idea behind that book? Not that many.

There was a big plagiarism suit in England about this, so it's not the best example. Besides which, you will learn on your own that ideas are less important than realizing them. It's a hard lesson to learn and it took me many, many years to see it, You will too.

So what if it was plagiarized? The idea is what made the book successful. Whether that idea was Dan Brown's or he stole it from someone else says nothing about the value of the idea behind making "The Da Vinci Code" a huge hit.

Are you serious? This is one of the dumbest things I've read on here. Writing a novel is execution. There are hundreds of these books with similar story lines that never got anywhere because of inferior writing. There are thousands of fantasy books that never became Harry Potter.

Are you claiming that Dan Brown and JK Rowling are the best in the world at writing their type of fiction? Maybe they are, but from what I understand, from a literary standpoint these two are not the best writers.

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