What gig workers can learn from romance writers
bbc.com
bbc.com
That last one is interesting. People entering a field do so for a reason. It might just be to do a job and get paid, but it could also be because no one is making what they want. Newbies unconsciously represent gaps in the market where someone with better execution could make a killing.
Brb, got to dive beginner programming forums and look at the types of projects that are so pressing that someone is willing to learn how to program.
In relation to HN, there is also the noob-submissions section: https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories
But in terms of aggregate genre growth, I think the Kindle and iBooks/Audible helped much more. Seeing the three-fold increase in romance author income coupled with the halving of other authors' income from 2008 to 2014 suggests that readers really altered their preferences to avoid being seen with a physical romance novel.
It feels like a similar phenomenon occurred with scifi/fantasy, judging by the audible best seller list.
I suspect the only reason this income is listed that entirely failed writers aren't included. And I suspect there are more failed (or "aspiring") writers with zero income than all the successful writers put together.
The article's only story is that successful romance writers are getting substantially more than they used to (it seems demand for romance novels has increased for cultural or cyclical reasons). But trying to be writer is a less reliable way to survive than an average sketchy gig where you get paid on a semi-regular basis.
The whole thing is in the "they made it, why can't you" genre.
I'd be cautious about coming to this conclusion so definitively. The vast majority of romance readers are women, many in a cultural milieu that differs from yours. Reading romances is not universally looked down upon — several of the highly educated women in my family do so unabashedly, for example, as do I.
E-reading is also cheaper and consumes less space than physical books. The number of niches and options therein exploded with self-publishing. I suspect that those factors are more important than avoiding the potential embarrassment of someone seeing you reading Danielle Steele. But I wouldn't put high certainty on my guess either :P
E-books solve a real "fat-tail" problem in romance at the same time that they allow discretion in public places. These days only Amazon knows you've got a thing for hot billionaire Navy SEALs who turn into otters at night. A physical bookstore would not be able to stock all Chuck Tingle's novels and turn a profit, and people in towns too highbrow to stock romances wouldn't be able to buy them without mail-order. (In some towns it can actually be really hard to find romance novels for sale on paper, and there's a huge bias toward the NYTimes bestsellers.)
Or erotic menage a trois set in Victorian England?
She was particularly thrilled at her first contract because she most loved to travel to London, and now she could write off the travel costs on her taxes as research.
I don't know about you, but I binge read something like fifty Star Trek novels when I was a kid because that's what the library had. That was once I ran out of the other shitty sci-fi on offer, because I'd already read all the Asimov three times over.
I think we think of women as doing this more because men tend to be employed more often than women, and once the kids are old enough to become self-sufficient - and/or shipped off to school - homemakers of both genders get more downtime to sit down and read.
And on the guys front, plenty of guys read cheap thrillers that are all about explosions and blood without much prose behind them.
Also, Star Wars.
Motor vehicles (muscle cars, Japanese sport bikes, Tesla, etc.), programming languages (JS, Lisp, Rust), liquor (vodka, whiskey, Moscow mules), electronics (hi-fi audio, pagers, TVs, smartphones), web frameworks (too many to list), beer styles ("imports", stouts, IPAs, Pilsners), grooming (sideburns, beards, mustaches), etc.
As far as I can tell, the main difference between men chasing trends and women doing is that dudes sink way more money into it and take it way more seriously.
In my opinion this trait exists for all genders.
An ugly monolith that solves pain is going to be worth more than a beautiful piece of software that doesn't solve the pain. I'm not saying you can't have both, just that writing beautiful code by itself doesn't help, much like very good prose in novel writing.
It could of course be argued that in literature what is said is more important than how it is said, but at least it has to be understandable. You don't have to have a wonderful prose to be a great author, but at least people need to be able to figure out (some of) what you are saying.
And then there is James Joyce :-)
This could be said about most things to be honest. What something says or does is generally more important than how exactly it does, regardless of whether the thing is a book or a piece of tech or anything else in between.
It's one of the reasons so many startups and projects struggle, because they think their work is going to be about solving a programming problem while it's actually about solving a marketing/network/human one. So many people all programming community software to become the next Facebook or Reddit or whatever else. So many losing to some guy setting up a forum script because the latter actually focused on the community and the former were interested in the shiny tech.
It might just have been her bias but she gave me the impression that sort of stuff mattered quite a lot.
And that Shakespeare was good-looking as a young man, before he lost his hair and puffed out from home-cooking, seems at least likely, on the fixed general principle that writers who become very celebrated in their youth, as he did, are, to a first approximation, almost always good-looking. Byron and Shelley, Mailer and Updike and Salinger, Fitzgerald, Dickens, Tennyson, Lowell, Ted Hughes—all celebrated in their youth, all not just O.K.-looking but an oil painting, each and every one. There are many good funny-looking writers, but it’s hard to think of good funny-looking writers who get famous young. Funny-looking writers, at least funny-looking male writers, get famous late—Samuel Johnson and Sinclair Lewis and John Milton and Philip Larkin all come instantly to mind—or else they don’t get famous. They get read, but they don’t get celebrated.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/adam-gopnik-look...
Of course, he was already becoming famously reclusive by this time so maybe he's exempt from this rule.
Anyway, I love that headshot.
In startup terms it's often like "Uber for X". Consider Harry Potter. There are tons of variants around the theme of "Young person with powers goes to school". So you end up with things that are like "Harry Potter for College", "Harry Potter but Superheroes", "Harry Potter but Female lead".
None of which is marketing in the sense of placing ads, but more fundamentally about writing/making something that will sell.
Dan Brown is the quintessential example of a horrible writer who is nonetheless successful. By any measure his prose is terrible. His fact checking is nonexistent. (In the first book, the hero looks out the window of a bathroom in the Louvre towards the Eiffel Tower, and you can't see the tower from there.) ...And yet he is a good tale-spinner and excellent with "and _then_ what happened?" plot, so it works.
One very successful fiction writer pointed out to me years ago that fiction can rely on several items: voice, plot, character, setting, etc. So "being a good writer" is just an overall label that obscures those things. Ideally an author is great at all of them, but few are.
And as the same author pointed out, if you write (and want to make a living at it), you have to publish, and you have to get noticed. There's an old saying that books don't become bestsellers if they're hidden in a trunk. In the olden days when book publishers ruled the earth, an author could rely on the effectiveness of a good agent or publisher (and the luck involved in finding one). Now, the author has to learn to present herself with confidence, which does not necessarily come naturally. It becomes another relevant skill that has little to do with plot, character, etc. -- rather like the skill of getting your own butt into the chair in the first place.
That does indeed map to tech skills. Just as a thoughtful writer (and reader!) identifies the various parts of the novel, so too does a thoughtful developer consider her tech skills (idea generation, debugging, team building, whatever). And the ability to communicate/market is among them.
Sometimes the absence of an attribute encourages the reader to fill in the blanks; readers' own imagination is an important element. So if the characters are undeveloped but the worldbuilding is superb, the reader supplies what the story lacks.
It works because people read fiction for good storytelling, not for the facts within. I can't see how getting that detail wrong makes him a poor writer.
Fiction requires the willing suspension of disbelief. But you should not have to hang it until dead.
Each of us is sensitized to different things. A doctor friend watched less than 60 seconds of the original "E.R." TV show because in that minute he saw someone use an IV upside down. That made the entire show untrustworthy.
It rarely takes a lot of effort to get it right. Why not do so?
Because, contrary to your claim, it takes a lot of effort to get it right, since there are a near-infinite number of ways every individual element of description or presentation can be wrong. And it's often a high cost:benefit ratio, because most errors will only be noticed by a small share of the target audience and will only break suspension of disbelief in an even smaller share (conversely, getting it right will often strike non-experts wrong and break suspension of disbelief; verisimilitude in fiction is not actually about matching reality, but audience expectations.)
So, except on the things about which your target audience is particularly knowledgeable and concerned, accuracy may not be worth the effort put into it.
Marketing is just as, if not maybe even more, important than actually completing a saleable novel. Unfortunately like many of us, writers are usually only interested in their specialty--writing--and so find marketing difficult and tiresome. Lots of great novels have languished due to an author's disinterest in marketing. Likewise lots of mediocre or bad novels have succeeded thanks to clever and diligent marketing.
This is one of the many reasons why self-publishing will never overthrow the big publishing houses, like so many people predicted a decade ago. The fact is that going from manuscript to financial success involves lots of different skills that most authors just haven't been trained for, like cover design, copyediting, printing, and marketing. In the traditional arrangement, publishing houses do all of that non-writerly work for the author in exchange for a profit share.
One can self-publish and keep all the profits, but most writers don't understand that that also means you must also be a pro-level cover artist, copyeditor, printing expert, and marketer (or have the money to hire them yourself).
(There are other good reasons why publishing houses aren't going away anytime soon despite technologist's frenzied predictions, this is just one of them.)
My brother in law, whom I love dearly, self-published a novel. He's gone to all sorts of local fairs in order to sell it. But when I ask him for the elevator pitch, he can't give one. I've listened to him talk about it, and he can't even get ME interested in reading it.
> A GIG equals a freelancing job and thanks to technology you have ways to easily convert your skill set into a highly profitable revenue generating stream of income.
just yikes
https://twitter.com/b_cavello/status/839876313473150976/
> Here in Los Angeles it is thriving
It's thriving, huh? How about the workers themselves? Are they thriving, too? Or just the economy?