The Very Rich Indie Writer (2011)
novelr.com
novelr.com
I really don't think I'm a snob or a pedant. I happily read cliche-drenched hard science fiction and horror. I don't think it's too much to ask for subject-verb agreement and proper punctuation. I don't think it's to much to remember what kind of vehicle the characters are traveling in within the same paragraph.
I suppose it bothers me because when a writer has that little respect for their own work, I feel like I've been scammed. I've been sold a product the manufacturer knows is defective and can't be bothered to fix.
Without a good story or a good text what is left to be good? Probably the price and the marketing.
I'm reading this and all I can think of is metadata. What kind of books could people write with the right tools?
I cannot imagine G. R. R. Martin holding all the knowledge of the universe he designed on his head. I imagine he built a whole on-paper encyclopedia of the world of GoT. I suspect even with all his notes he sometimes makes mistakes and introduces inconsistencies.
Are there any world-building tools for writers? (CAW? -- computer-aided-writing... :-p)
Kindle opened up an area to the left of the bell curve, pulled in much less educated and much less literate readers, and created a new class of much less educated (etc) writers producing content for them.
These new readers are much less picky about essentials like grammar and continuity. There are also far more of them. Numerically, the literate+educated market is much smaller than the barely-graduated-high-school market.
There's also a big teen lit audience which hasn't learned enough about grammar or fiction to be horrified by writing that looks just plain incompetent to educated etc readers.
Publishing rediscovers these markets every few generations. Previous iterations were pulps, potboilers, and penny dreadfuls.
There's a solid core of wannabe writers of all ages with much lower literacy than average. It's a bizarre thing. Their FB and forum posts have the same mistakes their writing does, and their writing is full of the usual potboiler cliches - murder, torture, sex, violence, maybe some magic, lots of shouting and running around.
Some of them are doing okay commercially, so that's just where are now.
Not necessarily related to the article, but for other interested in the learning more about the self-publishing world.
Courses and training for authors on how to use Amazon ads, Facebook ads, build an email list, etc. has become incredibly easy to find. Some of the bigger names in the space are Mark Dawson, Nick Stephenson, Joanna Penn, Derek Murphy, and the 20BookTo50K community.
Authors are now essentially internet marketers who also happen to write books.
For better (anyone can get started from their bedroom with just a laptop and an internet connection) and worse (less time spent on actual writing, likely no correlation between being a good marketer and a good artist), isn’t that true of all creative endeavors nowadays?
That word 'essentially' is vague to the point of unfalsifiability - whatever I could say against that, you could say, "Yeah, but essentially.." - the word sounds objective but means 'whatever I think is the most important/central/defining feature'.
The artists/musicians/writers/etc who are good at getting work for themselves has always been very different from those who are good at the art. And the people at the top of whatever charts (pop music etc) would be the first to admit they're not the greatest.
Maybe it's mainly a different of perspective; mine is a musician/artist/writer perspective, I feel like I'm talking to people in marketing. (Who else would describe everything turning to internet marketing as a party, even metaphorically..)
[disclosure: musician/artist who's 100% failed at self-marketing]
I think you've misunderstood - "late to the party" is a common English phrase, where late is the more important word, not so much party. Imagine arriving when everyone else has already gone home. The meaning here is that promoting your work online was profitable a decade ago, but authors & musicians are only discovering that now, when it has stopped being profitable.
People here agree with you - we want quality music and quality art! But we also need to hear about it & be inspired enough to even try listening to it. A musician or author has to learn "marketing" to be able to build an audience (unless they just want to make music for themselves, and that's fine too).
Don't think of it as "marketing", think of it as trying to find & make 1,000 friends. A lot of the music I buy is because the singer is actually a friend or someone I could email with a question. Marketing can also be writing about how you make your music, or being creative in how you distribute it (like Nine Inch Nails mailing their CDs out in bags of dirt that were stuck in customs, that gets people talking about it).
All people are saying here is that writing is important (it's the product being sold!), but if a writer wants to be profitable, finding an audience who will buy it now takes much more work & effort & time than the writing itself. And that's why authors are now marketers first, writers second. A bad song that people have heard about is more likely to get bought than an excellent song no one has heard.
(And for what it's worth, it's the same for indie software developers - I only spend a small part of my time making the software, most of my time is spent on customer support & talking to customers, accounting & tax compliance, administration and marketing.)
I think you're primarily appalled at the user of the word "authors" to only refer to those people. Which I can understand, but in the context of the point being made I'd argue that's mostly just semantics.
I'm appalled at the use of the word 'authors' to only refer to those people? um. I didn't realize anyone used 'authors' only meaning that, so, no, it wasn't that. Or maybe I don't know what they were talking about, who knows.
Quick search says indie authors make up 40% of kindle sales.
Couldn't find how many share those numbers but I would assume it's definitely way more than what it was in 2011!
E.g. Worm: https://parahumans.wordpress.com/
I've heard stories that the ebook goldrush has ended. Does anybody have firsthand knowledge?
I know that romance novels always do well generally, or I've read that. Thoughts?
Well, that's what I was curious about. Has the investment/profit ration gone way up? If so, that sucks for Amazon ebook publishers.
But now I think it could just as well be a way for Amazon to trick more people into contributing to their platform, of course until they find out that they can hardly make a living that way.