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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

It's absolutely astonishing to me how bad these books are. Not simply the weak plot, two-dimensional characters, and cliched writing, but grammatical and punctuation errors, continuity errors and logical mistakes.

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.

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Traditionally, books were sold to the relatively educated relatively literate middle classes.

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.

> I don't think it's to much to remember what kind of vehicle the characters are traveling in within the same paragraph.

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)

World Anvil is what you're looking for.

https://www.worldanvil.com

People are paying for the story, not the text. It is similar to how video games with bad graphics can sell millions of copies just because it is a good game.

But i think that the point is that it’s a bad story too.

Without a good story or a good text what is left to be good? Probably the price and the marketing.

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