Hacker News Reader

> You can self-publish, but less than 1% of the population has the savings and free time to do it right. It costs $10,000, minimum--you'll have to hire an editor, a cover designer, a formatter...

We wrote https://juliadatascience.io in a few months and have about 4k unique visitors per month (https://juliadatascience.pirsch.io/). The cover is designed for free by ourselves via a plotting library. Yes, we’re not selling millions but we have spent only 60 dollars (on the domain name).

I'm in the process of doing this free for someone I know. I got into it clueless to how any of this works and what it may cost. Reading you post $10,000 minimum and researching a few days ago on how much book editors get paid (and exactly how) slightly shocked me!

It depends on the nature of the work and also the project. You don't have to spend $10,000 if you're just looking to create a book that you can give to your friends. If you want it to have any chance of commercial or critical success, though, you're going to need a level of polish that you have to pay for.

First of all, congrats. Writing a book is difficult, and writing one that people actually enjoy reading, even more so.

Second, trade and technical publishing are completely different markets. You need a literary agent to even sit at the table in trade (or traditional) publishing. You also have no chance in hell of getting one ("querying" is a waste of time) if you don't have preexisting connections or have a trendy "hook".

Plus, the objective functions are different. If you write a technical book that only sells 10 copies per month (I'm assuming 0.25% of visitors buy, although that might be on the high side) but it improves your career, you win.

Fiction authors, on the other hand, are trying to make enough in royalties to live on. You'll get about $3 per copy in royalties. You need to be targeting a large audience to even have a chance. Large audiences mean lots of competition; other people out there can hire publicists or somehow have the connections ("querying" agents is a waste of time) to make it in trad-pub (which is deeply flawed, but they can sell books when they get their shit together). If you sell less than 1000 copies, you're done--for good. Your name now has negative value, but no publisher (or agent) is going to touch an anonymous pen name (no platform, no photo with the family and the dog) either.

In traditional publishing, you have to make it a full-time job or you will be flushed out of the system (but they don't tell you that). Most of the time isn't spent on the writing (as the quality of much of what's produced these days shows) but marketing. Your "advance" is basically your marketing budget--they can't force you, but "eating" your advance instead of spending it to market your book (the publishing house won't) is frowned upon.

In self-publishing, there are no rules, but it seems that the successful self-publishers, on average, spend even more time on self-promotion, which writers famously dislike doing.

> First of all, congrats. Writing a book is difficult, and writing one that people actually enjoy reading, even more so.

Thanks. Credits go to the co-authors and the book being in a niche.

> In self-publishing, there are no rules, but it seems that the successful self-publishers, on average, spend even more time on self-promotion, which writers famously dislike doing.

Yes. We were lucky that our book got successfully promoted by the co—authors who already had some social media followers and it got picked up in the niche that it’s aimed at including some hyperlinks.

What stops fiction authors from picking a niche as well? It’s a common strategy for people who start a business to. Expecting to earn a living from day one by writing seems very unlikely even with publishers.

> What stops fiction authors from picking a niche as well?

Trad publishing and a lack of any real discoverability.

I don't read much fiction in text format, anymore, so take Audible, for example. I have a backlog of maybe 50+ books in that format, and the store front is atrociously bad. There is a lot of what I call "pulp fiction" pushed at me - some of it is OK, most of it is garbage, good in the way that stale rice will feed you and not kill you, but only barely edible.

You are given a selection of maybe, 9-10 books, if you want to "discover" you have to do quite a bit of work, which the trad publishers don't make easy (remember, marketing budgets push particular books, not good books).

So even finding a niche is close-to-impossible for the average Joe - trad publishing pushes what sells, despite quality, and so niches simply don't form.

So you can imagine, those who are self-publishing, must do a great deal of effort to even establish that niche (website, marketing, distribution, technical knowledge for all the former), and, unlike tech authors, they aren't usually tech savy.

So I would say two things stop them in particular:

a) There is no access to manuscripts which is not filtered by nepotism, or a small crew of editors. You can't self publish and submit to github, and expect a niche following to occur.

b) Authors are human beings, who want to make a living. Understandably, they don't want to give away their hard work for free (their manuscripts), and we don't have a commonly agreed upon way to benefit them for their work, if the public decides they are good.

Tech has less of a problem here, we often work backwards. We work on something for free, give it away on github, find it gains a niche following, and experience some sort of reward down the line (hired by major tech company, doing consulting work, e.g.). We also don't have the same market forces - nearly everyone reads, almost everyone can write (well is another matter), we can solve esoteric problems, fiction writing is often formulaic and thereby constrained in topics.

We still experience the forces of trad publishers in the form of app-stores, OS or hardware vendors, but we aren't as limited as fiction writers are in the scope of our domain. Tech writing is also usually extremely ephemeral, often a just published tech book will be out of date as soon as it is available, or one or two years into its existence. Not to say that tech writing is not useful or work, just illustrating how different the problem spaces are.

It's past time to recognize this, along with blogspam, synthetically generated content, and spam as what they are ... pollution. There are varying forms of pollution. Even shows like Mythbusters and Pawn Stars are filled with their own pollution, repetitively showing the same clips three times.

Things designed to capture attention, that are not novel, new, different, useful etc, should be treated as attention polluters and dealt with by being "unsurfaced." In a world with a plethera of information, rising the cream to the top is more important than ever. Facebook is focused on removing the scum from the bottom and letting the rest float around. Google is focused on something else besides identifying and raising cream. The Youtube community is waay to focused on making shocked open mouth face thumbnails. More than ever people need tools and teams that exist to identify and promote good.

Treating attention like a muscle that can be trained and controlled, isnt enough. The world has become too toxic, that left without better tools, the people become either passive consumers of pollution OR spend a significant amount of mental effort constantly evaluating and denying pollution. Garbage in, garbage out.

> I would say that it's bad for writing, though.

What a weird take. Especially in this day and age. Where news stories are built on tweets, we're engaged in a comment section of a super niche topic, there's a proliferation of a lifetime of video uploaded to youtube every day. many lifetimes streamed live on twitch.

I don't think this impacts writing at all. I think you could argue the opposite point. The amount of people reading books is on the decline. But the amount of people reading and engaging with textual content is on the rise.

Traditional publishing is nearing end of life. What's the point?

My pov: The fate of all of these centralized institutions is the same, a mass proliferation of alternatives and as a result, less power, and ultimately, death.

The $10,000 number is a little too high.

I'd say it's easy to start spending and keep spending the bucks if you're aiming to duplicate a conventional print run from a large press, with no expense spared, but it isn't necessary.

Sites like Canva will take care of cover art, and print on demand presses like Blurb let you start with a very reasonably priced short run and will hook you up with a variety of distribution networks.

You can quite literally publish a professionally packaged book for a few hundred dollars or less.

There's also Amazon, but I've never tried it so can't comment on it.

> I would say that it's bad for writing, though. Ultimately, what he's doing exacerbates the absurdly lopsided distribution of visibility and rewards that writers experience.

How do you think famous painters and other artists work, even (or especially) the "old masters" (e.g. Rembrandt van Rijn)?