Writing as Microcosm, Part One: Publish and Perish | Hacker News Reader

Writing as Microcosm, Part One: Publish and Perish

ecosophia.net

35 pointsAmbolia8 comments

I self-publish my novels, and I've had steady if very low sales year after year (certainly not enough to live on) and I have friends who have chosen the small independent publisher route and have not been happy with the results at all.

One of my friends sold ten (!!) novels in the 1990s to a small publisher, but they sold in low volume and never earned out their advance. When her publisher dropped her, she wanted to republish them herself. The cost to buy back the rights exceeded all the money she had ever earned from the publisher for the entire series.

I guess what I'm saying is this: anecdotes are not data. Some will find success with the big publishers; many will not. Some will find success self-publishing; many will not. And some will find success with small publishers, but again... this is rare.

Success in writing is just really really hard. No matter what route you choose, luck will play a significant factor. The quality of your writing will also play a big role. Writing really well, exceptionally well, is probably the hardest thing of all.

The big publisher business model is the "Disney Vault" model - i.e. own the backlog, but be really stingy about selling it so you can control the narrative about the work. The goal is to get as many new works as possible published, then kill them early so that dedicated fans will stew about it.

Sure, not everyone actually believes this. The MBAs surely are just calculating how much they lost off the last print run and deciding to mothball the book. But they can't have writers clawing back rights, because then that makes them competition, and the pesky thing about writers is that they'll invest their own money into rescuing a failing work. What if they win? We can't have that.

Ergo, the large publishers become a machine that eats literature so nobody can have it.

I don't agree with this. It's well known the big publisher model is trying to predict the market based on an imperfect set of numbers of past sales. Debuts are calculated in their worth by what comparative titles they might sell as much as (in comparison: look at the tags #sffpit, #pitmad, etc. on twitter. See how authors are going <TITLE> X <TITLE>? This is authors trying to show that their work is comparable to these other profitable titles in an effort to imply this book will make just as much money.).

Once you publish a debut, how much you sell of it will directly correlate with how much you're offered in your next work. It doesn't matter if the publishing company is intentionally underfunding your launch and doesn't put resources to push your book; if you flop they offer less advances. They are more than happy to let go of work if it doesn't sell enough; its common for mid-trilogies to be cut at book 2 if book 1 doesn't sell enough and then the writer is forced to figure out what to do with a trilogy that's been abandoned by the publisher. [Additionally its common for authors to be cut after their first trilogy: look at what happened to K.S. Villoso, whose first trilogy was launched during COVID and she was cut anyways, even though a kickstarter for her next book was kickstarted for over 20,000CAD including hardcover, softcover, and audiobook productions. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ksvilloso/audiobook-for... ]

I take issue with the introduction. Nearly all of the ails of the world he mentions are nothing new. As an example, managers have been complaining about workers "not wanting to work" since industrial labor began.

Paul Fairies tweets will make you realize that not much has changed with people complaining in the past 100 years. https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1549527748950892544?lang...

Everything he says about publishers and middlemen might be true, but it is not the reason why aspiring novelists don't make money. They don't make money because the supply of novels (including unpublished and self-published novels) is far greater than the demand. Furthermore, most unpublished and self-published novels are simply not very good.

Note that "bad" here need not mean they're poorly written, though that's often true. It might just mean that they don't have anything that would make someone choose to read them instead of doing something else.

Rewards are distributed to authors in a steep Pareto distribution partly because that is the distribution of talent, and partly because of the nature of the market: there is social value in reading the same books that other people have read. Either way the number of authors sitting near the decision boundary between "making it" and "not making it" is pretty small.

> Rewards are distributed to authors in a steep Pareto distribution because that is the distribution of talent.

I wouldn't be so quick to relate rewards to talent. Publishing has network externalities. In a given social circle where everybody knows everybody, reader number x+1 has x people they can talk to about the novel, feels x amount of pressure not to miss out, etc. -- What distinguishes an effective publisher from an ineffective one is mostly the ability to set the wheel in motion and get the hype going.

Stats showing low average earnings for authors is somewhat skewed by nonfiction authors. suspense, fantasy, young adult fiction can pay well.Non-fiction books are more numerous and niche compared to fiction books, which are typically intended for large audiences.

This isn't quite correct about which genres make the most. The biggest money makers are Romance/Erotica and Crime/Mystery by an extremely wide margin.

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