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Comment by throwuwu | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but do any authors apply the same techniques promoted by software developers for honing their craft? e.g. instead of trying to write the next great American novel you focus on writing a lot of short stories and then analyze them for market fit and expand on the ones that have legs?

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Actually, one software-developer-turned-writer did something close. Check out Chris Fox's book "Write to Market" on Amazon. He sat down and analyzed sales figures for different book genres on Amazon then chose a genre where he thought he could squeeze onto the top ten bestseller list. He's been cranking out books for years and selling pretty well. If you check his author page, you'll see he has quite a few titles out.

I think writers as a whole are far less inclined to concern themselves with market fit than many developers are.

Short stories haven’t historically been very lucrative relative to longer works. Although there were some genres, eg SF, where they were a natural entry point.

Maybe they should be? I suggested short stories as a way to practice and test the waters since they would work well with social media and aggregator sites, people are willing to read a short story they find on reddit or hn but much less likely to read a whole book. Keeping your “demos” short also requires less commitment and takes less time so you can do more of them. The idea isn’t to earn money from short stories but to do analytics on them in order to decide which to turn into a novel.

You can't take every good short story and turn it into a novel, and not every novel could be meaningfully reduced to a short story. Concepts that work in one format won't work in another.

Probably true but if you have several popular short stories done in a certain style or genre then it’s a good bet that a novel in the same will be more popular. They’re good practice too, the article mentions that a lot of the respondents have only published a single book.

Agreed

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