Why are debut novels failing to launch?
esquire.com
esquire.com
The hell now is unless you get friends and family or an agency involved to push it and market it it will languish on the 500th page of any Amazon search forever. Oh and did I say that there are thousands of books a day released and there is nowhere you can self-promote stuff if you do not have social media, HN and reddit will also immediately block self-promotion even if relevant to the audience (I guess I can understand why). I guess the only ones destined to read it are the AI training algorithms.
Still it wont stop me writing, having a book published, even if nobody reads it is very self-satisfying and leaves something of you in this world when you are gone.
So, a waste of time and money? That's not how I feel about it at all. The creative process was illuminating. And as you say, it's satisfying to think that there's now a physical artifact of my mind that's longer and deeper than any other work I've produced, and it will probably stay for a while on somebody's bookshelf after I'm gone.
Although, it's gradually shifted into over-reliance on the linkrot of spinning rust, floating electrons, and burning transistors such that used and new bookstores and libraries are endangered species. Perhaps another cycle similar to the early medieval period maybe gradually happening as today's "Romes" decline in slow-motion, accelerated by climate change decline unless and until we save ourselves through economic and ecological limits.
So too is DNA in children. You don’t get to choose the entirety of the message but you do get to choose the half of the lottery that they must receive.
And that message is likely to far outlive any message in any dead tree or electronic book.
Berkeley News: Bottlenecks that reduced genetic diversity were common throughout human history (https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/06/23/bottlenecks-that-reduce...)
Perhaps the assertion is true in the sense that an average, mediocre person will have a better chance of having his genetic line survive than writing something that immoratalises him in history, like Newton or Pascal. But But if one has the ability, the latter might be a safer option...
also no one really chooses their offspring's 'half of the lottery', it's an accident of nature -- we only get to choose whether or not we try to propagate our own skew into the lottery roll.
and to be very real here for a second, 99% of sexual interaction has nothing to do with genetic time-traveling bottle-messages, and just as few people really give a thought about the genetic combinations resulting from their actions.
they just like to orgasm -- it's just not as poetic a concept to talk about.
In modern societies, most people choose their mating partner. That’s the lottery half that I am referring to.
Of course no one chooses specifically which half of each mate goes into the child. That would be absurd.
> and to be very real here for a second, 99% of sexual interaction has nothing to do with genetic time-traveling bottle-messages, and just as few people really give a thought about the genetic combinations resulting from their actions.
For the individual sure “it’s just deliberate sex” but for the genome, transmission of the message into the distant future is all there is.
Just look around you, you will likely see and hear more evidence of those billion year long message transmissions than anything else.
We still read Shakespeare and listen to Mozart.
I distinctly know this phrase is part of song's lyrics - but can't think of the name.
He's long since passed, and I have a stack of 20 or so left (many were destroyed) from "inheritance". Our current strategy is to take one with us to every hotel/b&b we stay in, most of which have a library shelf, and leave one there. Maybe they never get read, maybe they do. Feels better than sending them to burn!
Reminds me of that Groucho Marx quote: "From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it." :)
HN doesn't block self promotion if it comes up as part of a conversation, e.g. "I'm having this technical problem." Re: "I wrote a book about how to solve that!"
Also you can at least put a link in your profile!
Reddit has tons of self promos all the time, it just depends on the subreddit. Also it helps if you're a long time active member in a community.
I am not a prolific poster, maybe 2 or 3 a year, and appreciate HN efforts to keep the spam out, so I will give it another shot on my next original article using the "Show HN" option.
Ironically my last submission that was rejected was exactly about this https://rodyne.com/?p=1400
I suspect the suggestion was made due to you talking about books originally, which (given a sample chapter) are the one stated exception to written materials being out of scope for Show HN.
After that if I posted a link to an article I wrote it got shadow blocked (at least for a bit) the thing is I only post things here that I think fit the site, which is about 10% of what I write, and I am a relatively prolific poster.
Looking at my current submissions - in the last 30 submissions one was to an article I wrote. Why? Because I thought it fit HN, just like all the other things I post I think fit HN.
Personally I think that's being a relatively well-behaved user of the site, but evidently not.
Perhaps take it as constructive criticism on your writing, rather than blaming the poor reception on the community.
>After that if I posted a link to an article I wrote it got shadow blocked
and you responded
>If your post was flagged
please take that as constructive criticism (explanation if you don't get my point: I did not use the word "flagged")
it seems that a lot of my submissions over the past 7 months to my own stuff were with Medium's link shortener and that gets banned, mainly because if you follow a link from Medium's stats the url is the shortened form.
I noticed you mentioned Medium, perhaps your problems also stem from the same source?
You see this a lot in r/gaming where people post clips of games all day, but if you mention that you made the game in the clip, you get inane comments about how it's an ad.
That said, books are hard to market no matter what. There's no visual hook like you have with games and movies. You can't just guerilla-shill it like a SaaS.
I'm imagining a lone genius toiling away at a novel and dying in obscurity, with his work gaining recognition only after his death, à la Herman Melville, except in this future the writing eventually enters the canon by deeply impressing not human but machine readers.
Point being, had Melville continued writing south pacific adventure novels he probably would not be remembered today but might have died a well-off man.
Melville bought many things with debt: his farm, his rare books, clothes. I don’t find it unimaginable that he paid for the grand tour with debt spending either.
For example, in the 1920's they also extrapolated their current tech into the future. It showed people walking around with phonographs strapped to their hips, having just been dropped off by their personal blimps. Predicting the future is hard, but extrapolating the current state forwards is almost always wrong, and shows a huge failure of imagination.
Full disclaimer: I believe that so much that (as a fellow beginner writer) I created a “newsletter” platform more suited for fiction writers to slowly form an audience of readers owning the mailing list.
https://writer.confabulists.com
You still have to keep writing constantly (essays, short stories, chapters of a novel, or even some communication of what you are doing) but it feels more natural for writers to write than to keep posting cute pictures, hot takes or creative short videos.
Also, I added the concept of “books” in my platform, so new subscribers to your newsletter start reading your old stuff (not only your future posts).
Having a newsletter also is very satisfying that you keep some contact with people that like what you write, no matter how few they are.
That means constantly engaging their target audience, setting up booths at conventions, posting interesting content on social media, etc.
Writing for yourself is a wonderful thing. But if you do want more people to read your work, I would recommend scrapping the idea of avoiding social media and treat your social media presence like a business treats social media. For you it’s not a toxic doomscrolling app, it’s an app you use for your business during your business hours to market your business.
Let’s be real, so far you’ve basically talked about how you’ve been unwilling to do anything besides write.
> The hell now is unless you get friends and family or an agency involved to push it and market it it will languish on the 500th page of any Amazon search forever.
Sure, that will be the case if you just click publish and sit back doing nothing hoping for some sales. I sure hope my family and friends market my book for me, because I don’t want to be in social media!
And, hey, that’s fine, not everyone wants their hobby to be some kind of side business. But I sense a bit of disappointment in your comment almost like you tried everything and still haven’t gained traction, which doesn’t seem to be the case.
I hope I did not make it sound like I was disappointed; I certainly am not, I got to play with 2048-bit graphene processors, zero-point energy and wormholes for a short while, and I am happily writing my second novel as we speak.
Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.
but if you make a blog post and you make a regular submission and those blog posts of yours get automatically pulled out...then what?
But, yes, publishing a book that you think will be a bestseller with or without exceptional promotion is probably a lost hope.
I know a very successful writer of thrillers and he said that the technical content of the books would have to be completely stripped down to maybe what's contained in a few chapters of my book in order for it to be mainstream accessible.
The second novel draft is done and is being edited. It's about AI, Mars Colonization, and how humanity gets past the limits to growth and to the next stage of human history past the one we're currently in and takes place in the same universe as the first book. Here's an excerpt that describes a particularly soft and comfy AI doom: https://open.substack.com/pub/botsfordism/p/the-bot
Feels like there is a massive imbalance between quality outlets where eyeballs exist and the volume of people /content/businesses vying for attention at those outlets.
And, the idea that we need to all become influencers of some scale and amass our own audiences to get the word out about something is not practical or possible. Just creates a long-tail for the platforms. This leaves a relative handful of platforms and influencers through which everyone must flow.
It produces an all-or-nothing effect, with tons of failures and a few outsized winners (relatively).
I've solved this before, but things weren't as concentrated then. And, ironically, my latest business is intended to solve this for others. But, this startup phase is a beast.
>It produces an all-or-nothing effect, with tons of failures and a few outsized winners (relatively
The “it” you are referring to here is math, or just the way networks work when the barrier to entry is zero and the speed of information flowing through networks is almost instant.
Lots of things in nature follow a power law distribution because of it.
These are more observations around the dynamics of the current state. I think we all understand network effects and other factors involved in where we are.
But, there's no natural law that prescribes precisely the current state of affairs.
It's almost as if you've never bootstrapped a business, self-published a book, or similar.
If you have, and had the resources to use paid ads to reach your desired scale, then congratulations. I think that does indeed entitle you to be smug and dismissive with everyone else.
What I'm reading is someone wants all the upsides with none of the downsides. No one is entitled to an audience, especially that of another, just because they've produced some good or service. Participating in capitalism requires either time or money, usually both, and even then you're not guaranteed success.
Yes.
No one is entitled to an audience... Participating in capitalism requires either time or money...and even then you're not guaranteed success.
Wow. It's like I'm talking with a real, live Rockefeller! My comment was exactly about requesting sympathy and demanding government mandates to buy my products, and those of every bootstrapper.
But, your brilliant, esoteric insight regarding the true nature of capitalism has shown me the light. Thank you!
I said none of the things you want me to "address".
Maybe re-read what I actually wrote and respond to that, if it's really a discussion you're seeking.
I pointed out that you don't get an audience for free, and that seems to have further upset you.
Doesn't look like the issue is on my end. You could have used the opportunity to correct my understanding, instead you decided to be rude.
Right. Clutch your pearls now. People only pointed out some things and the bad man got so snippy.
What 'someone else' actually said was "maybe we should invent ads, so that we don't all have to become influencers".
Clearly a snarky comment, which I accurately identified as smug and dismissive.
>I pointed out that you don't get an audience for free, and that seems to have further upset you.
There's that "pointed out" phrase again. Yes, you "pointed out" a lot and your comments were just as obnoxious, dismissive and condescending, while imputing unstated sentiments in bad faith.
If it's really a discussion and understanding you want, then re-read your comments and see if you can figure out where you went wrong.
But, I feel no obligation to teach you how to talk to people.
Good luck.
That's just as well since it seems you don't actually know how to. Must be tough to be an influencer with a mouth like that.
You know well that you commented in bad faith on my original reply TO SOMEONE ELSE in agreement with him/her. I was interested in a discussion around the real challenges involved in self-publishing, starting a business and similar. These are challenges expressed by the OP, and which virtually everyone faces.
Then, you jumped in and, instead of engaging with the substance of my comment, decided that you'd make yourself look "smart" by dismissively condescending to me with a snarky comment. It was unwarranted and is up there for anyone to read, as much as you'd like to pretend that it's not.
So, I called you on it. As I said then, it was smug and dismissive. And, I'll add here, rude and trollish. Yes, you look bad. And, if you don't like looking bad, then the right thing to do is to own-up and apologize instead of doubling-down. The latter is the behavior of a spoiled child.
You want to offer up advertising as an alternative, then just say "What about ads?" or similar. Could've been an interesting discussion around the challenges there for startups. Instead, you snark, "someone should invent ads...blah, blah...".
It's not too late to acknowledge that you were wrong. But, if you truly don't see the difference, then I'll repeat here for you: it's not my responsibility to teach you how to talk to people.
So, I'm done replying to this silliness. If you want to accept responsibility and apologize, then I'll accept your apology. Otherwise, no need to waste your time.
there is nowhere you can self-promote stuff if you do not have social media
They forgot the last bit.
I’m okay with getting better at marketing, and allowing for the possibility of lack of product market fit.
I’m less okay with believing I have to become Extremely Online to “build my personal brand,” just to have a chance at launching things successfully.
That’s some bullshit that they peddle to justify their own addiction. It’s learned helplessness to platforms.
"Hey, look at a thing I made!" is a lot more interesting than a lot of the other drivel that gets posted.
A lot of forums and chat servers have similar rules for the same reason.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work very well on Reddit, since the smarter advertisers and astro turfers have figured out how to manipulate the system well enough that people don't suspect they're advertising.
Add this to how certain types of low effort content get a ton of upvotes anyway, and how popular creators don't need to care since their fans will promote them anyway, and well, the end result is less "participate in the community" and more "don't be unpopular or bad at pretending to be someone else"
Of course spam is unwelcome everywhere. Don't overdo it and don't be deceptive about it, and you'll be fine.
These posts are almost always of low quality and designed to hook gullible people, and much of it driven either by influencers or sellers of snake oil. It's not just legit promotional posts, either; there's plenty of astroturfing trying to post recommendations for products etc. Even so I bet a lot goes under my radar.
In a very few cases I have allowed a promotional post when I have been convinced that it was for a good purpose. I support genuine entrepreneurs who look like they're building something of value. But those are extremely rare on Reddit. All of Reddit is rather bleak in that regard. So much content stealing, influencing, astroturfing, link farming, and outright spam.
But reddit something else entirely. It so clear that all of the major subs are constantly being manipulated by firms working PR for large companies, but the second someone posts "I made this!" people get up-in-arms.
Of course who really knows how much of reddit is even real people anymore.
What people in these comments (and really, most places on the internet) fail to grasp is the role of the publisher as a curator and editor.
Unlike your friends, the editor is not your friend. They don't have a stake in your ego, they won't sugarcoat it beyond the veneer of professionalism. You need an editor who is not your friend, too say no to you. No, you shouldn't start your book with this cliché. No, you shouldn't have your character meandering aimlessly. No, you shouldn't use whedonisms. Exceptions apply, of course, but when the editor is your publisher and not your friend, "shouldn't" becomes "can't". Usually that involves saying no to 99% of manuscripts coming through the door. And this is how an okay story becomes a great book. Your editor, having read more books than you in their segment, knows the difference... usually.
All manuscripts are at least a little bit bad, some books aren't. As you can tell, I'm no fan of self-publishing, I just don't believe anyone can be objective enough with their own baby.
Now... I've read my fair share of bad books, especially recently. The publisher/editor is to blame 95% of the time. My theory is that being rigorous takes time, which is always in short supply, and skill. I believe people tend not to stay in the same role for too long anymore, lest they lose out financially. Which is totally fair, but skill (and the chutzpah to say "no") takes a while to develop, years really. And no one has "years" for anything.
Except, of course, all the people in the industry who don't mind being poor. And people making bank, I suppose, but these are so few as to be statistically insignificant.
It is true. I would like to qualify it by saying "At the beginning, the editor is not your friend." A friendship, even very strong one, can be developed along the time, based on mutual respect and appreciation, temperament match, etc. Even then, a good editor will still be professional and be honest when they edit the writer's draft.
A good book may not be a "successful" book, especially in literary fiction, since the post talks about novels. The reverse can be true as well. It happens often that the editor tells the author it is a good book, and the publisher allocates resources to marketing it, schedules book tours, etc. while at the same time both the writer's agent and the editor/publisher expect the book may sell only ~2,000 copies. The target audience are expected to be other writers, a subset of avid literature readers, etc. They don't expect it will earn back the advance paid to the author. The publishers have portfolios and long term visions. Of course, this doesn't apply to small publishers, most of which cannot afford it.
It's funny because I expect most of us do it for the art, but artistic merit doesn't pay the rent. This is why many smaller publishers have "locomotives" that are guaranteed to sell so they can publish "good" literature books that won't sell. Don't know about the big American ones, seeing as they're flooding the market I assume they're just playing a numbers game, let God sort them out...
It’s even true in tech. Most VC backed companies fail but the few mega-successes fund the entire ecosystem.
I feel like there's a difference between a company and an industry, though in the end I suppose it's all a sort of natural selection. Good (or rather, "fit") authors publish second books and third books, while good companies get to exist into second, third years etc.
It’s like letting someone tech savvy but not partial try the UI/UX of an app. They’ll see things you don’t and get confused in places you don’t.
IMO discovery of what is truly high quality is still an unsolved problem. Seems like recommendation systems generally just recommend things that are already popular. For someone that has zero following, but an interesting creative product, there's not much they can do. You're kind of relying on either "going viral" or hoping that someone with a lot of followers takes notice of your work and draws other people in.
It's frustrating if people don't see that this is almost always a manufactured problem, not some an inevitable outcome of simply having more choices. Platforms want to disable the ability for users to differentiate between organic, self-directed discovery vs advertised or promoted content.
Discovery needs to be just good enough so that users won't leave, and if there's no alternatives in a space, even that doesn't matter. Having poor discoverability directly increases engagement and nevermind that engagement is high because doing simple things is painful, the take-away for your stock-price here will just be that you're explicitly user hostile and no one leaves, so you must have a captive audience.
Every notice how when you're looking for something obscure, you can only find something popular, and when you're looking for something popular, you can only find something obscure? It's not random, it's just the platform working out what profits the company the most.
In the case of streaming content for platforms like spotify/amazon prime, some content is cheaper for them to offer. The perfect user is someone who wants low-royalty or completely unencumbered content, because it's cheaper for the platform to license, but the end-user sees the same number of ads for the same length of time. The average user is also someone who can be tricked into being a perfect customer. Suppose the user is searching for RoboCop, and it is missing from the catalog. Terminator might be a better recc, but why not just offer the user some shitty CyborgCopIII instead, just to cut your costs and bump your profits, just in case the user is a sucker? If the user is not a sucker.. great, they'll type more searches, engagement is up, and platforms win either way.
Think about how much more data FAANG has than say, GoodReads. GoodReads is small enough that people just rank stuff and it works fine, and people curate lists, and you find what you like that way. It's not working because GoodReads has AI super-powers, it's working because they don't sabotage it away from working.
It's not just that platforms don't want you to know if what they're showing you is an ad or an organic result/recommendation, if they made it easy for people to find what they want then companies wouldn't have to pay them for prominent placement in the first place.
There's still a real problem (that AI will only make worse) with really good things being drowned out by a sea of garbage, but people wanting to act as gatekeepers (and collect tolls) only make the problem worse.
The problem isn’t manufactured or conspiratorial, it’s just baked into sorting so much content on so few metrics. And needing to account for what the user is currently in the mood for something specific, something generic.
Edit: I realize I misread your comment. Disregard!
Meanwhile if I read a Richard Brody review I get a sense of whether a movie might be worth watching—even though we don't have identical taste, I've learned a lot about his, and now I know how his taste translates into reviews. Curation is totally the name of the game now.
Countless other pieces of art are never noticed by anyone, countless talented artists are forced into day jobs and eventually abandon art -- no matter how high quality (for whatever definition of "quality" you prefer) -- simply because they were not able to catch the attention of one of the elite critics, for a variety of reasons, almost all unrelated to the quality of the work itself.
But it may be a reflection of the modern media landscape but I don't have critics that I gravitate to any longer. Admittedly I couldn't even name the critics at publications I actually subscribe to.
For example I've spent a huge amount of time playing a game that's over a decade old. And I'm reading a book that's from 1952.
Some of the greatest, most interesting books I've ever read are thousands of years old.
I have read enough great stuff from picking up a book from 300 BCE or so and I've seen enough BS ghost written flavor of the month non-fiction to know it's good enough heuristics to suggest it in this forum.
Time is a good filter in the first way, which makes it a good filter. Because a filter which doesn't substantially do the first of these things isn't actually filtering: the null filter filters none of what you do want, by failing to reduce the data stream in any way.
Sometimes nobody really tries. It doesn't help that there are a lot of perverse incentive systems out there. I'm approaching this from mostly an Internet-centric perspective:
One observation I've made is that any story I first see by advertising is probably bad, even if I later see it elsewhere - if it were actually any good, I would've seen it in one of the non-advertising-based mechanisms first. But sites have a strong incentive to promote advertisements to the detriment of quality (and the inaccuracy of "hot" lists).
The "zero-initial-following" problem can be solved by showing each story to a random small subset of active readers (since, as big as the supply of crappy stories is, the demand is always higher). This should be smeared across time-of-day, rather than having a "new" queue subject to gamification. There also needs to be a quick "I'm not interested" feedback, with reasons including "breaks site rules", "bad story", "bad grammar", "bad initial hook", "bad continuation", "I just don't like it" (featured prominently), and "this story is badly tagged" (because both positive and negative tag searches should be the primary way of using any reading site).
Some particular ways that tagging implementations can fail:
* categories and tags are different things, thus a tag is often missing
* no tagging for things like "this a fanfiction of", "this is translated from", "author is not a native English speaker", ...
* tag names are ambiguous, meaning completely different things in different contexts
* tag names are contextual, providing a different shade of meaning depending on other tags
* tags are not prominently displayed when actually looking at a work
* user-made tags are permitted, so duplicates and typos are common
* user-made tags are not permitted and essential tags that people wish to search for (or hide) are missing
* hierarchial (DAG, not tree) tags are not supported, thus a tag is often missing (or if present the list takes up too much space)
* no way to specify tag degree (does this just show up in the background, or is it the focus of the work?)
* number of tags is artificially limited to a very small number
* tag is applied but applicable content doesn't appear yet (mostly relevant for when published serially)
Obviously with outright malicious actors, simply fixing these won't fix everything, but they are absolutely needed to function at scale for the honest actors.
A similar observation I've been finding lately is that if something is highly rated by critics and lowly rated by audiences, it probably sucks
I think the current batch of book/movie/game critics out there writing reviews are largely out of touch with what many people enjoy. They don't write useful reviews for consumers anymore
There's always accusations of review bombing being the culprit of such skewed scores, but even after sites claim they've culled all of the bad faith reviews, the ratio almost always still exists
Perhaps there is less skew today given that film critics are probably less a high-brow big city newspaper thing overall. But certainly I wouldn't expect the average Friday night young cinema-goer to have the same tastes as the film critic for the New York Times.
From my readings of many film reviews lately, a lot of them really talk down towards people who are not as into cinema as they are
Most bad reviews are well-deserved, even if they make the author feel bad. In particular, "people shouldn't downvote if they've only read 5 chapters" is an invalid complaint - as an author, your duty is to write a strong start! (I suspect some of these are actually tagging/description failures, but that's also the author's responsibility)
One very notable example of this is Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. He's even just announced that he managed to sell publishing only rights to Ace for large scale distribution which to my knowledge is a first (from authors that started on Royal Road).
https://x.com/mattdinniman/status/1780998536529883622
Also, I'd highly recommend reading Dungeon Crawler Carl if you enjoy anything close to Douglas Adams-esque comedic sci-fi. Its definitely trends a lot more "adult" than Douglas Adams, but that's about as close as I can think of off the top of my head for comparison. And I'd very much recommend the Audible versions narrated by Jeff Hayes for anyone that does audio books. The Sound Booth Theater production is also good but I'd only recommend that if you're doing a re-listen.
* there's a significant conflict between "this is a place to read stories" and "this is just a place to advertise for Amazon"
* the effective site rules are unwritten and quite arbitrary (one unwritten rule: you are not allowed to say anything positive about real-ish religions, only negative things)
* way too much pedophilia, including in site-promoted stories. Unlike religion, it's clearly not something they put effort into removing.
Of-course readers have also gotten smarter, many now leaving 0.5 stars for all new stories. If they are banned later, you can still adjust your rating. So now many new stories get a surge of 0.5 ratings.
Royalroad is not a place you go to find objectively good stories, it's the place you go to enjoy your particular blend of delicious trash because in the end you'd rather read chapter 1600 of the long running braindead litrpg than you would whatever just won the hugo's.
Not a pitch. Just my experience.
The industry indeed needs J. K. Rowling, Sally Rooney, Colleen Hoover, celebrity biographies & memoirs etc. to survive. Good books will find their way to be published, and get discovered, maybe dozens of years later. I happened to read a novel by an English author published ~100 years ago. It is a good book, IMO. The publishing house had only one person. The entire office was one room in his apartment.
Purity, All Dogs Are Blue, and Lightning Rods are next up for me, not sure which one will grab me, probably Purity.
I learned about Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) during these events. Most people think what they've written is interesting, or unique, or worth publishing. However, publishers have to make money, so they curate very carefully, edit the hell out of the raw manuscripts, and then only actually commit to publishing what they think there's a market for. Nearly zero of the random manuscripts that are sent in by unknown authors ever make it into this funnel, and the honest reason why, at least from what I have personally read, was because most of it was completely terrible -- in as many ways as you can think of terrible to be.
Three other thoughts:
1. The great videogame crash of '83 happened because the dominant platforms at the time did not have a lockdown on curation, so anybody and everybody flooded the market with garbage. Consumers decided it was better to not buy anything than to chance spending the equivalent of nearly $200 in 2024 money and get trash.
2. A few breakout, self-published, authors are making it through the piles of junk, but they are few and far between. Andy Weir (the Martian) and Hugh Howey (Silo) come to mind. The "secondary" film and TV markets are so starved for good new ideas that their works are getting converted into non-print media almost as fast as they can get sets built and costumes sewed.
3. There's probably a new market for solid, well known, curators. People who make money sifting the dreck to find the Weirs and Howeys and surfacing the cream to the top. The creators are self-publishing, and the publishing houses aren't doing well these days. But the curation function is still wildly important and finding the right way to do it, and the business model around it, is perhaps the future.
There's a long list of very good scifi that has never been made into a movie.
Instead, we get the Mandalorean which rehashes every spaghetti western trope. The character even sounds like Clint Eastwood. It has the hero breaking in the horse while the old ranch hand leans on the corral fence, for example. And training the village to defend itself from the bandits. And so on.
Mandalorean has one episode that’s about 50% The Wages of Fear and I bet the other main element of accidentally finding some officer you’d really like to get revenge on but while in the middle of committing another crime is also from something else, but I’m not sure what. The AT-ST episode is basically a Conan the Barbarian story plus any of a few westerns (the training-the-town-folk thing—even the woman who’s an uncannily good shot for no reason ever explained is lifted from westerns). That show got how to do Star Wars.
More broadly, yes, more original (at least, not based on an existing visual-media franchise) sci fi movies would be cool to see.
The list goes on.
The Mote in God's Eye would make a fine miniseries.
The fundamental truth of creative work is that if you make something genuinely great, you'll probably have a smooth path to success. I see a lot of anxiety among indie game developers about the sheer quantity of games being released, and yes bluntly, if you make a merely average game nobody will care. Make something great.
Hindsight Bias is blinding here. Judge whether something is "genuinely great" before you know its success or failure, and then we'll see if that's a true statement.
I'd have to chalk it up to a lack of vision (I don't genuinely believe someone grows up wanting to make a roguelike deckbuilder), but then that begs the question of why are they in game dev in the first place.
The latter are few and far between, but they have always been.
Can a game historian count the Doom clones that showed up after Doom? Does anyone remember any of them with the exception of Hexen and Rise of the Triad?
Not necessarily, I've seen plenty of good or great works go unnoticed. In movies and gaming that's often a timing thing (releasing too near popular works, releasing at a bad time of year, releasing on a console that's on its last legs, etc), but for other types of works it can simply be a failure to market said work at all, or the subject not immediately catching people's attention.
Even if you get a publisher, great authors sometimes sell only a handful of copies. You find amazing books on goodreads by award winning authors with only 5 reviews. And that’s people who can get their novels manuscript even looked at by an editor. Lots of self published authors end up with 0-1 reviews
How do you stand out in that swamp?
"MUST have 5 years experience in [tech that came out 9 months ago]"
Webnovels on sites like royalroad.com monetised via patreon and then published on Kindle Unlimited & Audible offer a different publishing model to that of traditional books and one that works really well for the right genres.
The audience that reads them is reading purely for entertainment, has vastly lower standards and is willing to directly support their favourite authors to the point where the most successful authors who started 5 years or so ago are now millionaires.
But this is mostly an anathema to the traditional publishing industry and for the most part they're pretending it doesn't exist because they literally cannot compete with it in the niches it now dominates.
Instead I get the sense that the people writing these "debut novels" are really looking for fame/acceptance within the kind of social circles that value "great intellectual novels".
Readers have become too socially poor to risk investing in ideas that could compromise their cultivated homogeny, and it's just too hard to care with any sincerity what someone brand safe for public radio writes about. I guess I'm saying novels would sell better if the people selling and publishing them produced something people actually wanted instead of churning out what they are being told by their granting agencies is good for their readers.
Also, writing a book can take years. Writing for what people want today is how you fail, as people will have moved on in the five years it took to write, edit, sell and produce the work. If you can reliably predict market desires in 5 years time, you have a lot more than a best selling novel on your hands.
> Write something someone wants.
i don't think we should apply a VC-isms to art. so many great pieces of art were overlooked because the market didn't want them at the time, only to be discovered and appreciated later.
Verdict: there just isn't a market for serious fiction like there was 70 years ago, say. J.D. Salinger considered himself a failure until he finally got a story in The New Yorker. How many writers dream of that nowadays?
Then there's Esquire, of course : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/376430.Esquire_s_Big_Boo...
The urges that led people to read fiction then are now directed to TV, movies, and serials. We could decry it, but that's how it is.
The thing I decry is the worthless idle attention suck of “social” media. That competes with all forms of quality art and content. Instead of watching good movies or listening to music or reading a book people are scrolling TikTok, Xhitter, Instagram, etc.
I listen to a specific sub-sub genre of metal that gets no mainstream (even from "big" metal publications) attention. The best way I have found to come across new albums is to subscribe to really small labels that specialize in the genre of music.
Many of these labels are hobbies or part time jobs for their owners, but I find they do an excellent job curating music I'll be interested in.
The problem, is often subscribing and keeping up to date with these labels is really tough. Fortunately, for music, we have bandcamp.com which does a pretty decent job of this (although it takes some additional work [1]). If bandcamp.com went away, I don't know how I'd discover most of my new music.
Does the book scene have anything similar?
[1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...
But it sells almost as well as a decent book, and you don’t have to spend as much promoting it, so it’s still what they want.
We rarely see or interact with truly below mediocre medium. Or filter it very quickly. Looking for example at Steam and your nth asset flip with poor 3d graphics and so on.
Likr setting up a store, making a branded product, Ie making beer from the wheat, or social media on farm life.
The tragedy is all the time required not farming.
In the case of books, to first debut, you must already be successful or perish. Even getting accepted to a publishing house requires insane stats, and they're just beginning.
I was intending to write the book anyway but wasn't planning on going through a publisher.
Didn't make any material money but it was very useful professionally.
New books are not just competing with all of the books that were written in the past, e.g. East of Eden, but also YouTube, podcasts, movies, computer and mobile game - and the total supply of those increases every year.
But I'm not sure how widespread/true that ever was. Authors went on book tours and TV shows all the time to promote their writing. I'm not sure how common the pseudonymous/reclusive successful author ever was.
All the spam and hustlecrap is ironically making good works more special but at the same time harder to find.
I’d say first and foremost: don’t make art unless it’s burning a hole in your head and it must be made. That helps solve the overproduction problem. As for the spam and junk problem that’s a discovery issue.
I’ve actually gotten back into reading lately. Good new stuff is as hard to find as it is to get it found. Of course like most readers I have a backlog… hence the overproduction problem.
I have an app that does your book recommending idea but with Wikipedia articles. I am trying to release it soon, once I get past my perfectionism, if anyone is interested. Expanding to non Wikipedia sources is an eventual goal.
I basically never want to read chatbot output for pleasure. I want to read primary sources.
On the other hand, do you really want to get stuck in a bubble and only read the same thing that you've read before and nothing new?
If it's bad when Facebook does it, it's bad with book recommendations too if you ask me.
And on the gripping hand...
This is already studied at nauseaum in search economics, long tails, the medium is the message, etc.
There's an obvious reason for that: far and away the primary determinant - often the sole determinant - of whether you will like a novel, is the author.
Personally I'd rather read about something that actually exists...
Anyone remember John Phillips?
========
John Aristotle Phillips, founder of political data-analytics firm Aristotle, graduated from Princeton University with a degree in aerospace engineering in the class of 1978. Known as the “A-bomb kid,” Phillips is known for a project he did in a physics seminar in 1976: designing a cost-effective and relatively small A-bomb. While the cost of creating an atomic bomb can vary greatly, most estimates place the cost at well over $1 million; Phillip’s project posited that it was possible to do so for roughly $2,000 and the actual bomb would fit in the size of a U-haul trailer.
A project with frightening connotations, Phillip’s work was confiscated by the FBI, despite the fact that Phillips was able to design his bomb using only his nuclear engineering textbook and two unclassified government documents.
Phillip’s professor has said that the design would likely work, but his design was not actually built. Moreover, in comparison to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, this bomb design has been said to be more sophisticated and complex, implying how easy it would be for political terrorists to make such a devastating weapon. Nevertheless, though Phillips has said, “any other physics major could do this better,” his project was the only one in that seminar to get an A.
========
But, I have for many years been drawn to non-fiction books, typically about WW2, such as the battle of midway (Shattered Sword) or the Guadalcanal campaign. I have also listened to a lot of civil war audio books, including Battle Cry of Freedom and the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.
I get enough of the real world in the real world, when I read, I want see something new
2. Middlemarch isn't social realism. If you had to put a label on it, it would be psychological fiction a la Stephen King
3. Lolita is DEFINITELY not lolicon (if anything it's the opposite) and it's quite offensive to suggest it is
The point is, OP is complaining about not liking reading, but if he's only read sci-fi, he hasn't read the classics
This avowedly humanist world-building would come to be called realism. Middlemarch is often cited as a template of that now familiar mode.
but I'm more than happy to leave the bunfight of opinions to those more invested.
> Lolita is DEFINITELY not lolicon
Well I wouldn't take that suggestion too seriously although it seems that you have.
Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon that sparked Pickwick merchandise and spin-offs.
His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.Might also ask their position on taking advice from those that cannot follow it.
Agreed. 'Arrogance' likely refers to attitude and manner.
> This demonisation of
What demonisation?
> is anti intellectualism.
What intellectualism?
Somehow we still read Marquees De Sade too even though everything he wrote is more depraved than most of what goes on 4chan today.
In fact there’s not even a single graphic sex scene in Lolita
Anyway, as said in another epic, there is always hope.
I say, if you have something to say that fits well in a book, write it. Let other people decide if it is worth reading or not. A lot of the best books ever written were kept private, or were not well received at first.
But I agree, being on bestsellers list nowadays doesn’t even as much as it used to. Everyone’s up there to game the system, whether through extreme SEO-boosting or buying their ways into shortlists and recommendations.
Just because it's not depressing oscar bait or space opera it doesn't mean it doesn't have some merits.
Although i find it hard to believe it was done as a "labour of love".
The majority of sales and debut authors are ebooks, and traditional publishers aren't involved. This has been true for years. Read publishing is pretty much pointless if you aren't a celebrity. Yes, there are a few that make it, but a handful, compared to the numbers that make something significant self publishing. And the trad publishing process is so slow. You can write and market several books in the time is takes to get one book to reads the old way.
If you aren't a celebrity, self publishing is the way to go.
Not that publishing an ebook is easy, but the process of much more controllable by you. And the payback is much higher.