Comment by neponeko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neponeko | Hacker News Reader

What cronyism buys you is restarts. Having an enforcer can get you more than the 20 pages. You’ll be read to the end by every judge, and you may not get the award (these are competitive, and even most people with good enforcers aren’t great writers) but you’ll get a thought-out reason if it’s a rejection. You’ll know that everyone tried to find a yes because, while they were allowed to say no and eventually did, not taking you seriously would be bad for their careers and reputations. Only 0.01% of people have that kind of access, though, and you don’t write your way to getting those agents and publicists—you’re either born into it or you’re not. The rest of us poor loser fuckers get tossed at the first bump, which could be a minor copy error like a missing comma.

The truth about the literary world is that, while a lack of talent can impose a ceiling—no one gets book awards in fiction for being rich or famous if they can’t write at least as well as an above-average college grad—there is no level of talent that overcomes the lack of access, and it’s a kind of access you’re born into, to get a fair read from anyone who matters in the industry.

It’s all a scam and even most people who succeed spend more trying to fulfill the expectations of the published-novelist/public-intellectual role than they’ll ever get back from it in royalties or options or anything else. It’s an exhausting, dismal life in truth. The lifestyle costs of being someone who can get a $500,000 advance every two years run to… easily that rate.

If you actually want to write and have a decent life, you have three options:

1. Write genre and go back in time to the 1970s when getting a literary agent (as opposed to a schmagent who can’t get anyone to read anything) was possible.

2. Figure out the self-publishing game and get really, really good at it.

3. Take a job that has absolutely nothing to do with writing and accept that you’ll take three times as long to produce a book as a career author. Self-publish or work through university presses and don’t expect to be read by more than a few hundred people.

I don’t love Silicon Valley but if they had done something about publishing in the era of “disruption” I would have cheered it on.

This all sounds informed and authoritative. And it’s believable. But can I ask how you came to these conclusions? Did you attempt this? Do you know authors getting 500k every two years?

I know probably three dozen authors.

$500k every two years seems great for a job that so many people romanticize, but the money goes fast. The writing is the easy part. Self promotion becomes a full-time job, and you do the writing in your off hours.

Also, you don’t get to take all that money home. Your agent gets 15%, but you’ll never get published at all without one. And there is an unspoken rule that you must put a certain fraction of your advance into marketing yourself, the proportion depending on genre and level. Most authors at the $500k level (“major deal”) have to retain publicists and live in New York to sustain it. The publisher might give you one hour per quarter with a publicist if you’re really lucky. If you want favors called in and arms twisted to get your book coverage, you have to pay for that on your own.

The best way to be a writer is honestly to get a 9-5 you don’t hate and that stays 9-5, and then self-publish and accept the likelihood of obscurity. The book world is toxic and the proportion of actual smart people isn’t zero but it’s no higher than you’d find in a decent high school.

If you go trad and you genre-maxx, you’ll get typecast to one niche and be treated like shit the moment the house no longer sees you as a reliable 7-figure line item. If you try to go literary, you’re forced to write within the narrow confines of a social class and format you probably won’t enjoy for the next forty years.

Interesting! how did you come to know three dozen authors?

I know 2-3 published authors --- published at all, not fulltime authors, just people who got a book published. In my history of acquaintances I know of one mildly successful fantasy author who is making a living at it (parent of a classmate of my child).

So 36 seems like a very high number to me... maybe you sell typewriters? or Wite-Out?

from another thread

> I actually am a top 1% writer

Ah, i see.

The fact is that the supply of people wanting to write books greatly exceeds the demand of readers. It’s inevitable that most books barely get read by anyone. You either accept it or you find something else to do.

Not exactly. I have some voracious readers in my family, but none of them ever tried to publish themselves (despite, in my sister's case, winning an award for a novella written as schoolwork).

The thing is that we want to read the same books. And it's not just about quality. It sucks to be the only one to enjoy a great book, to stand there feeling like you're a Star Trek nerd trying to explain your obsession to a group of rural Siberians.

That’s the problem. Literary culture requires nucleation—for shared discussion and to finance projects. But the real talent differences are not steep enough to justify it. I I said my offline identity there is a chance you would recognize me and, while obscure, I actually am a top 1% writer. But there have to be thousands of obscure figures who are just as good and who are even more invisible.

Meanwhile, the talentless jokers who run the industry continue to promote mediocrity, and the world slowly loses readers.

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