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Comment by ajb | Hacker News Reader

You work for six months or a year building up your product, for no pay. A startup founder - or an unpublished author.

What most tech types don't realize is how much risk there is already in the writers profession. These are not fat-cat music executives. They don't have anything like as much chance of becoming rich as a founder of a startup. Heck, most don't even make a living, and have to keep the day job; even once they get published and get advances on later books. And if one book tanks, they're back to square one.

That's why they don't like change. They are already drowning in risk, and people are saying they should take on some more?

I don't buy the idea that text-to-speech is infringement, personally. But it's too easy to say that authors should just 'change their business model'. How?

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Hey! This is what my start-up does, so I can talk about that a little bit.

The first thing to change about the business model is the focus. A lot of people who are enthusiastic about writers know two or three names of writers they follow, and that's it. Everything outside of that is an unknown to them. The first part of the solution is to focus people who are enthusiastic about writing in one place.

The next fix is to let writers release fast, iterate often, similar to hackers, and that means critique. You need to give them a good system for getting lots of feedback fast. The minute they start writing they should have access to feedback, even if they choose to finish a first draft before releasing anything and showing it to people. The better your revision access is, the less of a risk it is.

The final solution is to publish more writers, more incrementally. It means that you sift through a lot of short stories and poems and yes, even novels, if you're a publishing company, and you get back to everybody so that they can figure out how to get better. At the same time, you expand aggressively so that you can handle the incoming people as your model expands outward, and you keep the focus on quality publishing, just more of it.

Also, computer-based vocalization is horrible, and it will never replace audiobooks. I want Steven Colbert reading to me, not my Kindle.

Those sound like the right goals, if you have a way to implement them.

Does your startup have a website yet?

We finished fine-tuning our prototype yesterday (you know your web site is ready when your registration page looks beautiful). Starting today we're coding the beta.

Any chance of a sneak preview? I promise not to share with my fellow Authors Guild members until instructed to.

I'd love to see what you think. Matt@mattmaroon.com?

EDIT: Or just drop a line: my email's in my profile.

Yeah that works.

Journalism faces almost the same obstacle. The current business model is not working any more and there are no alternatives.

I have not bought a single newspaper this year - and I have not even looked at online advertisements on newspaper websites.

I think the newspaper industry is going to largely collapse and it is going to burn everyone (worse reporting, no more investigative reporting, etc....)

How about "I don't care?". Really. I bought the book and I am free to do with it as I please. That's where you rights as an author stop and mine as a reader begin. Will we have fewer authors? Likely. But I don't care. For all I know there are too many books being written already.

To put it another way, should we also charge each parent who reads a book to his child? It would make current authors more prosperous, but then it will also attract more people to writing and those new people will be just as miserable as the current crop is today. There will always be some miserable writers, no matter where the goal posts are set.

Can't make a living writing? Don't write. Go do something people would want.

"They don't have anything like as much chance of becoming rich as a founder of a startup."

Have you ever looked at the revenues for a best selling author? They very much a have a small chance of hitting it big. They should change their business model by offering interesting things like McSweeney's which uses both online and offline products to attract an audience.

Yes, they have a small chance of hitting it big. But I reckon it's a much smaller chance than that of a startup founder.

McSweeney's is an icky model. They work online, but they're very closed-door, they appreciate only a very specific manner of writing, and they don't tell writers what it is they're doing wrong when they are, in fact, doing something wrong.

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