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Sorry, the parallels do not work that far. Listening to your customers as you go along is a great idea for a startup and a really terrible idea for a book. If y

by hristov 17y ago

Sorry, the parallels do not work that far. Listening to your customers as you go along is a great idea for a startup and a really terrible idea for a book. If you listen to your customers you are guaranteed to get a very mediocre book. A good book has to continually challenge and surprise the reader. Imagine if Dostoevsky had listened to his customers when he wrote "Notes from the Underground." Most of the people reading the first couple of lines would say "please change the main character." By the way here are the first couple of lines: "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased." So this would never have been written if Dostoevsky actually listened to his customers. And yet it is one of the best books ever written. But releasing early and often is an interesting proposition for books. A lot of writers had to do that, because they published their books in serial fashion as they were writing them. Many other writers would continuously rewrite their drafts and would never release anything they had not completed and edited. And you can definitely notice when you are reading a book that a writer was writing and publishing it as he went along. But it is hard to say which one is better. The books that are published as they are written tend to be less organized and with less cohesive story arcs, but they can also be more original and pleasantly surprising.

peterarmstrong 17y ago
In some senses you're right, in that great art is usually created by ignoring the conventional wisdom etc. However, even then feedback is important: as Paul Graham has repeatedly argued, great artists don't usually work in total isolation (the Renaissance was concentrated in Florence, etc). However, my point applied more to non-fiction than fiction: it was based on my own experiences writing Flexible Rails (self-publishing, getting early customers and feedback, etc) and then Hello! Flex 4 (traditional publisher approach). And we even did release Hello! Flex 4 while it was being written, but I didn't build the community of "earlyvangelists" around it that happened with Flexible Rails. Part of this was the content (Hello! Flex 4 is an uncontroversial introductory book; Flexible Rails was arguing something and was something largely new), but part of it was affected by the dynamic of self-publishing vs. using a traditional publisher. With Flexible Rails I created a Google Group that had hundreds of readers, while the book was still in-progress. I felt I had a closer connection with them, and I learned what worked and what didn't work in my book, etc. So that post was about those experiences. Finally, a disclaimer: I'm not an artist, and certainly not a Dostoyevsky, so I really have no idea what kind of feedback that type of talent wants. (P.S. I love Dostoyevsky btw; I read Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov while working a summer job in university at Walmart -- before I switched from Philosophy to Comp Sci.)

by hristov 17y ago

peterarmstrong 17y ago

In some senses you're right, in that great art is usually created by ignoring the conventional wisdom etc. However, even then feedback is important: as Paul Graham has repeatedly argued, great artists don't usually work in total isolation (the Renaissance was concentrated in Florence, etc). However, my point applied more to non-fiction than fiction: it was based on my own experiences writing Flexible Rails (self-publishing, getting early customers and feedback, etc) and then Hello! Flex 4 (traditional publisher approach). And we even did release Hello! Flex 4 while it was being written, but I didn't build the community of "earlyvangelists" around it that happened with Flexible Rails. Part of this was the content (Hello! Flex 4 is an uncontroversial introductory book; Flexible Rails was arguing something and was something largely new), but part of it was affected by the dynamic of self-publishing vs. using a traditional publisher. With Flexible Rails I created a Google Group that had hundreds of readers, while the book was still in-progress. I felt I had a closer connection with them, and I learned what worked and what didn't work in my book, etc. So that post was about those experiences. Finally, a disclaimer: I'm not an artist, and certainly not a Dostoyevsky, so I really have no idea what kind of feedback that type of talent wants. (P.S. I love Dostoyevsky btw; I read Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov while working a summer job in university at Walmart -- before I switched from Philosophy to Comp Sci.)