8 ms·

I would say that it's bad for writing, though. Ultimately, what he's doing exacerbates the absurdly lopsided distribution of visibility and rewards that writers

by cs137 4y ago

I would say that it's bad for writing, though. Ultimately, what he's doing exacerbates the absurdly lopsided distribution of visibility and rewards that writers experience. Most books sell horribly, and not for reasons of low quality but because discoverability is a huge problem, even in today's world of recommendation algorithms and the like. There are a good number of "famous" writers who live in poverty, because the percentage of books that sell well enough to live on is so small. Traditional publishers don't bother to invest much in a book unless they are sure it would sell without them (i.e., the author has 4,000,000 Instagram followers). The typical budget for marketing and publicity is about $300. The thing is, trad-pubs don't have to be better. They're inundated with unsolicited manuscripts ("slush") and even though very few of those are excellent, at least 5% are in a state where a competent editor could turn it into a book as good as any other commercial bestseller. They have all the power and, to them, authors are a fungible commodity. Oh, and if you think a literary agent is going to help you navigate this, well... unless you went to prep school with an agent, you won't even get _read_. You'll sit in a query pile, possibly get a glance by a 19-year-old unpaid intern, and get a form-letter rejection 18 months later. You can self-publish, but less than 1% of the population has the savings and free time to do it right. It costs $10,000, minimum--you'll have to hire an editor, a cover designer, a formatter... and while you probably won't be able to afford a publicist you'll be competing against people who can--and non-writing efforts will take up at least a hundred hours of your time--some people find the marketing aspect fun and if that's you, great, but most writers don't, which is a big part of why so many of them pursue traditional publishing even though it's abusive if you're in the bottom 99%. Allowing big-name authors to supercharge their apparent productivity by hiring teams of "co-authors" who do the actual writing exacerbates this problem. I don't see a good way to fix it, and what Patterson does probably shouldn't be outlawed, but it still sucks. The book world, in which name and "author brand" matter far more than literary quality, is already pretty moribund... and this kind of stuff doesn't help.

huijzer 4y ago
> You can self-publish, but less than 1% of the population has the savings and free time to do it right. It costs $10,000, minimum--you'll have to hire an editor, a cover designer, a formatter... We wrote https://juliadatascience.io https://juliadatascience.io in a few months and have about 4k unique visitors per month (https://juliadatascience.pirsch.io/ https://juliadatascience.pirsch.io/). The cover is designed for free by ourselves via a plotting library. Yes, we’re not selling millions but we have spent only 60 dollars (on the domain name).
- browie 4y ago
  I'm in the process of doing this free for someone I know. I got into it clueless to how any of this works and what it may cost. Reading you post $10,000 minimum and researching a few days ago on how much book editors get paid (and exactly how) slightly shocked me!
  - cs137 4y ago
    It depends on the nature of the work and also the project. You don't have to spend $10,000 if you're just looking to create a book that you can give to your friends. If you want it to have any chance of commercial or critical success, though, you're going to need a level of polish that you have to pay for.
- cs137 4y ago
  First of all, congrats. Writing a book is difficult, and writing one that people actually enjoy reading, even more so. Second, trade and technical publishing are completely different markets. You need a literary agent to even sit at the table in trade (or traditional) publishing. You also have no chance in hell of getting one ("querying" is a waste of time) if you don't have preexisting connections or have a trendy "hook". Plus, the objective functions are different. If you write a technical book that only sells 10 copies per month (I'm assuming 0.25% of visitors buy, although that might be on the high side) but it improves your career, you win. Fiction authors, on the other hand, are trying to make enough in royalties to live on. You'll get about $3 per copy in royalties. You need to be targeting a large audience to even have a chance. Large audiences mean lots of competition; other people out there can hire publicists or somehow have the connections ("querying" agents is a waste of time) to make it in trad-pub (which is deeply flawed, but they can sell books when they get their shit together). If you sell less than 1000 copies, you're done--for good. Your name now has negative value, but no publisher (or agent) is going to touch an anonymous pen name (no platform, no photo with the family and the dog) either. In traditional publishing, you have to make it a full-time job or you will be flushed out of the system (but they don't tell you that). Most of the time isn't spent on the writing (as the quality of much of what's produced these days shows) but marketing. Your "advance" is basically your marketing budget--they can't force you, but "eating" your advance instead of spending it to market your book (the publishing house won't) is frowned upon. In self-publishing, there are no rules, but it seems that the successful self-publishers, on average, spend even more time on self-promotion, which writers famously dislike doing.
basch 4y ago
It's past time to recognize this, along with blogspam, synthetically generated content, and spam as what they are ... pollution. There are varying forms of pollution. Even shows like Mythbusters and Pawn Stars are filled with their own pollution, repetitively showing the same clips three times. Things designed to capture attention, that are not novel, new, different, useful etc, should be treated as attention polluters and dealt with by being "unsurfaced." In a world with a plethera of information, rising the cream to the top is more important than ever. Facebook is focused on removing the scum from the bottom and letting the rest float around. Google is focused on something else besides identifying and raising cream. The Youtube community is waay to focused on making shocked open mouth face thumbnails. More than ever people need tools and teams that exist to identify and promote good. Treating attention like a muscle that can be trained and controlled, isnt enough. The world has become too toxic, that left without better tools, the people become either passive consumers of pollution OR spend a significant amount of mental effort constantly evaluating and denying pollution. Garbage in, garbage out.
gumby 4y ago
> I would say that it's bad for writing, though. Ultimately, what he's doing exacerbates the absurdly lopsided distribution of visibility and rewards that writers experience. How do you think famous painters and other artists work, even (or especially) the "old masters" (e.g. Rembrandt van Rijn)?
zebraflask 4y ago
The $10,000 number is a little too high. I'd say it's easy to start spending and keep spending the bucks if you're aiming to duplicate a conventional print run from a large press, with no expense spared, but it isn't necessary. Sites like Canva will take care of cover art, and print on demand presses like Blurb let you start with a very reasonably priced short run and will hook you up with a variety of distribution networks. You can quite literally publish a professionally packaged book for a few hundred dollars or less. There's also Amazon, but I've never tried it so can't comment on it.
nickstinemates 4y ago
> I would say that it's bad for writing, though. What a weird take. Especially in this day and age. Where news stories are built on tweets, we're engaged in a comment section of a super niche topic, there's a proliferation of a lifetime of video uploaded to youtube every day. many lifetimes streamed live on twitch. I don't think this impacts writing at all. I think you could argue the opposite point. The amount of people reading books is on the decline. But the amount of people reading and engaging with textual content is on the rise. Traditional publishing is nearing end of life. What's the point? My pov: The fate of all of these centralized institutions is the same, a mass proliferation of alternatives and as a result, less power, and ultimately, death.

by cs137 4y ago

huijzer 4y ago

> You can self-publish, but less than 1% of the population has the savings and free time to do it right. It costs $10,000, minimum--you'll have to hire an editor, a cover designer, a formatter... We wrote https://juliadatascience.io https://juliadatascience.io in a few months and have about 4k unique visitors per month (https://juliadatascience.pirsch.io/ https://juliadatascience.pirsch.io/). The cover is designed for free by ourselves via a plotting library. Yes, we’re not selling millions but we have spent only 60 dollars (on the domain name).

browie 4y ago
I'm in the process of doing this free for someone I know. I got into it clueless to how any of this works and what it may cost. Reading you post $10,000 minimum and researching a few days ago on how much book editors get paid (and exactly how) slightly shocked me!
- cs137 4y ago
  It depends on the nature of the work and also the project. You don't have to spend $10,000 if you're just looking to create a book that you can give to your friends. If you want it to have any chance of commercial or critical success, though, you're going to need a level of polish that you have to pay for.
cs137 4y ago
First of all, congrats. Writing a book is difficult, and writing one that people actually enjoy reading, even more so. Second, trade and technical publishing are completely different markets. You need a literary agent to even sit at the table in trade (or traditional) publishing. You also have no chance in hell of getting one ("querying" is a waste of time) if you don't have preexisting connections or have a trendy "hook". Plus, the objective functions are different. If you write a technical book that only sells 10 copies per month (I'm assuming 0.25% of visitors buy, although that might be on the high side) but it improves your career, you win. Fiction authors, on the other hand, are trying to make enough in royalties to live on. You'll get about $3 per copy in royalties. You need to be targeting a large audience to even have a chance. Large audiences mean lots of competition; other people out there can hire publicists or somehow have the connections ("querying" agents is a waste of time) to make it in trad-pub (which is deeply flawed, but they can sell books when they get their shit together). If you sell less than 1000 copies, you're done--for good. Your name now has negative value, but no publisher (or agent) is going to touch an anonymous pen name (no platform, no photo with the family and the dog) either. In traditional publishing, you have to make it a full-time job or you will be flushed out of the system (but they don't tell you that). Most of the time isn't spent on the writing (as the quality of much of what's produced these days shows) but marketing. Your "advance" is basically your marketing budget--they can't force you, but "eating" your advance instead of spending it to market your book (the publishing house won't) is frowned upon. In self-publishing, there are no rules, but it seems that the successful self-publishers, on average, spend even more time on self-promotion, which writers famously dislike doing.

basch 4y ago

It's past time to recognize this, along with blogspam, synthetically generated content, and spam as what they are ... pollution. There are varying forms of pollution. Even shows like Mythbusters and Pawn Stars are filled with their own pollution, repetitively showing the same clips three times. Things designed to capture attention, that are not novel, new, different, useful etc, should be treated as attention polluters and dealt with by being "unsurfaced." In a world with a plethera of information, rising the cream to the top is more important than ever. Facebook is focused on removing the scum from the bottom and letting the rest float around. Google is focused on something else besides identifying and raising cream. The Youtube community is waay to focused on making shocked open mouth face thumbnails. More than ever people need tools and teams that exist to identify and promote good. Treating attention like a muscle that can be trained and controlled, isnt enough. The world has become too toxic, that left without better tools, the people become either passive consumers of pollution OR spend a significant amount of mental effort constantly evaluating and denying pollution. Garbage in, garbage out.

gumby 4y ago

> I would say that it's bad for writing, though. Ultimately, what he's doing exacerbates the absurdly lopsided distribution of visibility and rewards that writers experience. How do you think famous painters and other artists work, even (or especially) the "old masters" (e.g. Rembrandt van Rijn)?

zebraflask 4y ago

The $10,000 number is a little too high. I'd say it's easy to start spending and keep spending the bucks if you're aiming to duplicate a conventional print run from a large press, with no expense spared, but it isn't necessary. Sites like Canva will take care of cover art, and print on demand presses like Blurb let you start with a very reasonably priced short run and will hook you up with a variety of distribution networks. You can quite literally publish a professionally packaged book for a few hundred dollars or less. There's also Amazon, but I've never tried it so can't comment on it.

nickstinemates 4y ago

> I would say that it's bad for writing, though. What a weird take. Especially in this day and age. Where news stories are built on tweets, we're engaged in a comment section of a super niche topic, there's a proliferation of a lifetime of video uploaded to youtube every day. many lifetimes streamed live on twitch. I don't think this impacts writing at all. I think you could argue the opposite point. The amount of people reading books is on the decline. But the amount of people reading and engaging with textual content is on the rise. Traditional publishing is nearing end of life. What's the point? My pov: The fate of all of these centralized institutions is the same, a mass proliferation of alternatives and as a result, less power, and ultimately, death.