4 ms·
Write something someone wants. Literary fiction was art that discovered and expressed the essential, where cultural production today explicitly militates agains
by motohagiography 2y ago
Write something someone wants. Literary fiction was art that discovered and expressed the essential, where cultural production today explicitly militates against anything that could be percived as essential(-ist). New novels are failing because the culture has no eros.
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.
- adamc 2y agoThere are lots and lots of well-written, relatively obscure books. I don't think that has much to do with being "brand safe". It has to do with discoverability, network effects (people are more motivated to read books people they know have liked), and the vast number of books.
- stubish 2y agoI'd wager most books are content someone wants. A lot are even content a lot of people want. This is not good enough. Reaching the audience is the problem. 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.
- bluGill 2y agoThere are more good books than time to read. That is why reaching an audience is hard, you are not better than the other choices.
- grugagag 2y agoYou can’t say that until people could reach you, read you and move on.
- bluGill 2y agoThere are more than enough free books on various sources to say that. Most show clear need of a good editor, but still more good books of any fiction genre you care to read than you have time for. Sometimes they are hard to find, but that is a different issue. Even pre internet (say 1960) publishers got more submissions that with some editing could be good than they had time to work with.
- greenie_beans 2y agosounds like you might like to read books from independent presses. this distributor is a good place to find stuff: https://asterismbooks.com/ https://asterismbooks.com/ > 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.