14 ms·

Why to Not Write a Book

252 points by telotortium 2y ago

taivare 2y ago
I found a families, great grandfather’s memoirs while doing their estate. I realized with the family all gone and there were few in his class with the education to speak of early American life so I published it and illustrated the e-book. https://books2read.com/A-young-Mans-Adventures-In-19th-Century-America https://books2read.com/A-young-Mans-Adventures-In-19th-Centu...
- cableshaft 2y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to do that. I'm sure if they were alive they would appreciate it. I went ahead and bought a copy and have read a few pages before passing out tonight. I'll read more tomorrow.
- everybodyknows 2y ago
  A content preview of a few pages might lead to more sales.
- interludead 2y ago
  Preserving your great-grandfather's memoirs like that (especially with the context of early American life) must have been a fascinating endeavor.
compressedgas 2y ago
Why not just make an EPUB version of your website?
- l0b0 2y ago
  That sounds like hundreds of hours of work.
  - __mharrison__ 2y ago
    Or a few hours writing a script of they are well formed. (Possible even less using AI).
- LudwigNagasena 2y ago
  Yeah, and then why not just print it and put it in a cover? I don’t really understand the problem, honestly. The post doesn’t seem to be about writing a book, it seems to be about the Book as a concept that holds sentimental value to the author.
  - gizajob 2y ago
    Yeah but what’s the point in that really? The website exists for anyone who wants it already. It’s not a book.
- ZacNorth 2y ago
  This is addressed in TFA - the author’s posts are characteristically full of hypertext.
andrewedstrom 2y ago
So curious who the anonymous example is
- telotortium 2y ago
  I thought it was The Last Psychiatrist, but then I saw TLP mentioned later.
- Vecr 2y ago
  If he's really into chaff generation it might be be him. Or a fictional version of him, because your examples don't have to be real if you're posting online under an alias.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - gwern 2y ago
    It is not me.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jppope 2y ago
Maybe just me, but authors gravitate towards certain formats that fit them. Oscar Wilde did great with Dorian Grey but it was nothing compared to his plays. Imagining J.K. Rowling writing a blog feels wrong. I get Gwern's perspective, I'm not sure if I would read a gwern.net book... but on the flip side Randall Munroe (XKCD) has a couple of great books. So who knows?
- Vecr 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure she has written blog posts. Maybe you can claim they don't fit some technical definition but I have vague recollections of a quite large number of blog-like writings.
- komali2 2y ago
  JK's a prolific micro-blogger. I'm not sure her tweet engagements have surpassed her book sales yet but sure feels like we'll get there at some point.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
The main reason not to write a book is that the topic doesn't need a book-length treatment, and would be better as an article. Fiction of course is one thing, but even then, some fictional ideas and personality combinations are better as short stories. Personally, as a reader, I find a lot of book ideas interesting (especially in the realm of popular science), but I can stomach very few of them because they are excessively wordy and often full of overly long (IMO) personal experiences.
- exe34 2y ago
  "this book fills a much needed gap in the literature."
- interludead 2y ago
  Books often overextend simple ideas but for some this is the way to understand maybe
  - passion__desire 2y ago
    > this is the way to understand maybe I have this idea. Let's say I want to bring two words (AI and Apocalypse, Yud's thesis ) closer in some semantic space of ideas. How would I do it? I would write thousands of stories bring those two concepts together. Sort of like warping the space of ideas. Like a horseshoe. Subconsciously, if I want to guage the weightage of a particular thesis, my mind does it informally if it can pull many emotionally weighted instances in support of that thesis. The same applies to societies and groups.
- tinybrain 2y ago
  This is my #1 gripe with non-fiction books. Way too wordy, too many anecdotes, just spit it out already. Please value my time as the reader. I read a lot of books, but I feel like I’m allocating more mental energy skimming half the content than I am absorbing knowledge. 37signals/Basecamp had some illuminating things to say about their book experiences. They kept fighting with the publisher to make their book short, the appropriate length. The publisher kept wanting it to be double the length to seem more impressive on the shelf. That mindset is to the detriment of books, just get to the point.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
If you want to write a book, go for it! I wrote a book "Amazing CTO", I earned quite some money and I got great feedback from people whom the book helped. I'm very happy I did it, even if I didn't become famous :-)
- cubefox 2y ago
  It's highly unlikely to earn money with a book...
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    It depends on how you calculate the "earnings". If I calculate my hourly rate to $200 and take the hours it took to write and market the book, I lost a lot of money. But would I have worked instead of writing the book? My book is $30 and I get 80% selling through Leanpub. So I got quite some money, and a trickle of money every week since it peaked. Can you earn money with a book through a publisher (if you're not already a famous name)? Not so sure. Probably better for your branding than your wallet. So as I've said, it depends.
    - cubefox 2y ago
      Yeah, "Amazing CTO" does sound like something people would pay money for. But fiction very likely doesn't sell, and likewise most passion projects of the "I want to write a book" type.
for_i_in_range 2y ago
Sad. I did $403k last month as an independent writer. All analog publishing. None of it from KDP. Be careful what advice you listen to.
- mvkel 2y ago
  Do you feel fulfilled?
  - for_i_in_range 2y ago
    Yes.
- niederman 2y ago
  Surely you realize that this is not at all the typical experience for independent writers, though.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    It's not the typical experience for traditionally published writers either.
- __mharrison__ 2y ago
  That's awesome. As an author myself, I'd love to hear more. Also note, that you are an outlier. (Congrats!) Folks listening to you should not expect those results.
  - sanswork 2y ago
    Pretty sure it's just fantasy, it's easy to find his book from his comments. He has <5k followers and minimal engagement on any social media platform, his book does not have great reviews nor many of them on goodreads(150 reviews for a book that would have had to sell almost 25k copies in a month to get those numbers). Any conversation I've found in related subreddits seems negative.
- gizajob 2y ago
skybrian 2y ago
Maybe there’s a similar post to be written about whether to start a blog and write essays? It works for some people, but for me, writing an an article that I think is good enough to publish (even on my obscure blog) takes all day and the extra effort doesn’t seem worthwhile, compared to writing comments and sharing links.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I have definitely shifted more to commenting here and there. I may get back to my blogs but I've sort of been faffing around since semi-retiring a few months back but maybe after I get back from my next trip and wrap up some home projects.
__mharrison__ 2y ago
If you want to write a book wrote one (out two or three). It has never been easier. Just be aware that it is a marathon not a sprint. I have a bunch of anecdotes about folks who have done well publishing their books. If you don't want to don't.
gizajob 2y ago
If you’re not completely driven to write a book, and there isn’t a book inside you that you just have to get out, then do not bother writing a book. Agents and publishers have nothing to do with it - you don’t need to ask for permission to write your book, it’s a piece of art. Agents and publishing come afterwards - and nobody is going to be interested really anyway, at least in the early stages. So if that is enough to make you confused about writing your book or makes you not want to bother, then don’t write your book. If you still have to write a book, you’ll love doing it despite the difficulty and futility, because the person who enjoys it the most will be you anyway.
- a_bonobo 2y ago
  I've heard this many times before (I think Charles Bukowski used to preach this?), and I have to say I disagree. Famously Douglas Adams had to be forced to write every sentence in the Hitchhiker's Guide. He certainly didn't have a book inside him that had to get out, he had external deadlines and rent to pay. Can you imagine a world without HGTTG?
  - gizajob 2y ago
    What happens when you walk up to a publishing agent and tell them you don’t have anything to show them, and they’ll need to force you to write every sentence but assure them it’ll be brilliant? I think you’re also talking about one of Adams’ later books after HHGTG once his publisher was deep in hock for his advance.
    - modernerd 2y ago
      > What happens when you walk up to a publishing agent and tell them you don’t have anything to show them… They told him to hand over whatever he'd got: "Douglas happily built his reputation for (at this stage, merely) sailing close to the wind when it came to publishing deadlines by telling interviewers that he had been ordered to literally stop writing and hand his manuscript over to a courier no matter where he had got to…" — The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Jem Roberts" He was famous for scraping or missing deadlines from the very start, and openly admitted to it: "All of my life I've been attracted to the idea of being a writer, but like all writers I don't so much like writing as having written. … each time I meant to try to write something, I'd miss the deadline by two weeks."
hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
>I suspect that if many writers took seriously writing a book as a real project, rather than an aspirational cultural ideal of ‘being an author’ along the lines of ‘being a foreign language speaker’ or ‘being a PhD’, they would realize that it is a serious risk which can backfire. Ha, I feel called out. I'm in the latter camp, I was always terrible at languages as a kid and it was part of the reason I decided to move to Finland and learn Finnish as an adult. 1000+ hours in and I"m still nowhere close to my goals. I wouldn't recommend it for most halfway sane cost-benefit analyses - my ballpark number is I've forgone some $200,000 and counting in opportunity cost. (I still feel like I'm coming out on net is because it also allowed me to marry the world's greatest woman, and to heal a bunch of deep psychological issues. Assuming you don't have those, stay far away!)
- gizajob 2y ago
  “I decided to move to Finland and learn Finnish as an adult” Amazing move but you’ve not made it very easy for yourself given the huge difficulty in mastering the most mind-bending of European languages. Doubly difficult with the very high English fluency of all the locals. Hope you’re enjoying the Fazer!
  - hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    Fazer Sininen has indeed powered many a long night so far ;) greatest mass market chocolate bar I've ever had.
- interludead 2y ago
  Your language-learning journey with Finnish is cool
  - hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    Shhh you'll make me blush
    - interludead 2y ago
asicsp 2y ago
On the flip side, converting my tutorials to ebooks saved me from having to look for a job again. Been selling them for 6 years (with the last two years spent just to update them to newer software versions, improve examples, new cover images, etc). Of course, I have the advantage of living in a developing country but selling to an international audience (just $200/month to pay my bills).
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Living in a high income country, where $200 is well within monthly fluctuation, this situation makes me wonder if a little more telepresence might lead to us bifurcating into a world where the Eloi will know a tiny amount about how all of it works, and the Morlocks will know all about how a tiny amount of it works?
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    isn't this how it already works?
    - gradschoolfail 2y ago
      Designers* will know all about how it is all supposed to work *personally prefer the term “designists”, but YMMV on that one
      - gradschoolfail 2y ago
        UPDATE: Designori, as in Hesse’s magnum opus
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      It does seem to be already moving in that direction, yet there are still some discrepancies: (a) living in a highly developed country (and having grown up in one almost as developed), according to this theory I ought to be going full Eloi and mechanical Turk'ing out (AI as "actually, indians"?) all the schlep work in my life to telepresent Morlocks, yet the little of my washing which I do send out goes (to the best of my knowledge) mostly to the historically-developed world. (b) also to the best of my knowledge, current proto-Morlocks very rarely (or even never) eat current proto-Eloi.
hyperbrainer 2y ago
See, I am torn on this article. On the one hand, I am probably the target audience. I have much better things to focus on, but I cannot get the idea of having a novel(la) written out of my head. On the other, I have no stories to tell which would not be rather told in a short story/poem form. In short, yes but no but yes.
blindluck 2y ago
I would write a technical book for the challenge and learning rather than the "I published a book". It would also learn me a ... haskell or whatever. But not for the money and probably not the opportunities as anything there would be a bonus. I am more like that 1hr a day cranker. As you can see I am not natural at it... I would grind out and rewrite, get edits until it looks OK.
- interludead 2y ago
  I think treating everything as a skill-building exercise rather than a pursuit for external rewards could keep any process enjoyable
coolThingsFirst 2y ago
I always find it very interesting when smart people mistakenly exaggerate how difficult it is to achieve something. Pro bodybuilder is hard to become but it's very likely that with once to once every 10 days in the gym is going to transform the average person into a monster. Funny how we can make assumptions about life which are totally wrong. I did this as well by believing. 1) Making money is hard 2) Your startup needs to be brand new and doing somethign no else has done before 3) Exaggerating dangers of failure and by FAR the most dangerous 4) Feeling behind in life and rushing
- interludead 2y ago
  >I always find it very interesting when smart people mistakenly exaggerate how difficult it is to achieve something. Overthinking works like this
- OvidNaso 2y ago
  It's very likely that the average person will become pro bodybuilder level monster with hitting the gym oncee every 10 days?!!!
  - coolThingsFirst 2y ago
    i said the average person will become a monster in the sense that he will be unrecognisable to his old self working out has probably one of the greatest ROI in life, it takes surprisingly little time. i did this, the amount of workouts it took was so much less than i thought before i have basically no belly fat defined deltoids and biceps. the level of confidence is immesurable. things just don't intimidate me anymore, girl says no. No worries. Anyone trying to intimidate me, well good luck won't work.
komali2 2y ago
Wow, I really love this site design, and the features like the floating annotations / footnotes. > same way one might want to have ‘learned to read Mandarin’ or ‘become a bodybuilder’, but not to actually sweat through memorizing (and then forgetting) endless arbitrary characters or hours in the gym (followed by gluttony as cruel as the starvation). Having done both of these things to some degree, I wonder where the impression is coming from that they're super hard. Certainly a certain kind of bodybuilding body is absurdly difficult to achieve and I simply don't recommend it to anyone - and every single person I know that's achieved it has body dysmporphia and is driven by it. Not worth. But achieving something "like" a bodybuilder's body is, imo, achievable for most people with the same amount of effort as most of the things people dream about - learning a language, learning to code, having an active blog, reading a book a month, etc. A few hours effort a week consistently and you'll likely have great results after a year, and the journey never ends from there! Mandarin as well is a more than achievable goal that can be achieved with a great degree of skill with a few years of consistent effort. I think this article is right though - a book will kill other goals and activities if you don't maintain a balance. I have many different thoughts about this that one day I'll organize, hah, into a blog post. But my thinking is basically along these lines: 1. The 40 hour workweek is the wrong way to approach maximizing human productivity 2. Humans are inconsistently productive 3. Guardrails are necessary to achieve productivity 4. Consistency is probably the most important guardrail 5. The hardest part of doing a thing isn't doing it, it's scheduling it accurately, and sticking to the schedule If a person maintains a fun blog incidentally alongside their work, blitzing out an article here and there as the whim strikes them, they might appear quite productive. However in an office setting, a corporation would find their productivity schedule infuriating - when will the thing be done? Idk, when I feel like it? When the mood strikes me? Leave me alone, I'm reading hacker news until the mood strikes me. Hence the inconsistently productive. I'm not making a naturalist argument though - I want to be more productive than "when the mood strikes me," and I don't mean for just capitalist endeavors, I mean for all the various activist activities I want to do as well. However I think the modern trap is thinking that the way to be productive is to set hours for activities - 40 hours for work, 9-5. Lots of work done then, right? Instead I think it's better to combine scheduling time with an understanding of human motivation as something flexible and malleable. Most workout advocates will advise things like going to the gym every day 8am, and achieving this by making putting on your gym shorts the first thing you do when you get out of bed, engaging a Habit process, and I think this is effective. But for me what's been more effective is, the night before, determining what time I'm going to bed, and then setting my alarm 8 hours after that, and then noticing - oh wait, I have a meeting 20 minutes after I wake up, ok, in that case, I put my gym shorts next to my computer chair, and immediately after the meeting put them on and then go to the gym, because 2 hours after that I have another call. Or, it's 2am and I'm drunk, there's no way I'm going to do anything but puke my guts out if I try to go on a run in 8 hours, I'll schedule a nighttime run instead - or fuck it, it's the weekend, I'll relax instead and acknowledge it's just not happening tomorrow, but that's ok because I have another go scheduled on Monday morning. There's another side to that which is accurate scheduling. Writing a book takes a long time and I think if it was slotted into a life correctly it would take years to write the book, when most want it done within a year or at most 2. But to achieve that they'd need to spend all their free time on it which would kill their blog hobby or whatever else. If I accurately measure out all the things I want to do in life - blogging, language study, reading, working out, riding my motorcycle, making videos showing off how beautiful taiwan is, fighting car capitalism, continuing to develop myself as an engineer, making enough money to retire - boy do I get depressed... I can do maybe 4 of those things before a week's time is spent already. It's hard to schedule things across the months, year, years, and not feel sad imo. Also total sidenote but I think most non fiction books are way too long anyway and would work better as blogs and blog posts, and I think the market dynamics of bookselling pushes this tendency - excluding fields like academia where people are writing to include as much supporting material as possible and with the expectation of being quoted and cited extensively in future works by themselves or other authors, which with the merging of popular culture and academia is causing issues. See: "Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" as an example. A really incredible new view of history and anthropology that's imo inaccessible to most readers because it's also at least partially written for academia.
aaravom 2y ago
[flagged]
aaravom 2y ago
[flagged]
firefoxd 2y ago
I haven't blogged in a while, so i decided to write a blog post about my experience building a chatbot that was actually generating revenue and helping people. There is a lot of noise in this field, but at the same time no real information. The more I wrote the more i realized that I had a lot more to say than a 900 words article. Next thing you know, I shared what I am doing in an HN comment and I was asked to provide a way for people to follow. I dumped what I had so far on github and it's now gonna be a book written in public. I'll probably turn it into a physical book eventually, but for now I got information to share and I'll type away until I'm done Sharing. That's one reason to write.
Einenlum 2y ago
Oh boy. I can relate so much to this article and everything said here. I published a book last year and it has been a long journey. It took me one year and a half to write it. But then when you think it's done, it's just a second challenge coming up. I wanted to write a book that was as straight-to-the-point as possible. The publisher I signed with didn't really understand my approach and wanted me to turn it into a random book ("less rough") where you would get the usual long and useless introductions that I hate. Took me a while to realise that if I signed with a publisher it was just to get this "I'm an author" recognition this article talks about. I realised I didn't even buy "regular" programming books and most of my library are self published books. I didn't want to publish a book I would have not read. Ended up cancelling my contract and publishing it myself. I talk a bit about it in this article: https://www.einenlum.com/articles/my-book-from-php-to-python-is-out https://www.einenlum.com/articles/my-book-from-php-to-python... I sold like 50 of them but got great feedback. To anyone wondering if it's worth it financially, definitely NOT. Is it still worth it for other reasons? I would say I don't regret it but you first have to realise you'll go into a rabbit hole and experience the levels of stress the author of the article talks about.
- andai 2y ago
  Without additional context, my guess is that you could have sold more if you had gotten more exposure. If the quality is good and there is a market for it, then it's only potential readers not knowing about it that prevents them from buying it.
  - Einenlum 2y ago
    I should have mentioned this part indeed. Finding a publisher and following their process is already a hard path. But if you decide to self-publish (which I did) then a whole new story begins. Being a good author is not what matters at this point. You'll need good communication skills and a strategy to get some visibility. You'll need to market your "product" and feel at ease with this. A self-published book can be amazingly written, but without a very good strategy it's a book no one will read, sadly (especially if your audience is very niche, like mine). It's the part I feel the least comfortable with, so I have to accept the very limited reach.
d--b 2y ago
Great read and you could totally translate it to “Why to Not Write an App” almost verbatim. The following passage is I think the most interesting: > Now of course, there is a second kind of author: authors who write books with little discernible impact on their newsletter or blog. They sit down for an hour (statistically, in the morning), pound out their quota, and turn to the next task. The book does not weigh on their minds, and they are confident that they will have it out, as usual, in 12 months. More power to them—but I also think that most would-be book authors already know if they are one of that latter kind of writers, or if they are the former kind I’ve been discussing.
- achenet 2y ago
  I actually wrote a novella over the summer, using the "just write a bit every day and then go live your life method". It works quite well ^^
  - ghaff 2y ago
    The 1 to 2 hours most days works for a lot of things. I was saying to a friend I've gotten so little done since semi-retiring a few months ago so I wrote out a list and they're "You've gotten a ton of stuff done!"
Uptrenda 2y ago
Maybe it doesn't have to be complex. Gwern could just have a restructured text feature to their articles that auto-builds to a PDF that you can buy as an on-demand book or get it on kindle. I don't think it has to be on a single subject. Gwerns essays are interesting in their own right and would still make a fine book. Wasn't 'Hackers and Painters' in the same spirit?
shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
I never wrote a book. But we all live in the age of e-books and self-published books, so the money involved may be limited to 2-3 digits at most all you need is a strong online presence to be successful. Moreover, finding an audience is also not as difficult as it used to be in the past if you have a large active following base such as https://x.com/levelsio https://x.com/levelsio has self-published his book (https://readmake.com https://readmake.com) and he outperformed (sold 25000+ copies at 100% profit) many good writers, agents and publishers marketing channels.
- hk__2 2y ago
  > Moreover, finding an audience is also not as difficult as it used to be in the past if you have a large active following base Well, "if you have a large active following base" is the key here. If you don’t, it’s almost impossible to find an audience.
  - probably_wrong 2y ago
    Finding an audience is not as difficult as it used to be in the past if you have an audience.
  - shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
    > it’s almost impossible to find an audience Follow the path of those who have written many successful books, and you'll find that it's not almost impossible to find an audience e.g., William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde et al.
    - hk__2 2y ago
      > Follow the path of those who have written many successful books, and you'll find that it's not almost impossible to find an audience e.g., William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde et al. You’re contradicting yourself: if it were so easy, you wouldn’t cite only five names that span five centuries. It’s like saying music is easy, just do like Mozart or Beethoven. There are 3 million books published each year in the US. That’s more than 8k per day. See: https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publishing https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish...
hengheng 2y ago
I've once talked to a semi-successful author. His day job was Mechanical Engineering at the local university. He eventually quit once he had his formula worked out. He writes crime novels. Doesn't even like them, but if you want to sell, you either write smut (big gamble) or crime novels (less crowded). Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel. You also have to keep your protagonists whether you like them or not, or else every book will be your first one. He also found that he had to write local novels that take place around the local tourist sights. He couldn't write about his actual hometown of course, but there is a touristy spot an hour's drive from him, so that's where the detective had to be based for every single adventure. The touristy area must also be a city. That way you have half a million inhabitants, and the same amount of tourists whose relatives are looking for gifts. He was basically playing bookstore SEO. Unsurprisingly, being an ME, he had a product lifecycle. He was working on several books at once in a pipelined fashion. One was being drafted, the next one was being written, the third one was in early proof reading, the fourth one was being finalized. That way he had a good balance between creative and menial work at all times. He also explained how he was careful to use few proofreaders in the early stages, because apparently, his work is a dire read before any corrections. He has a process where he rotates through his early stage proofreaders, and mostly gives them later stage work that is more readable. Being a successful author is no more romantic than being a successful programmer. Or painter. Or mathematician. Any romanticism is at odds with professionalism, e.g. what works. And that's the same across all these professions.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  > Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel. Isaac Asimov figured that out!
  - beacon294 2y ago
    What do you mean? All I read was foundation, some non fiction, and robot short story collections.
    - rusticpenn 2y ago
khafra 2y ago
I'm mid-career in security, and having written a book is probably worth 3-6 decent certifications at this point. I should probably coauthor one with ChatGPT before common knowledge of how easy that is gets any more widespread.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Not sure if you're being sarcastic but, in my experience, ChatGPT is mostly useful for producing editable filler. Mind you, that's often useful. The intros and definitions are needed. But it's not producing anything that is especially interesting on its own.
mewse 2y ago
I can't stop thinking about this throwaway parenthetical at the start of the blog post: > [...] for many writers, writing a book is about the last thing they should do (unless they feel a book bursting out of them, much like a facehugger). Now, as we all know, the aliens that burst out of people in the Aliens franchise are called 'chestbursters'. "Facehuggers", by comparison, are hatched from alien eggs. So in this metaphor, since we're told that novels are facehuggers, the writers must be the eggs. And by process of elimination, we can deduce that the innocent starship crewmembers being attacked by facehuggers (novels) are innocent readers. The metaphor actually contradicts the author's main thesis, since every egg (writer) does in fact contain a facehugger (novel). But contrariwise, all the human characters (the rest of us) would be much better off if those novels just stayed inside the writers and didn't insist on being written or read. Metaphors are like scissors; they're twice as much fun when you run with them!
- smikhanov 2y ago
  Considering how tooth-achingly boring the original post is, this is the best kind of feedback for it.
  - pc86 2y ago
    First Gwern post I see.
  - joenot443 2y ago
    I found it super readable. I think it helps a lot if you’re familiar with the other authors Gwern is referencing.
- sandworm101 2y ago
  And they are most fun when their author actually understands the subject. Don't make a trek reference unless you know your Kirks from your Spocks.
  - gwern 2y ago
    This is a strange comparison. It is a humorous throwaway line about SF, where the actual 'subject' is not SF at all. (It's nonfiction writing.) That aside, your Kirk/Spock comparison is also wrong: the difference between Kirk and Spock is not a minor terminological quibble over a monster's name (which was not even the most important monster of that movie). The relationship of Kirk/Spock is the heart of _Star Trek_, the dramatic core, as they oppose and support each other. Even I, a non-Star Trek fan, know that!
timonoko 2y ago
"Book about ideas for a book" was entertaining and very economical. I wish more authors would do that and stop wasting our precious time. https://fi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Aiheita?_x_tr_sl=fi&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://fi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Aiheita?_x_tr...
Jiro 2y ago
gwern thinks we shouldn't be writing any more books anyway: https://gwern.net/culture-is-not-about-esthetics https://gwern.net/culture-is-not-about-esthetics
glimshe 2y ago
Would most of the arguments apply for videogames? "Why to Not Write a Game"?
- hug 2y ago
  Gwern and the articles examples are not terribly well known for output of interactive fiction that is almost but not quite a video game, so most of it does not apply.
- andai 2y ago
  I think the analog here would be "only do game jams, never spend 5 years making one game", which is actually something I hear quite often on indie game forums.
grecy 2y ago
I’ve self published three books now, with another in the works. Amazon print on demand makes it incredibly easy. They’re about my adventures around the world, with some lessons I learned and observations about whatever part of the world I’m in sprinkled throughout. The process was immensely satisfying, and I’ll never forget the feeling the first time I held the printed book in my hands. “Holy shit, I wrote a book!” My name was on the spine and everything. I write them in LaTeX to have ultimate control over the layout and formatting, then run it through Pandoc to get a compliant epub file. Details here [1]. I have them for sale on Amazon printed and book, and kobo and apple as ebooks. I’ll never get rich, but ~$500 a month forever is really nice when I’m on the road in a foreign country where costs are not high. If you have the desire, I highly recommend it. The learning and immense satisfaction are great. It doesn’t cost a cent, and you will have it forever. [1] http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-published-a-professional-paperback-and-ebook-using-latex-and-pandoc http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-published-a-professiona...
- _tom_ 2y ago
  I don't see a date the article. The web has taught me to never waste time with an undated article. Odds are very good it's obsolete.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - grecy 2y ago
    Huh, I never noticed the wp theme I’m using doesn’t put a date on “pages” , only “posts”. I wrote that in 2020, and I’m doing the identical thing right now for my next book. Not out of date at all.
aubanel 2y ago
In the collection of Rilke's letters "Briefe an einem jungen Dichter", he writes what I think one of the best advice about writing a book or not: "This above all: Ask yourself, in your night’s quietest moment, Do I have to write? Dig deep down into yourself for the answer. And if it is yes, if you can meet this solemn question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life around that necessity." It's harsh, but I think the necessity aspect is important: if you feel like a spring from which the urge of writing naturally flows and you could not repress it, then write. Else, don't.
- passion__desire 2y ago
  There is modern version of Charles Dickens' way of publishing a chapter each week in the newspaper. Artists on tiktok and instagram and youtube shorts are developing characters with backstories and so on. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@dsand00 https://www.youtube.com/@dsand00 Nowadays, you don't have to write the boring parts, just write the interesting bits.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
"Less fiction, more science" Karl Marx.
DanielBMarkham 2y ago
I completely agree with the author and yet I have taken up the profession of writing books. There are, as we know, two different kinds of books: fiction and non-fiction. There's actually only two flavors of books as well: polemic and exploratory. With a polemic, you're expected to have your own internal theme song and the produced work will conform to it. With exploratory books, you're on an adventure with the reader and the only bullshitting you add is the minimum amount necessary to make the exploration fun for both of you. Polemics have become quite popular lately, and I suspect anybody taking a set of blogs or essays and "sticking them together into a book" would only have this avenue available. I took a lot of essays and material I'd collected over the years and wrote some non-fiction books on programming. They were exploratory: the theme emerged as I condensed the work together. (My guess is that exploratory fiction and non-fiction is very tough to do and sell; people like a book that they already know the gist of and are familiar with the author much more than they feel like spending many hours on a lark) After I finished a few non-fiction books on coding and performative teams, I was done. It was fun, I learned stuff, I think it's critically important stuff, nobody cares, and I'm okay with that. Because it wasn't a polemic, I felt no need to rant or self-promote. There was no movement I wanted to lead. Time to move on to something else. Books suck. Books change the way you think. All writing does that. Books especially change you because they draw you into some sort of self-created cosmology that you've now adopted. I write because I'm a writer. I've always been a writer. I simply got honest about it as I grew older. I don't think you choose whether to write or not. I think you choose the fashion in which your writing interacts with your subconscious. A book is just a deployment bundle. It's not the point.
ruthmarx 2y ago
I have several books I want to write - I'm definitely bursting with idea, intent and motivation, and not just idea as a concept, but rather fully fleshed out. The hardest part is fighting ADHD or whatever and actually doing the work. These days if I were to publish I'd probably setup an LLC as a publishing company, do a little work to make the company look a lot bigger than it is and try to find some bookstores to sell to directly - in addition to selling online of course.
- greenie_beans 2y ago
  > try to find some bookstores to sell to directly bookstores don't wanna carry your book if they can't buy it from a distributor with standard discounts and the ability to return. good luck getting your books from your brand new publishing company carried by ingram. (see https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/94690-small-press-distribution-shuts-down.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p..., which would've been the best chance you had at being distributed, and even then they weren't easy to get into)
  - ruthmarx 2y ago
    Interesting, thanks for the info and link. So what, it would be basically impossible to get a distributor to take books from a new publishing company? Or is it that they could be convinced to do so but likely if the new publishing company made a deal where they picked up more of the costs and/or risk than usual? Any reason the new publishing company couldn't just be a distributor themselves, and make deals with bookstores allowing for discounts and returns? I have no issue with the idea of taking losses before making a profit, and if anything I produce is good, I would have faith it would sell eventually. Any returned copies are copies that could be donated to various places, which might hopefully allow word of mouth to spread.
    - greenie_beans 2y ago
      ingram is about* the only game in town. it's very hard to get them to take your books as a small publisher. you'll be stuck with their terms. your venture will need a backlist and proof that you can move books, otherwise it makes no sense for them to go into business with a small publisher who doesn't move much product. you'd be better off using ingram spark if you're a self-published author who wants to be carried in bookstores. *asterism books is trying to fill the void left by small press distribution. they distribute independent presses. but they're picky about who they carry, and also require you to have some semblance of successful sales. you can certainly diy distribution, but some bookstores don't want to work directly with small publishers unless they're a fan/friends of the press. they already have business processes in place for handling distribution. they don't want to deal with a bunch of self-pubbed authors who created a brand to self publish their books. it's too much work for something that most likely won't sell enough to make up the cost of doing business with the press. bookselling is a low margin endeavor (like a 2% profit margin according to one recent ABACUS by the american booksellers association), so it makes sense for them to be this way.
pfortuny 2y ago
Well, most PhDs are obtained by writing a book, so there is that.
cortezdecoy 2y ago
Gwern's site feels like the "old web" in all the best ways to me. I think the writing would actually lose something if transposed into book form
bjclark13 2y ago
I didn't get into this article too much, but it took me an embarrassing amount of amount of time to figure out that the drop cap at the beginning was an "A".
gknoy 2y ago
Good grief, Gwern is a treasure. Every time I stumble across a link to something they've written, it's chock-full of side quest links to things that are _absolutely amazing_. I happened to leave my mouse briefly over one of the drop-caps, and it turns out there's an entire page dedicated to _generating drop-caps_ with AI, as well as showcasing all sorts of stuff. "Thank you for making such awesome stuff" seems so pedestrian of a reaction. This is like looking at a fractal cathedral made by one person, where every time I look at it it's a hologram of something amazing and beautiful that I didn't even know was possible.
- gwern 2y ago
  > I happened to leave my mouse briefly over one of the drop-caps, and it turns out there's an entire page dedicated to _generating drop-caps_ with AI I'm very pleased to read that! I pushed Achmiz to implement that - "can we make all the dropcaps instances popup the https://gwern.net/dropcap https://gwern.net/dropcap page? "uh, probably, but why would you want to do that?" "because someone might be interested in one of the dropcaps and hover over it and otherwise they'll never know!" - and this is the first I've seen anyone mention it, but it sounds like it worked. It is one of the many touches few will ever notice, but I hope the ones who do will love it.

252 points by telotortium 2y ago

I found a families, great grandfather’s memoirs while doing their estate. I realized with the family all gone and there were few in his class with the education to speak of early American life so I published it and illustrated the e-book. https://books2read.com/A-young-Mans-Adventures-In-19th-Century-America https://books2read.com/A-young-Mans-Adventures-In-19th-Centu...

cableshaft 2y ago
Thank you for taking the time to do that. I'm sure if they were alive they would appreciate it. I went ahead and bought a copy and have read a few pages before passing out tonight. I'll read more tomorrow.
everybodyknows 2y ago
A content preview of a few pages might lead to more sales.
interludead 2y ago
Preserving your great-grandfather's memoirs like that (especially with the context of early American life) must have been a fascinating endeavor.

compressedgas 2y ago

Why not just make an EPUB version of your website?

l0b0 2y ago
That sounds like hundreds of hours of work.
- __mharrison__ 2y ago
  Or a few hours writing a script of they are well formed. (Possible even less using AI).
LudwigNagasena 2y ago
Yeah, and then why not just print it and put it in a cover? I don’t really understand the problem, honestly. The post doesn’t seem to be about writing a book, it seems to be about the Book as a concept that holds sentimental value to the author.
- gizajob 2y ago
  Yeah but what’s the point in that really? The website exists for anyone who wants it already. It’s not a book.
ZacNorth 2y ago
This is addressed in TFA - the author’s posts are characteristically full of hypertext.

andrewedstrom 2y ago

So curious who the anonymous example is

telotortium 2y ago
I thought it was The Last Psychiatrist, but then I saw TLP mentioned later.
Vecr 2y ago
If he's really into chaff generation it might be be him. Or a fictional version of him, because your examples don't have to be real if you're posting online under an alias.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gwern 2y ago
  It is not me.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jppope 2y ago

Maybe just me, but authors gravitate towards certain formats that fit them. Oscar Wilde did great with Dorian Grey but it was nothing compared to his plays. Imagining J.K. Rowling writing a blog feels wrong. I get Gwern's perspective, I'm not sure if I would read a gwern.net book... but on the flip side Randall Munroe (XKCD) has a couple of great books. So who knows?

Vecr 2y ago
I'm pretty sure she has written blog posts. Maybe you can claim they don't fit some technical definition but I have vague recollections of a quite large number of blog-like writings.
komali2 2y ago
JK's a prolific micro-blogger. I'm not sure her tweet engagements have surpassed her book sales yet but sure feels like we'll get there at some point.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

The main reason not to write a book is that the topic doesn't need a book-length treatment, and would be better as an article. Fiction of course is one thing, but even then, some fictional ideas and personality combinations are better as short stories. Personally, as a reader, I find a lot of book ideas interesting (especially in the realm of popular science), but I can stomach very few of them because they are excessively wordy and often full of overly long (IMO) personal experiences.

exe34 2y ago
"this book fills a much needed gap in the literature."
interludead 2y ago
Books often overextend simple ideas but for some this is the way to understand maybe
- passion__desire 2y ago
  > this is the way to understand maybe I have this idea. Let's say I want to bring two words (AI and Apocalypse, Yud's thesis ) closer in some semantic space of ideas. How would I do it? I would write thousands of stories bring those two concepts together. Sort of like warping the space of ideas. Like a horseshoe. Subconsciously, if I want to guage the weightage of a particular thesis, my mind does it informally if it can pull many emotionally weighted instances in support of that thesis. The same applies to societies and groups.
tinybrain 2y ago
This is my #1 gripe with non-fiction books. Way too wordy, too many anecdotes, just spit it out already. Please value my time as the reader. I read a lot of books, but I feel like I’m allocating more mental energy skimming half the content than I am absorbing knowledge. 37signals/Basecamp had some illuminating things to say about their book experiences. They kept fighting with the publisher to make their book short, the appropriate length. The publisher kept wanting it to be double the length to seem more impressive on the shelf. That mindset is to the detriment of books, just get to the point.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

If you want to write a book, go for it! I wrote a book "Amazing CTO", I earned quite some money and I got great feedback from people whom the book helped. I'm very happy I did it, even if I didn't become famous :-)

cubefox 2y ago
It's highly unlikely to earn money with a book...
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  It depends on how you calculate the "earnings". If I calculate my hourly rate to $200 and take the hours it took to write and market the book, I lost a lot of money. But would I have worked instead of writing the book? My book is $30 and I get 80% selling through Leanpub. So I got quite some money, and a trickle of money every week since it peaked. Can you earn money with a book through a publisher (if you're not already a famous name)? Not so sure. Probably better for your branding than your wallet. So as I've said, it depends.
  - cubefox 2y ago
    Yeah, "Amazing CTO" does sound like something people would pay money for. But fiction very likely doesn't sell, and likewise most passion projects of the "I want to write a book" type.

for_i_in_range 2y ago

Sad. I did $403k last month as an independent writer. All analog publishing. None of it from KDP. Be careful what advice you listen to.

mvkel 2y ago
Do you feel fulfilled?
- for_i_in_range 2y ago
  Yes.
niederman 2y ago
Surely you realize that this is not at all the typical experience for independent writers, though.
- vidarh 2y ago
  It's not the typical experience for traditionally published writers either.
__mharrison__ 2y ago
That's awesome. As an author myself, I'd love to hear more. Also note, that you are an outlier. (Congrats!) Folks listening to you should not expect those results.
- sanswork 2y ago
  Pretty sure it's just fantasy, it's easy to find his book from his comments. He has <5k followers and minimal engagement on any social media platform, his book does not have great reviews nor many of them on goodreads(150 reviews for a book that would have had to sell almost 25k copies in a month to get those numbers). Any conversation I've found in related subreddits seems negative.
gizajob 2y ago

skybrian 2y ago

Maybe there’s a similar post to be written about whether to start a blog and write essays? It works for some people, but for me, writing an an article that I think is good enough to publish (even on my obscure blog) takes all day and the extra effort doesn’t seem worthwhile, compared to writing comments and sharing links.

ghaff 2y ago
I have definitely shifted more to commenting here and there. I may get back to my blogs but I've sort of been faffing around since semi-retiring a few months back but maybe after I get back from my next trip and wrap up some home projects.

__mharrison__ 2y ago

If you want to write a book wrote one (out two or three). It has never been easier. Just be aware that it is a marathon not a sprint. I have a bunch of anecdotes about folks who have done well publishing their books. If you don't want to don't.

gizajob 2y ago

If you’re not completely driven to write a book, and there isn’t a book inside you that you just have to get out, then do not bother writing a book. Agents and publishers have nothing to do with it - you don’t need to ask for permission to write your book, it’s a piece of art. Agents and publishing come afterwards - and nobody is going to be interested really anyway, at least in the early stages. So if that is enough to make you confused about writing your book or makes you not want to bother, then don’t write your book. If you still have to write a book, you’ll love doing it despite the difficulty and futility, because the person who enjoys it the most will be you anyway.

a_bonobo 2y ago
I've heard this many times before (I think Charles Bukowski used to preach this?), and I have to say I disagree. Famously Douglas Adams had to be forced to write every sentence in the Hitchhiker's Guide. He certainly didn't have a book inside him that had to get out, he had external deadlines and rent to pay. Can you imagine a world without HGTTG?
- gizajob 2y ago
  What happens when you walk up to a publishing agent and tell them you don’t have anything to show them, and they’ll need to force you to write every sentence but assure them it’ll be brilliant? I think you’re also talking about one of Adams’ later books after HHGTG once his publisher was deep in hock for his advance.
  - modernerd 2y ago
    > What happens when you walk up to a publishing agent and tell them you don’t have anything to show them… They told him to hand over whatever he'd got: "Douglas happily built his reputation for (at this stage, merely) sailing close to the wind when it came to publishing deadlines by telling interviewers that he had been ordered to literally stop writing and hand his manuscript over to a courier no matter where he had got to…" — The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Jem Roberts" He was famous for scraping or missing deadlines from the very start, and openly admitted to it: "All of my life I've been attracted to the idea of being a writer, but like all writers I don't so much like writing as having written. … each time I meant to try to write something, I'd miss the deadline by two weeks."

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago

>I suspect that if many writers took seriously writing a book as a real project, rather than an aspirational cultural ideal of ‘being an author’ along the lines of ‘being a foreign language speaker’ or ‘being a PhD’, they would realize that it is a serious risk which can backfire. Ha, I feel called out. I'm in the latter camp, I was always terrible at languages as a kid and it was part of the reason I decided to move to Finland and learn Finnish as an adult. 1000+ hours in and I"m still nowhere close to my goals. I wouldn't recommend it for most halfway sane cost-benefit analyses - my ballpark number is I've forgone some $200,000 and counting in opportunity cost. (I still feel like I'm coming out on net is because it also allowed me to marry the world's greatest woman, and to heal a bunch of deep psychological issues. Assuming you don't have those, stay far away!)

gizajob 2y ago
“I decided to move to Finland and learn Finnish as an adult” Amazing move but you’ve not made it very easy for yourself given the huge difficulty in mastering the most mind-bending of European languages. Doubly difficult with the very high English fluency of all the locals. Hope you’re enjoying the Fazer!
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  Fazer Sininen has indeed powered many a long night so far ;) greatest mass market chocolate bar I've ever had.
interludead 2y ago
Your language-learning journey with Finnish is cool
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  Shhh you'll make me blush
  - interludead 2y ago

asicsp 2y ago

On the flip side, converting my tutorials to ebooks saved me from having to look for a job again. Been selling them for 6 years (with the last two years spent just to update them to newer software versions, improve examples, new cover images, etc). Of course, I have the advantage of living in a developing country but selling to an international audience (just $200/month to pay my bills).

082349872349872 2y ago
Living in a high income country, where $200 is well within monthly fluctuation, this situation makes me wonder if a little more telepresence might lead to us bifurcating into a world where the Eloi will know a tiny amount about how all of it works, and the Morlocks will know all about how a tiny amount of it works?
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  isn't this how it already works?
  - gradschoolfail 2y ago
    Designers* will know all about how it is all supposed to work *personally prefer the term “designists”, but YMMV on that one
    - gradschoolfail 2y ago
      UPDATE: Designori, as in Hesse’s magnum opus
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    It does seem to be already moving in that direction, yet there are still some discrepancies: (a) living in a highly developed country (and having grown up in one almost as developed), according to this theory I ought to be going full Eloi and mechanical Turk'ing out (AI as "actually, indians"?) all the schlep work in my life to telepresent Morlocks, yet the little of my washing which I do send out goes (to the best of my knowledge) mostly to the historically-developed world. (b) also to the best of my knowledge, current proto-Morlocks very rarely (or even never) eat current proto-Eloi.

hyperbrainer 2y ago

See, I am torn on this article. On the one hand, I am probably the target audience. I have much better things to focus on, but I cannot get the idea of having a novel(la) written out of my head. On the other, I have no stories to tell which would not be rather told in a short story/poem form. In short, yes but no but yes.

blindluck 2y ago

I would write a technical book for the challenge and learning rather than the "I published a book". It would also learn me a ... haskell or whatever. But not for the money and probably not the opportunities as anything there would be a bonus. I am more like that 1hr a day cranker. As you can see I am not natural at it... I would grind out and rewrite, get edits until it looks OK.

interludead 2y ago
I think treating everything as a skill-building exercise rather than a pursuit for external rewards could keep any process enjoyable

coolThingsFirst 2y ago

I always find it very interesting when smart people mistakenly exaggerate how difficult it is to achieve something. Pro bodybuilder is hard to become but it's very likely that with once to once every 10 days in the gym is going to transform the average person into a monster. Funny how we can make assumptions about life which are totally wrong. I did this as well by believing. 1) Making money is hard 2) Your startup needs to be brand new and doing somethign no else has done before 3) Exaggerating dangers of failure and by FAR the most dangerous 4) Feeling behind in life and rushing

interludead 2y ago
>I always find it very interesting when smart people mistakenly exaggerate how difficult it is to achieve something. Overthinking works like this
OvidNaso 2y ago
It's very likely that the average person will become pro bodybuilder level monster with hitting the gym oncee every 10 days?!!!
- coolThingsFirst 2y ago
  i said the average person will become a monster in the sense that he will be unrecognisable to his old self working out has probably one of the greatest ROI in life, it takes surprisingly little time. i did this, the amount of workouts it took was so much less than i thought before i have basically no belly fat defined deltoids and biceps. the level of confidence is immesurable. things just don't intimidate me anymore, girl says no. No worries. Anyone trying to intimidate me, well good luck won't work.

komali2 2y ago

Wow, I really love this site design, and the features like the floating annotations / footnotes. > same way one might want to have ‘learned to read Mandarin’ or ‘become a bodybuilder’, but not to actually sweat through memorizing (and then forgetting) endless arbitrary characters or hours in the gym (followed by gluttony as cruel as the starvation). Having done both of these things to some degree, I wonder where the impression is coming from that they're super hard. Certainly a certain kind of bodybuilding body is absurdly difficult to achieve and I simply don't recommend it to anyone - and every single person I know that's achieved it has body dysmporphia and is driven by it. Not worth. But achieving something "like" a bodybuilder's body is, imo, achievable for most people with the same amount of effort as most of the things people dream about - learning a language, learning to code, having an active blog, reading a book a month, etc. A few hours effort a week consistently and you'll likely have great results after a year, and the journey never ends from there! Mandarin as well is a more than achievable goal that can be achieved with a great degree of skill with a few years of consistent effort. I think this article is right though - a book will kill other goals and activities if you don't maintain a balance. I have many different thoughts about this that one day I'll organize, hah, into a blog post. But my thinking is basically along these lines: 1. The 40 hour workweek is the wrong way to approach maximizing human productivity 2. Humans are inconsistently productive 3. Guardrails are necessary to achieve productivity 4. Consistency is probably the most important guardrail 5. The hardest part of doing a thing isn't doing it, it's scheduling it accurately, and sticking to the schedule If a person maintains a fun blog incidentally alongside their work, blitzing out an article here and there as the whim strikes them, they might appear quite productive. However in an office setting, a corporation would find their productivity schedule infuriating - when will the thing be done? Idk, when I feel like it? When the mood strikes me? Leave me alone, I'm reading hacker news until the mood strikes me. Hence the inconsistently productive. I'm not making a naturalist argument though - I want to be more productive than "when the mood strikes me," and I don't mean for just capitalist endeavors, I mean for all the various activist activities I want to do as well. However I think the modern trap is thinking that the way to be productive is to set hours for activities - 40 hours for work, 9-5. Lots of work done then, right? Instead I think it's better to combine scheduling time with an understanding of human motivation as something flexible and malleable. Most workout advocates will advise things like going to the gym every day 8am, and achieving this by making putting on your gym shorts the first thing you do when you get out of bed, engaging a Habit process, and I think this is effective. But for me what's been more effective is, the night before, determining what time I'm going to bed, and then setting my alarm 8 hours after that, and then noticing - oh wait, I have a meeting 20 minutes after I wake up, ok, in that case, I put my gym shorts next to my computer chair, and immediately after the meeting put them on and then go to the gym, because 2 hours after that I have another call. Or, it's 2am and I'm drunk, there's no way I'm going to do anything but puke my guts out if I try to go on a run in 8 hours, I'll schedule a nighttime run instead - or fuck it, it's the weekend, I'll relax instead and acknowledge it's just not happening tomorrow, but that's ok because I have another go scheduled on Monday morning. There's another side to that which is accurate scheduling. Writing a book takes a long time and I think if it was slotted into a life correctly it would take years to write the book, when most want it done within a year or at most 2. But to achieve that they'd need to spend all their free time on it which would kill their blog hobby or whatever else. If I accurately measure out all the things I want to do in life - blogging, language study, reading, working out, riding my motorcycle, making videos showing off how beautiful taiwan is, fighting car capitalism, continuing to develop myself as an engineer, making enough money to retire - boy do I get depressed... I can do maybe 4 of those things before a week's time is spent already. It's hard to schedule things across the months, year, years, and not feel sad imo. Also total sidenote but I think most non fiction books are way too long anyway and would work better as blogs and blog posts, and I think the market dynamics of bookselling pushes this tendency - excluding fields like academia where people are writing to include as much supporting material as possible and with the expectation of being quoted and cited extensively in future works by themselves or other authors, which with the merging of popular culture and academia is causing issues. See: "Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" as an example. A really incredible new view of history and anthropology that's imo inaccessible to most readers because it's also at least partially written for academia.

aaravom 2y ago

[flagged]

aaravom 2y ago

[flagged]

firefoxd 2y ago

I haven't blogged in a while, so i decided to write a blog post about my experience building a chatbot that was actually generating revenue and helping people. There is a lot of noise in this field, but at the same time no real information. The more I wrote the more i realized that I had a lot more to say than a 900 words article. Next thing you know, I shared what I am doing in an HN comment and I was asked to provide a way for people to follow. I dumped what I had so far on github and it's now gonna be a book written in public. I'll probably turn it into a physical book eventually, but for now I got information to share and I'll type away until I'm done Sharing. That's one reason to write.

Einenlum 2y ago

Oh boy. I can relate so much to this article and everything said here. I published a book last year and it has been a long journey. It took me one year and a half to write it. But then when you think it's done, it's just a second challenge coming up. I wanted to write a book that was as straight-to-the-point as possible. The publisher I signed with didn't really understand my approach and wanted me to turn it into a random book ("less rough") where you would get the usual long and useless introductions that I hate. Took me a while to realise that if I signed with a publisher it was just to get this "I'm an author" recognition this article talks about. I realised I didn't even buy "regular" programming books and most of my library are self published books. I didn't want to publish a book I would have not read. Ended up cancelling my contract and publishing it myself. I talk a bit about it in this article: https://www.einenlum.com/articles/my-book-from-php-to-python-is-out https://www.einenlum.com/articles/my-book-from-php-to-python... I sold like 50 of them but got great feedback. To anyone wondering if it's worth it financially, definitely NOT. Is it still worth it for other reasons? I would say I don't regret it but you first have to realise you'll go into a rabbit hole and experience the levels of stress the author of the article talks about.

andai 2y ago
Without additional context, my guess is that you could have sold more if you had gotten more exposure. If the quality is good and there is a market for it, then it's only potential readers not knowing about it that prevents them from buying it.
- Einenlum 2y ago
  I should have mentioned this part indeed. Finding a publisher and following their process is already a hard path. But if you decide to self-publish (which I did) then a whole new story begins. Being a good author is not what matters at this point. You'll need good communication skills and a strategy to get some visibility. You'll need to market your "product" and feel at ease with this. A self-published book can be amazingly written, but without a very good strategy it's a book no one will read, sadly (especially if your audience is very niche, like mine). It's the part I feel the least comfortable with, so I have to accept the very limited reach.

d--b 2y ago

Great read and you could totally translate it to “Why to Not Write an App” almost verbatim. The following passage is I think the most interesting: > Now of course, there is a second kind of author: authors who write books with little discernible impact on their newsletter or blog. They sit down for an hour (statistically, in the morning), pound out their quota, and turn to the next task. The book does not weigh on their minds, and they are confident that they will have it out, as usual, in 12 months. More power to them—but I also think that most would-be book authors already know if they are one of that latter kind of writers, or if they are the former kind I’ve been discussing.

achenet 2y ago
I actually wrote a novella over the summer, using the "just write a bit every day and then go live your life method". It works quite well ^^
- ghaff 2y ago
  The 1 to 2 hours most days works for a lot of things. I was saying to a friend I've gotten so little done since semi-retiring a few months ago so I wrote out a list and they're "You've gotten a ton of stuff done!"

Uptrenda 2y ago

Maybe it doesn't have to be complex. Gwern could just have a restructured text feature to their articles that auto-builds to a PDF that you can buy as an on-demand book or get it on kindle. I don't think it has to be on a single subject. Gwerns essays are interesting in their own right and would still make a fine book. Wasn't 'Hackers and Painters' in the same spirit?

shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago

I never wrote a book. But we all live in the age of e-books and self-published books, so the money involved may be limited to 2-3 digits at most all you need is a strong online presence to be successful. Moreover, finding an audience is also not as difficult as it used to be in the past if you have a large active following base such as https://x.com/levelsio https://x.com/levelsio has self-published his book (https://readmake.com https://readmake.com) and he outperformed (sold 25000+ copies at 100% profit) many good writers, agents and publishers marketing channels.

hk__2 2y ago
> Moreover, finding an audience is also not as difficult as it used to be in the past if you have a large active following base Well, "if you have a large active following base" is the key here. If you don’t, it’s almost impossible to find an audience.
- probably_wrong 2y ago
  Finding an audience is not as difficult as it used to be in the past if you have an audience.
- shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
  > it’s almost impossible to find an audience Follow the path of those who have written many successful books, and you'll find that it's not almost impossible to find an audience e.g., William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde et al.
  - hk__2 2y ago
    > Follow the path of those who have written many successful books, and you'll find that it's not almost impossible to find an audience e.g., William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde et al. You’re contradicting yourself: if it were so easy, you wouldn’t cite only five names that span five centuries. It’s like saying music is easy, just do like Mozart or Beethoven. There are 3 million books published each year in the US. That’s more than 8k per day. See: https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publishing https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish...

hengheng 2y ago

I've once talked to a semi-successful author. His day job was Mechanical Engineering at the local university. He eventually quit once he had his formula worked out. He writes crime novels. Doesn't even like them, but if you want to sell, you either write smut (big gamble) or crime novels (less crowded). Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel. You also have to keep your protagonists whether you like them or not, or else every book will be your first one. He also found that he had to write local novels that take place around the local tourist sights. He couldn't write about his actual hometown of course, but there is a touristy spot an hour's drive from him, so that's where the detective had to be based for every single adventure. The touristy area must also be a city. That way you have half a million inhabitants, and the same amount of tourists whose relatives are looking for gifts. He was basically playing bookstore SEO. Unsurprisingly, being an ME, he had a product lifecycle. He was working on several books at once in a pipelined fashion. One was being drafted, the next one was being written, the third one was in early proof reading, the fourth one was being finalized. That way he had a good balance between creative and menial work at all times. He also explained how he was careful to use few proofreaders in the early stages, because apparently, his work is a dire read before any corrections. He has a process where he rotates through his early stage proofreaders, and mostly gives them later stage work that is more readable. Being a successful author is no more romantic than being a successful programmer. Or painter. Or mathematician. Any romanticism is at odds with professionalism, e.g. what works. And that's the same across all these professions.

dr_dshiv 2y ago
> Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel. Isaac Asimov figured that out!
- beacon294 2y ago
  What do you mean? All I read was foundation, some non fiction, and robot short story collections.
  - rusticpenn 2y ago

khafra 2y ago

I'm mid-career in security, and having written a book is probably worth 3-6 decent certifications at this point. I should probably coauthor one with ChatGPT before common knowledge of how easy that is gets any more widespread.

ghaff 2y ago
Not sure if you're being sarcastic but, in my experience, ChatGPT is mostly useful for producing editable filler. Mind you, that's often useful. The intros and definitions are needed. But it's not producing anything that is especially interesting on its own.

mewse 2y ago

I can't stop thinking about this throwaway parenthetical at the start of the blog post: > [...] for many writers, writing a book is about the last thing they should do (unless they feel a book bursting out of them, much like a facehugger). Now, as we all know, the aliens that burst out of people in the Aliens franchise are called 'chestbursters'. "Facehuggers", by comparison, are hatched from alien eggs. So in this metaphor, since we're told that novels are facehuggers, the writers must be the eggs. And by process of elimination, we can deduce that the innocent starship crewmembers being attacked by facehuggers (novels) are innocent readers. The metaphor actually contradicts the author's main thesis, since every egg (writer) does in fact contain a facehugger (novel). But contrariwise, all the human characters (the rest of us) would be much better off if those novels just stayed inside the writers and didn't insist on being written or read. Metaphors are like scissors; they're twice as much fun when you run with them!

smikhanov 2y ago
Considering how tooth-achingly boring the original post is, this is the best kind of feedback for it.
- pc86 2y ago
  First Gwern post I see.
- joenot443 2y ago
  I found it super readable. I think it helps a lot if you’re familiar with the other authors Gwern is referencing.
sandworm101 2y ago
And they are most fun when their author actually understands the subject. Don't make a trek reference unless you know your Kirks from your Spocks.
- gwern 2y ago
  This is a strange comparison. It is a humorous throwaway line about SF, where the actual 'subject' is not SF at all. (It's nonfiction writing.) That aside, your Kirk/Spock comparison is also wrong: the difference between Kirk and Spock is not a minor terminological quibble over a monster's name (which was not even the most important monster of that movie). The relationship of Kirk/Spock is the heart of _Star Trek_, the dramatic core, as they oppose and support each other. Even I, a non-Star Trek fan, know that!

timonoko 2y ago

"Book about ideas for a book" was entertaining and very economical. I wish more authors would do that and stop wasting our precious time. https://fi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Aiheita?_x_tr_sl=fi&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://fi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Aiheita?_x_tr...

Jiro 2y ago

gwern thinks we shouldn't be writing any more books anyway: https://gwern.net/culture-is-not-about-esthetics https://gwern.net/culture-is-not-about-esthetics

glimshe 2y ago

Would most of the arguments apply for videogames? "Why to Not Write a Game"?

hug 2y ago
Gwern and the articles examples are not terribly well known for output of interactive fiction that is almost but not quite a video game, so most of it does not apply.
andai 2y ago
I think the analog here would be "only do game jams, never spend 5 years making one game", which is actually something I hear quite often on indie game forums.

grecy 2y ago

I’ve self published three books now, with another in the works. Amazon print on demand makes it incredibly easy. They’re about my adventures around the world, with some lessons I learned and observations about whatever part of the world I’m in sprinkled throughout. The process was immensely satisfying, and I’ll never forget the feeling the first time I held the printed book in my hands. “Holy shit, I wrote a book!” My name was on the spine and everything. I write them in LaTeX to have ultimate control over the layout and formatting, then run it through Pandoc to get a compliant epub file. Details here [1]. I have them for sale on Amazon printed and book, and kobo and apple as ebooks. I’ll never get rich, but ~$500 a month forever is really nice when I’m on the road in a foreign country where costs are not high. If you have the desire, I highly recommend it. The learning and immense satisfaction are great. It doesn’t cost a cent, and you will have it forever. [1] http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-published-a-professional-paperback-and-ebook-using-latex-and-pandoc http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-published-a-professiona...

_tom_ 2y ago
I don't see a date the article. The web has taught me to never waste time with an undated article. Odds are very good it's obsolete.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- grecy 2y ago
  Huh, I never noticed the wp theme I’m using doesn’t put a date on “pages” , only “posts”. I wrote that in 2020, and I’m doing the identical thing right now for my next book. Not out of date at all.

aubanel 2y ago

In the collection of Rilke's letters "Briefe an einem jungen Dichter", he writes what I think one of the best advice about writing a book or not: "This above all: Ask yourself, in your night’s quietest moment, Do I have to write? Dig deep down into yourself for the answer. And if it is yes, if you can meet this solemn question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life around that necessity." It's harsh, but I think the necessity aspect is important: if you feel like a spring from which the urge of writing naturally flows and you could not repress it, then write. Else, don't.

passion__desire 2y ago
There is modern version of Charles Dickens' way of publishing a chapter each week in the newspaper. Artists on tiktok and instagram and youtube shorts are developing characters with backstories and so on. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@dsand00 https://www.youtube.com/@dsand00 Nowadays, you don't have to write the boring parts, just write the interesting bits.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

"Less fiction, more science" Karl Marx.

DanielBMarkham 2y ago

I completely agree with the author and yet I have taken up the profession of writing books. There are, as we know, two different kinds of books: fiction and non-fiction. There's actually only two flavors of books as well: polemic and exploratory. With a polemic, you're expected to have your own internal theme song and the produced work will conform to it. With exploratory books, you're on an adventure with the reader and the only bullshitting you add is the minimum amount necessary to make the exploration fun for both of you. Polemics have become quite popular lately, and I suspect anybody taking a set of blogs or essays and "sticking them together into a book" would only have this avenue available. I took a lot of essays and material I'd collected over the years and wrote some non-fiction books on programming. They were exploratory: the theme emerged as I condensed the work together. (My guess is that exploratory fiction and non-fiction is very tough to do and sell; people like a book that they already know the gist of and are familiar with the author much more than they feel like spending many hours on a lark) After I finished a few non-fiction books on coding and performative teams, I was done. It was fun, I learned stuff, I think it's critically important stuff, nobody cares, and I'm okay with that. Because it wasn't a polemic, I felt no need to rant or self-promote. There was no movement I wanted to lead. Time to move on to something else. Books suck. Books change the way you think. All writing does that. Books especially change you because they draw you into some sort of self-created cosmology that you've now adopted. I write because I'm a writer. I've always been a writer. I simply got honest about it as I grew older. I don't think you choose whether to write or not. I think you choose the fashion in which your writing interacts with your subconscious. A book is just a deployment bundle. It's not the point.

ruthmarx 2y ago

I have several books I want to write - I'm definitely bursting with idea, intent and motivation, and not just idea as a concept, but rather fully fleshed out. The hardest part is fighting ADHD or whatever and actually doing the work. These days if I were to publish I'd probably setup an LLC as a publishing company, do a little work to make the company look a lot bigger than it is and try to find some bookstores to sell to directly - in addition to selling online of course.

greenie_beans 2y ago
> try to find some bookstores to sell to directly bookstores don't wanna carry your book if they can't buy it from a distributor with standard discounts and the ability to return. good luck getting your books from your brand new publishing company carried by ingram. (see https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/94690-small-press-distribution-shuts-down.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p..., which would've been the best chance you had at being distributed, and even then they weren't easy to get into)
- ruthmarx 2y ago
  Interesting, thanks for the info and link. So what, it would be basically impossible to get a distributor to take books from a new publishing company? Or is it that they could be convinced to do so but likely if the new publishing company made a deal where they picked up more of the costs and/or risk than usual? Any reason the new publishing company couldn't just be a distributor themselves, and make deals with bookstores allowing for discounts and returns? I have no issue with the idea of taking losses before making a profit, and if anything I produce is good, I would have faith it would sell eventually. Any returned copies are copies that could be donated to various places, which might hopefully allow word of mouth to spread.
  - greenie_beans 2y ago
    ingram is about* the only game in town. it's very hard to get them to take your books as a small publisher. you'll be stuck with their terms. your venture will need a backlist and proof that you can move books, otherwise it makes no sense for them to go into business with a small publisher who doesn't move much product. you'd be better off using ingram spark if you're a self-published author who wants to be carried in bookstores. *asterism books is trying to fill the void left by small press distribution. they distribute independent presses. but they're picky about who they carry, and also require you to have some semblance of successful sales. you can certainly diy distribution, but some bookstores don't want to work directly with small publishers unless they're a fan/friends of the press. they already have business processes in place for handling distribution. they don't want to deal with a bunch of self-pubbed authors who created a brand to self publish their books. it's too much work for something that most likely won't sell enough to make up the cost of doing business with the press. bookselling is a low margin endeavor (like a 2% profit margin according to one recent ABACUS by the american booksellers association), so it makes sense for them to be this way.

pfortuny 2y ago

Well, most PhDs are obtained by writing a book, so there is that.

cortezdecoy 2y ago

Gwern's site feels like the "old web" in all the best ways to me. I think the writing would actually lose something if transposed into book form

bjclark13 2y ago

I didn't get into this article too much, but it took me an embarrassing amount of amount of time to figure out that the drop cap at the beginning was an "A".

gknoy 2y ago

Good grief, Gwern is a treasure. Every time I stumble across a link to something they've written, it's chock-full of side quest links to things that are _absolutely amazing_. I happened to leave my mouse briefly over one of the drop-caps, and it turns out there's an entire page dedicated to _generating drop-caps_ with AI, as well as showcasing all sorts of stuff. "Thank you for making such awesome stuff" seems so pedestrian of a reaction. This is like looking at a fractal cathedral made by one person, where every time I look at it it's a hologram of something amazing and beautiful that I didn't even know was possible.

gwern 2y ago
> I happened to leave my mouse briefly over one of the drop-caps, and it turns out there's an entire page dedicated to _generating drop-caps_ with AI I'm very pleased to read that! I pushed Achmiz to implement that - "can we make all the dropcaps instances popup the https://gwern.net/dropcap https://gwern.net/dropcap page? "uh, probably, but why would you want to do that?" "because someone might be interested in one of the dropcaps and hover over it and otherwise they'll never know!" - and this is the first I've seen anyone mention it, but it sounds like it worked. It is one of the many touches few will ever notice, but I hope the ones who do will love it.