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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
by 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 agoWhat do you mean? All I read was foundation, some non fiction, and robot short story collections.
- rusticpenn 2y agoAre you being sarcastic? The Robot novels are basically crime novels with robots...
- genghisjahn 2y agoAye, the main character is a detective.
- ghaff 2y agoAlso the Black Widower stories. I'm sure others as well.
- dsr_ 2y agoIt's not sarcasm: the conventional wisdom was that an SF novel could not also be a satisfying mystery/detective novel, because the readers could not guess that Aldebaranians can see in ultraviolet, or any other authorial invention. Asimov's insight was that it was up to the author to play rigorously fairly: every fact of consequence needed to be revealed naturally.
- a_bonobo 2y agoAnd that's what I love about the robot stories. He sets up the law of robotics, just like Agatha Christie and friends set up the detective fiction commandments, and then Asimov sets about finding all the loop holes in the laws of robotics. Every story is one loop-hole.
- beacon294 2y agoThere's actually a significant corpus of robot stories. However, I did forget that "I, Robot" does have a lot of crimes, investigations, and such.
- rusticpenn 2y agoI am talking about these for example The Caves of Steel (1954) - first Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel The Naked Sun (1957) - second Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel "Mirror Image" (1972) - short story about R. Daneel Olivaw and detective Elijah Baley The Robots of Dawn (1983) - third Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel Robots and Empire (1985) - fourth Robot series/R. Daneel Olivaw novel
- QuesnayJr 2y agoI read some subreddits for authors for a while, and all of the advice was like this. A few authors get lucky writing what they like, but most of them find a niche and relentlessly optimize for it. Romance sounded like the most optimizable, because it's a bunch of microgenres, and within a microgenre the readers want to read the exact same thing over and over. Some authors were making good money writing a book a month and self-publishing. At that point, I'd rather be an accountant.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y agoIt's partly a transition in the industry towards less risk taking. You see it in the movie industry as well. Certain authors are the equivalent of blockbuster movie releases. Publishers pay them huge amounts and market the ever living daylights out of them. Sally Rooney is a recent example, or authors like Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith, where their books releases are "events". Many publishers are moving away from the long tail model that used to let "midlist" authors still eke out a living or at least publish. The consolidation in the industry has also made it difficult for authors to shop their books around to different publishers with their own "brands". The other "safe" bet for publishers has been genre books, like romance or crime, with clear templates and the ability to churn out books while relying on the authors name more than anything else, like Grisham. In romance, for example, there is a big emphasis on "family" series, where each book focuses on a different member of a family or group. An example is an author like Kleypas. The books are essentially just variations on a set of tropes, almost algorithmic, but the way they fit together and mutually reference one another keeps people invested. In general though, very few authors make a living writing. The midlist era that thrived in the last 19th and 20th century is sadly going the way of the dodo.
- _tom_ 2y agoThe midlist has moved into self publishing. Many more books are published on amazon than by trad publishers. Many of them don't sell, but the numbers (guess) aren't probably that different from fad publishing in terms of success. Many authors that succeed at self publishing move to traditional publishers. (Hugh Howe, E L James) Others (Tamara Taylor) like to control and much higher royalties and stay self published.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago> 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). Reminds me of Chuck Tingle, who is an author but also a troll, writing books like "Pounded In The Butt By My Handsome Sentient Library Card Who Seems Otherworldly But In Reality Is Just A Natural Part Of The Priceless Resources Our Library System Provides".
- dayjaby 2y agoReminds me of about every single Japanese web novel... "I've been killing slimes for 300 years and maxed out my level" "I'm a behemoth, an S-ranked monster, but mistaken for a cat, I live as an elf girl's pet" The list goes on with even longer titles.
- asddubs 2y agoIt's just clickbait titles, because it works. Wouldn't surprise me if we see more of that on books as well in the future rather than short and vague titles
- cpach 2y agoThis fashion was not uncommon before the 20th century or so. For example, Daniel Defoe’s seminal work from 1719: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself.
- ants_everywhere 2y agoAnd well-known enough for Monty Python to make a joke of it > Yes...I wonder if you might have 'The Amazing Adventures of Captain Gladys Stoutpamphlet and her Intrepid Spaniel Stig Amongst the Giant Pygmies of Beckles'...volume eight.
- brudgers 2y agoWriting is like any other form of creative expression: most people pursuing it need a day job too. Among possible day jobs for writers, most writers can and do do worse than writing. Even a dream job is still a job and brings some resentment just for the fact it is a job. It ain’t gonna make you a trust fund baby.
- passion__desire 2y agoThis was depicted in The Simpsons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Job https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Job > "The Book Job" is the sixth episode of the twenty-third season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on November 20, 2011. In the episode, Lisa is shocked to discover that all popular young-adult novels are not each written by a single author with any inspiration, but are conceived by book publishing executives through use of market research and ghostwriters to make money. When Homer hears this, he decides to get rich by starting work on a fantasy novel about trolls together with Bart, Principal Skinner, Patty, Moe, Professor Frink, and author Neil Gaiman.
- hotsauceror 2y agoThere was also a wonderful little throwaway gag, with a sign outside a bookstore reading “James Michener $3.99/lb”
- 082349872349872 2y agoMostly we rate authors by readability, but in this century it's also possible to judge them by how well their books serve as impromptu laptop stands.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y agoThis is called write-to-market, and it's a well-known thing in self publishing - even though many wannabe fiction writers choose to ignore it, because they'd rather believe their book will have publishers swooning and readers gushing. (Spoilers: odds of that are very, very close to zero.) In fact all publishing is write-to-market now. Most traditionally published books are picked to chase trends. There's also a huge market for ghost-written titles with a celebrity on the cover. It's a shamelessly conservative industry. It's unbelievably hard to pitch a fresh fiction franchise, even if it's wildly creative and incredibly well-written.
- DanielBMarkham 2y ago"Most drama today sucks" --- "This is called write-to-market" Yes. I doubt you disagree, but I needed to point that out. These two, along with writing-by-formula, are intricately related. There's nothing wrong with writing being a racket. If you want to feel depressed and lack a sense of optimism in humanity, spend some time learning about the publishing industry. Woof. It's nothing but formulaic conservative market-driven darkness all the way down. AND all the players are well-established, they've driven out inefficiencies, and they've got plenty of tricks to keep the riff-raff out. They've been doing that for centuries. I don't like joking on HN, but this is a personal joke I've used for some time and seems appropriate: Want to start a new streaming series? Throw together a bunch of marketing-driven adjectives and end with "and they solve crimes." "She's a gay little person goth time-traveling alien, he's an autistic left-handed incel Quaker. They live in Portland, and together they solve crimes." My opinion is that people are going to eventually get sick of this stuff, much the same as they got tired of the B Monster Movies in the 50s, but who knows. Detective and True-Crime novels are perennials. Not my circus, not my monkeys. Working like this sounds to me like having a job I hate.
- sph 2y ago> "She's a gay little person goth time-traveling alien, he's an autistic left-handed incel Quaker. They live in Portland, and together they solve crimes." I'm pretty sure a Netflix executive would have signed on this concept based on this sentence alone half a decade ago. Now it seems the entire world is waking up to these formulaic data-driven products that have been pushed by media conglomerates for a decade. This is especially apparent in the gaming world, where big productions seemingly flop out of nowhere (cough Concord cough) while indie studios keep innovating. It's so easy to blame this phenomenon on rose-tinted glasses and older people like us thinking all old things are better than modern, but when the world wasn't decided by "data scientists" and corporate committees, there was more variety, more volatility. Lower lows but higher highs as well. I've been thinking about this a lot the other day while watching snippets of the movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", wondering where pure, plain fun movies that are not pushing an agenda or pandering to some audience have gone. And now, in the current era of the remake, which still has to reach the film industry, it is gonna get worse. When they'll find they are unable to invent the new multi-billion franchise, why not go and remake and "modernise" an older one? It's basically free money.
- andai 2y agoIf I'm reading this right, the proofreading process massively improves the quality of the work? Could you expand on this?
- ghaff 2y agoI'm much less familiar with writing fiction but there are continuity errors, abrupt jumps that just lose a reader, errors of logic, organizational problems of various kinds. But even if you can mostly avoid that kind of thing whether in fiction or non-fiction, you absolutely need a copyeditor who will carefully look for typos, grammatical errors, spelling and capitalization of company names, etc.
- hengheng 2y agoBeyond what u/ghaff mentions, I believe the early editing work was about pacing, whether to include or kill dead-ends and expositional pieces, character arcs and biographical details that could change, choice of setting, time of day, locations, etcetera. I believe he had one change where a different character became the murderer. Anything that would get sidenoted, he would do in second stage proofreading only. Not even worth fixing a typo if the whole page could still be axed. The guy does a lot of scaffolding and prototyping, and some heavy refactoring.
- bonoboTP 2y agoProlific professors who publish dozens of papers at scientific conferences year after year also have similar methods. There's a pattern, there's a method. There's always some novelty of course but it's a production line nevertheless. (I'm talking about real successful academics with real status in the community, not fakes). It also reminds me of the MrBeast document from the other day. Once you hit the formula, you keep grinding it. Consistent high performers almost all do it, no matter the field. Whether it's songs, books, YouTube videos, science papers, blog posts, paintings, consultants, etc. Of course science papers are a team effort but so are novels and music and paintings. Hans Zimmer didn't single handedly compose his recent film scores, he has lots of people working for him on the project. Master painters used assistants. Stephen King isn't typing every character himself. Amd then there are one hit wonders who are at the right place at the right time, saying what needed to be said in that moment, and then sink back into obscurity or become a parody/tribute of their own self as they try to milk that one insight from their 15 minutes of fame. Outlier level work by one person that keeps being novel in truly surprising ways, on a consitent basis, is so rare that there are probably only a handful of instances.
- ghaff 2y agoAs someone who gave hundreds of talks and wrote at least hundreds of articles etc. over the years, I basically agree. Some I look back on as being particular insightful or clever. But you pretty much have to mostly crank at least to a minimum standard. And, yes, there's a lot of reuse in various ways.
- bonoboTP 2y agoYes, I'm not trying to disparage it too much, it's just the reality of the job. But I found that even junior PhD students can have a romantic illusion that real scientists just spend their time musing and thinking and sometimes they have a flash of insight which they then enthusiastically share with the others. But the more mundane reality is that papers are projects with their own life cycle. You have to be on time, you have to cater to where "the discourse" is right now, the metagame. But to be fast, you need a process, a formula. It's sales. Everything can be approached from a sales and marketing mentality and it tends to bring success to a scary degree. Some apply similar tools in their romantic lives too, where optimizing your dating profile is just the start. I tend to think this is not the real path to something fulfilling, but pursuing this question veers into religious territory.