9 ms·

When ebooks first came on the scene, self-publishing was profitable. Due to relatively low competition, new authors and new releases could get traction with min

When ebooks first came on the scene, self-publishing was profitable. Due to relatively low competition, new authors and new releases could get traction with minimal marketing budgets. At the time, it seemed the great equalizer we'd all been waiting for had finally arrived. Nowadays, ebooks is a huge industry with thousands of new releases every day. Word on the street is 10k-30k of marketing spend per year is required to generate any sales at all. It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market. Is there a model could we create to bolster out the middle? If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller sells more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list. It just makes economical sense for the big publishers to focus on their bestsellers. There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming! I guess all we can do is continue our patronage for the authors we like, to trust the recommendations from people we respect, and to be willing to try out new authors and new releases. When working on a book for 2 years nets a $30k advance and it's unlikely to payout. It feels the incentives to pursue writing full-time are increasingly diminishing. Sometimes I wonder if for the majority of people who'd like to pursue authorship that doing so part-time is the only choice.

irq-1 1y ago
> Is there a model could we create to bolster out the middle? Extend Copyright? (no, no..) I have two ideas: - Recommendations. Publishers connect with private LLM/Agents for custom recommendations. They'd need to keep reviews private, but could trade them among themselves. - Insurance Pool. Authors could add works to a pool of books, and the profits could be split. Publishers would need to maintain the quality of books or authors won't join.
- prerok 1y ago
  You mean like an authorship coop? Might work, but the main problem is authors' self importance. Not a single author I know of would opt for it. They are all just impoverished millionares. For less narcissistic authors it may well work, though. Will pitch it, thanks for the idea!
Telemakhos 1y ago
> There's so many high quality books being published each day. Great is the stream of the Assyrian river, but much filth of earth and much refuse it carries on its waters. And not of every water do the Melissae carry to Deo, but of the trickling stream that springs from a holy fountain, pure and undefiled, the very crown of waters.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  Username checks out.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Perfect quote!
prerok 1y ago
I think part-time is indeed the only option and has been for a long long time. The e-books only shortly promised a disruption until it fell apart. As you say, partly due to advertising, but partly also due to being no editor. Editors can be both an annoyance but they are also a blessing, because they can advise as to what works and what does not. If most people will just read one book per year, or better yet, will choose which one book to give to someone else (not having read it at all), of course they will choose #1. I vividly remember the disappointment I felt when I gave #2 to an acquaintance (where I read both 1 and 2 and genuinely liked the one I gave better), only to be told that I gave the #2 and why didn't they receive the #1, and if that meant anything. Ok, off on a tangent, but geez that still hurts :(
dingnuts 1y ago
> If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller sells more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list All commercial art follows this pattern, a Pareto Distribution[0]. The top musician gets 10x what #2 does. Same with athletes. On and on. The rule applies to many competitive fields. The sky is blue, but it's astute of you to notice. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
borroka 1y ago
I don't think there have ever been any particular incentives to become a full-time writer. Most of us have read articles or books (Graydon Carter's) that have recently talked about the huge sums paid to some journalists 20 or 40 years ago, but the ratio of aspiring writers to well-paid writers has always yielded very high numbers. It's the same in all creative professions, and even more so for those that grant visibility. I think most would be fine considering this activity as a part-time commitment, instead of chasing something that has little chance of coming true. Of course, you can't be a part-time athlete and aspire to greatness, but I don't think the same applies to writing, for example. Now, we are in the realm of anecdotes, but the novel “Il Gattopardo,” which I consider to be among the top three Italian, and perhaps European, novels of the 20th century, was written by an amateur who did not even send the manuscript out to be considered for publication. It was discovered after Tomasi di Lampedusa's death by Giorgio Bassani, a talented writer who did not write full-time and who had incredible success with some fantastic novels, such as "Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini" (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis).
- piltdownman 1y ago
  The post-humous discovery and promotion of previously unknown works by unpopular Authors has always represented a major component in 19th-21st Century Publishing. John Kennedy Toole is probably the exemplar of this, in that 'A Confederacy of Dunces' was unpublishable during his lifetime, but became the picaresque national narrative after a large push by Walker Percy to get it published a decade after Toole's death. It ended up winning the Pulitzer the following year. Stoner, a novel by the American writer John Williams, is a lesser known but no less apt example. In 1963 Williams' own publisher questioned Stoner's potential to gain popularity and become a bestseller. It sold fewer than 2000 copies, and was out of print a year later. After subsequently being discovered and championed by literary luminaries like John McGahern, it was republished and translated into several languages, selling hundreds of thousands of copies across 21 Countries. By 2013, the book had achieved international best-seller status. I'd urge anyone with a love for academia, literature, or modern bildungsromans to give it a go. To me it's effectively 'American Gothic - The Novel' https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/stoner-john-williams-julian-barnes https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/stoner-john-wi...
BJones12 1y ago
> It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market. It seems that any product with effectively capped consumption will become a winner-take-all market. People go to the movie theater 6 times a year, so that's winner-take-all. People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all. People go to approximately 1 university, so while an average university has 200 million in endowments, Harvard has 50 billion (250x). Heck, I'm pretty sure the same factor is leading to the rise of megachurches because people are only capable of attending approximately 1 service per week. I recall the book Blockbusters by Anita Elberse (2013) being one of the first to point this out.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all. It doesn't sound like you know much about the market for books.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    >That same 2016 publication showed that on average, Americans read 12 books a year. Sounds like they may know more than you in this case.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      There is nothing approximating a cap at that level. You can easily read five times as many books. The proposed mechanism cannot work. Note also that the average of 12 books a year is dominated by people who read zero a year, and those people aren't relevant to the market.
      - IanCal 1y ago
        Would a figure of 60 books per year change the argument? 100? 200? There’s a realistic cap on total number of books consumed by a large enough group of people to matter economically.
hshdhdhehd 1y ago
Word on the street 30k spend, I guess that scenario is someone unknown. But what if someone builds an audience first. Granted that audience building isn't free.
carlosjobim 1y ago
There's no book recommendation system in the same way that we have music recommendation through Spotify et al, and video/movie recommendation through Netflix, YouTube et al. The best way to discover books is when they are mentioned in other good books, but this does nothing for new books. A book recommendation system will need to have access to full-text search within the books to work well. That will solve the problem.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  Recommendation systems are just bad across the board. Audible says "You liked this John Scalzi book? Here's every other Scalzi book as a recommendation! Also a few other very popular books which are almost exactly the same as the one you just read!" Amazon says "You just bought a hammer, here are 37 more hammers in case you want another one!" Why yes, I do like books with spaceships in them, but maybe I want to see more than the next 20 most popular books with spaceships in them... Recommendation engines fail by failing to make connections that aren't in the immediate neighborhood.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  I've found that: https://www.literature-map.com/ https://www.literature-map.com/ works well for authors whose books sell well enough to be listed there.
- boznz 1y ago
  The algorithm is your enemy, not your friend.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    It doesn't have to be an algorithm, it could be recommendations by real people. But I haven't found any such system which is as extensive as music or video recommendations.
Zigurd 1y ago
I wrote a book about Macintosh programming in C in the 1980s, when the first self hosted C compilers became available. At the time, I could barely write a coherent paragraph. Before Stackoverflow and other online resources people were desperate enough to buy tens of thousands of copies. I made serious money off of that. I quit writing books about coding when I wrote one with a team of amazing co-authors about Android programming that was 100 times better than my first book and sold a 10th of the number of copies. Unless you're Peter Norton, you never made a lot of money writing books even when it was profitable to do so. And I suspect a lot of Peter Norton books had ghost writers.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  Dr. Donald E. Knuth seems to be doing well --- made enough to at least include a mention of what he did with his royalty checks in an index entry in one of his books (royalties, use of points to a page with a graph which resembles the pipe organ which he had installed in his home).
  - bombcar 1y ago
    There are always outliers (that's the whole point). All he was saying is that when the market for technical books was new (because that was really the only way to get to speed on something) you didn't need to have Knuth-levels of knowledge and writing skill (Knuth is both incredibly knowledgeable and an exceptionally good writer) to make a decent living.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> Nowadays, ebooks is a huge industry with thousands of new releases every day. > There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming! Thousands of new releases a day could mean as many as two or three in high quality. That's more than you can read, but not enough to overwhelm anyone. What's overwhelming is the several thousand that are garbage.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  That goes for almost everything, these days. Job-hunting is a brutal, humiliating slog, because of the thousands of junk CVs even the most obscure job posting gets. Selling high-quality stuff (software, hardware, widgets, literature, etc.) is a nightmare, because you have to tread water above the deluge of junk. It's really depressing.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    > Job-hunting is a brutal, humiliating slog, because of the thousands of junk CVs even the most obscure job posting gets. Having been on the hiring end, I can assure you that it is not true that even the most obscure posting gets thousands of applicants. Sometimes you put out a job and get very few bites. So it depends, as always, on the specifics of the posting (what industry, where it is, etc).
    - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      Good point. I was really referring to IT industry openings. I will say that companies use the tsunami of junk, as justification for the nastiness of the interview process.
bonoboTP 1y ago
> It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market. Books, music, films, games, basically all creative things. Because everyone can just watch/read/listen to the best of the best. It's not like restaurants where the consumer actually consumes the product. It's the result of global scale distribution networks. Long ago you could be okay-famous by being the best guitarist in the village and people would appreciate you. Or you could be the local history buff. But if you write enter the global arena, you'll compete with everyone else. There's no limit to how many books the famous author can sell, or how many times a famous singer's song can be streamed on Spotify. There's simply very little demand for mediocre stuff. Also, people want to be able to talk to each other about cultural things. Even if it's a bit more fragmented today, people still want to belong together through liking the same things.
- torben-friis 1y ago
  Winner doesn’t necessarily equal better. Media takes time to consume, which means that many products won’t be consumed at all even if they are good, much less be consumed enough to reach the point where word of mouth can achieve virality. The reality is that the best winner is usually a product good enough to not be laughed at (though not usually best in class), with some characteristics that make it marketable, and with strong backing behind (money, connections or both). One funny effect is that you end up with artists talking about viral topics like social justice and discrimination like it’s first hand experience, but a quick check will show they come from immensely privileged backgrounds.
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    And specifically not laughed at by your target market. See Twilight, Hunger Games and 50 Shades of Grey for a few examples. Clearly mocked products, but immensely popular and winners in their own right.
  - mbg721 1y ago
    Can you even define "best" for creative media? Sure, there's obvious junk that most people will agree can be discarded, but culture is very subjective. So instead of barriers to getting published at all, there are barriers in the form of curation and gatekeeping. I assume the parent comment's last paragraph is why every fantasy novel I've read in the last decade has a five-page-long lesbian romance; the author has to play ball with the publisher in order to get marketed.
pixodaros 1y ago
I know several full-time self-published authors and they are not spending anything like $10-30k a year on ads
walkabout 1y ago
The fix is to get people reading fiction again. The market’s tiny because very little time is spent reading fiction now. There used to be a market for writing that could supply some kind of a decent-ish living to quite a few authors, not just a handful of super-stars. That world is gone and it’s not coming back. TV killed it, and smartphones carved up the body and buried it in several unmarked graves at crossroads. Not even the dark arts can bring it back now. It’s over. The shrinking market is also why YA and YA-like books have taken over, even for adults. You can’t afford to exclude much of the market, so the “reading level” on mass market fiction for adults has been slipping downward fast for the last couple decades. Readers willing to put in effort are too small a market for commercial success. Rarely, maybe, but not like things used to be.
- piltdownman 1y ago
  It's a terrifying and observable phenomena in the American Market in particular, but I still hold out some hope from the parasitic nature of premium-streaming services ultimately needing decent narrative foundations. Hilary Mantel's historical fiction being picked up is a good example of this in recent times in Western Europe. Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation, was a surprise hit given its somewhat dry subject matter as a fictionalised biography documenting the life of Thomas Cromwell.
lmm 1y ago
> There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming! > It feels the incentives to pursue writing full-time are increasingly diminishing. Seems like this is the market working as it should? Maybe we as a society could stand to have fewer people writing full-time.
higginsniggins 1y ago
Isn’t that the exact same case for software though? It seems interesting to me the one of the highest paying professions- software engineer and the lowest- author are both that way because of scalability.

irq-1 1y ago

> Is there a model could we create to bolster out the middle? Extend Copyright? (no, no..) I have two ideas: - Recommendations. Publishers connect with private LLM/Agents for custom recommendations. They'd need to keep reviews private, but could trade them among themselves. - Insurance Pool. Authors could add works to a pool of books, and the profits could be split. Publishers would need to maintain the quality of books or authors won't join.

prerok 1y ago
You mean like an authorship coop? Might work, but the main problem is authors' self importance. Not a single author I know of would opt for it. They are all just impoverished millionares. For less narcissistic authors it may well work, though. Will pitch it, thanks for the idea!

Telemakhos 1y ago

> There's so many high quality books being published each day. Great is the stream of the Assyrian river, but much filth of earth and much refuse it carries on its waters. And not of every water do the Melissae carry to Deo, but of the trickling stream that springs from a holy fountain, pure and undefiled, the very crown of waters.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
Username checks out.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
Perfect quote!

prerok 1y ago

I think part-time is indeed the only option and has been for a long long time. The e-books only shortly promised a disruption until it fell apart. As you say, partly due to advertising, but partly also due to being no editor. Editors can be both an annoyance but they are also a blessing, because they can advise as to what works and what does not. If most people will just read one book per year, or better yet, will choose which one book to give to someone else (not having read it at all), of course they will choose #1. I vividly remember the disappointment I felt when I gave #2 to an acquaintance (where I read both 1 and 2 and genuinely liked the one I gave better), only to be told that I gave the #2 and why didn't they receive the #1, and if that meant anything. Ok, off on a tangent, but geez that still hurts :(

dingnuts 1y ago

> If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller sells more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list All commercial art follows this pattern, a Pareto Distribution[0]. The top musician gets 10x what #2 does. Same with athletes. On and on. The rule applies to many competitive fields. The sky is blue, but it's astute of you to notice. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

borroka 1y ago

I don't think there have ever been any particular incentives to become a full-time writer. Most of us have read articles or books (Graydon Carter's) that have recently talked about the huge sums paid to some journalists 20 or 40 years ago, but the ratio of aspiring writers to well-paid writers has always yielded very high numbers. It's the same in all creative professions, and even more so for those that grant visibility. I think most would be fine considering this activity as a part-time commitment, instead of chasing something that has little chance of coming true. Of course, you can't be a part-time athlete and aspire to greatness, but I don't think the same applies to writing, for example. Now, we are in the realm of anecdotes, but the novel “Il Gattopardo,” which I consider to be among the top three Italian, and perhaps European, novels of the 20th century, was written by an amateur who did not even send the manuscript out to be considered for publication. It was discovered after Tomasi di Lampedusa's death by Giorgio Bassani, a talented writer who did not write full-time and who had incredible success with some fantastic novels, such as "Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini" (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis).

piltdownman 1y ago
The post-humous discovery and promotion of previously unknown works by unpopular Authors has always represented a major component in 19th-21st Century Publishing. John Kennedy Toole is probably the exemplar of this, in that 'A Confederacy of Dunces' was unpublishable during his lifetime, but became the picaresque national narrative after a large push by Walker Percy to get it published a decade after Toole's death. It ended up winning the Pulitzer the following year. Stoner, a novel by the American writer John Williams, is a lesser known but no less apt example. In 1963 Williams' own publisher questioned Stoner's potential to gain popularity and become a bestseller. It sold fewer than 2000 copies, and was out of print a year later. After subsequently being discovered and championed by literary luminaries like John McGahern, it was republished and translated into several languages, selling hundreds of thousands of copies across 21 Countries. By 2013, the book had achieved international best-seller status. I'd urge anyone with a love for academia, literature, or modern bildungsromans to give it a go. To me it's effectively 'American Gothic - The Novel' https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/stoner-john-williams-julian-barnes https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/stoner-john-wi...

BJones12 1y ago

> It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market. It seems that any product with effectively capped consumption will become a winner-take-all market. People go to the movie theater 6 times a year, so that's winner-take-all. People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all. People go to approximately 1 university, so while an average university has 200 million in endowments, Harvard has 50 billion (250x). Heck, I'm pretty sure the same factor is leading to the rise of megachurches because people are only capable of attending approximately 1 service per week. I recall the book Blockbusters by Anita Elberse (2013) being one of the first to point this out.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all. It doesn't sound like you know much about the market for books.
- pixl97 1y ago
  >That same 2016 publication showed that on average, Americans read 12 books a year. Sounds like they may know more than you in this case.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    There is nothing approximating a cap at that level. You can easily read five times as many books. The proposed mechanism cannot work. Note also that the average of 12 books a year is dominated by people who read zero a year, and those people aren't relevant to the market.
    - IanCal 1y ago
      Would a figure of 60 books per year change the argument? 100? 200? There’s a realistic cap on total number of books consumed by a large enough group of people to matter economically.

hshdhdhehd 1y ago

Word on the street 30k spend, I guess that scenario is someone unknown. But what if someone builds an audience first. Granted that audience building isn't free.

carlosjobim 1y ago

There's no book recommendation system in the same way that we have music recommendation through Spotify et al, and video/movie recommendation through Netflix, YouTube et al. The best way to discover books is when they are mentioned in other good books, but this does nothing for new books. A book recommendation system will need to have access to full-text search within the books to work well. That will solve the problem.

colechristensen 1y ago
Recommendation systems are just bad across the board. Audible says "You liked this John Scalzi book? Here's every other Scalzi book as a recommendation! Also a few other very popular books which are almost exactly the same as the one you just read!" Amazon says "You just bought a hammer, here are 37 more hammers in case you want another one!" Why yes, I do like books with spaceships in them, but maybe I want to see more than the next 20 most popular books with spaceships in them... Recommendation engines fail by failing to make connections that aren't in the immediate neighborhood.
WillAdams 1y ago
I've found that: https://www.literature-map.com/ https://www.literature-map.com/ works well for authors whose books sell well enough to be listed there.
boznz 1y ago
The algorithm is your enemy, not your friend.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  It doesn't have to be an algorithm, it could be recommendations by real people. But I haven't found any such system which is as extensive as music or video recommendations.

Zigurd 1y ago

I wrote a book about Macintosh programming in C in the 1980s, when the first self hosted C compilers became available. At the time, I could barely write a coherent paragraph. Before Stackoverflow and other online resources people were desperate enough to buy tens of thousands of copies. I made serious money off of that. I quit writing books about coding when I wrote one with a team of amazing co-authors about Android programming that was 100 times better than my first book and sold a 10th of the number of copies. Unless you're Peter Norton, you never made a lot of money writing books even when it was profitable to do so. And I suspect a lot of Peter Norton books had ghost writers.

WillAdams 1y ago
Dr. Donald E. Knuth seems to be doing well --- made enough to at least include a mention of what he did with his royalty checks in an index entry in one of his books (royalties, use of points to a page with a graph which resembles the pipe organ which he had installed in his home).
- bombcar 1y ago
  There are always outliers (that's the whole point). All he was saying is that when the market for technical books was new (because that was really the only way to get to speed on something) you didn't need to have Knuth-levels of knowledge and writing skill (Knuth is both incredibly knowledgeable and an exceptionally good writer) to make a decent living.

thaumasiotes 1y ago

> Nowadays, ebooks is a huge industry with thousands of new releases every day. > There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming! Thousands of new releases a day could mean as many as two or three in high quality. That's more than you can read, but not enough to overwhelm anyone. What's overwhelming is the several thousand that are garbage.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
That goes for almost everything, these days. Job-hunting is a brutal, humiliating slog, because of the thousands of junk CVs even the most obscure job posting gets. Selling high-quality stuff (software, hardware, widgets, literature, etc.) is a nightmare, because you have to tread water above the deluge of junk. It's really depressing.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  > Job-hunting is a brutal, humiliating slog, because of the thousands of junk CVs even the most obscure job posting gets. Having been on the hiring end, I can assure you that it is not true that even the most obscure posting gets thousands of applicants. Sometimes you put out a job and get very few bites. So it depends, as always, on the specifics of the posting (what industry, where it is, etc).
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    Good point. I was really referring to IT industry openings. I will say that companies use the tsunami of junk, as justification for the nastiness of the interview process.

bonoboTP 1y ago

> It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market. Books, music, films, games, basically all creative things. Because everyone can just watch/read/listen to the best of the best. It's not like restaurants where the consumer actually consumes the product. It's the result of global scale distribution networks. Long ago you could be okay-famous by being the best guitarist in the village and people would appreciate you. Or you could be the local history buff. But if you write enter the global arena, you'll compete with everyone else. There's no limit to how many books the famous author can sell, or how many times a famous singer's song can be streamed on Spotify. There's simply very little demand for mediocre stuff. Also, people want to be able to talk to each other about cultural things. Even if it's a bit more fragmented today, people still want to belong together through liking the same things.

torben-friis 1y ago
Winner doesn’t necessarily equal better. Media takes time to consume, which means that many products won’t be consumed at all even if they are good, much less be consumed enough to reach the point where word of mouth can achieve virality. The reality is that the best winner is usually a product good enough to not be laughed at (though not usually best in class), with some characteristics that make it marketable, and with strong backing behind (money, connections or both). One funny effect is that you end up with artists talking about viral topics like social justice and discrimination like it’s first hand experience, but a quick check will show they come from immensely privileged backgrounds.
- Ekaros 1y ago
  And specifically not laughed at by your target market. See Twilight, Hunger Games and 50 Shades of Grey for a few examples. Clearly mocked products, but immensely popular and winners in their own right.
- mbg721 1y ago
  Can you even define "best" for creative media? Sure, there's obvious junk that most people will agree can be discarded, but culture is very subjective. So instead of barriers to getting published at all, there are barriers in the form of curation and gatekeeping. I assume the parent comment's last paragraph is why every fantasy novel I've read in the last decade has a five-page-long lesbian romance; the author has to play ball with the publisher in order to get marketed.

pixodaros 1y ago

I know several full-time self-published authors and they are not spending anything like $10-30k a year on ads

walkabout 1y ago

The fix is to get people reading fiction again. The market’s tiny because very little time is spent reading fiction now. There used to be a market for writing that could supply some kind of a decent-ish living to quite a few authors, not just a handful of super-stars. That world is gone and it’s not coming back. TV killed it, and smartphones carved up the body and buried it in several unmarked graves at crossroads. Not even the dark arts can bring it back now. It’s over. The shrinking market is also why YA and YA-like books have taken over, even for adults. You can’t afford to exclude much of the market, so the “reading level” on mass market fiction for adults has been slipping downward fast for the last couple decades. Readers willing to put in effort are too small a market for commercial success. Rarely, maybe, but not like things used to be.

piltdownman 1y ago
It's a terrifying and observable phenomena in the American Market in particular, but I still hold out some hope from the parasitic nature of premium-streaming services ultimately needing decent narrative foundations. Hilary Mantel's historical fiction being picked up is a good example of this in recent times in Western Europe. Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation, was a surprise hit given its somewhat dry subject matter as a fictionalised biography documenting the life of Thomas Cromwell.

lmm 1y ago

> There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming! > It feels the incentives to pursue writing full-time are increasingly diminishing. Seems like this is the market working as it should? Maybe we as a society could stand to have fewer people writing full-time.

higginsniggins 1y ago

Isn’t that the exact same case for software though? It seems interesting to me the one of the highest paying professions- software engineer and the lowest- author are both that way because of scalability.