4 ms·
For the past 5-6 years I've been writing a book in my spare time. The outline of it is how reason emerges in past societies from the needs of social complexity,
by mihaic 5mo ago
For the past 5-6 years I've been writing a book in my spare time. The outline of it is how reason emerges in past societies from the needs of social complexity, how it's lessons get converted into rules and rituals, which in turn remove any competitive advantage of aquiring reason, ending it to setup a new cycle. And in the meanwhile LLMs became the ultimate heuristic of humanity.
I've gotten it 60-70% ready, and I really don't know if it'll have an audience in a post-AI world. I never meant to strike big with it, but I'm now wondering if thousands of hours of research and writing can amount to more than a novelty gift I'd give to friends.
- i5heu 5mo agoI would like to read it! Please publish it!
- saaaaaam 5mo agoWhy wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience. Yes, AI means there are more poor works competing. But if it’s actually good writing, you will find an audience if you market the book. Pay an editor. Publish to kindle. Pay for marketing. Get people to sign up for an email list.
- lacewing 5mo ago> Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience. And that's precisely the issue here. For a while, the internet allowed you to find an audience, just like that. Start a blog / podcast / YT channel, keep going, get enough attention. You could then approach a traditional publisher and tell them "hey, I'm kind of a big deal", or you could self-publish and rely on the word-of-mouth from your followers. Now, how would that work? If you have a blog, AI answers will summarize it without attribution and not send anyone your way. Even the "references" cited in AI answers often point to AI-slop blogs, not the original source. The articles we discuss on HN are often AI-written too. So yeah, it's about reaching the audience, but you're now competing with machines that produce an endless stream of human-like text, good enough for most consumers, practically for free.
- saaaaaam 5mo agoWord of mouth is not marketing. The way you find the audience is by marketing. Paying to get in front of people. Targeting people who read similar books. Getting people who already have audiences to review your book or interview you. A book won’t sell itself. Which addresses your second point: machines can produce an endless stream of human-like text, but they have exactly the same problem as human generated text: finding an audience. How are these endless streams of human-like text finding an audience? Most of the time they are not. And as soon as you scratch beneath the surface there is no one to interview. No one to turn up at literary festivals. No one to write opinion pieces or blog pieces for book-interested audiences. As I said: writing isn’t the problem. Finding the audience is the problem. What distinguishes a book that is read by no one from a book that is read by a bunch of people? It’s definitely not the writing. There are great books out there that never find an audience because no one ever went out there to find an audience for those books.
- camdenreslink 5mo agoThe low budget marketing channels that worked in the past are harder in this post-LLM world. SEO seems to have changed a lot, email marketing now involves trying to escape the Promotions tab, organic social media marketing is much harder too (I suspect the large social networks want you to buy ads, not get organic reach as a person/business promoting a product or service). Marketing something like a self published book online has changed dramatically.
- mocpocalypse 5mo ago[dead]
- jdw64 5mo ago[dead]
- ishouldstayaway 5mo ago> The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience. You are literally responding to > I really don't know if it'll have an audience
- red-iron-pine 5mo agothe problem is finding an audience with reading comprehension
- ishouldstayaway 5mo agoYou're telling me.
- saaaaaam 5mo agoIndeed! It appears the person you are responding to skipped over a bunch of stuff and so missed my response which was “you need to market your book, not just write it”.
- mihaic 5mo agoSure, I've been a start-up founder before, I know the trap of "if you build it, they will come". It's just that AI is evolving so fast that book do seem like the market for vinyl (as the article said). No amount of marketing can help you out is your entire market is shrinking daily. Shriking markets are also not won by quality. The more competition, the more marketing then becomes the main thing, and you also need to alter the book in the process so that it fits the bite-sized pills you can push on most channels, or worse change it so much for the audience until it becomes something else entirely.
- mocpocalypse 5mo ago[dead]
- saaaaaam 5mo agoYes. And my response was “market your book”.
- mocpocalypse 5mo ago[dead]
- jdw64 5mo agoI really hope you don't give up. I've built and shipped systems with 80000 to 90,000 lines of code, only to see most of the companies that bought them go out of business. But there was still immense value in the act of delivering them. By putting our creations out into the world, we connect with each other. The act of writing and building is, in itself, humanity's grand narrative for trying to understand the world. The journey itself is inherently valuable. Isn't the ability to organize our thoughts, pass them down to the next generation, and continue that narrative exactly what makes us uniquely human? Even if only a few people around you end up reading it, those few could be deeply inspired to go on and build an even greater world. Please don't stop. I'm rooting for you.
- backprop1989 5mo agoFor what it’s worth, that sounds like a very interesting premise. N=1, but you have a potential reader here!
- pryelluw 5mo agoI’m also a writer and publish my works every week. Also working towards a book. My take? I don’t care. Still doing it for myself. God could come down in a chariot made of golden carrots and I wouldn’t change my mind.
- doitLP 5mo ago> God could come down in a chariot made of golden carrots With imagery like this, I’d love to read your other work! Link?
- pryelluw 5mo agoI appreciate the kind words. You can find a link to my newsletter over at https://yelluw.com https://yelluw.com Do subscribe if you like it. It’s free and will stay free.
- XargonEnder 5mo agoYour comment makes me wonder what the historical ratio was between books and readers. I know that books were in very short supply a thousand years ago, but readers were also very short in supply. I wonder if things are worse in the tiktok era or the pre-printing press era.
- WalterBright 5mo agoMass literacy was the result of printing presses, not the cause.