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!
Everyone should read my science fiction novel, where a team of intrepid heroes travels in time to assassinate Marx and Engels, but returns to a future where things are worse because they should've focused on Hegel.
What I think happened is that he said "facehugger" when he meant "chestbuster," likely because 1) the word "chestbuster" almost repeats the word "bursting," and 2) everyone knows that a chestbuster is the only notable symptom (aside from hunger and sudden indigestion) of having been attacked by a facehugger.
You've introduced eggmorphing (the transformation of people and other animals into eggs), which is not canon because the scene was cut.
"Facehugger" is a lot more familiar a term, and yeah, I didn't even realize there was a difference because a facehugger leads to bursting-chests, at least in what I remember of the 3 Alien movies I watched. (I also keep thinking of 'facehuggers' thanks to the AI startup Hugging Face. Every time I see their logo+name, I think again to myself, 'what a bizarre brand, it looks like _Alien_, like the poor emoji guy is about have his chest burst from the face-hugging alien'.)
But since the term is apparently not technically correct (which as we all know, is the best - indeed, only - kind of correctness), I have changed it.
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!
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.
This 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.
"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.
> "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.
I would say that a reasonable person could have foreseen Concord failing. Perhaps not necessarily as hard as it did, but there were a number of red flags before it released. The character designs were bland and bad, which is worse than just being bad. They drummed up a whole bunch of controversy, and the marketing outside of that controversy was basically non-existent. Almost nobody had heard of the product until it already had failed. Even when it was in beta for free, they only garnered about a couple of thousand players at any given time.
Then you add on that they already missed the train for hero shooters by about eight years and their modern competition is all free to play and has already sucked up the entire market for the most part. I saw an analysis by a former game producer that thought that perhaps they had a work environment that stifled criticism and commentary from developers and I think that that might have been an accurate assessment; The entire product was released in a way that myself and a number of other people that I've seen online simply can't believe that nobody was throwing their hands up and saying that this was a bad idea before release.
> 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.
There's a trend of thinking that our age is the most accepting and inclusive and the past was rigid and conformist but in many regards it's the opposite. Through all the metrics and quantification and SEO-like data analysis-based incentives and judgments we are being "snapped to grid". The risk averseness is growing. There's only a narrow path and people must tick many boxes or get disqualified.
Just as movie producers make the nth superhero movie and everything is a sequel of old IP, science is similarly turned into a formulaic churn.
Just think about how Peter Higgs said he couldn't fit the mold of today's academia and the pressure of producing a stream of consistent (and hence typically consistently mediocre - like the consistent taste of a BigMac) output.
The other day I watched this interview with a pioneer of artifical neural networks Warren McCulloch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wawMjJUCMVw). I wonder if today we're letting such personalities thrive in academia. He was originally headed to the Christian ministry and learned a lot of theology then got drawn rather to math, and his pondering of abstractions, understanding, humans and theology moved him to study neurology and to use math to model logic expressed as neural networks. Nowadays, you must specialize early and grind for tests, no "forgiveness" if you go off-track, you must be single-mindedly focus on optimizing your path towards tenure for it to be realistic. Can't even get a PhD position without having published several of your original research papers beforehand.
While hiring committees say they reward well-roundedness and try to avoid a monoculture, what that becomes in practice is checking if your parents sent you to one of these trendy types of extracurriculars or foreign "volunteer" programs, and whether you later were engaged with some shortlist of trendy buzzword issues.
This breeds conformity, uniformity and bland predictability.
Prolific 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.
As 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.
Yes, 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.
I've even had this discussion with people in at least adjacent roles to mine. We could put together ten very serviceable conference submittals tomorrow that we could spend a week turning into very competent conference presentations within a week. They wouldn't be brilliant but they'd be "good" relative to the norm. It's just one of the things we can crank out like we crank out blogs/columns.
> "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.
> 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".
Actually Japanese titles are explained by the reality that market is so crowded that no one reads the synopsis(backside) or even blurbs anymore. So putting it all in the title is best way to get enough information out to catch some attention.
Additionally, although this is potentially hearsay (IANAJCL), from my understanding Japanese copyright law is strict and names cannot be re-used, so to get around this they tack on a single sentence synopsis, so it’s incredibly difficult to run out of names.
It'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
This 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.
In manga aren't click bait titles, but because there are so many published, you pick basically a title that explains the premise, otherwise it's harder to get users to read your manga. I suppose that also could work with novels, I'm not a book person, but I suppose you read a review or watched some video that recommended you a book, and if the title is self descriptive, then would easier to go to the book store and buy something that might is your liking.
Chuck Tingle is a treasure. On the surface all the books are smut, though this is actually because they're smut, but once you dig a little you'll find a ton of other amusements.
All of them are smut? I think you've forgotten Absolutely No Thoughts Of Pounding During My Fun Day With This Kind T-Rex Because I'm Aromantic And Asexual And That's A Wonderfully Valid Way Of Proving Love Is Real.
I did read one out-and-out crime novel by Azimov. You will not be surprised to learn that the victim was graduate student in chemistry, the murder occurred in a laboratory, and the plot twist turned on something known chiefly to chemists.
(I've forgotten the title--I read the book nearer 50 than 40 years ago.)
Edit: I see from Wikipedia that it was The Death Dealers, later republished as A Whiff of Death.
It'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.
I did read one out-and-out crime novel by Asimov. You will not be surprised to learn that the victim was graduate student in chemistry, the murder occurred in a laboratory, and the plot twist turned on something known chiefly to chemists.
(I've forgotten the title--I read the book nearer 50 than 40 years ago.)
I 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.
It'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.
The 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.
Social media is full of trad-pubbed authors (some with NYT best-sellers) complaining they have to keep their day jobs.
Self-pubbed author groups have far more authors earning far more money. There's a good number of six figure authors and not a few seven figure authors. They're almost all writing to market - tight-niche, mid-quality writing that gives readers a predictable genre experience they want to repeat.
Successful self-pub is equivalent to a bootstrapped micro start-up, and many of the same ideas apply. It's not trivially easy, especially the marketing. But it's certainly easier than trying to pitch from a cold start to the agent/publisher circus.
Beyond 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.
I'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.
Writing 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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."
> "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."
Having written several works without ever completing or publishing any of them, I find this comment from Adams particularly resonates with me. That said, I’ve had success with a narrative podcast, which is heavily influenced by his genius—his wit and comedic writing style shine through. While I’ve always admired what he brought to the sci-fi comedy genre, in hindsight, I probably owe just as much gratitude to his editor and publisher.
Considering how much he loved everything else and how well he was able to do things like radio shows or video or inspire text adventures, I do have to wonder if forcing him to write books was pounding a square peg into a round hole.
I had a coauthor once who loved to show off and give away copies of "his" book once it was published. But getting them to do work on it? That was pulling teeth.
>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.
The book was written 45 years ago, an entirely different media market, was based of a story he had already developed for radio, and we have no idea if this anecdote is apocryphal.
Yes. Maybe an unpopular opinion here, but the book form of HGTTG is a mess. You can tell that it was converted from an episodic weekly-gag-based radio show into written form with very little effort to make it into a coherent whole. It's popular because it has brilliant one-liners, but as a book it's not nearly as good as its popularity would suggest.
Adaptations of loosely-connected episodic material to book form is tough even with editing. I did it once and it didn't really work very well. Look at most compilations of newspaper columns too.
So 0.1% of people who don't have a burning desire for it should still write a book, which seems like a large amount of people to me.
And there's not really a way to know if you're gifted and talented at writing, so just go for it anyways. Your appeal to exception falls flat because there's no reason why there can't be another one.
> I disagree. Famously Douglas Adams had to be forced to write every sentence
Who says we all need to be Douglas Adams? If the book is only for you then the bar is very low.
With creativity there's an overlap between creating for oneself and creating for others. You might start with the former but end up craving the latter. But most people creating things don't require validation from others; it would just be nice.
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).
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?
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.
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.
>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!)
“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!
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.
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.
Publishers in general want books that are 250+ pages. And that's probably too much for a lot of topics.
The one time I went through a publisher I definitely felt I was padding things. The second edition was better. I took out some of the padding and I fleshed out other topics that deserved it. It still barely made it to the 250-ish page point though.
Well, I think the problem is the market. When I was a teenager, I didn't mind reading all that stuff because it was all new to me. Now that I've read hundreds of books, I just want the new stuff, which occurs at more infrequent intervals in books do to past reading.
But people who have read a lot are not the main market for any book, unfortunately and seemingly paradoxically.
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.
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-Centu...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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/p..., which would've been the best chance you had at being distributed, and even then they weren't easy to get into)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The advantage of a publisher like Apress or O'Reilly is a lot of people still attach probably excessive value to the publisher pedigree.
The downside, as you say, is that they control length, format, pricing, deadlines, etc.
I went through the publisher route once through two editions and, on net, I'm glad I did but I've also self-published in no small part because I'd rather write some more bite-size books on narrow topics and I want to be able to do whatever I want with the material on the schedule I choose.
I agree. Being published by a big name gives you some credibility right away.
The issue I personally had with the publisher I signed with (one that you mentioned) is the quality of their products. And I don't mean this specific publisher: it's the whole industry that is mostly broken. I'm not even talking about the content here, only the presentation.
Most publishers can't provide good syntax highlighting for their programming books: mine didn't provide any (we're in 2024 and it's supposedly their domain of expertise so I'm baffled), and their ePub books are generally almost unreadable.
I didn't want to make my readers pay $35 or $40 for a book that doesn't provide the basics of what you could expect from a programming book.
In my case, the challenge was even bigger cause my book is about two programming languages and I needed syntax highlighting for both and a different theme for each. I don't think I've seen this anywhere yet in the "professional" programming book industry.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 has self-published his book (https://readmake.com) and he outperformed (sold 25000+ copies at 100% profit) many good writers, agents and publishers marketing channels.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
That's great for you. But the average full time author of books in the UK earned below minimum wage a few years ago, and that's fairly typical for developed countries. It's a profession that very heavily skews towards a tiny proportion of top earners.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Considering how tooth-achingly boring the original post is, this is the best kind of feedback for it.
I found it super readable. I think it helps a lot if you’re familiar with the other authors Gwern is referencing.
First Gwern post I see.
Are you saying everyone would be better off not reading my Starship Troopers fan fiction where they get it on with the Arachnids?
Where is this fanfiction located? So you know.. I can avoid it at all costs of course.
I'm sure there's a market for your creation ;-)
Everyone should read my science fiction novel, where a team of intrepid heroes travels in time to assassinate Marx and Engels, but returns to a future where things are worse because they should've focused on Hegel.
But if you open up in preparation for launching that facehugger, you may trigger Ripley's response with a flamethrower, then no eggs are happy.
What I think happened is that he said "facehugger" when he meant "chestbuster," likely because 1) the word "chestbuster" almost repeats the word "bursting," and 2) everyone knows that a chestbuster is the only notable symptom (aside from hunger and sudden indigestion) of having been attacked by a facehugger.
You've introduced eggmorphing (the transformation of people and other animals into eggs), which is not canon because the scene was cut.
https://collider.com/alien-eggmorph-deleted-scene-explained/
"Facehugger" is a lot more familiar a term, and yeah, I didn't even realize there was a difference because a facehugger leads to bursting-chests, at least in what I remember of the 3 Alien movies I watched. (I also keep thinking of 'facehuggers' thanks to the AI startup Hugging Face. Every time I see their logo+name, I think again to myself, 'what a bizarre brand, it looks like _Alien_, like the poor emoji guy is about have his chest burst from the face-hugging alien'.)
But since the term is apparently not technically correct (which as we all know, is the best - indeed, only - kind of correctness), I have changed it.
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.
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!
No he just made a mistake.
As usual, readers reading too much into something.
I bet you're fun at parties.
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.
This 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.
"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.
> "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.
I would say that a reasonable person could have foreseen Concord failing. Perhaps not necessarily as hard as it did, but there were a number of red flags before it released. The character designs were bland and bad, which is worse than just being bad. They drummed up a whole bunch of controversy, and the marketing outside of that controversy was basically non-existent. Almost nobody had heard of the product until it already had failed. Even when it was in beta for free, they only garnered about a couple of thousand players at any given time.
Then you add on that they already missed the train for hero shooters by about eight years and their modern competition is all free to play and has already sucked up the entire market for the most part. I saw an analysis by a former game producer that thought that perhaps they had a work environment that stifled criticism and commentary from developers and I think that that might have been an accurate assessment; The entire product was released in a way that myself and a number of other people that I've seen online simply can't believe that nobody was throwing their hands up and saying that this was a bad idea before release.
> "And now, in the current era of the remake, which still has to reach the film industry"
You haven't heard of the Disney live-action remakes of the old classics? It's already starting to happen.
> 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.
There's a trend of thinking that our age is the most accepting and inclusive and the past was rigid and conformist but in many regards it's the opposite. Through all the metrics and quantification and SEO-like data analysis-based incentives and judgments we are being "snapped to grid". The risk averseness is growing. There's only a narrow path and people must tick many boxes or get disqualified. Just as movie producers make the nth superhero movie and everything is a sequel of old IP, science is similarly turned into a formulaic churn.
Just think about how Peter Higgs said he couldn't fit the mold of today's academia and the pressure of producing a stream of consistent (and hence typically consistently mediocre - like the consistent taste of a BigMac) output.
The other day I watched this interview with a pioneer of artifical neural networks Warren McCulloch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wawMjJUCMVw). I wonder if today we're letting such personalities thrive in academia. He was originally headed to the Christian ministry and learned a lot of theology then got drawn rather to math, and his pondering of abstractions, understanding, humans and theology moved him to study neurology and to use math to model logic expressed as neural networks. Nowadays, you must specialize early and grind for tests, no "forgiveness" if you go off-track, you must be single-mindedly focus on optimizing your path towards tenure for it to be realistic. Can't even get a PhD position without having published several of your original research papers beforehand. While hiring committees say they reward well-roundedness and try to avoid a monoculture, what that becomes in practice is checking if your parents sent you to one of these trendy types of extracurriculars or foreign "volunteer" programs, and whether you later were engaged with some shortlist of trendy buzzword issues.
This breeds conformity, uniformity and bland predictability.
Check out how Snow White has been going. The film industry is absolutely there, but the good news is it's going exactly as horribly as you predicted.
Prolific 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.
As 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.
Yes, 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.
I've even had this discussion with people in at least adjacent roles to mine. We could put together ten very serviceable conference submittals tomorrow that we could spend a week turning into very competent conference presentations within a week. They wouldn't be brilliant but they'd be "good" relative to the norm. It's just one of the things we can crank out like we crank out blogs/columns.
This was depicted in The Simpsons.
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.
There was also a wonderful little throwaway gag, with a sign outside a bookstore reading “James Michener $3.99/lb”
> 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".
Reminds 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.
Actually Japanese titles are explained by the reality that market is so crowded that no one reads the synopsis(backside) or even blurbs anymore. So putting it all in the title is best way to get enough information out to catch some attention.
Additionally, although this is potentially hearsay (IANAJCL), from my understanding Japanese copyright law is strict and names cannot be re-used, so to get around this they tack on a single sentence synopsis, so it’s incredibly difficult to run out of names.
It'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
This 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.
In manga aren't click bait titles, but because there are so many published, you pick basically a title that explains the premise, otherwise it's harder to get users to read your manga. I suppose that also could work with novels, I'm not a book person, but I suppose you read a review or watched some video that recommended you a book, and if the title is self descriptive, then would easier to go to the book store and buy something that might is your liking.
Chuck Tingle is a treasure. On the surface all the books are smut, though this is actually because they're smut, but once you dig a little you'll find a ton of other amusements.
All of them are smut? I think you've forgotten Absolutely No Thoughts Of Pounding During My Fun Day With This Kind T-Rex Because I'm Aromantic And Asexual And That's A Wonderfully Valid Way Of Proving Love Is Real.
> Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel.
Isaac Asimov figured that out!
What do you mean? All I read was foundation, some non fiction, and robot short story collections.
I did read one out-and-out crime novel by Azimov. You will not be surprised to learn that the victim was graduate student in chemistry, the murder occurred in a laboratory, and the plot twist turned on something known chiefly to chemists.
(I've forgotten the title--I read the book nearer 50 than 40 years ago.)
Edit: I see from Wikipedia that it was The Death Dealers, later republished as A Whiff of Death.
He used the detective/crime dialogue format to deliver sci-fi.
Are you being sarcastic? The Robot novels are basically crime novels with robots...
There's actually a significant corpus of robot stories. However, I did forget that "I, Robot" does have a lot of crimes, investigations, and such.
It'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.
Also the Black Widower stories. I'm sure others as well.
Aye, the main character is a detective.
I did read one out-and-out crime novel by Asimov. You will not be surprised to learn that the victim was graduate student in chemistry, the murder occurred in a laboratory, and the plot twist turned on something known chiefly to chemists.
(I've forgotten the title--I read the book nearer 50 than 40 years ago.)
I 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.
It'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.
The 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.
Social media is full of trad-pubbed authors (some with NYT best-sellers) complaining they have to keep their day jobs.
Self-pubbed author groups have far more authors earning far more money. There's a good number of six figure authors and not a few seven figure authors. They're almost all writing to market - tight-niche, mid-quality writing that gives readers a predictable genre experience they want to repeat.
Successful self-pub is equivalent to a bootstrapped micro start-up, and many of the same ideas apply. It's not trivially easy, especially the marketing. But it's certainly easier than trying to pitch from a cold start to the agent/publisher circus.
If I'm reading this right, the proofreading process massively improves the quality of the work? Could you expand on this?
Beyond 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.
I'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.
Writing 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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."
> "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."
Having written several works without ever completing or publishing any of them, I find this comment from Adams particularly resonates with me. That said, I’ve had success with a narrative podcast, which is heavily influenced by his genius—his wit and comedic writing style shine through. While I’ve always admired what he brought to the sci-fi comedy genre, in hindsight, I probably owe just as much gratitude to his editor and publisher.
Digital Antiquarian has a few posts up recently about Douglas Adams, and it all sounds like it was a great deal more painful than I had ever realized as a kid reading _Hitchhiker's_: https://www.filfre.net/2024/07/the-later-years-of-douglas-ad...
Considering how much he loved everything else and how well he was able to do things like radio shows or video or inspire text adventures, I do have to wonder if forcing him to write books was pounding a square peg into a round hole.
I know someone who presumably worked very closely with him on a text adventure game. I'll have to ask what it was like next time we talk.
I had a coauthor once who loved to show off and give away copies of "his" book once it was published. But getting them to do work on it? That was pulling teeth.
My point was that you're not Douglas Adams and don't already have a degree of success. What happens when you try it?
He wasn't successful when his first book was pulled out of him by Simon Brett (described as HHGTTG's "co-midwife") and others.
He was a successful TV and radio script author on household name projects like Dr Who, and the HHGTTG radio show was already a huge hit.
The book was practically guaranteed to be a best-seller.
>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.
The book was written 45 years ago, an entirely different media market, was based of a story he had already developed for radio, and we have no idea if this anecdote is apocryphal.
> Can you imagine a world without HGTTG?
Yes. Maybe an unpopular opinion here, but the book form of HGTTG is a mess. You can tell that it was converted from an episodic weekly-gag-based radio show into written form with very little effort to make it into a coherent whole. It's popular because it has brilliant one-liners, but as a book it's not nearly as good as its popularity would suggest.
Adaptations of loosely-connected episodic material to book form is tough even with editing. I did it once and it didn't really work very well. Look at most compilations of newspaper columns too.
HHTG was an odd one since he was adapting existing material (the radio series) to a novel form.
I have nothing to add to the conversation but love the continual degrading of coherency with the acronym used.
Next comment someone please call it HGGHT.
You are most likely not Douglas Adams though. He was obviously incredibly gifted and good at what he did. 99.9% of people will not be that talented.
So 0.1% of people who don't have a burning desire for it should still write a book, which seems like a large amount of people to me.
And there's not really a way to know if you're gifted and talented at writing, so just go for it anyways. Your appeal to exception falls flat because there's no reason why there can't be another one.
> I disagree. Famously Douglas Adams had to be forced to write every sentence
Who says we all need to be Douglas Adams? If the book is only for you then the bar is very low.
With creativity there's an overlap between creating for oneself and creating for others. You might start with the former but end up craving the latter. But most people creating things don't require validation from others; it would just be nice.
I believe Virginia Woolf wrote, "I write only for my own pleasure. I write to give myself pleasure." Which pretty much encapsulates this.
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).
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?
isn't this how it already works?
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.
Designers* will know all about how it is all supposed to work
*personally prefer the term “designists”, but YMMV on that one
I immediately thought of your work when reading your comment... And it turns out It's actually you. Nice!
I'm currently going through the CLI tutorials. No ebooks for the time being, as I'm just broke right know. Thanks for all the content. Keep it up!
Edit: typo.
Would love to know more about this. Do you have a link?
I have written a few blog posts: https://learnbyexample.github.io/tags/career/
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.
>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!)
“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!
Fazer Sininen has indeed powered many a long night so far ;) greatest mass market chocolate bar I've ever had.
Sounds like you had a difficult beginning but a wonderful Finnish. Like many books.
Your language-learning journey with Finnish is cool
Shhh you'll make me blush
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.
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.
Publishers in general want books that are 250+ pages. And that's probably too much for a lot of topics.
The one time I went through a publisher I definitely felt I was padding things. The second edition was better. I took out some of the padding and I fleshed out other topics that deserved it. It still barely made it to the 250-ish page point though.
Do you know what the 250 page target is based on? Knowing the underlying assumptions, metrics, KPIs, or whatever, could be helpful.
Well, I think the problem is the market. When I was a teenager, I didn't mind reading all that stuff because it was all new to me. Now that I've read hundreds of books, I just want the new stuff, which occurs at more infrequent intervals in books do to past reading.
But people who have read a lot are not the main market for any book, unfortunately and seemingly paradoxically.
"this book fills a much needed gap in the literature."
Books often overextend simple ideas but for some this is the way to understand maybe
> 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.
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-Centu...
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.
A content preview of a few pages might lead to more sales.
Preserving your great-grandfather's memoirs like that (especially with the context of early American life) must have been a fascinating endeavor.
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.
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
Nowadays, you don't have to write the boring parts, just write the interesting bits.
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.
I think treating everything as a skill-building exercise rather than a pursuit for external rewards could keep any process enjoyable
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.
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.
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
It's very likely that the average person will become pro bodybuilder level monster with hitting the gym oncee every 10 days?!!!
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.
>I always find it very interesting when smart people mistakenly exaggerate how difficult it is to achieve something.
Overthinking works like this
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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 ^^
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!"
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.
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.
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 :-)
It's highly unlikely to earn money with a book...
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.
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.
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.
> 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/p..., which would've been the best chance you had at being distributed, and even then they weren't easy to get into)
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.
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.
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...
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.
The advantage of a publisher like Apress or O'Reilly is a lot of people still attach probably excessive value to the publisher pedigree.
The downside, as you say, is that they control length, format, pricing, deadlines, etc.
I went through the publisher route once through two editions and, on net, I'm glad I did but I've also self-published in no small part because I'd rather write some more bite-size books on narrow topics and I want to be able to do whatever I want with the material on the schedule I choose.
I agree. Being published by a big name gives you some credibility right away. The issue I personally had with the publisher I signed with (one that you mentioned) is the quality of their products. And I don't mean this specific publisher: it's the whole industry that is mostly broken. I'm not even talking about the content here, only the presentation.
Most publishers can't provide good syntax highlighting for their programming books: mine didn't provide any (we're in 2024 and it's supposedly their domain of expertise so I'm baffled), and their ePub books are generally almost unreadable. I didn't want to make my readers pay $35 or $40 for a book that doesn't provide the basics of what you could expect from a programming book. In my case, the challenge was even bigger cause my book is about two programming languages and I needed syntax highlighting for both and a different theme for each. I don't think I've seen this anywhere yet in the "professional" programming book industry.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 has self-published his book (https://readmake.com) and he outperformed (sold 25000+ copies at 100% profit) many good writers, agents and publishers marketing channels.
> 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.
Finding an audience is not as difficult as it used to be in the past if you have an audience.
> 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.
> 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-publish...
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.
"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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
That's great for you. But the average full time author of books in the UK earned below minimum wage a few years ago, and that's fairly typical for developed countries. It's a profession that very heavily skews towards a tiny proportion of top earners.
And I made $15million last month as a lottery winner.
Surely you realize that this is not at all the typical experience for independent writers, though.
It's not the typical experience for traditionally published writers either.
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.
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.
Don’t tell me, if I buy your book I can learn how to do it too?
What books did you write? And what do you mean by "analog publishing?"
Do you feel fulfilled?
Yes.
What are your books about? Fiction or non- ?
Non-fiction
Would most of the arguments apply for videogames? "Why to Not Write a Game"?
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.
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.
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".
Well, most PhDs are obtained by writing a book, so there is that.
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
So curious who the anonymous example is
I thought it was The Last Psychiatrist, but then I saw TLP mentioned later.
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.
It is not me.
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-professiona...
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.
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.
Why not just make an EPUB version of your website?
This is addressed in TFA - the author’s posts are characteristically full of hypertext.
That sounds like hundreds of hours of work.
Or a few hours writing a script of they are well formed. (Possible even less using AI).
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.
Yeah but what’s the point in that really? The website exists for anyone who wants it already. It’s not a book.
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.
gwern thinks we shouldn't be writing any more books anyway: https://gwern.net/culture-is-not-about-esthetics
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.
I found Dawn of Everything to be very accessible, personally.
"Less fiction, more science" Karl Marx.
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