When ebooks first came on the scene, self-publishing was profitable. Due to relatively low competition, new authors and new releases could get traction with minimal marketing budgets. At the time, it seemed the great equalizer we'd all been waiting for had finally arrived.
Nowadays, ebooks is a huge industry with thousands of new releases every day. Word on the street is 10k-30k of marketing spend per year is required to generate any sales at all.
It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market. Is there a model could we create to bolster out the middle? If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller sells more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list. It just makes economical sense for the big publishers to focus on their bestsellers.
There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming! I guess all we can do is continue our patronage for the authors we like, to trust the recommendations from people we respect, and to be willing to try out new authors and new releases.
When working on a book for 2 years nets a $30k advance and it's unlikely to payout. It feels the incentives to pursue writing full-time are increasingly diminishing. Sometimes I wonder if for the majority of people who'd like to pursue authorship that doing so part-time is the only choice.
> It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market.
Books, music, films, games, basically all creative things. Because everyone can just watch/read/listen to the best of the best. It's not like restaurants where the consumer actually consumes the product.
It's the result of global scale distribution networks. Long ago you could be okay-famous by being the best guitarist in the village and people would appreciate you. Or you could be the local history buff. But if you write enter the global arena, you'll compete with everyone else. There's no limit to how many books the famous author can sell, or how many times a famous singer's song can be streamed on Spotify. There's simply very little demand for mediocre stuff. Also, people want to be able to talk to each other about cultural things. Even if it's a bit more fragmented today, people still want to belong together through liking the same things.
Media takes time to consume, which means that many products won’t be consumed at all even if they are good, much less be consumed enough to reach the point where word of mouth can achieve virality.
The reality is that the best winner is usually a product good enough to not be laughed at (though not usually best in class), with some characteristics that make it marketable, and with strong backing behind (money, connections or both).
One funny effect is that you end up with artists talking about viral topics like social justice and discrimination like it’s first hand experience, but a quick check will show they come from immensely privileged backgrounds.
Can you even define "best" for creative media? Sure, there's obvious junk that most people will agree can be discarded, but culture is very subjective. So instead of barriers to getting published at all, there are barriers in the form of curation and gatekeeping.
I assume the parent comment's last paragraph is why every fantasy novel I've read in the last decade has a five-page-long lesbian romance; the author has to play ball with the publisher in order to get marketed.
>Can you even define "best" for creative media? Sure, there's obvious junk that most people will agree can be discarded, but culture is very subjective.
I think all disciplines start “hard” and objective, getting into the subjective at a more advanced stage - at the very least it is easy for a knowledgeable reader to know when an author is actively choosing to disregard an established rule and when it is incapable of following it.
Saramago, the novelist, is famous for writing unconventionally, with long phrases and sparse punctuation, but nobody doubts he could have written conventionally. Same for Picasso rejecting realism.
Many famous authors right now would clearly have a hard time following the “base” rules, and that for me warrants judging them by hard rules. If they could, and got into the twisting rules phase, then I agree it becomes a far more subjective matter.
And specifically not laughed at by your target market. See Twilight, Hunger Games and 50 Shades of Grey for a few examples. Clearly mocked products, but immensely popular and winners in their own right.
> There's no limit to how many books the famous author can sell
There is, of course. The book is interesting within a particular range of cultures, and depends on good translations to be popular outside its native language area.
So, for a hyper-successful book, like "Harry Potter", the potentially interested audience is "merely" a few billion people, and "merely" a few hundred million are potential buyers of the book. 600M books sold worldwide, counting all the books in the series.
Selling 2x as much is highly unlikely, and 10x as much, completely unrealistic. The number of New Testament copies printed since 1450s is estimated to be below 7 billion.
Yes, and the number of atoms in the observable universe is also finite.
I obviously didn't mean it literally. The point is that they don't need to do any personal action per sale. Selling 10x as much does not make them 10x as much tired, while e.g. a lumberjack gets much more tired if he has to cut down 10x as many trees in a week.
This is different from in-person performances, where again giving more concerts is more effort, though giving the concert in a bigger stadium for 5x as many people is again not more effort.
The point is the scalability, or in other words low marginal cost of sales. It becomes a commodity.
Most regular jobs that people do also don't scale. Even in software, custom one-off software for a particular company is still the rule, not the shrinkwrap or public SaaS.
In a more profane context, it's like the difference between a prostitute and an OnlyFans performer. The prostitute with the most clients won't have 100x as many as the average, while orders of magnitude difference in subscribers is common on OnlyFans.
> It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market.
It seems that any product with effectively capped consumption will become a winner-take-all market. People go to the movie theater 6 times a year, so that's winner-take-all. People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all. People go to approximately 1 university, so while an average university has 200 million in endowments, Harvard has 50 billion (250x). Heck, I'm pretty sure the same factor is leading to the rise of megachurches because people are only capable of attending approximately 1 service per week.
I recall the book Blockbusters by Anita Elberse (2013) being one of the first to point this out.
If you're arguing that the market dynamics are driven by the existence of a cap on consumption, in contrast to other goods, your argument must fail if the cap isn't actually restricting anyone.
There is an infinitely high cap on the consumption of every good. That can't distinguish anything from anything else.
So...
> Would a figure of 60 books per year change the argument? 100? 200?
Yes, that's the difference between the argument being theoretically able to work on its own terms, or not.
>There is an infinitely high cap on the consumption of every good
Huh. No, no there is not. This is why a few rich people don't consume 100x as much toilet paper as you do. The cap isn't how much of the good we can make, the cap is human time and attention, of which time is fixed and attention is a highly competitive market. Simply put people are not buying infinite books and immediately throwing them in infinite fires.
Let me try adjusting for a very low level of reading comprehension:
1. All goods have capped consumption. There are no goods without this feature.
2. The cap might be very high.
3. If you want to argue that one good differs from another good by virtue of capped consumption...
3(a). It is not enough to show that a cap exists;
3(b). Instead, you must show that the cap is actually achieved.
4. The reason for this is that the cap exists for all goods.
5. Books do not come anywhere close to reaching their consumption cap. The consumption of books is just as unbounded as the consumption of immortality pills.
I don't think there have ever been any particular incentives to become a full-time writer. Most of us have read articles or books (Graydon Carter's) that have recently talked about the huge sums paid to some journalists 20 or 40 years ago, but the ratio of aspiring writers to well-paid writers has always yielded very high numbers.
It's the same in all creative professions, and even more so for those that grant visibility. I think most would be fine considering this activity as a part-time commitment, instead of chasing something that has little chance of coming true. Of course, you can't be a part-time athlete and aspire to greatness, but I don't think the same applies to writing, for example.
Now, we are in the realm of anecdotes, but the novel “Il Gattopardo,” which I consider to be among the top three Italian, and perhaps European, novels of the 20th century, was written by an amateur who did not even send the manuscript out to be considered for publication. It was discovered after Tomasi di Lampedusa's death by Giorgio Bassani, a talented writer who did not write full-time and who had incredible success with some fantastic novels, such as "Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini" (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis).
The post-humous discovery and promotion of previously unknown works by unpopular Authors has always represented a major component in 19th-21st Century Publishing.
John Kennedy Toole is probably the exemplar of this, in that 'A Confederacy of Dunces' was unpublishable during his lifetime, but became the picaresque national narrative after a large push by Walker Percy to get it published a decade after Toole's death. It ended up winning the Pulitzer the following year.
Stoner, a novel by the American writer John Williams, is a lesser known but no less apt example. In 1963 Williams' own publisher questioned Stoner's potential to gain popularity and become a bestseller. It sold fewer than 2000 copies, and was out of print a year later.
After subsequently being discovered and championed by literary luminaries like John McGahern, it was republished and translated into several languages, selling hundreds of thousands of copies across 21 Countries. By 2013, the book had achieved international best-seller status. I'd urge anyone with a love for academia, literature, or modern bildungsromans to give it a go. To me it's effectively 'American Gothic - The Novel'
> There's so many high quality books being published each day.
Great is the stream of the Assyrian river, but much filth of earth and much refuse it carries on its waters. And not of every water do the Melissae carry to Deo, but of the trickling stream that springs from a holy fountain, pure and undefiled, the very crown of waters.
The fix is to get people reading fiction again. The market’s tiny because very little time is spent reading fiction now.
There used to be a market for writing that could supply some kind of a decent-ish living to quite a few authors, not just a handful of super-stars. That world is gone and it’s not coming back. TV killed it, and smartphones carved up the body and buried it in several unmarked graves at crossroads. Not even the dark arts can bring it back now. It’s over.
The shrinking market is also why YA and YA-like books have taken over, even for adults. You can’t afford to exclude much of the market, so the “reading level” on mass market fiction for adults has been slipping downward fast for the last couple decades. Readers willing to put in effort are too small a market for commercial success. Rarely, maybe, but not like things used to be.
It's a terrifying and observable phenomena in the American Market in particular, but I still hold out some hope from the parasitic nature of premium-streaming services ultimately needing decent narrative foundations.
Hilary Mantel's historical fiction being picked up is a good example of this in recent times in Western Europe. Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation, was a surprise hit given its somewhat dry subject matter as a fictionalised biography documenting the life of Thomas Cromwell.
I wrote a book about Macintosh programming in C in the 1980s, when the first self hosted C compilers became available. At the time, I could barely write a coherent paragraph. Before Stackoverflow and other online resources people were desperate enough to buy tens of thousands of copies. I made serious money off of that.
I quit writing books about coding when I wrote one with a team of amazing co-authors about Android programming that was 100 times better than my first book and sold a 10th of the number of copies.
Unless you're Peter Norton, you never made a lot of money writing books even when it was profitable to do so. And I suspect a lot of Peter Norton books had ghost writers.
Dr. Donald E. Knuth seems to be doing well --- made enough to at least include a mention of what he did with his royalty checks in an index entry in one of his books (royalties, use of points to a page with a graph which resembles the pipe organ which he had installed in his home).
There are always outliers (that's the whole point).
All he was saying is that when the market for technical books was new (because that was really the only way to get to speed on something) you didn't need to have Knuth-levels of knowledge and writing skill (Knuth is both incredibly knowledgeable and an exceptionally good writer) to make a decent living.
> Is there a model could we create to bolster out the middle?
Extend Copyright? (no, no..)
I have two ideas:
- Recommendations. Publishers connect with private LLM/Agents for custom recommendations. They'd need to keep reviews private, but could trade them among themselves.
- Insurance Pool. Authors could add works to a pool of books, and the profits could be split. Publishers would need to maintain the quality of books or authors won't join.
You mean like an authorship coop? Might work, but the main problem is authors' self importance. Not a single author I know of would opt for it. They are all just impoverished millionares.
For less narcissistic authors it may well work, though. Will pitch it, thanks for the idea!
> If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller sells more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list
All commercial art follows this pattern, a Pareto Distribution[0]. The top musician gets 10x what #2 does. Same with athletes. On and on. The rule applies to many competitive fields. The sky is blue, but it's astute of you to notice.
There's no book recommendation system in the same way that we have music recommendation through Spotify et al, and video/movie recommendation through Netflix, YouTube et al.
The best way to discover books is when they are mentioned in other good books, but this does nothing for new books.
A book recommendation system will need to have access to full-text search within the books to work well. That will solve the problem.
Recommendation systems are just bad across the board.
Audible says "You liked this John Scalzi book? Here's every other Scalzi book as a recommendation! Also a few other very popular books which are almost exactly the same as the one you just read!"
Amazon says "You just bought a hammer, here are 37 more hammers in case you want another one!"
Why yes, I do like books with spaceships in them, but maybe I want to see more than the next 20 most popular books with spaceships in them...
Recommendation engines fail by failing to make connections that aren't in the immediate neighborhood.
It doesn't have to be an algorithm, it could be recommendations by real people. But I haven't found any such system which is as extensive as music or video recommendations.
> Nowadays, ebooks is a huge industry with thousands of new releases every day.
> There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming!
Thousands of new releases a day could mean as many as two or three in high quality. That's more than you can read, but not enough to overwhelm anyone. What's overwhelming is the several thousand that are garbage.
> Job-hunting is a brutal, humiliating slog, because of the thousands of junk CVs even the most obscure job posting gets.
Having been on the hiring end, I can assure you that it is not true that even the most obscure posting gets thousands of applicants. Sometimes you put out a job and get very few bites. So it depends, as always, on the specifics of the posting (what industry, where it is, etc).
Isn’t that the exact same case for software though?
It seems interesting to me the one of the highest paying professions- software engineer and the lowest- author are both that way because of scalability.
Word on the street 30k spend, I guess that scenario is someone unknown. But what if someone builds an audience first. Granted that audience building isn't free.
I think part-time is indeed the only option and has been for a long long time. The e-books only shortly promised a disruption until it fell apart. As you say, partly due to advertising, but partly also due to being no editor. Editors can be both an annoyance but they are also a blessing, because they can advise as to what works and what does not.
If most people will just read one book per year, or better yet, will choose which one book to give to someone else (not having read it at all), of course they will choose #1.
I vividly remember the disappointment I felt when I gave #2 to an acquaintance (where I read both 1 and 2 and genuinely liked the one I gave better), only to be told that I gave the #2 and why didn't they receive the #1, and if that meant anything. Ok, off on a tangent, but geez that still hurts :(
Smut (and Archie Comics) are one of the few ways you can keep selling the same plot over and over again.
You can even find it in serialized writings of some of the "greats" of yore - if you real everything Dickens or Chesterton or Wodehouse wrote, you start to see some serious echos, if not direct repetition.
None of this is new, it has been this way for decades. It just gets worse as the industry gets more concentrated, and the publishers are more tightly controlled by media conglomerates and equity investors who treat them as black boxes for the extraction of value. I haven't worked on the acquisitions side in a long time, but practically everything in this article could have been written thirty years ago. The midlist where you'd try to grow a new author's audience was already being squeezed out.
I feel like part of this is that ebooks basically exist on Amazon and a few other large store fronts. Maybe if each niche had their own markets you could try and compete in smaller pools?
I've gotten a lot of BattleTech novels and Fantasy Flight Games universe novelas there. There a bunch of comics as well. A lot of entering reading material for flights. Dark Horse comics as well.
In the essay "Writers and Money", collected in The Hall of Uselessness, Simon Leys writes
"""
From his own experiences, Chardonne concluded: "Any good book will sell 3,000 copies, no more, no less. We used to publish every year translations of some forty foreign novels. Invariably, one of these would suddenly sell 100,000 copies (which would pay for all our other publications)--and we never knew why.
"""
Earlier in the paragraph, Leys refers to Chardonne's then boss as "a notorious gambler."
When ebooks first came on the scene, self-publishing was profitable. Due to relatively low competition, new authors and new releases could get traction with minimal marketing budgets. At the time, it seemed the great equalizer we'd all been waiting for had finally arrived.
Nowadays, ebooks is a huge industry with thousands of new releases every day. Word on the street is 10k-30k of marketing spend per year is required to generate any sales at all.
It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market. Is there a model could we create to bolster out the middle? If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller sells more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list. It just makes economical sense for the big publishers to focus on their bestsellers.
There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming! I guess all we can do is continue our patronage for the authors we like, to trust the recommendations from people we respect, and to be willing to try out new authors and new releases.
When working on a book for 2 years nets a $30k advance and it's unlikely to payout. It feels the incentives to pursue writing full-time are increasingly diminishing. Sometimes I wonder if for the majority of people who'd like to pursue authorship that doing so part-time is the only choice.
> It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market.
Books, music, films, games, basically all creative things. Because everyone can just watch/read/listen to the best of the best. It's not like restaurants where the consumer actually consumes the product.
It's the result of global scale distribution networks. Long ago you could be okay-famous by being the best guitarist in the village and people would appreciate you. Or you could be the local history buff. But if you write enter the global arena, you'll compete with everyone else. There's no limit to how many books the famous author can sell, or how many times a famous singer's song can be streamed on Spotify. There's simply very little demand for mediocre stuff. Also, people want to be able to talk to each other about cultural things. Even if it's a bit more fragmented today, people still want to belong together through liking the same things.
Winner doesn’t necessarily equal better.
Media takes time to consume, which means that many products won’t be consumed at all even if they are good, much less be consumed enough to reach the point where word of mouth can achieve virality.
The reality is that the best winner is usually a product good enough to not be laughed at (though not usually best in class), with some characteristics that make it marketable, and with strong backing behind (money, connections or both).
One funny effect is that you end up with artists talking about viral topics like social justice and discrimination like it’s first hand experience, but a quick check will show they come from immensely privileged backgrounds.
Can you even define "best" for creative media? Sure, there's obvious junk that most people will agree can be discarded, but culture is very subjective. So instead of barriers to getting published at all, there are barriers in the form of curation and gatekeeping.
I assume the parent comment's last paragraph is why every fantasy novel I've read in the last decade has a five-page-long lesbian romance; the author has to play ball with the publisher in order to get marketed.
>Can you even define "best" for creative media? Sure, there's obvious junk that most people will agree can be discarded, but culture is very subjective.
I think all disciplines start “hard” and objective, getting into the subjective at a more advanced stage - at the very least it is easy for a knowledgeable reader to know when an author is actively choosing to disregard an established rule and when it is incapable of following it.
Saramago, the novelist, is famous for writing unconventionally, with long phrases and sparse punctuation, but nobody doubts he could have written conventionally. Same for Picasso rejecting realism.
Many famous authors right now would clearly have a hard time following the “base” rules, and that for me warrants judging them by hard rules. If they could, and got into the twisting rules phase, then I agree it becomes a far more subjective matter.
And specifically not laughed at by your target market. See Twilight, Hunger Games and 50 Shades of Grey for a few examples. Clearly mocked products, but immensely popular and winners in their own right.
> There's no limit to how many books the famous author can sell
There is, of course. The book is interesting within a particular range of cultures, and depends on good translations to be popular outside its native language area.
So, for a hyper-successful book, like "Harry Potter", the potentially interested audience is "merely" a few billion people, and "merely" a few hundred million are potential buyers of the book. 600M books sold worldwide, counting all the books in the series.
Selling 2x as much is highly unlikely, and 10x as much, completely unrealistic. The number of New Testament copies printed since 1450s is estimated to be below 7 billion.
Yes, and the number of atoms in the observable universe is also finite. I obviously didn't mean it literally. The point is that they don't need to do any personal action per sale. Selling 10x as much does not make them 10x as much tired, while e.g. a lumberjack gets much more tired if he has to cut down 10x as many trees in a week.
This is different from in-person performances, where again giving more concerts is more effort, though giving the concert in a bigger stadium for 5x as many people is again not more effort.
The point is the scalability, or in other words low marginal cost of sales. It becomes a commodity.
Most regular jobs that people do also don't scale. Even in software, custom one-off software for a particular company is still the rule, not the shrinkwrap or public SaaS.
In a more profane context, it's like the difference between a prostitute and an OnlyFans performer. The prostitute with the most clients won't have 100x as many as the average, while orders of magnitude difference in subscribers is common on OnlyFans.
Upvote for that there first sentence
> It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market.
It seems that any product with effectively capped consumption will become a winner-take-all market. People go to the movie theater 6 times a year, so that's winner-take-all. People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all. People go to approximately 1 university, so while an average university has 200 million in endowments, Harvard has 50 billion (250x). Heck, I'm pretty sure the same factor is leading to the rise of megachurches because people are only capable of attending approximately 1 service per week.
I recall the book Blockbusters by Anita Elberse (2013) being one of the first to point this out.
> People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all.
It doesn't sound like you know much about the market for books.
>That same 2016 publication showed that on average, Americans read 12 books a year.
Sounds like they may know more than you in this case.
I don’t know anything about the reading habits of Americans, but I know Anscombe’s quartet says that ain’t the whole story, not by a long shot.
There is nothing approximating a cap at that level. You can easily read five times as many books. The proposed mechanism cannot work.
Note also that the average of 12 books a year is dominated by people who read zero a year, and those people aren't relevant to the market.
Would a figure of 60 books per year change the argument? 100? 200?
There’s a realistic cap on total number of books consumed by a large enough group of people to matter economically.
If you're arguing that the market dynamics are driven by the existence of a cap on consumption, in contrast to other goods, your argument must fail if the cap isn't actually restricting anyone.
There is an infinitely high cap on the consumption of every good. That can't distinguish anything from anything else.
So...
> Would a figure of 60 books per year change the argument? 100? 200?
Yes, that's the difference between the argument being theoretically able to work on its own terms, or not.
>There is an infinitely high cap on the consumption of every good
Huh. No, no there is not. This is why a few rich people don't consume 100x as much toilet paper as you do. The cap isn't how much of the good we can make, the cap is human time and attention, of which time is fixed and attention is a highly competitive market. Simply put people are not buying infinite books and immediately throwing them in infinite fires.
Let me try adjusting for a very low level of reading comprehension:
1. All goods have capped consumption. There are no goods without this feature.
2. The cap might be very high.
3. If you want to argue that one good differs from another good by virtue of capped consumption...
3(a). It is not enough to show that a cap exists;
3(b). Instead, you must show that the cap is actually achieved.
4. The reason for this is that the cap exists for all goods.
5. Books do not come anywhere close to reaching their consumption cap. The consumption of books is just as unbounded as the consumption of immortality pills.
[flagged]
I don't think there have ever been any particular incentives to become a full-time writer. Most of us have read articles or books (Graydon Carter's) that have recently talked about the huge sums paid to some journalists 20 or 40 years ago, but the ratio of aspiring writers to well-paid writers has always yielded very high numbers.
It's the same in all creative professions, and even more so for those that grant visibility. I think most would be fine considering this activity as a part-time commitment, instead of chasing something that has little chance of coming true. Of course, you can't be a part-time athlete and aspire to greatness, but I don't think the same applies to writing, for example.
Now, we are in the realm of anecdotes, but the novel “Il Gattopardo,” which I consider to be among the top three Italian, and perhaps European, novels of the 20th century, was written by an amateur who did not even send the manuscript out to be considered for publication. It was discovered after Tomasi di Lampedusa's death by Giorgio Bassani, a talented writer who did not write full-time and who had incredible success with some fantastic novels, such as "Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini" (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis).
The post-humous discovery and promotion of previously unknown works by unpopular Authors has always represented a major component in 19th-21st Century Publishing.
John Kennedy Toole is probably the exemplar of this, in that 'A Confederacy of Dunces' was unpublishable during his lifetime, but became the picaresque national narrative after a large push by Walker Percy to get it published a decade after Toole's death. It ended up winning the Pulitzer the following year.
Stoner, a novel by the American writer John Williams, is a lesser known but no less apt example. In 1963 Williams' own publisher questioned Stoner's potential to gain popularity and become a bestseller. It sold fewer than 2000 copies, and was out of print a year later.
After subsequently being discovered and championed by literary luminaries like John McGahern, it was republished and translated into several languages, selling hundreds of thousands of copies across 21 Countries. By 2013, the book had achieved international best-seller status. I'd urge anyone with a love for academia, literature, or modern bildungsromans to give it a go. To me it's effectively 'American Gothic - The Novel'
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/stoner-john-wi...
> There's so many high quality books being published each day.
Great is the stream of the Assyrian river, but much filth of earth and much refuse it carries on its waters. And not of every water do the Melissae carry to Deo, but of the trickling stream that springs from a holy fountain, pure and undefiled, the very crown of waters.
Username checks out.
Perfect quote!
The fix is to get people reading fiction again. The market’s tiny because very little time is spent reading fiction now.
There used to be a market for writing that could supply some kind of a decent-ish living to quite a few authors, not just a handful of super-stars. That world is gone and it’s not coming back. TV killed it, and smartphones carved up the body and buried it in several unmarked graves at crossroads. Not even the dark arts can bring it back now. It’s over.
The shrinking market is also why YA and YA-like books have taken over, even for adults. You can’t afford to exclude much of the market, so the “reading level” on mass market fiction for adults has been slipping downward fast for the last couple decades. Readers willing to put in effort are too small a market for commercial success. Rarely, maybe, but not like things used to be.
It's a terrifying and observable phenomena in the American Market in particular, but I still hold out some hope from the parasitic nature of premium-streaming services ultimately needing decent narrative foundations.
Hilary Mantel's historical fiction being picked up is a good example of this in recent times in Western Europe. Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation, was a surprise hit given its somewhat dry subject matter as a fictionalised biography documenting the life of Thomas Cromwell.
I wrote a book about Macintosh programming in C in the 1980s, when the first self hosted C compilers became available. At the time, I could barely write a coherent paragraph. Before Stackoverflow and other online resources people were desperate enough to buy tens of thousands of copies. I made serious money off of that.
I quit writing books about coding when I wrote one with a team of amazing co-authors about Android programming that was 100 times better than my first book and sold a 10th of the number of copies.
Unless you're Peter Norton, you never made a lot of money writing books even when it was profitable to do so. And I suspect a lot of Peter Norton books had ghost writers.
Dr. Donald E. Knuth seems to be doing well --- made enough to at least include a mention of what he did with his royalty checks in an index entry in one of his books (royalties, use of points to a page with a graph which resembles the pipe organ which he had installed in his home).
There are always outliers (that's the whole point).
All he was saying is that when the market for technical books was new (because that was really the only way to get to speed on something) you didn't need to have Knuth-levels of knowledge and writing skill (Knuth is both incredibly knowledgeable and an exceptionally good writer) to make a decent living.
I know several full-time self-published authors and they are not spending anything like $10-30k a year on ads
> Is there a model could we create to bolster out the middle?
Extend Copyright? (no, no..)
I have two ideas:
- Recommendations. Publishers connect with private LLM/Agents for custom recommendations. They'd need to keep reviews private, but could trade them among themselves.
- Insurance Pool. Authors could add works to a pool of books, and the profits could be split. Publishers would need to maintain the quality of books or authors won't join.
You mean like an authorship coop? Might work, but the main problem is authors' self importance. Not a single author I know of would opt for it. They are all just impoverished millionares.
For less narcissistic authors it may well work, though. Will pitch it, thanks for the idea!
> If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller sells more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list
All commercial art follows this pattern, a Pareto Distribution[0]. The top musician gets 10x what #2 does. Same with athletes. On and on. The rule applies to many competitive fields. The sky is blue, but it's astute of you to notice.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
There's no book recommendation system in the same way that we have music recommendation through Spotify et al, and video/movie recommendation through Netflix, YouTube et al.
The best way to discover books is when they are mentioned in other good books, but this does nothing for new books.
A book recommendation system will need to have access to full-text search within the books to work well. That will solve the problem.
Recommendation systems are just bad across the board.
Audible says "You liked this John Scalzi book? Here's every other Scalzi book as a recommendation! Also a few other very popular books which are almost exactly the same as the one you just read!"
Amazon says "You just bought a hammer, here are 37 more hammers in case you want another one!"
Why yes, I do like books with spaceships in them, but maybe I want to see more than the next 20 most popular books with spaceships in them...
Recommendation engines fail by failing to make connections that aren't in the immediate neighborhood.
I've found that:
https://www.literature-map.com/
works well for authors whose books sell well enough to be listed there.
The algorithm is your enemy, not your friend.
It doesn't have to be an algorithm, it could be recommendations by real people. But I haven't found any such system which is as extensive as music or video recommendations.
> Nowadays, ebooks is a huge industry with thousands of new releases every day.
> There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming!
Thousands of new releases a day could mean as many as two or three in high quality. That's more than you can read, but not enough to overwhelm anyone. What's overwhelming is the several thousand that are garbage.
That goes for almost everything, these days.
Job-hunting is a brutal, humiliating slog, because of the thousands of junk CVs even the most obscure job posting gets.
Selling high-quality stuff (software, hardware, widgets, literature, etc.) is a nightmare, because you have to tread water above the deluge of junk.
It's really depressing.
> Job-hunting is a brutal, humiliating slog, because of the thousands of junk CVs even the most obscure job posting gets.
Having been on the hiring end, I can assure you that it is not true that even the most obscure posting gets thousands of applicants. Sometimes you put out a job and get very few bites. So it depends, as always, on the specifics of the posting (what industry, where it is, etc).
Good point. I was really referring to IT industry openings.
I will say that companies use the tsunami of junk, as justification for the nastiness of the interview process.
Isn’t that the exact same case for software though?
It seems interesting to me the one of the highest paying professions- software engineer and the lowest- author are both that way because of scalability.
Word on the street 30k spend, I guess that scenario is someone unknown. But what if someone builds an audience first. Granted that audience building isn't free.
I think part-time is indeed the only option and has been for a long long time. The e-books only shortly promised a disruption until it fell apart. As you say, partly due to advertising, but partly also due to being no editor. Editors can be both an annoyance but they are also a blessing, because they can advise as to what works and what does not.
If most people will just read one book per year, or better yet, will choose which one book to give to someone else (not having read it at all), of course they will choose #1.
I vividly remember the disappointment I felt when I gave #2 to an acquaintance (where I read both 1 and 2 and genuinely liked the one I gave better), only to be told that I gave the #2 and why didn't they receive the #1, and if that meant anything. Ok, off on a tangent, but geez that still hurts :(
> There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming!
> It feels the incentives to pursue writing full-time are increasingly diminishing.
Seems like this is the market working as it should? Maybe we as a society could stand to have fewer people writing full-time.
Going by what's popular on Goodreads, the publishing industry thinks the way out of this uncertainty is smut disguised as fantasy.
Smut (and Archie Comics) are one of the few ways you can keep selling the same plot over and over again.
You can even find it in serialized writings of some of the "greats" of yore - if you real everything Dickens or Chesterton or Wodehouse wrote, you start to see some serious echos, if not direct repetition.
None of this is new, it has been this way for decades. It just gets worse as the industry gets more concentrated, and the publishers are more tightly controlled by media conglomerates and equity investors who treat them as black boxes for the extraction of value. I haven't worked on the acquisitions side in a long time, but practically everything in this article could have been written thirty years ago. The midlist where you'd try to grow a new author's audience was already being squeezed out.
I feel like part of this is that ebooks basically exist on Amazon and a few other large store fronts. Maybe if each niche had their own markets you could try and compete in smaller pools?
https://www.drivethrufiction.com/
I've gotten a lot of BattleTech novels and Fantasy Flight Games universe novelas there. There a bunch of comics as well. A lot of entering reading material for flights. Dark Horse comics as well.
In the essay "Writers and Money", collected in The Hall of Uselessness, Simon Leys writes
""" From his own experiences, Chardonne concluded: "Any good book will sell 3,000 copies, no more, no less. We used to publish every year translations of some forty foreign novels. Invariably, one of these would suddenly sell 100,000 copies (which would pay for all our other publications)--and we never knew why. """
Earlier in the paragraph, Leys refers to Chardonne's then boss as "a notorious gambler."