Please stop with the existing sockpuppets as well.
Is it that unbelievable that its role in a years-long effort to destroy a good man's reputation, as well as in a coverup of that effort, has made your organization disliked by more than one person?
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psi75 commented on Welcome Home, Garry Tan ycombinator.com/blog/welc... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
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> Sure, it might be harder to get a sizable advance
It's not hard at all, that's what crowdfunding is for. It's been quite successful at rewarding free and open content, especially for lower-cost media like books (compared to live action movies or AAA games).
Crowdfunding only works if you have a preexisting platform. Otherwise, it's just going to embarrass you. It's not zero-risk either, because if you start a Kickstarter and it fails, you can never remove the evidence (and the social anti-proof involved in a failed campaign). For authors--reputation ends up being a big deal because it takes 10+ hours of human effort to tell if a book is any good--this sort of thing can be fatal.
Also, it's much harder to build a platform organically than it used to be. I was semifamous in the 2010s and was literally almost killed for it. (Some people who were high in Y Combinator were on the wrong side of history there, but I digress.) So, I know how these systems actually work and how to exploit them (if one wants to go black hat). The game of getting attention is more competitive these days because there are so many more spammers, bad actors, and general-issue crapflooders. You can buy 10,000 fake Twitter followers for less than a hundred bucks and you probably won't get caught or face any negative consequences; on the other hand, getting from zero to 1000 legitimate followers is really difficult (much harder than it was in 2010).
Thanks for the perspective. While I was in the industry, being on the tech side felt like it insulated me from a lot of the drama of the editorial world. I would share your sentiments about money being secondary for them, you would meet people that had been in "assistant editorial" style roles for decades! All waiting for the chance to be in charge and have the cultural cache that came along with gatekeeping/creating trends.
At that level, definitely not in it for the money. At the C level though I got the sense that there was supreme respect for the cultural role of publishers - but it was a narrow second to business concerns, and they would make that tradeoff if necessary.
At that level, definitely not in it for the money. At the C level though I got the sense that there was supreme respect for the cultural role of publishers - but it was a narrow second to business concerns, and they would make that tradeoff if necessary.
The "cultural role" is drummed up in order to get people to work on below-subsistence salaries.
It's probably more about ego than money for the high-level people. Since people are cheap (because "passion") they can have large teams under them without their organizations having to pay the typical costs of large teams.
The truth about it, though, is that the culture is too balkanized for any of this stuff to make sense. Very few people go out of their way to read or find the best books; for good or for bad, they've all self-segregated into warring genres and subgenres--and the so-called "literary" crowd who insist their genre is not a genre are often the worst in this regard. The balkanization is probably why no one knows how to market books anymore; people really understand a small slice of the total readership and, in any case, the lines are always changing.
Yep, and how so many publishers want your own platform stats. I know people with large insta followings getting book deals purely because they can market their own books and cost publishers next to nothing, with an almost guaranteed profit. I hope the broken publishing system is destroyed by these same people realising they can do it all themselves - then perhaps the publishers can rise from the ashes and actually add true value.
Yep, and how so many publishers want your own platform stats. I know people with large insta followings getting book deals purely because they can market their own books and cost publishers next to nothing, with an almost guaranteed profit.
Right, and this is basically an admission of their own uselessness. They'll only help you if you can prove you don't need the help. They're rent-seekers at this point.
To be fair, it is a hard problem. In the visual arts, you can tell if someone is talented immediately. With authors, especially in fiction, there's about a 12-hour commitment before one even knows if they know how to begin, carry, and finish a story. Literary agents, who are supposed to be the gatekeepers, are beyond useless at it (although it is worthwhile to get one, if you can, because you need one to be a serious player in traditional publishing).
> to publish anything new, you need social media presence, writing on something that appeals to a mass market, which passes sensitivity readers, and gets past gatekeepers who are essentially redditors
You really don't. I've been working with a new author about to publish recently and he's just a regular bloke and his work doesn't seem to hit any of your criteria. Are you sure your impression is grounded in reality?
There are tiers of what it means to "get published".
If you want your book to get a decent editor and maybe get a print run in the three or four digits, you don't have to deal with all the faddish bukkake (social media presence, trendy subject matter, performative wokery designed to signal virtue without actually changing anything or challenging capitalism, dodging cancel mobs). You can just write, and you may be able to find an audience organically if you put time and money into it. You probably won't, however, make enough money to write full time.
If your focus is on getting set up to make enough money to write full time, then you do have to worry about all that garbage, because there just aren't many good book deals to go around.
The present reality is that all publishers have been reduced to vanity press, and they don't realize it yet.
In theory, publishers provide a real service, because self-publishing well is expensive (four, five digits easily). In theory, they should be offering access to people who couldn't afford what it costs to self-publish to the expected standard. In practice? The only people who can get in are people who have the connections and financial resources not to need the help. Whoops.
What we're learning about publishing (which we already knew, those of us who've been studying it) is that no one is good at selling books. Most self-publishers aren't, most traditional publishers aren't, and most PR firms are only good at taking and spending your money. We just don't have a good understanding of why individuals buy books (it changes) and there's a lot of evidence, sadly, that book sales are only loosely correlated to the quality of the writing (in the long term, quality matters more, but a book that dies in the short term won't have a long term).
psi75 commented on El Sueño Americano / The American Dream tomkiefer.com/el-sueno-am... · Posted by u/wseqyrku
None of us are entitled to anything.
Human laws reinforce power and social dynamics, stable equilibrium solutions the result of thousands of years of human conflict.
There are no "rules" beyond physics, and the rule breakers often wind up ahead.
The rule makers don't want to pay for those that cannot contribute more than they consume. To put it another way, they don't want their taxes to go up. One lever to control this is through immigration policy.
The voting class is told unskilled immigrant labor is a net negative. Skilled labor, a positive. One side tells them skilled labor threatens their jobs and total compensation, another side tells them it's alright and that we're at a shortage for labor. There are abstract reasons you can point to for each of these ideologies, but ultimately each side is fundamentally concerned with money.
Every one of us is ultimately about consuming energy. For those of us fortunate enough, we can care about Starbucks, how many homes we own, and what kind of luxury goods we have. But at the end of the day, if it were all taken away and we had to fight for food and energy, nearly every one of us would.
Step out into the Serengeti alone and you'll be eaten. There are no rules.
Entitlement is a weird concept, especially since it is now used as a pejorative only to connote false senses of entitlement (i.e., when people believe they are owed things but have no logical basis for the belief). This deprives us of the language to describe situations in which people actually are, legitimately, entitled to certain things.
I am of the mindset that the decent functioning of human society is an entitlement and that people who deliberately cause dysfunction (such as Davos assholes, who are deliberately destroying the U.S. middle class to set some weird kind of example) should be treated as reneging criminals and removed from power using whatever means are necessary. Some people coat doorknobs in feces (or, say, found companies with terrible cultures, support capitalism past its deserving end-of-life) simply because they enjoy the thrill of being the cause; others among us, people of culture, are entitled to a society that protects us from the fecal spreaders. That's literally why we permit the state to exist; so it will protect us. However, it does a terrible job these days.
But yes, it is true that, absent the existence of human society, I am owed nothing (since the lions and gazelles and wolves clearly owe me nothing).