this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Yeah, I absolutely can't imagine being a writer who is trying to break in this space. Discoverability is going to be a nightmare going forward.
It's honestly heartbreaking considering how much work it must be to write a book and how scary it is especially with so many influencers and celebrities in the market now already making it harder for real authors to get noticed
The two communities I'm most missing from going cold turkey on Reddit are niche book subgenre subs. I used to check them daily for new book announcements and discussions, and I got literally all of my "fun" book recommendations from those subs.
I guess they have a Discord group which is okay, but I'm not really interested in sitting in a chat room.
So yeah, agreed. Discoverability is a huge problem for authors already, even before AI-written drivel starts filling the Kindle store.
Isn't there a fediverse site for books? Book Wyrm? Or something like that, I wonder if that'll ever take off, but considering it's not very mainstream, maybe not
It's still super basic.
I don't blame them, but you can't actually functionally break your books into lists. They exist, but you have to manually search each one to add them, which isn't practical unless your history is extremely small.
Bookogs would have been perfect but the morons running the platform shut it down.
What genres are you looking for? There are a couple good communities, but youre right, not nearly as big or as niche as most subreddits. Though ive found the reccomendations to be higher quality when i do see them.
For me it's fantasy. Stuff like Dungeon Crawler Carl, Joe Abercrombe or R A Salvatore etc... If you have a suggestion for an active community that's not on discord I'd love to hear it.
Hmmm I am more of a sci-fi person, but I've definitely still seen some threads talking about fantasy books. I'm guessing you're already on the main book communities like !books@lemmy.ml !literature@beehaw.org ? They are pretty active and I do see discussion on threads talking about fantasy books. There is also the fantasy community !fantasy@lemmy.ml -- which does admittedly have pretty low traffic (though, you could be the change you want to see...). I found one niche community that was very recently made !cozyfantasy@wayfarershaven.eu
I get how hard it can be to find active book reading communities & wish I had more suggestions in the fantasy realm. If you have a specific sub genre in mind, search for it or maybe even make a community for it. I was surprised to find a few different scifi sub genres already had active communities on lemmy & even recently made communities are growing fairly quickly with the new users.
Good luck finding your next page turner & lmk if you want sci-fi recs :)
Edit: to add and un-add exclamation points
To be fair you don't need that many people to commit to a session in a book reading club before it's full enough to work. Anything more is just a bonus.
Thats true, just a few thoughtful people can make for good discussions and recommendations :)
RoyalRoad would probably work for you. That's where a lot of Lit RPG is right now.
This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn't be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I'd be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.
One thing we're re learning is that curating content is necessary. Whether you pay a publisher by buying books they sell or crowdsorce via some website, it's near impossible to just yourself go through the firehose.
As a former podcaster, I know this feeling well.
I was just beginning to get somewhere when Covid hit. Suddenly there were hundreds of celebrities, bored at home, ready to all start interviewing each other. And that was that for indie podcasters.
This is part of the reason behind the writers strike in Hollywood right now.
This is my daughter at the moment. Just gone 21, at university studying Creative Writing. Thing is she was doing so well with Biology etc. Changed about 3 months into her first year. She's had a couple of self published books on Amazon, nothing more than a dozen or so sales. She's going to find it hard to find full time work etc. in her chosen field.
I thought about bringing up technical writing, then I realized that it's a possibility that even that job isn't safe within the next 5 years considering the promising development of Spiking Neural Net. This is something I would probably suggests to your daughter at this point that she should probably reconsider her chosen field and try to enter biology or some stable job.
I dunno, people have been trying to automate technical writing for at least 30 years. The results have been mostly garbage. I'm not sure an LLM is going to understand what's going on any better than the folks doing this work now, it tends to involve lengthy discussions.
And work with AI not against it. I mean if AI can quickly make a filler chapter that can be tweaked, more time can be used to make it all get together etc etc. Or so I figure.
That's a really good point. Use the AI to bridge gaps and for short segments. Probably a good way to get around some writer's block.
Yeah, though it would be more challenging to make a living when it lower the barrier of entry for writers.
Yeah for sure, but someone good at biology can surely handle AI, while other writers might not.
This seems way to stem biased imho. Interacting with chatgpt isn't really a technical skill. And editing prose certainly isn't. I think writers, especially creative writers would be way ahead on prompts (basically an outline) and massaging the output into one more cohesive whole. Good writers can probably also discriminate between powerful prose and overblown pompous language that GPT can output sometimes.
The other thing is I would hope that good writers would never have a filler chapter. I don't like needlessly padded content of any type, and if I notice that my ranking of the content goes down.
Been there, done that. She has her own mind, so I'll just have to get on board.
Kids eh?
Guess that all you can do, yep.
I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing "literary" stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing...
As someone who's been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There's an incoming "demographic collapse" coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren't.
Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.
I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say "You need a degree in X to get that job".
Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It's basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it's awful.
I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn't be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I'm a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.
That's interesting, is this worldwide or just in your country (America?)
I'm out of the loop, I had assumed the sausage factory was churning along ok.
I think that's her plan. She was a bit disillusioned with knock backs, until I sent her a list of 50 odd famous(?) writers that got rejected, some many times. Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, J. K. Rowling, Isaac Asimov etc. That perked her up a bit ;-)
Everyone gets rejections. Something that's hard to fully appreciate when you're starting out is how much quite good stuff gets rejected for bad fit or "we already have one of those" or just timing.
As someone who's been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There's an incoming "demographic collapse" coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren't.
Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.
Honest questions: What worthwhile alternatives exist already? If there are none, what can be done? What can be built to improve discoverability of authors while moderating what is visible?
Libraries and some bookstores are great about picking favorites and putting blurbs about them right on the shelf.
Powell's always has great recommendations, I've found lots of fantastic new reads there. I wish everyone had access to one in person, I love that store so much.
We're going to return to the era of word of mouth discovering.
Already have for multiple subgenres. My subgenre (litrpg and progression fantasy) seems to almost exclusively rely on posting your book as a webnovel on Royalroad->creating a patreon->Batching up your chapters into a ebook on Amazon.
I wouldn't classify these books as real competition. Nobody was really prepared for this, but it's a very solvable problem and there's no market for books full of word salad. I can't see Amazon or any store tolerating the existence of a product that doesn't sell.
I think you've misunderstood this. Listen to the two recent episodes of behind the bastards on this topic if you want to get a good handle on it.
This is half the problem: these books ARE selling. I do try to be kind, but I can't deny that there are a lot of idiots in the world who seem to have a fair amount of disposable income.
They are buying these books for their children, or being duped by a pretty front cover, or a synopsis that sounds up their alley.
The books aren't 'word salad' so much as they are simply a cheap facsimile of actual stories. They have the elements of storytelling, munged together into a brain-breaking stew - but they aren't word salad, they just aren't human.
This whole situation is making me fairly uncomfortable, but also making me laugh. I love books. I love literature. The idea that one of the largest retailers in the world: an almost tech-giant that made all of their money flogging books to the masses cannot seem to clear its platform of fake books ghost written by computers with a little unscrupulous human help is simultaneously delicious and disturbing as hell.
I hate amazon with every fiber of my being, but this doesn't feel like a good omen for my children.
They are competing for attention of potential buyers. In terms of sales new authors are similar to these spammy nonsense books. Therefore when Amazon chooses a "new author to promote" chances are it's going to be a spammy one instead of more genuine work. I agree that amazon should react to this as it should hurt their brand from both an authors and readers point of view
What's odd is that this isn't an especially new thing in terms of possibly. Maybe if they wanted some veneer of viability for like, a paragraph or two, but any reader is going to catch on to what's happening pretty fast.
The titles are still nonsense enough that even a simple Markov chain could have made them. So I think the main issue at play is whatever they're doing to exploit themselves to the top of the list.
This is what I'm having trouble with: how are word salad books at the top of their "bestsellers" list - is anyone buying them? If someone is buying them, then are others buying them just because they appear on the bestseller list?
It doesn't pass the sniff test.
My guess is that Amazon gives new books some visibility if they manage to score a dozen sales within a few days of release. So the author probably bought a few copies as soon as his listing appeared on the store. It's a very old tactic that plagues the best seller's list and Amazon is plagued by the same issue.
Amazon book discoverability has kind of always been terrible, at least from a reader perspective. I basically never use genre filters because they seem to return random results and sometimes my favorite books are 'top sellers' in totally weird categories like 'Chemistry Textbooks' for a fantasy novel (not involving chemistry at all). It's clear that there's been some sort of ever escalating SEO war that has turned search and basic categorization functions into drivel, just like what's happened to Google Search.