[barbariangrunge]

Discoverability sucks, for almost everyone, but especially for new authors. And that was before ai started flooding out “content.”

Even if you get a publisher, great authors sometimes sell only a handful of copies. You find amazing books on goodreads by award winning authors with only 5 reviews. And that’s people who can get their novels manuscript even looked at by an editor. Lots of self published authors end up with 0-1 reviews

How do you stand out in that swamp?

[HDThoreaun]

This is why you see these massive advances for known names. The only thing publishers seem to know is that authors who create their own publicity sell copies, and those that dont have an audience dont.

[inanutshellus]

"Step one: hype the human, step two: publish their books" reminds me of being a senior in college and seeing and despairing at job postings saying

"MUST have 5 years experience in [tech that came out 9 months ago]"

[ilrwbwrkhv]

The problem is that book publishing hasn't really been disrupted for a very long time. Amazon just switched it to selling online, but think about how much more you can engage with a book that you just read. Somehow no apps or ereaders allow for anything beyond reading the book text.

[dageshi]

It is being quietly disrupted, just probably not in the way people want.

Webnovels on sites like royalroad.com monetised via patreon and then published on Kindle Unlimited & Audible offer a different publishing model to that of traditional books and one that works really well for the right genres.

The audience that reads them is reading purely for entertainment, has vastly lower standards and is willing to directly support their favourite authors to the point where the most successful authors who started 5 years or so ago are now millionaires.

But this is mostly an anathema to the traditional publishing industry and for the most part they're pretending it doesn't exist because they literally cannot compete with it in the niches it now dominates.

[iteria]

This is correct. I give $3/month on patreon for 2 chapters a week to this one author. $36/year isn't a lot, but it takes these authors' years to finish these books at this rate, and any author would kill for the amount of amount I sunk into 1 book. Multiply it out, and it becomes a livable wage if you can get enough people to support your patreon. I have a friend I personally know who did this. He's not even a good writer. He just found an underserved niche and made a livable wage $1from somebody at a time. His writing improved and I'd say it's passable, but no one would pay $10 at all once for any book he wrote. Apparently over a year is fine though.

[dageshi]

This is the interesting thing about this entire thread. There are a lot of opportunities for authors to make a living, even potentially become wealthy writing but they actually have to write in niches people want to read.

Instead I get the sense that the people writing these "debut novels" are really looking for fame/acceptance within the kind of social circles that value "great intellectual novels".