[mihaic]

For the past 5-6 years I've been writing a book in my spare time. The outline of it is how reason emerges in past societies from the needs of social complexity, how it's lessons get converted into rules and rituals, which in turn remove any competitive advantage of aquiring reason, ending it to setup a new cycle. And in the meanwhile LLMs became the ultimate heuristic of humanity.

I've gotten it 60-70% ready, and I really don't know if it'll have an audience in a post-AI world. I never meant to strike big with it, but I'm now wondering if thousands of hours of research and writing can amount to more than a novelty gift I'd give to friends.

[jdw64]

I really hope you don't give up. I've built and shipped systems with 80000 to 90,000 lines of code, only to see most of the companies that bought them go out of business. But there was still immense value in the act of delivering them. By putting our creations out into the world, we connect with each other.

The act of writing and building is, in itself, humanity's grand narrative for trying to understand the world. The journey itself is inherently valuable. Isn't the ability to organize our thoughts, pass them down to the next generation, and continue that narrative exactly what makes us uniquely human?

Even if only a few people around you end up reading it, those few could be deeply inspired to go on and build an even greater world. Please don't stop. I'm rooting for you.

[pryelluw]

I’m also a writer and publish my works every week. Also working towards a book. My take? I don’t care. Still doing it for myself. God could come down in a chariot made of golden carrots and I wouldn’t change my mind.

[doitLP]

> God could come down in a chariot made of golden carrots

With imagery like this, I’d love to read your other work! Link?

[pryelluw]

I appreciate the kind words.

You can find a link to my newsletter over at https://yelluw.com

Do subscribe if you like it. It’s free and will stay free.

[saaaaaam]

Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience. Yes, AI means there are more poor works competing. But if it’s actually good writing, you will find an audience if you market the book. Pay an editor. Publish to kindle. Pay for marketing. Get people to sign up for an email list.

[mocpocalypse]

The idea that "marketing" is a simple, turnkey thing one can do to build an audience is incorrect. It's time-consuming and expensive, and most people lose money.

It's like saying "you can make money on Kalshi." Not false, but reductive.

I know plenty of authors, self-publishers and traditionally published, who've lost five and six figures marketing their own books. Whether this is worth doing is subjective, but for most people, it's not.

[lacewing]

> Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience.

And that's precisely the issue here. For a while, the internet allowed you to find an audience, just like that. Start a blog / podcast / YT channel, keep going, get enough attention. You could then approach a traditional publisher and tell them "hey, I'm kind of a big deal", or you could self-publish and rely on the word-of-mouth from your followers.

Now, how would that work? If you have a blog, AI answers will summarize it without attribution and not send anyone your way. Even the "references" cited in AI answers often point to AI-slop blogs, not the original source. The articles we discuss on HN are often AI-written too. So yeah, it's about reaching the audience, but you're now competing with machines that produce an endless stream of human-like text, good enough for most consumers, practically for free.

[saaaaaam]

Word of mouth is not marketing. The way you find the audience is by marketing. Paying to get in front of people. Targeting people who read similar books. Getting people who already have audiences to review your book or interview you.

A book won’t sell itself.

Which addresses your second point: machines can produce an endless stream of human-like text, but they have exactly the same problem as human generated text: finding an audience.

How are these endless streams of human-like text finding an audience? Most of the time they are not.

And as soon as you scratch beneath the surface there is no one to interview. No one to turn up at literary festivals. No one to write opinion pieces or blog pieces for book-interested audiences. As I said: writing isn’t the problem. Finding the audience is the problem.

What distinguishes a book that is read by no one from a book that is read by a bunch of people? It’s definitely not the writing. There are great books out there that never find an audience because no one ever went out there to find an audience for those books.

[camdenreslink]

The low budget marketing channels that worked in the past are harder in this post-LLM world. SEO seems to have changed a lot, email marketing now involves trying to escape the Promotions tab, organic social media marketing is much harder too (I suspect the large social networks want you to buy ads, not get organic reach as a person/business promoting a product or service). Marketing something like a self published book online has changed dramatically.

[mocpocalypse]

You're not wrong, but you're sorta saying "the reason most people don't make money on Kalshi is because they're bad at gambling." Marketing matters, but most writers have no idea how to do it.

Maybe I am being too hard on you, but I think everyone who follows the writing world knows that writing doesn't influence sales. That's why publishers exist. Authors right now fucking hate traditional publishing with a passion—not just rejected authors, but career midlisters and lower-tier lead-title authors—and the only reason you don't hear more rage is that they know how replaceable 99% of them are. No one would put up with them if there weren't strong economic reasons to do so.

Most marketing strategies break even or have slightly positive EV for traditional publishers, due to all the entrenched unfair advantages they have. They're -EV for self-publishers who are trying to replicate the benefits of the stolen village on a shoestring.

[ishouldstayaway]

> The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience.

You are literally responding to

> I really don't know if it'll have an audience

[saaaaaam]

Yes. And my response was “market your book”.

[ishouldstayaway]

And the part you didn't understand is that all the marketing in the world won't matter if the audience barely - or doesn't - exist.

[saaaaaam]

Ok! Thanks for educating me.

[red-iron-pine]

the problem is finding an audience with reading comprehension

[saaaaaam]

Indeed! It appears the person you are responding to skipped over a bunch of stuff and so missed my response which was “you need to market your book, not just write it”.

[mihaic]

Sure, I've been a start-up founder before, I know the trap of "if you build it, they will come". It's just that AI is evolving so fast that book do seem like the market for vinyl (as the article said).

No amount of marketing can help you out is your entire market is shrinking daily. Shriking markets are also not won by quality. The more competition, the more marketing then becomes the main thing, and you also need to alter the book in the process so that it fits the bite-sized pills you can push on most channels, or worse change it so much for the audience until it becomes something else entirely.

[mocpocalypse]

Also, marketing is expensive. You can spend $50 to place one copy. You'd honestly do better buying your own books, if you care about bestseller status, which will do less for you than you might think, but pays off in certain categories. [1] "Just do marketing" is advice every self-publisher hears, and yet most don't make money. Even most traditionally published authors, who benefit from enormous unfair advantages, fail.

The worsening health of the market is a real issue. And yes, writing to market is a grind. Writing for virality is worse, because you compromise the work and also don't get anything for it most of the time.

----

[1] Own-buys are common with business books. You take a loss, but you get a promotion or you earn speaking fees from the status of being a bestseller, even if no one read the damn thing. For literature, they'll cost you more than they're worth—you'll get a better advance, but not as much as you paid for the bestseller distinction.

[ishouldstayaway]

You're telling me.

[backprop1989]

For what it’s worth, that sounds like a very interesting premise. N=1, but you have a potential reader here!

[XargonEnder]

Your comment makes me wonder what the historical ratio was between books and readers. I know that books were in very short supply a thousand years ago, but readers were also very short in supply. I wonder if things are worse in the tiktok era or the pre-printing press era.

[WalterBright]

Mass literacy was the result of printing presses, not the cause.

[i5heu]

I would like to read it!

Please publish it!