Comment by shahzaibmushtaq 3 days ago
> it’s almost impossible to find an audience
Follow the path of those who have written many successful books, and you'll find that it's not almost impossible to find an audience e.g., William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde et al.
Oh, I am contradicting myself.
First, I said try to build a strong online presence so that you have a large active following base from which you'll find an audience for your book. You try to hide behind "large active following base" is the key here, and it's almost impossible to find an audience otherwise.
Then, I said follow the path of great writers, you again hide behind "I only mentioned five names, and they all span across five centuries which I can't study or research how they became great writers". Should I write here the names of every great writer in history or the names of Mark Manson, James Clear, Tim Ferriss et al. of this era.
You brought up your music analogy (I don't know where you found it) and who said anything about what is easy? You said, I didn't use that word anywhere in our conversation.
I presented two keys to find an audience, and you came up with a third key by saying I'm contradicting myself.
If 3 million books are published in the US every year (over 8k per day), what does that have anything to do with me or you? Next time, please first digest what others are trying to convey, then respond (if necessary).
All I’m saying is that it’s really not as easy as your comments make it sound like. The problem with citing successful writers is the selection bias: you see only the successful cases and not the millions of failures.
If it were easier than before to sell books, we would see it in the data, but it’s the opposite: the market is oversaturated, and it’s harder now than before. There are 10 times more books published today than 20 years ago, and yet the overall profits made by book industry declined by almost 40% since that time (source: link in previous comment).
Maybe you are right. My comments make it sound like it is easy to do, but actually I said it was not as difficult as before. You don't have to travel far and much to get a worldview, now the world has become a global village thanks to the internet.
Market is oversaturated because of awful books being published every year and it will surely become supersaturated with AI authors.
That's why I gave the example of Pieter - link in the parent comment. He self-published his e-book to bypass the oversaturated market and was recently invited by Lex Fridman on his podcast.
> Follow the path of those who have written many successful books, and you'll find that it's not almost impossible to find an audience e.g., William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde et al.
You’re contradicting yourself: if it were so easy, you wouldn’t cite only five names that span five centuries. It’s like saying music is easy, just do like Mozart or Beethoven.
There are 3 million books published each year in the US. That’s more than 8k per day. See: https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish...