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.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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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.
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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.
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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.
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 [email protected] [email protected] ? They are pretty active and I do see discussion on threads talking about fantasy books. There is also the fantasy community [email protected] -- 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 [email protected]
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.
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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.
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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?
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It's the Dead Internet Theory in action. While it stays a conspiracy for the Internet as a whole, it is definitely true at particular websites. There are many communities which are just controlled by bots and have no real people there.
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It really sucks that we're facing the digital equivalent of climate change with regards to the internet and the content economy on top of the decline of the actual economy and actual climate change. It's all so much.
Be the change you want to see in the world!
I had to pull my kindle unlimited membership… it’s just a pile of crap.
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I, for one, can’t wait to read Apricot bar code architecture
Sounds like an indie band
This is going to be the real result of the large language model hype train, massive floods of basically worthless “content” made simply to pump metrics and fool investors.
I’m not saying that there is no useful applications for the tech just that none of those are particularly marketable nor do they generate a lot of monetizable utility.
And more importantly it’s not AI anymore than auto complete, spell check are. People insisting otherwise almost seem like they’re trying to start cults.
"Meanwhile the government" by Rentlar
The company was founded in the late afternoon by its founder in a rush to create a more prominently displayed flag. I don't want your kids to know when you get to work.
...View this and much more riveting writing coming soon to the Amazon Bestsellers list!
I, too, have snorted scornfully at this shameful state of affairs.
"Folding Ideas" does amazing work on YouTube around exposing grifters in well structured, long form explanations of their grifts.
One of their videos looked into a group of growth hustler type folks, a pair of twins. Part of their scam was automating the process of creating fake books like this from start to finish to sell them online for passive income.
Highly recommend anything this channel creates. Worth your time to have a focused sit to watch the journey unfold (especially if interested in the main subject of this post).
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Well, that's all the more reason to not try to monetize through Amazon. But Patreons seem to only be about 0.5% of the people who Follow a story on Royal Road. Well, I'll have to keep working on more incentives I guess.
If this indeed breaks Amazon then at least that is one silver lining of AI. It's a shame indie authors are losing their platform, but they'll find another.
It would make it even more important to have sites like Goodread where books are recommended by communities.
There's even a federated alternative, BookWyrm!
...I guess these days the Fediverse is my hammer of choice, and every problem with the internet is a nail.
To be fair, it a REALLY good hammer.
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Anyone that buys anything from Amazon is also part of the problem. Support your local bookshop while you still can.
I mean, most of my reading comes from authors who are literally only on amazon. And they're only on amazon because it's impossible to make a living trying to sell your book anywhere else. Brandon Sanderson has brought attention to this issue.
I'm supporting indie authors in a sub-genre that you literally can't even find in a physical bookstore. I get that bookstores are hurting, but I had to make a choice between small time authors and small time book stores.
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We should stop making rankings of books...
What I don't understand is who is downloading and reading these books?
More bots
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I would like to peruse a copy of apricot bar code architecture! Surely, it must be one of the books of all time!
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Remember the good old days when you could mod your kindle and download any book from Amazon servers? Lots of books got leaked that way.
I recently released a book using Kindle Unlimited Publishing and was surprised at how easy and simple the whole process was. Especially the Kindle only bits since the formatting and dimensions of the cover don't really matter for digital versions.
It was quite the learning process to get the physical books right but that's a different story and one that bots would probably care much less about since the margins are so low.
However, even outside of nonsense written by AI, there were already a ton of questionably written titles that were trying to take advantage of SEO and keywords. This feels like an easy next step for the people who never cared about writing interesting stories and just saw a system they could exploit.
Welp..this is a problem we have to expect now. What a time to be alive. The scary part is this is basically gen 1. Wait till the books are actually good
When I first heard of the Elon and Zuckerberg cage match, I assumed it was some deep fake thing. I literally had my first experience of not knowing if something was real or AI. I just assumed it was AI. Not until days later did I know it was a real thing.
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