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Comment by outop | Hacker News Reader

But there are more books published than ever before.

Most of the books that sell hundreds of copies wouldn't have been published in the past. If you write a niche book about something and a few hundred people read it, that seems great. If you're (stochastically) subsidized by a few huge hits and bestsellers, that also seems great. People are reading the Bible, Harry Potter and celebrity memoirs? Great too, I'm sure they are enjoying them. Possibly many of those people have not chosen those books in preference to other more "worthy" books but in preference to other pastimes.

The only problem I can see is if you wrote a book and had it published hoping it would be this year's runaway success, and it wasn't. Fine, but someone's book was. By its nature not everyone can achieve this.

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I also read the article and felt that the tone was weird. Much of what's described is unsurprising in a for-profit business. The fact that these big companies are willing to publish so many unprofitable books seems like a good thing to me. And if you don't want to work with big publishing there are many avenues.

I'm not sure what the author wants from the big publishers. Should they stop publishing hits, spend more money marketing books that won't sell, and then declare bankruptcy?

I do appreciate the opportunity to learn more about what a bad deal traditional publishing can be for authors. Seems like valuable information for anyone who wants to start writing professionally.

It's a bit weird that those niche books are sold - as opposed to just published free with maybe print-on-demand for those who want hard copies.

The authors don't make (practically) any money out of those books. Even the publisher probably doesn't. Vast majority of books aren't written to get any significant money (from sales at least), unless the author is delusional.

It's probably a kind of status thing and cultural lag. To get a publishing deal is a "stamp of approval" that it's a "real book" from a "real author" that has passed the gatekeeper. And that a copy of it costs something means it's not worthless, unlike e.g. the Linux kernel.

It's a combination of status and an attempt at an investment, and I guess somewhat of a lottery ticket.

There are also costs involved in a quality release even of a self-published novel. You want a cover. It's not expensive, but unless you're a talented artist it will show if you do it yourself. You can avoid paying for an editor, but it will generally be noticeable (you might have near perfect grammar and orthography, but you will miss things). If a publisher is going to put their name on it, those things will be at least a bit more expensive, and people tend to want to at least try to recoup some or all of costs even if they don't expect a significant return.

And if you want to turn writing into something more, you want to build an audience, and you want at least some signal of how large a portion of that audience are actually people prepared to pay, so that maybe next time your publisher is willing to put a little bit of money into marketing.

But yes, a lot of books could just as well be free. But vast quantities of writing - including fiction - is also released for free. Turns out there's signalling the other way too. It's hard to get people to read anything, but for at least some parts of the market, it's harder to convince them something free is worth their time.

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