‘A button gives the option to “text President Trump,” which, when clicked, opens a text message to a pre-selected number with the default text “Greatest President Ever!” Sending the text signs the user up for alerts, which individuals can also do through the app itself.’
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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[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.
“One person even took the time to write out an 850-word breakdown of the AI work’s shortcomings.”
But they didn’t. The “breakdown” they link to is clearly and glaringly AI-authored.
“ Fair warning before I dig in: this image is actually a very competent rendition. It's doing more right than most AI Monet pastiches. But you asked what makes it inferior to a real Monet, so here's the honest breakdown. What's missing — the physical object”
Plus the whole piece is just “someone did something and now here are a bunch of tweets”.
Yeah the 850 worded one is certainly AI, but I don't think it disproves the whole article. It's not an official study either, but things in between are allowed to be written about too.
I have found it depends on how comfortable the earplugs are. If I feel they are uncomfortable in the ear, there is a good chance I'll get an infection/inflammation in the next few days.
I tried to create a new gmail address recently because my primary gmail address is my name, and it's quite common, so I get more email for other people than I get for me.
My phone number - which I've had for about 15 years and have only ever used for personal purposes (minimal SMS, mainly just an iMessage/Whatsapp ID) - is apparently "not eligible" to create a new gmail account. Which is quite strange.
For something as central as a Google account, it feels pretty unreasonable that a long-held personal number can be silently rejected with no appeal path or explanation
Phone number, it’s not tied to any piece of HW because is portable. I’ve had the same phone number equally as long, but I’ve transferred it to multiple devices over the years.
My gut says that the occupations with the higher incidence of divorce are ones that have lower educational/qualification thresholds and in which people may be likely to marry when they are younger. It would be interesting to know if this is backed up by data.
I don’t understand the “record high” point. How did you decide when a “record high” had been reached in a volatile market? Because at $1 the record high might be $2 until it reaches $3 a week or month later. How did you determine where to slice on “record highs”?
Genuine question because I feel like I’m maybe missing something!
The longer answer is; you never know whats coming next, bitcoin could have doubled the day after, and doubled the day after that, and so on, for weeks. And by selling half you've effectively sacrificed huge sums of money.
The truth is that by retaining half you have minimised potential losses and sacrificed potential gains, you've chosen a middle position which is more stable.
So, if bitcoin 1000 bitcoing which was word $5 one day, and $7 the next, but suddenly it hits $30. Well, we'd sell half.
If the day after it hit $60, then our 500 remaining bitcoins is worth the same as what we sold, so in theory all we lost was potential gains, we didn't lose any actual value.
Of course, we wouldn't sell we'd hold, and it would probably fall down to $15 or something instead.. then the cycle begins again..
I wouldn't say that. The current title indicates that the article is likely written in a less clinical manner than an article called "Using computer vision to score rifle shooting cards" would have been.
Thanks for that, now I know I don't care about the contents before clicking. Misleading titles (something about smartphones and metals?) is why people open comments before reading the article
No - just because a title inspires curiosity doesn’t mean it is clickbait. Clickbait titles are urgent and generally either over-egg something or are misleading.
This was just a good title.
Thinking about this a little more: the reason I opened and read the piece was because it inspired questions. First of all, a phone and a brass plug are conceptually different things. So immediately I thought “how can a phone replace a plug? What sort of plug?” Then I thought more about plugs - is it a bath plug? An electrical plug? This doesn’t make sense! How can a phone replace a plug? And then the specific fact it was a BRASS plug made me even more curious. What sort of plugs are made from brass? It’s a strange and specific thing to make a plug from… there’s clearly something I’m missing here and I’d like to find out more. So then I opened the piece, and the quality of the writing meant that, invested in the question as I already was, I didn’t really mind that the answer wasn’t immediate. I was prepared to go on the journey the writer had contradicted for me to find what I needed to know.
That’s why it’s a great title, because the questions it prompted meant that by the time I clicked and started reading I was already mentally invested in the journey.
Would you call titles of other media click bait too, like 1984 or Gone with the wind? Sometimes an article doesn't have to have a literal title, sometimes it's an artistic decision to have a more vague title that nevertheless relates to the media.
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