About two years ago I was searching for a new sci-fi book to read - I routinely rotate genres. I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess.
I've since just started reading older stuff, before the 2000s. I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt - even the Hugo awards gets scammed by influence campaigns.
Sites like Goodreads and Rotten Tomatoes are targeted by marketing firms.
Every popular outlet that become a proxy for reviews gets targeted. The New York Times best seller list has been gamed for decades by publishers who will mass-purchase their own books to get on to the list.
When getting a high score on Product Hunt was viewed as impressive it was standard practice for startups to have all of their friends and family register accounts and then have everyone spam their LinkedIn to beg for Product Hunt upvotes in a coordinated campaign. Now you can just buy Product Hunt upvotes for negligible prices from people in other countries who maintain hoards of sock puppet accounts. Anyone who posts to Product Hunt gets DMs from these companies offering their services. Nobody takes Product Hunt seriously now.
That's putting it mildly. I'm not normally about doing this sort of thing, but I went out of my way to find and install an extension to block google results for producthunt and alternative.to specifically.
This is not a good time to be an indie author (I should know) writing the book is only the start of the journey, if you want people to now read it you have to fight a system dead set against your success. Word of mouth eventually gets you a few readers, or sales (thankfully) but there are plenty of really good indie authors out there, and you will never find them in the normal algorithms or book recommendation sites.
Now we have the double whammy of a consolidated publishing system pumping out whatever James Patterson’s assistants churn out and and a long tail of drivel, both AI and regular slop.
Word of mouth is the best way to do this, among friends who read similar things to you.
Even if you're recommended something you end up not liking, it's not because they're malicious, their tastes are just not the same as yours - and after awhile, you learn to adapt. Friend A recommends a space opera? Great, you have very similar tastes. They recommend a horror novel? Eh, you know that what they consider to be good horror isn't what you do, so you skip that one.
These are some of my most recent conversations: "try Raymond Feist's Magician series" "I'm reading the Book of the New Sun series now" "I read the Pendragon Cycle (she's English and obsessed with King Arthur stories) in high school and liked it but now it's a weird right-wing tv show"
These are all old books but still super enjoyable. (Except maybe book of the new sun - kind if a bummer)
For anyone else who was intrigued by this statement: The essay links to another Medium essay[0] which links to a book critic's blog[1] which links to a 2014 article from Publisher's Weekly[2]. That article reports, e.g., that in the week after winning the Pulitzer for general nonfiction, "Tom's River by Dan Fagin, went from 10 copies to 162 copies sold (6,266 copies sold to date) on BookScan." The poetry winner that year had sold 353 copies at the time the article was published. It came out about six months earlier.
So perhaps for some poetry books, an author could win a Pulitzer and "sell just a few hundred copies." But that seems like it would be rare.
Anyway, these aren't great numbers, but maybe not as abysmal as the author makes it sound.
[0] https://aaronschnoor.medium.com/does-winning-a-pulitzer-priz...
[1] https://malwarwickonbooks.com/how-much-is-a-pulitzer-prize-w...
[2] https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/a...
The publishers have been saying that their ability to promote books has drastically reduced with the internet, along with changes in reading and information habits.
It seems like a book needs a far bigger push today to rise above the noise of the internet (and people's over-abundance of content to consume), and this unfortunately meant that small publishers struggled unless they "joined together" to make a bigger push.
There's extremely small (self published) books and extremely large hits, but the middle is increasingly less viable, it seems. Similar to films.
The number of new books available exploded after 2000 (yes, way way before AI).
Readers are arguably better off than they ever have been in terms of variety.
The novel I've got out is urban fantasy, but what I _really_ want to get out there is the hard science fiction series entirely from the aliens' points of view... which is very much not a fit with the current zeitgeist. Because that's unlikely to be a blockbuster, if I ever want to see it in print, I'll probably have to do it myself, with a proportionately diminished chance of finding readers.
(And all this is one reason why writers have day jobs. I'll be pleasantly surprised if my novel income hits even 1% of my tech job salary this year.)
Think about what happens when you feed the first few books of a series into long context llm, along with their audience interests, pitch lines, plot summaries and character guides. When each element is multi-shot rather than zero-shot.
This is a modern edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peter-Wendy-AmazonClassics-J-Barrie...
They could have just left it alone - "fired the design team". But no - they spent time and money to vandalize it. Look at the Museum of Modern Art (conveniently also in New York): https://museumsexplorer.com/museum-of-modern-art-moma-in-new...
https://loving-newyork.com/museum-of-modern-art-new-york/
The paintings in the most lauded modern art museum in the world are indistinguishable from those garish book covers. That's what gets recognition in the "art" world.
You may not enjoy modern art, and that's fine - but most of it runs circles around modern book covers. The latter are optimized to grab attention, without any artistic merit. They're the equivalent of shouting loudly.
Modern art may be the equivalent of speaking in esperanto or lojban to you, but at least it's still trying to say something.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79892
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/101471
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81527
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/35054
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79816
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/35548
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80712
Now I'm a production editor for a uni press. For a while, it seemed to be a bit of a haven from the madness, but it's coming for us now too.