My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.
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.
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.
Isn’t there a fediverse site for books? Book Wyrm? Or something like that, I wonder if that’ll ever take off, but considering it’s not very mainstream, maybe not
It’s still super basic.
I don’t blame them, but you can’t actually functionally break your books into lists. They exist, but you have to manually search each one to add them, which isn’t practical unless your history is extremely small.
Bookogs would have been perfect but the morons running the platform shut it down.
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 !books@lemmy.ml !literature@beehaw.org ? They are pretty active and I do see discussion on threads talking about fantasy books. There is also the fantasy community !fantasy@lemmy.ml – 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 !cozyfantasy@wayfarershaven.eu
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.
Thats true, just a few thoughtful people can make for good discussions and recommendations :)
Just a heads up, I think you should remove the exclamation points in your links, it resulted in a 404 for me before I removed them.
using a exclamation mark should work, and it does work exactly as intended for me. Each of these links properly opens to the community on my local instance
thanks for the heads up, ill change that
update: I tried removing them, but it made it so the links no longer worked for me, so I put them back
To clear up some confusion: Kbin users need links without the ! and lemmy users need them in.
RoyalRoad would probably work for you. That’s where a lot of Lit RPG is right now.
Seconding Royal Road.
Fair disclaimer: I am an author on there. :) Stories are free (generally), but lots of authors have Patreons going.
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.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 1•2 years ago
Are you succeeding?
As a former podcaster, I know this feeling well.
I was just beginning to get somewhere when Covid hit. Suddenly there were hundreds of celebrities, bored at home, ready to all start interviewing each other. And that was that for indie podcasters.
This is part of the reason behind the writers strike in Hollywood right now.
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.
There are active researches on world model working alongside with llm. The idea generally is that llm is used for generating text, but world model provide more context for llm to understand the world.
When you say “the world”, what do you mean? If it means the actual world, I don’t understand how that would help with technical writing. Plenty of people can get around in the real world but struggle to use Excel.
As in actual world, providing context to physics of things, providing logical association/evaluation, and so go on. It is basically something that supposed to help LLM get closer to understanding the “world” rather than just spewing out whatever the training dataset give it. It does have a direct implication for technical writing, because with stronger understanding of the things you wanted to write about in technical writing, LLM with World Model would basically auto-fill that.
This is something that the researchers are pretty much all hand on deck working on to create.
Thanks! I’ll take the time to go through this paper when I’m more awake, I really appreciate the link.
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.
Yeah, though it would be more challenging to make a living when it lower the barrier of entry for writers.
Yeah for sure, but someone good at biology can surely handle AI, while other writers might not.
This seems way to stem biased imho. Interacting with chatgpt isn’t really a technical skill. And editing prose certainly isn’t. I think writers, especially creative writers would be way ahead on prompts (basically an outline) and massaging the output into one more cohesive whole. Good writers can probably also discriminate between powerful prose and overblown pompous language that GPT can output sometimes.
The other thing is I would hope that good writers would never have a filler chapter. I don’t like needlessly padded content of any type, and if I notice that my ranking of the content goes down.
Having played with ChatGPT as a writer, I agree. It takes some learning to shape prompts. It might eventually be good for churning out first-draft-level writing more rapidly by fleshing out those sections where you usually head off to a search engine or just want to add some ‘scaffolding’ such as a location description you know won’t make it to the final book, but which lets you more clearly imagine the space.
It’s incredibly limited though, once you start to really get familiar with it!
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.
Been there, done that. She has her own mind, so I’ll just have to get on board.
Kids eh?
Guess that all you can do, yep.
I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing “literary” stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing…
As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.
Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.
I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say “You need a degree in X to get that job”.
Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It’s basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it’s awful.
I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn’t be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I’m a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.
That’s interesting, is this worldwide or just in your country (America?)
I’m out of the loop, I had assumed the sausage factory was churning along ok.
I think that’s her plan. She was a bit disillusioned with knock backs, until I sent her a list of 50 odd famous(?) writers that got rejected, some many times. Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, J. K. Rowling, Isaac Asimov etc. That perked her up a bit ;-)
Everyone gets rejections. Something that’s hard to fully appreciate when you’re starting out is how much quite good stuff gets rejected for bad fit or “we already have one of those” or just timing.
As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.
Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.
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?
Libraries and some bookstores are great about picking favorites and putting blurbs about them right on the shelf.
Powell’s always has great recommendations, I’ve found lots of fantastic new reads there. I wish everyone had access to one in person, I love that store so much.
I like to use goodreads, though that is still Amazon owned, it has more human curated lists and the like. I used to also use some of the subreddits to see what was recommended, I don’t know if lemmy yet has like a mystery book or sci fi book or whatever community.
As I have done with several others, I am going to point you to a website called Royal Road. Stories are free (generally, STUBs are stories that have moved at least a portion of their work to Amazon), Authors are hoping for Patreon support (which usually included Early Chapters at a minimum). I am one of said authors, link in my profile, same user name here and there.
I heard about Royal Road. I write and planned to put a complete novel on it. That being said, I saw reports of the community there being quite averse to LGBT content (it was in an old thread on r/hobbydrama).
As an author there, does that match your experience? Did things improve if it used to be the case? Thanks!
I started writing my story back in September, and I do not seem to have more than the normal amount of trollish low ratings.
My MCs are an M/F/F thruple, I have an explicitly stated F/F couple, a not yet explicitly stated M/M couple, and one of the female MCs has an earthy attitude and took full advantage of having magic birth control and disease prevention/curing available, before getting into this relationship. Only on her terms though, and she’s a warrior-monk who broke several bones of the last guy who tried to grab her when she walked away. :D
There’s also a forum thread that is all about collating LGBTQ+ stories, since there is not a specific tag for them.
I am sure there are some assholes there, but it appears welcoming enough to me. I could be missing something, but at the least they are not overt.
Thanks! I’ll give it a try
if I ever edit the bloody novelsomeday.Also your warrior-monk sounds absolutely badass.
I like to think she’s pretty cool. :) Circumstances of the story make it a little harder to focus on her sometimes, but she should shine pretty well in volume 3.
I wouldn’t classify these books as real competition. Nobody was really prepared for this, but it’s a very solvable problem and there’s no market for books full of word salad. I can’t see Amazon or any store tolerating the existence of a product that doesn’t sell.
I think you’ve misunderstood this. Listen to the two recent episodes of behind the bastards on this topic if you want to get a good handle on it.
This is half the problem: these books ARE selling. I do try to be kind, but I can’t deny that there are a lot of idiots in the world who seem to have a fair amount of disposable income.
They are buying these books for their children, or being duped by a pretty front cover, or a synopsis that sounds up their alley.
The books aren’t ‘word salad’ so much as they are simply a cheap facsimile of actual stories. They have the elements of storytelling, munged together into a brain-breaking stew - but they aren’t word salad, they just aren’t human.
This whole situation is making me fairly uncomfortable, but also making me laugh. I love books. I love literature. The idea that one of the largest retailers in the world: an almost tech-giant that made all of their money flogging books to the masses cannot seem to clear its platform of fake books ghost written by computers with a little unscrupulous human help is simultaneously delicious and disturbing as hell.
I hate amazon with every fiber of my being, but this doesn’t feel like a good omen for my children.
They are competing for attention of potential buyers. In terms of sales new authors are similar to these spammy nonsense books. Therefore when Amazon chooses a “new author to promote” chances are it’s going to be a spammy one instead of more genuine work. I agree that amazon should react to this as it should hurt their brand from both an authors and readers point of view
What’s odd is that this isn’t an especially new thing in terms of possibly. Maybe if they wanted some veneer of viability for like, a paragraph or two, but any reader is going to catch on to what’s happening pretty fast.
The titles are still nonsense enough that even a simple Markov chain could have made them. So I think the main issue at play is whatever they’re doing to exploit themselves to the top of the list.
This is what I’m having trouble with: how are word salad books at the top of their “bestsellers” list - is anyone buying them? If someone is buying them, then are others buying them just because they appear on the bestseller list?
It doesn’t pass the sniff test.My guess is that Amazon gives new books some visibility if they manage to score a dozen sales within a few days of release. So the author probably bought a few copies as soon as his listing appeared on the store. It’s a very old tactic that plagues the best seller’s list and Amazon is plagued by the same issue.
Amazon book discoverability has kind of always been terrible, at least from a reader perspective. I basically never use genre filters because they seem to return random results and sometimes my favorite books are ‘top sellers’ in totally weird categories like ‘Chemistry Textbooks’ for a fantasy novel (not involving chemistry at all). It’s clear that there’s been some sort of ever escalating SEO war that has turned search and basic categorization functions into drivel, just like what’s happened to Google Search.
We’re going to return to the era of word of mouth discovering.
Already have for multiple subgenres. My subgenre (litrpg and progression fantasy) seems to almost exclusively rely on posting your book as a webnovel on Royalroad->creating a patreon->Batching up your chapters into a ebook on Amazon.
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.
The goal for most of the investors in this tech is going to be to crow bar large language model nonsense in to every corner of the internet. At a certain point I can’t help but wonder if they are actively trying to ruin it.
The goal is really to create spambots either for marketing products or to create an impression of popularity. The problem is that it becomes too obvious so they end up taking down whole platforms.
There is no way a modern LLM wrote this stuff. Maybe a medium language model, or a really old LLM. It reads better than a Markov chain’s work, I guess.
I don’t think they are trying to ruin it per se, more like they want to make the most money possible and then get out (which will have the same result)
Check out unicorn social lol
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 had to pull my kindle unlimited membership… it’s just a pile of crap.
So like the rest of Amazon then? Never used kindle, but Amazon for physical goods has been a dumpster fire for a while - completely overrun with dropshipped garbage, to the extent that it’s actually difficult now to find quality stuff in the sea of “brands” with random string of capital letter names, all using the same poorly photoshopped image…
Some large percentage of Amazon is just significantly marked up stuff you can get more direct via Temu or eBay. I never thought Amazon would reinvigorate Best Buy but if you want actual brand nane stuff, you have to go there. I also never thought it would be hard to discover actual brands online, but it is now.
The kindle eink reader is amazing and absolutely great. However I don’t use KU and rarely buy books on it. I mainly use my library and read the borrowed books on it. As a piece of hardware it’s one of the few Amazon builds well. I’m surprised too.
This. I own a basic Kindle because it only cost me $60, and while I could upgrade to a better e-reader from a less monopolistic company, it’d just be a bit of e-waste I don’t need to produce, and in the meantime Calibre + NoDRM / DeDRM means I can read books from anywhere on it.
In my experience, you have to find a good product first, then search for the exact brand and item, or follow a link from Project Farm or whichever tester you trust to get something good from Amazon.
I had kindle unlimited a decade ago and it was decent. Lots of good sci-fi and fantasy.
Then overnight the entire catalog became “shape shifting billionaire stepbrother bear” and other trash. It’s like browsing your spam folder.
I haven’t found that, but I’m not using the Kindle storefront to find new books, so maybe that’s why?
Or maybe it’s because KU and online web serials are the only popular spots for my favourite niche subgenre. Trad publishers don’t publish my favourite genres.
What are you looking for, out of curiosity?
Sorry, didn’t realize my new Lemmy app didn’t show reply notifications!
LitRPG and progression fantasy almost exclusively.
Yeah, this is more for people that actually use the recommendations. If you read Lit RPGs you’d also be completely exempt from this. If you read YA then you’re probably screwed but ehn.
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.
“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).
I fully second this. Folding Ideas is a first-class educator. I would still be completely in the dark on NFTs and Crypto without him, and “In Search of a Flat Earth” completely changed my perspective on flat earth adherents (i.e., I am much less amused by it).
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) English1•2 years ago
Flat Earth adherents? What’s their dirty secret?
No secret, I just used to think they were being stubbornly dense, like goofy idiots. His video contended that it’s more malicious than that, born out of evangelical arrogance and an unfulfilled need to be smarter and more “moral” than everyone else.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) English3•2 years ago
I feel like I turned out similarly, except the exact opposite.
To me, it’s really, really important to be correct. Not to think I’m correct, mind you, but to actually be correct. One of my fears, therefore, is to be wrong about something without realizing it, especially if other people do realize that I’m wrong.
I wonder what that says about me.
There’s also BtB
Robert evans did a decent job looking into this specifically inspired by folding ideas
There’s a podcast and written version at shatterzone substack
Was hoping someone posted this. Immediately what I thought of.
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.
Assuming you mean the sub-genres popular on Royal Road, sufficient Patreon support helps keep authors off of Amazon.
But that gets expensive fast if you support multiple authors, so that’s hard to do too.
A store cannot survive on good will alone unfortunately. As much as I like my local bookstore, Amazon provides more content in more formats. It’s just better from every angle.
If you need The Good to be just as convenient as The Bad in order to make the switch, it’ll never happen. Nobody’s saying bookstores offer a better deal than Amazon, they’re saying that Amazon is so bad for the world that it makes sense to sacrifice that convenience and switch to alternatives.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 3•2 years ago
Problem: those formats are DRM’d. Your access to “your” books can be revoked at any time without justification.
Don’t worry, your utopian vision of streets full of closed shops and associated tumbleweed will be here soon enough.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 1•2 years ago
There won’t be tumbleweed. There’ll be tents. Tents everywhere. Portland, Oregon is a preview of everyone’s future at this rate.
I like reading ebooks on my phone or tablet. Google and Amazon make acquisition easy in that regard.
So yes I am part of ‘the problem’ whatever that means.
Good for you. Just remember that monopolies rarely have your or the little authors’ interests at the centre of their business plans. It’s seems to be mainly about owning big yachts and rocket companies.
Be the change you want to see in the world!
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) English17•2 years ago
I, too, have snorted scornfully at this shameful state of affairs.
We should stop making rankings of books…
Or a least, have humans read the book before doing ranking or recommandations. But that’s not very profitable.
I, for one, can’t wait to read Apricot bar code architecture
Sounds like an indie band
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.
How does the federation work in this case? Do I have to create a new account there, or can I see their content using my Kbin account?
I guess the most intuitive way to federate is that you can follow
@user@bookwyrm.social, after which all reviews published by the user will appear in your subscriptions. You can participate in the conversation as normal, and boost it to increase visibility across the Fediverse.If you want to do more sophisticated things like manage your library or post reviews, I think you’ll have to sign up for an instance of BookWyrm. :)
Fedi needed to figure out nomadic identities before it started to get popular, seen some proposals but IF anything is chosen it’ll be a lot of trouble to migrate to that
Unfortunately it is extremely sparse vs goodreads. Maybe someday it will catch up, but I really didn’t find it useful right now. Then again I am def a lurker on goodreads so where I read lists and reviews from doesn’t matter that much.
I guess what I don’t get is what were people using GoodReads for? Because I’m using BookWyrm to just track what I already wanted to read and use the review system as a way to sum up books for myself.
To find other books I want to read. The shelving, the reviews are all useful.
Not everything has an answer yet, for example Discord, there’s alternatives but none on Fedi. Also somebody earlier was mentioning fanfiction sites, there’s problems with all the existing ones and again, no Fedi alternative. However, not everything needs to be federated, look at Wikipedia for example.
The Discord alternative probably should be end-to-end encrypted, so I guess Matrix or something would be a better alternative than the Fediverse. Or just IRC if it’s public ;) In either case it’s probably a good example of where the Fediverse is not the solution (but decentralizzato might still be).
Fanfiction I guess could be federated - I don’t know how these services work. Personally I’m waiting for a good federated TripAdvisor/Yelp alternative that can be integrated with OpemStreetMaps.
Wikipedia is wonderful, and probably shouldn’t be decentralized. Then again, it’s one of the few good things about the contemporary internet (along with archive.org).
Honestly, AO3 is pretty based for what it is, especially when you consider how the two main competitors (FFN and Wattpad) are ad driven with all the problems that entails. Tho come to think of it, now I’m getting worried about FFN getting enshittified…
From what i understand from buddies who use it, it has it’s own set of cultural problems, but i don’t have much of a conception of what are they
GR is owned by Amazon.
Keyword is ‘like’, not necessarily Goodread, one other user brought up BookWyrm.
I don’t think these particular books are even generated by large language models - from the examples the content is just meaningless nonsense.
I would like to peruse a copy of apricot bar code architecture! Surely, it must be one of the books of all time!
Indeed. Written by one of the writers.
Behind the Bastards just did a two-parter on this phenomenon but with children’s “books.” Icky stuff. Great episodes, but ugh that this is even a thing.
Part One: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000617646703
Part Two: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000617949358
Saw this post and this was my first thought. I am morbidly pleased that Robert called it so hard. I hope everyone becomes aware of these scumbag grifts
Is this basically Elsagate book edition?
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.
