/lit/ - Literature

>>22969186
>>22969627
These "indie" authors are publishing mass-market slop targeted for a lowest-common-denominator audience. If they didn't, they wouldn't be able to earn a living.

Amazon sells somewhere around 80% of all books globally, a vast majority of which are "self" published. Anyone can upload anything to "kindle direct publishing" and enjoy the same revenue split that only A-list authors can get from conventional presses. In strict dollars and cents, you'd be a fool to publish anywhere but on Amazon.

This leads to incredible market saturation. Kindle direct is drowning in ChatGPT summaries of bestselling books, e-celebrity autobiographies, self-help manifestos, and genre schlock in every genre.

To succeed in this environment, you must either (1) cater to a very small niche of readers who reliably pay for anything that checks certain boxes, or (2) rely heavily on social media marketing and keyword matching -- often so much so that your outline is little more than an amalgam of trends.

(1) is great if you don't mind writing pornography (sometimes called "romance") or post-apocalyptic neo-westerns that advocate a return to the gold standard. Keep turning out the specific thing your readership wants, and they'll keep buying your books. But if you have any artistic drive, you'll eventually get sick of writing the same book over and over again.

(2) gives the author flexibility, since you can write any story you want as long as it coincides with the current BookTok trend. But unless you can see a year into the future, you find yourself in a new dilemma: (a) write an inventive story first, then shoehorn in the viral terms you see trending just before publishing it, or (b) write a stock story that you can churn out quickly, tailored from the beginning to the trend.

(a) works, but if you have a genuine artistic vision, you won't cheapen it just to accommodate the right hashtags, so in practice almost nobody pursues it. So nearly everyone does (b), reproducing stock plots and stock characters, tailored to the moment.

Postmodern design is in? Write characters with simple clothes, and pay a contractor to draw your characters in the Memphis style. Earth tones are in? Change the setting to a rocky cliffside. Female heros are in? Gender-swap the knight and the princess. Sensitive men are in? Swap the knight and the princess back again, but make the knight sad about his dead wife. Pan-Asian race politics are in? Set it in a vaguely oriental city (without saying "oriental," of course; we don't use that word anymore), and make the bad guys English.

In practice, (2b) is only distinguishable from (1) because the demand for a given keyword expires over a period of months rather than years. Regardless of the mode, every "indie" author is effectively a servant of Amazon's user-recommendation algorithm, tailoring their work to a tiny audience they can predictably monitize.

>>10473658
>I don't know what supertasks are
>I don't know how newtonian physics work
Last two are silly, though.

What is the last book you shitposted about or criticized on /lit/ that you have not actually read?