YABookgate

[Gnillik Yot]

I'm not able to reply in the usual way so I'll tag instead @Registration but I'll just say this was never my experience until I met the Twilight fans. Growing up as a Potterhead nerd (yes, yes, I know) there was very little difference in the way a girl Potterhead would talk as to what a boy would say. We all were enthused about the same characters for the same reasons and would come up with similar theories as to what would happen in Deathly Hallows. The girls did not talk about romance more than the boys did. Some of the girls thought Draco Malfoy was hot, but otherwise they were the same as us.

Still, the most ideas-interested fans tended to be girls, contrary to the Romantasy types. My conversations with the nerdy girls who liked Harry Potter tended to be deeper and address morals and themes much more than my talks with other boys who enjoyed the series. Obviously there were exceptions. I liked a Jewish boy who knew the names of all the students and who later went on to defend Rowling when she was attacked by her former fans.

Now maybe you will say this just shows that male Potterheads are more feminine than other male readers and so are better able to relate to girl readers, but I DID feel a difference when I read Twilight and realized the overwhelmingly women fambase would discuss the characters in an alien fashion that felt shallow to me. Adult women Potterheads had similar ways of analyzing books as I did, but these Twihards were different.

Over the years, I have found a lot of difference between women and male readers in hard sci-fi and romance...and no difference between women and men on horror. A woman horror writer is just as likely to scare me and make me think as a man, and I've found the hardcore horror fans to have similar desires regardless of gender.

Any recommendations?

Unfortunately not. I'm sure there are good ones out there, but I haven't read any of them. I know there's a bunch of authors who write in the genre because I see their books on booklists, but I can't recommend something I haven't read. If you want I could find a few and give you the link in case you're interested in checking one out yourself.

Man not gonna lie, AI is fucking great. I used to make a overhaul to a wikia visual that I am an admin and it helped a lot. If a book can be made better by using it, I see no problem with it, even more when it is english since english is kinda lame to write in (too mechanical and not flowery enough)

I do believe the best way to have an audience is to get them to like you enough on youtube and then do your own stuff when you feel like there is a public that ressonates with you/your work.

There is this gaming Youtuber that sometime ago started making videos about historical topics like romans and his public liked it, even when they were gamers.

But of course, it could be very hard to make it happen, depending of the lack of overlapping possibilities between two different groups (imagine a YA writer making woodwork content on YT)

Excellent, I have a pro-AI author to question on this subject. Do you agree with my assessment that Spines's business model is trash? Correct me if I'm wrong, but as an author who utilizes AI, one of the reasons you do this is to be cost-effective. Also, you are able to do it yourself. There is no way you would throw $5,000 at a vanity press so that they make an AI book for you based on your directions. Spines wants to find 8,000 pro-AI authors who will pay them to do this by the end of 2025. Am I just not seeing the benefits here for an AI author? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

 

[Registration]

@Gnillik Yot Harry Potter is such a funny thing to me. I was supposed to be a reader/watcher. I was around 7-8 years old when the first film came out and I did watch it. Then the next film when it came out too. Then nothing.

I didn't read it or watched it. I have memories of joking around with friends about Dumbledore being a fag and I remember seeing the books at the school library and people reading when a new one came out but I never tried.

Then when I was fifteen I watched the film with the twilight guy who dies on a random cartoon Network exhibition. And that was my personal adventure with Harry Potter.

Whenever I listen to summaries or reviews as white noise as I do something else. It sounds so fucking lame and bad. I feel like it is the most milquetoast shit ever and I can't understand why anyone who isn't s very young kid would like it. It feels like there is more potential there than actual good content.

But that is a sail boat that I will never catch on. When I was 17 I read a VN that had elements of magic and some semblance of a magical school somehow that made me like it so much that 12 years later I still have content from it to consume as stuff still comes out from it. And with more curious concepts and better characters and magecraft.

I really don't understand besides being exposed as a kid why someone would consume harry potter stuff at this day (not because muh transfobia because I couldn't give a shit or retarded people comparing politics to the big bad in the books).

I feel like women are more prone to be harry potter adult fans than grown men. Not because of the text itself but rather the idea of abandoning it as something from your childhood. Women tends to hold it dear to their hearts and shape their world views (

As for the AI model.... It doesn't make sense at all. When I was doing the AI based fixed in the codes, sometimes when you fix something, you break other later, so you have to be quite precise in what you dont want and what you want and it still doesn't work always. Now imagine this as a book/story that has so much more elements that aren't fixed like code.

But this ai model included printing? I fail to see why it is do expensive, if you can do the same shit without the same cost by just doing yourself working as an editor, even if not professional one.

 

[Vecr]

Whenever I listen to summaries or reviews as white noise as I do something else. It sounds so fucking lame and bad.

The rollback ate my post so I'll make it shorter this time.

It's not that bad. I suggest stopping after the third book though. The series got popular and Rowling didn't get good researchers/consultants and editors on board to deal with that.

What happened instead was, I assume, the editors backed off and the books ballooned in length.

 

[Registration]

The rollback ate my post so I'll make it shorter this time.

It's not that bad. I suggest stopping after the third book though. The series got popular and Rowling didn't get good researchers/consultants and editors on board to deal with that.

What happened instead was, I assume, the editors backed off and the books ballooned in length.

Well here is the thing, even the content that I watched back then I didn't found that interesting so it wasn't a matter of something good being tarnished as new stuff comes out. So it isn't like I had much to care in the first place about the decline.

Now what I just don't get it, is how after you stabilish the foundation of this magic world and you just sit on it without doing anything new building it further. You have the other schools, you could hire other people to write minor stories on it and go to old days and explore the magical world but it just doesn't happen.

I know it doesn't mean shit but look this here:

TYPE-MOON universe started in 1998 with Kara no Kyoukai indie web novels and then tsukihime visual novel. But their first commercial work was Fate/stay night in 2004.

The whole story was released in a single day and each arc has this amount of words:
- Prologue: 676 pages, 2313 lines and 26246 words.
- Fate: 9530 pages, 28056 lines and 299080 words.
- UBW: 7221 pages, 22154 lines and 219495 words.
- HF: 9206 pages, 37508 lines and 275774 words

The total is 820,595 words for this foundation work. If we count all Harry Potter books we get a number of 1,084,170 words. A little bit higher, divided in 7 books I guess.

Then what? Both works are just a character driven story set in this fictional magical world, but what happens elsewhere or elsewhen in other parts of it? In Harry Potter we get the stage play/script, the fantastic beasts books/films, hogwarts legacy and minor games in the span of 20 years?

Fate/TYPE-MOON, after a single year released a sequel, a prequel teo years later, then it got adapted into anime, then a movie (that adapts the Second arc), a manga adaptation then a new futuristic game released in 2010, a magical girl spinoff series, a comedy series all in 2007.

And that was just the beginning. They understood that people liked the world so far and then build on it by bringing in fans to build it further, new authors, new illustrators and so on making a literal media empire born out a single work released 20 years ago.

Now harry potter. No comic/graphic novel adaptation, no game adaptation of the books, no animation adaptation, not new stories set in the world. The only work that got more content was the films and all works based on the films (see the game based on films rather than books)

It just feels like Rowling doesn't care about her work to flourish, it isn't even a matter of money since she is rich and could just delegate functions to her own Company like a Lucas arts for HP.

So in more than 20 years, you get almost no content in this fictional world that as I see, people like it more than the story itself.

In Fate, the current big boy both on money and content is Fate/Grand Order, when the game launched, they had very little text and the stories were simplier, but eventually (camelot and Babylonia), the writers realized that people would read it if the stories were good enough because they liked the characters, settings and stories, so they started making the stories and big as they need to be without any fear of lenght.

You can see in the graph how big the stories become and the quality shows, since there is more time.

And Harry Potter/Rowling doesn't do any of that or delegate for others. This shit makes me mad as fuck.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

What happened instead was, I assume, the editors backed off and the books ballooned in length.

I recall a lot of it felt "immersive" to me as a kid, even if Harry flying around on a broomstick or whatever wasn't exactly relevant to whatever Voldemort was doing this book. I'd almost attribute part of the popularity of the series to that, since readers could basically spend a year with Harry and his friends. But overall the books evolved into the template for some of those bloated modern YA books.

 

[Vecr]

Fate/stay night in 2004.

I only know about this because Eliezer Yudkowsky compared it to Hamlet. Something about a "great historical work"?

- Prologue: 676 pages, 2313 lines and 26246 words.
- Fate: 9530 pages, 28056 lines and 299080 words.
- UBW: 7221 pages, 22154 lines and 219495 words.
- HF: 9206 pages, 37508 lines and 275774 words

That is very long.

You can see in the graph how big the stories become and the quality shows, since there is more time.

What are these "singularities"? LB6? LB7? Are these names of fictional black holes/naked singularities?

 

[Shaneequa]

The whole story was released in a single day and each arc has this amount of words:
- Prologue: 676 pages, 2313 lines and 26246 words.
- Fate: 9530 pages, 28056 lines and 299080 words.
- UBW: 7221 pages, 22154 lines and 219495 words.
- HF: 9206 pages, 37508 lines and 275774 words

I just wanna say that these figures are inflated by retards opening up the game ONscripter and counting things like programing script lines that make the characters move around, play a different BGM, and change BGs.

 

[Registration]

I only know about this because Eliezer Yudkowsky compared it to Hamlet. Something about a "great historical work"?

That is very long.

What are these "singularities"? LB6? LB7? Are these names of fictional black holes/naked singularities?

Just the shortened chapter names in the first part of the story the singularities are basically points in history that are being altered and if not fixed could erase humanity's future since mages basically developed an miniature earth that works as a mirror from 100 years in the future. So by observing this miniature earth, we can see our own future, and when the 7 singularities appeared, we were gone from Earth.

At first there are seven of them around the Earth so the player/reader is send there to fix this and get the Holy Grail:

- Hundred Years' War of the Evil Dragons: Orleans in France - 1431 AD
-Eternal Madness Empire: Septem in Rome - 60 AD
- Sealed Ends of the Four Seas: Okeanos in the Ocean - 1573 AD
- Death World in the Demonic Fog City The Mist City: London - 1888 AD
- North American Myth War: E Pluribus Unum- 1783 AD
- Divine Realm of the Round Table: Camelot - Jerusalem 1273 AD
- Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia - 2655 BC Mesopotamia

In the part 2 of the story we get Lostbelts (LB), which is an even more complicated stuff (basically an alternate Earth where that is set to be pruned because humanity failed to continue to evolve into an acceptable path (for example, in lostbelt 3 the first Emperor of China basically became a super human computer and dominated the world, and implemented his policies to the whole world, basically stunning the growth of humanity as we know, so humanity doesn't advance forward as species so it will eventually be destroyed)

It all builds on concepts and advances the lore of previous works, making someone who knows the earlier story and see how it develops enjoys more and more.

For you to get an example, I am currently reading the Lostbelt 4 on youtube and just the story sections is 11 hours long. Lostbelt 6 is 36 hours long.

I just wanna say that these figures are inflated by retards opening up the game ONscripter and counting things like programing script lines that make the characters move around, play a different BGM, and change BGs.

Even then it is still a very long read in case of stay night even more because it was released all at the same time (jesus, imagine your balls as a writer to write 3 different stories with the same characters and expanding the world and characters without zero readers feedback to potential sequel about what they liked).

For example this image is the size of lostbelt 6 if it was printed on paper.

 

[Gnillik Yot]

@Registration Yeah I agree with you that the girls who were Potterheads remained Potterheads as adults, while many of the boys went on to other series. What interests me about women Potterheads is I see them as a template of one half of women readers. Adult women Potterheads are able to discern themes in series and tend to be very leftist. They are the ones who have caused the publishing industry (especially YA) to be woke. The other faction is represented by the women who liked Twilight. They went on to like Fifty Shades of Grey and the recent billionaire romances. In this thread, people often lump both groups together, but really, the latter group is mostly not interested in politics and only goes along with the first group to avoid being called out. I don't blame any guy who is standing outside YA, looking in and assuming they're the same people, though. If you don't follow reviewers in the sphere or read recent YA, they'll kind of look the same. But if you do, then you notice the differences in priorities, and sometimes, you'll notice the tensions.

 

[Registration]

@Registration Yeah I agree with you that the girls who were Potterheads remained Potterheads as adults, while many of the boys went on to other series. What interests me about women Potterheads is I see them as a template of one half of women readers. Adult women Potterheads are able to discern themes in series and tend to be very leftist. They are the ones who have caused the publishing industry (especially YA) to be woke. The other faction is represented by the women who liked Twilight. They went on to like Fifty Shades of Grey and the recent billionaire romances. In this thread, people often lump both groups together, but really, the latter group is mostly not interested in politics and only goes along with the first group to avoid being called out. I don't blame any guy who is standing outside YA, looking in and assuming they're the same people, though. If you don't follow reviewers in the sphere or read recent YA, they'll kind of look the same. But if you do, then you notice the differences in priorities, and sometimes, you'll notice the tensions.

I believe there is even more divisions like the women writing gay romance for other women. I thought it was something more exclusive to Japan but it grew so much that even normal books are about the same stuff.

So we can have the left leaning novels that originates from harry potter, the reducionist tag orientated novels from twilight and the fag shit in the middle.

The tags ones infuriates me the most since it removes any semblance of development and already spoils the kind of content straight up to the reader, it is the mcdonalds version of literature, you are going to have slop and you know what kind of slop it is since you have in the synopsis:

-enemy to lovers
-grumpy & sunshine
-age gap

It is all slop, but to be this shameless about it is very very lame.

 

[Misogenes]

The tags ones infuriates me the most since it removes any semblance of development and already spoils the kind of content straight up to the reader, it is the mcdonalds version of literature, you are going to have slop and you know what kind of slop it is since you have in the synopsis:

You know, I hadn't really thought of that before, but I can see how it'd be annoying. I don't read tag fic generally, and have only recently started reading series on Royal Road but only through word of mouth. Slop culture seems to love the tag system, even in more male-dominated areas online like progression fantasy. Maybe it's the nature of sites like AO3 or RR that let it flourish as a marketing or filter thing.

 

[SphinxItOver]

At what point does a tag become a sub-genre? Wouldn't the ones listed fall under Romance similar to how Cyberpunk falls under SciFi and S&S under Fantasy?

 

[Dragged Into Sunlight]

I swear Booktok is more about showing off than actually reading or having meaningful discussion about books



Although I doubt there is much meaningful discussion that could happen over that shelf of absolute garbage.

 

[Registration]

I swear Booktok is more about showing off than actually reading or having meaningful discussion about books

View attachment 6716070

Although I doubt there is much meaningful discussion that could happen over that shelf of absolute garbage.

In my country we have a term for it: "Bind Sommelier"

They care more about how the spine looks in the shelf than the goddamn book

 

[Kari Kamiya]

I swear Booktok is more about showing off than actually reading or having meaningful discussion about books

I swear, modern book series are more about showing off the book sleeves than the quality of writing itself (unless it's smut). There is no way you should be shitting out that many thick books just to make a graphic out of the spines, no normal person plans that out from the start.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

Excellent, I have a pro-AI author to question on this subject. Do you agree with my assessment that Spines's business model is trash? Correct me if I'm wrong, but as an author who utilizes AI, one of the reasons you do this is to be cost-effective. Also, you are able to do it yourself. There is no way you would throw $5,000 at a vanity press so that they make an AI book for you based on your directions. Spines wants to find 8,000 pro-AI authors who will pay them to do this by the end of 2025. Am I just not seeing the benefits here for an AI author? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

This might be bullshit, dunno...

...as I've never heard of this anywhere else, but I guess it wouldn't surprise me.

It is a snip from Larry Corriea's private writer Facebook group, so I can't link to it. It was actually on the discussion thread there about that article/AI Vanity Press.

Thankfully I have a couple of burner accounts from back when you could sign up for Facebook without a phone number. Otherwise I wouldn't be there.

Edit:

I swear, modern book series are more about showing off the book sleeves than the quality of writing itself (unless it's smut). There is no way you should be shitting out that many thick books just to make a graphic out of the spines, no normal person plans that out from the start.

Web novels, web serials, etc., run to millions words. And quite a few get printings now. The Wandering Inn is apparently over 12 million words and still going. Blows my mind that that's three times longer than the Wheel of Time. As to the qualify of it...well, I guess YMMV etc.

Going the other way there's stuff I've seen from authors complaining that no trad publisher will accept long books these days. Which of course I didn't save links to and now can't find.

 

[Vecr]

Going the other way there's stuff I've seen from authors complaining that no trad publisher will accept long books these days. Which of course I didn't save links to and now can't find.

It's hard/expensive/annoying to print a single volume if it's too long. If someone wants to print a web novel, they can just split it into volumes, about 100,000 words each. I assume marketing doesn't like that for a book that's actually being published.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

The tags ones infuriates me the most since it removes any semblance of development and already spoils the kind of content straight up to the reader, it is the mcdonalds version of literature, you are going to have slop and you know what kind of slop it is since you have in the synopsis:

-enemy to lovers
-grumpy & sunshine
-age gap

It is all slop, but to be this shameless about it is very very lame.

You know, I hadn't really thought of that before, but I can see how it'd be annoying. I don't read tag fic generally, and have only recently started reading series on Royal Road but only through word of mouth. Slop culture seems to love the tag system, even in more male-dominated areas online like progression fantasy. Maybe it's the nature of sites like AO3 or RR that let it flourish as a marketing or filter thing.

I can't knock on it too hard because the stuff I love ultimately boils down to "tags". Fiction in the style of Weird tales, or Robert E. Howard, or whoever really just amount to a nicer way of saying Tag: Weird Tales, Tag: Sword and Sorcery, Tag: Robert E. Howard. And the slop/mass produced nature of it really amounts to a 1930s/40s/50s Weird Tales/Amazing Stories/Planet Stories magazine format but in novel length form.

At what point does a tag become a sub-genre? Wouldn't the ones listed fall under Romance similar to how Cyberpunk falls under SciFi and S&S under Fantasy?

This is a good question. My guess is when the total numbers of sales/readers grows enough to support several works in that tag/sub-genre/genre. Then it becomes a proper sub-genre, and eventually its a genre in its own right.

I swear, modern book series are more about showing off the book sleeves than the quality of writing itself (unless it's smut). There is no way you should be shitting out that many thick books just to make a graphic out of the spines, no normal person plans that out from the start.

This is all a product of hardbacks earning more than paperbacks, and people desiring longer series with proven authors than new ones. Market forces and all...

This might be bullshit, dunno...

I hope it is, because if it isn't, this is going to run publishing and reading into the ground even more.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

I want more and more people exposed to the horrors of booktok's porn folders. Women need to be shamed for their shittily-written godawful smut and forced back into writing depraved fanfiction in some dark corner of the Internet away from everyone else.

 

[Gnillik Yot]

https://youtu.be/KgAY4iRnR2w?si=cuPZHN4LbgJqaD_k

I bet this is the first time you're hearing of Daily Wire Books, Ben Shapiro's attempt to influence literature in a conservatisve direction. Turns out they only managed to release one fiction book (not including Matt Walsh's picture books) and forced the writer to edit it herself. Then the book flopped hard on now the imprint is only interested in non-fiction.

There is a reason why things are how they are. Time and time again in the past decade, we've seen different publishers attempt to replace the woke audiences with a based one, and time and time again this is the result.

I mean, how many people remember when The New York Post attempted to "buck the left-wing YA trend" by promoting a right-wing YA trilogy written by a military vet? Has anyone here even heard of those books? Spoiler warning, that guy quit YA after the trilogy ended.

Or how about when Vulture magazine spent a considerable amount of time trying to get YA to get rid of sensitivity readers, while doing wall to wall coverage of all the scandals in publishing for 2019, while promoting right-wing alternatives? One of the author who led that charge wrote two YA books, both of which flopped, and now she writes about politics on a MAGA website.

Let's not forget when pro-MAGA influencers attempted to start a brand new YA publishing house that would publish non-woke literature, and then the woman who started it deleted all her social media accounts after ranting that the woke mob were coming after her...having failed to publish a single book through her new house. Also let's not forget Bre Faucheux, who stopped being able to sell books after coming out as "alt-right."

This is not to say books with conservative messages can't do well in today's publishing environment. But it is to say that the "anti-woke" branding is a complete dead end that you should not try if you want to get into YA. People who start those brands are usually either naive and disconnected from the grassroots, or they are scam artists.

P.S. Recently, "someone I know" managed to get inside Raconteur Press. It wasn't remotely hard. He quickly became one of their biggest authors under a pseudonym, and he can confirm the profit is next to nothing. It's sadder even than I thought it would be. But I'll leave for the next post.