YABookgate

[stupid frog]

Two-hundred years after World War III, the world is at peace, all thanks to the soul-identification system. Every 18-year-old must report to the government to learn about their past lives, a terrifying process known as kirling. Good souls leave the institute with their inheritance, a career path, and if they’re lucky, a soulmate. Bad souls leave in handcuffs.​

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It's a nerve-wracking ordeal for Sivon, who, given her uncanny ability to win every chess match, already suspects her soul isn’t normal. Turns out, she was right to worry. Sivon’s results stun not only her, but the entire world, making her the object of public scrutiny and anonymous threats.​

​

Saddled with an infuriating and off-limits bodyguard, Sivon is thrust into a high-stakes game where souls are pawns and rules don’t exist. As deaths mount, Sivon must decipher friend from foe while protecting her heart against impossible odds. One wrong move could destroy the future lives of everyone Sivon loves, and she can’t let that happen, even if they’ll never love her back.​

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220160382-soulmatch

The lone one star reviewer:

 

[Wodanaz]

"Dystomance."

art imitates life

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

I mean my favorite horror writer's probably a toss between Richard Matheson or Robert E. Howard at this point. Manly Wade Wellman's great too. But I don't see anyone aping their styles. It feels like a lot of stuff's just some variation of romantasy or IDPOL people trying to mimic something notable while missing the point.

There's definitely going to be a lot of that shit for another 2 years as the pipeline clears. I suspect IDPOL's still going to have an active faction, but it won't be as influential as before. Normal Person Summer may yet happen.

I won't lie, I kinda want to see horror-romance be a thing.

It could actually work with the right author!

There's been a level of sneaking it under the radar with "dark fantasy" but horror fantasy will be allowed to go nuts without having to fight accusals of being probelmatic.

T​

​

Saddled with an infuriating and off-limits bodyguard, Sivon is thrust into a high-stakes game where souls are pawns and rules don’t exist. As deaths mount, Sivon must decipher friend from foe while protecting her heart against impossible odds. One wrong move could destroy the future lives of everyone Sivon loves, and she can’t let that happen, even if they’ll never love her back.​

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220160382-soulmatch

The lone one star reviewer:
View attachment 7637987

S & S trying to make "Fetch" happen. According to this 2023 article there was a small dystopia bump following shows such as Squid Games, which would align with the acquisition of this book. It's certainly ripping off something Squid Gamey" and the publisher went nuts over it. The genre's not caught on... and to be fair it wasn't the games that made Squid Game compelling, but the horror of dealing with other people.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

 

[Wodanaz]

I read Murtagh earlier in the year and I have to agree that the state of modern writing is absolute.

I have such fond memories of the Inheritance cycle by Paolini and I've read it three or four times over the years, it still holds up. Certainly no masterpiece, but compared to Murtagh, it's high art. Murtagh is so bloated and meandering that I was completely uninterested by the time he arrived at the place that all the weird shit is leading to - and then there are even more mountains of text to climb.

It's frustrating that someone like Paolini is unable to keep up his standard of excellence, because it gives ammo to the people who read slop. What else are they supposed to read? The shit that you say is mediocre anyway?

 

[liam dees]

I read Murtagh earlier in the year and I have to agree that the state of modern writing is absolute.

I have such fond memories of the Inheritance cycle by Paolini and I've read it three or four times over the years, it still holds up. Certainly no masterpiece, but compared to Murtagh, it's high art. Murtagh is so bloated and meandering that I was completely uninterested by the time he arrived at the place that all the weird shit is leading to - and then there are even more mountains of text to climb.

It's frustrating that someone like Paolini is unable to keep up his standard of excellence, because it gives ammo to the people who read slop. What else are they supposed to read? The shit that you say is mediocre anyway?

I've never read anything from Paolini, but that sounds horrifying. So you're saying Paolini as a child can write circles around his adult self? What the fuck.

 

[Wodanaz]

I've never read anything from Paolini, but that sounds horrifying. So you're saying Paolini as a child can write circles around his adult self? What the fuck.

Yeah basically. It doesn't make any sense. He did rip off Star Wars and LOTR a bit, but the original books are quite good for what they are. Certainly better young adult reading material than the shit that gets pushed now.

Eragon is a 16 year old who is forced to confront his assumed notions about a whole host of things. One of the most notable is during a scene in the first book where a band of slavers is about to fuck around with them. The dragon appears and scares most of them off, but the leader falls off his horse and is left behind. Eragon's companion then walks over and executes him by beheading, because they're being chased by the evil empire and he believes they can't take the chance that this guy will tell the empire where they are or anything. Also he's a slaver, LOL! Despite this, Eragon starts moralfagging about how it's wrong to kill defenseless people because he's just a stupid farm boy.

These are important lessons for young readers to learn, and it's not hard to work them into a compelling narrative. It's one of the reasons the original Avatar show was so good and popular, and the sequel was shit. But yeah the pacing is really what kills Murtagh. And the fact that it's mostly just Murtagh himself the whole time. There are no other really strong supporting characters like Roran and Nasuada.

However from another perspective, it does make perfect sense. When he was a child/very young adult, he had such obvious passion for fantasy stories that it was undeniable. He simply had to write, and write massive books at that. It's completely natural for that sort of thing to fade as you get older.

 

[Candlelight Desolation]

I have such fond memories of the Inheritance cycle by Paolini and I've read it three or four times over the years, it still holds up. Certainly no masterpiece, but compared to Murtagh, it's high art.

I've never read anything from Paolini

I wouldn't read anything from him; Eragon is literally just Star Wars fanfiction with a medieval skin to it, just add dragons and goblins urgals among other stock fantasy creatures. The ra'zac are just throwing whatever at the wall to see what sticks regarding an original fantasy creature.

 

[Mola Ram]

I wouldn't read anything from him; Eragon is literally just Star Wars fanfiction with a medieval skin to it, just add dragons and goblins urgals among other stock fantasy creatures. The ra'zac are just throwing whatever at the wall to see what sticks regarding an original fantasy creature.

He also only got any kind of publishing deal (as a teenager!) because his parents were in publishing. Paolini is a perfect example of a literary nepo baby and I have never understood why anyone takes him seriously.

 

[Candlelight Desolation]

He also only got any kind of publishing deal (as a teenager!) because his parents were in publishing. Paolini is a perfect example of a literary nepo baby and I have never understood why anyone takes him seriously.

There is very much a phenomenon of looking back on your old work and thinking "Wow, I could write well as a teenager" while also thinking "Wow, I really was a teenager when I wrote this."

Like the scene in the first book where it comes off as "I'm so edgy and mature you guys, I had urgals kill a baby."

 

[Wodanaz]

There is very much a phenomenon of looking back on your old work and thinking "Wow, I could write well as a teenager" while also thinking "Wow, I really was a teenager when I wrote this."

Like the scene in the first book where it comes off as "I'm so edgy and mature you guys, I had urgals kill a baby."

Yeah that shit was kind of retarded. Especially when he tried to square the circle by making the humans team up with them to destroy the evil empire because uhhhhhhh they're not evil, they just love war! I never bought that. But I am a racist, so.
I disagree that it's just Star Wars fanfiction. There are certainly elements taken from it, but not enough for what I would consider to be derivative garbage. He simply wasn't cynical or calculating enough when he wrote it.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ffvRhsViyIQ

While listening, I just have to ask if there's actual moral lessons or some kind of story to take away from all this smut, like "porn with plot" exists, ladies. You really shouldn't forsake life lessons for the coom, you need to be able to take away something that you could either implement into your life (to better it) or come away with some talking points because it got you to use that gray matter between your ears a little bit as literature traditionally challenges the reader.

Oh, wait, you mean to tell me the lesson all along is "female empowerment" because she could be a total vapid slut without consequence and still able to keep her man, or two, or three?

No wonder art and literature is dead. Women literally ruin everything.

EDIT: Also, there's actual hypocrisy to be had with these books because they're just out in the open on shelves for anyone to pick up and just read a random page, but manga that has exposed boobs in it for any certain amount of pages has to be in plastic wrapping. Difference is one just has written descriptions of heaving perky bosoms, the other has pictures of boobs attached to a figure, but both books have exposed breasts in them, and very rarely will you see a penis explicitly in a manga (unless it's a hentai) but you will read about the Tall, Dark, and Handsome's veiny manhood.

Also the manga in question has a better story, at least I'm getting some kind of lesson out of what I'm reading and experiencing versus the one where the woman is going on and on about how fucking exciting it is to have a man inside her for once in her life.

 

[Fcret]

I'm just going to snipe the thread with the current autistic vibe I'm feeling:

You can only really go without men for so long as an entertainment industry - men (particularly those aged 25-60) earn more, spend a higher % of their income on entertainment, and are generally far more sticky as customers. English-language publishing has exhausted its current market but it's not polite to say this out loud so we'll see shifts in genre prioritization to try and court more men. I don't think this will work short-term as the industry is still too dominated by women to really understand how to sell things to men, but once accountants and creditors start getting involved we'll probably see some big shifts in staffing. There's no other option for the big publishing companies.

Why is there no other option? Let's look at some data - Here's a chart of Scholastic's outstanding liabilities (they're the only ones who have a public balance sheet due to being a publicly traded company but I imagine it's indicative of the wider industry):


If you notice, they massively expanded their debt load in the zero interest rate period prior to COVID and their debt load has not really gone down. The issue is that interest rates have gone up massively and the cost of refinancing is painful. I've seen some raving about "profits rebound in 2024 by being up 6% YoY" for some publisher as if it's a good headwind for the industry. It's nonsense. You need big dick growth to dig out of a hole like this and the only way to get big dick growth is to try and expand your market. Woke horseshit and femgooner lit is a ZIRP and now that bills are actually coming due, the publishers are going to need to rethink what they're doing or they're simply going to go bust. We're already seeing some of the early stages of financial stress with stuff like Penguin and Random House merging.

At the same time, Kadokawa also smells blood in the water when they see the American comic book industry completely decimated by manga and they aren't shackled by PC nonsense so they're already massively ramping their releases of popular light novels. Not only are LNs not especially expensive to translate, but they're tied into existing anime that already exist just to sell the LNs and merch which means they're tapped directly into the entertainment medium that is most popular among young men. The Japanese and Korean publishers are even scouting out new authors based not just on domestic appeal but overseas appeal. The traditional English-language book industry is about to have a very rude wake up call because they're going to have real foreign competition for the first time in like 200 years.

To be fair, when I think millennials, I think broke college students smoking joints and shoving dildos up their asses. I don't think it deserves to be written about lmao.

bro I max my contribution to a 401k and haven't had anything shoved anything up my ass since the obama administration

 

[Wodanaz]

Okay but how do you get men interested in reading? Videogames mog the shit out of them for raw entertainment value. It takes a certain refinement of thought to actively pursue reading as a hobby. Even gamers who say they care about stories will just point to slop like The Last of Us and God of War to prove that videogames totally match up to books in that regard.

I can count the number of times I've recommended/been recommended something written after 2007 on like, two hands. And obviously most of my friends are guys.

The Japanese and Korean publishers are even scouting out new authors based not just on domestic appeal but overseas appeal. The traditional English-language book industry is about to have a very rude wake up call because they're going to have real foreign competition for the first time in like 200 years.

Not to mention China. I still haven't read the Three Body Problem or anything written by that chink because I'm very suspicious of it and I have a huge backlog anyway, but the trend is undeniable. I saw it at a Barnes and Noble the other day.

 

[Elite Kipchak]

last time I went to b&n I was the only male in the store, at least that I saw. and idk how it varies from store to store, but the manga section at mine has grown to almost half of the entire store. I think the most recently published book I read was some dan brown self-insert dreck from a decade ago. everyone I know is either reading smut or brandon sanderson, assuming they're reading at all.

 

[Fcret]

Okay but how do you get men interested in reading? Videogames mog the shit out of them for raw entertainment value. It takes a certain refinement of thought to actively pursue reading as a hobby. Even gamers who say they care about stories will just point to slop like The Last of Us and God of War to prove that videogames totally match up to books in that regard.

I mean, if the publishers knew the answer to that, they'd immediately hop on it. I don't even know if the East Asian publishers can fully turn this trend around, but they're certainly going to try (and they're probably the best positioned right now).

My post isn't so much opining on what exactly they should do, but more pointing out that they cannot sustain themselves on their current market. If they can't figure this out, we're probably going to see another big wave of consolidations and downsizing.

Not to mention China. I still haven't read the Three Body Problem or anything written by that chink because I'm very suspicious of it and I have a huge backlog anyway, but the trend is undeniable. I saw it at a Barnes and Noble the other day.

China has a rich history of SF and literary fiction that has suffered under CCP rule. I don't know how viable they are in the long-term as the CCP is currently doing everything possible to crack down on novels that don't promote whatever Xi Jinping cares about this week, but maybe if we see another era of liberalization once he's out of power then it might have some teeth as well.

last time I went to b&n I was the only male in the store, at least that I saw. and idk how it varies from store to store, but the manga section at mine has grown to almost half of the entire store. I think the most recently published book I read was some dan brown self-insert dreck from a decade ago. everyone I know is either reading smut or brandon sanderson, assuming they're reading at all.

I don't think I've been in a bookstore in like 10 years. The few physical books I buy, I order online but most books I just buy on Kindle (I know... Amazon bad... but I do DeDRM them so I'm not fully locked into Bezos' hellscape).

 

[Dead Lion]

Okay but how do you get men interested in reading? Videogames mog the shit out of them for raw entertainment value. It takes a certain refinement of thought to actively pursue reading as a hobby. Even gamers who say they care about stories will just point to slop like The Last of Us and God of War to prove that videogames totally match up to books in that regard.

The way to get new customers in the entertainment industry these days is to release something so good that the pre existing customers make so much noise about it on the internet that other people get sucked in. Men enjoy stuff like CRPGs and comic books which are relatively similar to literature, a lot of people could get sucked in from there.

Another boon is that TV won’t be a problem anymore since everyone over there is disinterested in anything that isn’t an ancient IP with a massive pre existing fanbase, so there is no threat of an adaptation stealing the show.

 

[stupid frog]

I think someone mentioned light novels?

One thing I noticed, is the LitRPG authors change their covers frequently. They will completely change a cover characters design, and it won't even match a character in the book. I've only read a few of these, but it's very weird. How would it even trick people on Kindle?

When Spice and Wolf was first released, it had an anime cover, but it came with "normal" slip covers. I don't know any other books this has been done to, so I guess it didn't work.


Last thing I guess I'll ask here... I noticed a lot of people in Goodreads news posts getting mad at a lack of LGBTQIA+ books being recommended. Now I don't see comments. Anyone know if the two are related?

 

[Dead Lion]

One thing I noticed, is the LitRPG authors change their covers frequently. They will completely change a cover characters design, and it won't even match a character in the book. I've only read a few of these, but it's very weird. How would it even trick people on Kindle?

Back in the day it used to be that a piece of fan art would get posted that was better than the old cover (which half the time was ‘graphic design is my passion tier) so in it goes.

Now it’s probably just a/b testing for the most appealing anime girl.

 

[Fcret]

When Spice and Wolf was first released, it had an anime cover, but it came with "normal" slip covers. I don't know any other books this has been done to, so I guess it didn't work.

Now this is some lore I didn't know. The cover on the right is what I'd expect if Spice and Wolf was getting a tacky low-budget SyFy miniseries.

One thing I noticed, is the LitRPG authors change their covers frequently. They will completely change a cover characters design, and it won't even match a character in the book. I've only read a few of these, but it's very weird. How would it even trick people on Kindle?

Having not read a ton of LitRPG, my guess is that when they get a bit of spare cash they update the art to try and widen the net. It's not like traditional publishing has a great track record with representative art. For example, a lot of 1970s editions of Earthsea had unambiguously white people despite Ged being described as uhhh... 'copper-colored':