YABookgate

[Pascal's Wagie]

What I'd really like to do is create an all male group that's curated for not being a tranny or dickhead, like a men's shed for creative writing.

Something similar was done once before, look how that turned out.

 

[Trianon]

To give her credit, she produces. And apparently knows her audience of YA librarians and blue haired adolescent girls of all ages with daddy issues well enough to write what they like. FWIW, the Hugos still do seem to have a residual snobbery toward YA or YA type books, as much as the whole thing is otherwise thoroughly feminized. And seemingly has little to do with science fiction these days.

I would have had no issue with that silly TikTok I posted if she was discussing her work ethic or her ability to write to the market.

I give her a lot of credit for that, and I do find most of the concepts of her books interesting, but the one series of hers I've finished (A Darker Shade of Magic) was a big letdown. It really is YA-lite, in the sense that you can feel her struggling to make three books out of it on a deadline. I found the character motivations truly baffling most of the time.

But I do think she's talented, so it may just be that not every book is gonna hit.

 

[Commissar Fuklaw]

Something similar was done once before, look how that turned out.

What happened?

EDIT: Oh, it's a CC thing

 

[Sergeant Major Buzzkill]

folks were catty there, badgering each other on a constant basis. if they weren't being quarrelsome, they weren't really being very helpful or productive to begin with

Sounds like my experience interacting on the Nanowrimo forums starting back in 2019/2020. Granted, I still hung around until July of this year (found a few like-minded users and interacted with the communities I thought were interesting) but only for me to get suspended for saying nigga and retard in DMs.

Man, I hate that happened. There’s particularly lolcow worthy behavior from the mods and especially the users that’s worthy of interest.

 

[brocktherock]

What I'd really like to do is create an all male group that's curated for not being a tranny or dickhead, like a men's shed for creative writing.

Impossible. I joined one overwhelmingly male group looking for regular nerd autism and over the past decade being pro-tranny has become their site culture. It's like a combo of them getting so desperate that they try to change sex like fish, pervs sneaking their fetishes in, or being so up their own asses they think they transcend gender when really it's just low T. If you go looking for a woman-free space you're going to end up among men who try to deny a woman is what they really want and they'll be fucking weird about it.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

Larry Correia's Writer Dojo Facebook group is far from all male, but it is tolerably free from $CurrentYear distractions. It is an extension of the podcast he does with Steve Diamond. Some of the advice offered, both on the podcast and in the group seems a bit dubious at times, but they're the successful authors, not me.

I'm there under a burner I set up years ago. Not sure if you can set up an account without a phone number nowadays, but back when I did you could. Don't really comment, but do find it is worth the occasional read.

Biggest downside is, well it is fucking Facebook. I cannot convey how much I detest everything about Facebook. Even ignoring the whole monetizing/stealing your data thing I detest the way threads slide around and you can't really search much of anything within groups. But Facebook is apparently baked into Mormon DNA at this point, so here we are.

 

[Mola Ram]

But Facebook is apparently baked into Mormon DNA at this point, so here we are.

I like Larry a lot, but I'll never understand why he keeps going back to Facebook after getting repeatedly kicked off for ruffling feathers.

 

[TheAmbiguousLurker]

getting along with people in this business sounds really taxing, these days. i'm not being sarcastic either. when i was in high school, my english teacher gave me a writing website where i could sign up for free, something like a workshop. folks were catty there, badgering each other on a constant basis. if they weren't being quarrelsome, they weren't really being very helpful or productive to begin with. i don't remember why i took this screenshot exactly but let's say this was around 2011-2012. either way, it was repulsive, and the last straw for me before i stopped visiting.

View attachment 5268738

larry correia may be a good writer (haven't read anything) but his rants on twitter are radioactive. a few weeks ago he spent several days raging on some unabashed incels - which i'm all for, don't get me wrong. but the more he kept posting, the more he sounded like a MGTOW schizo. i've never seen anyone grab a simple W and then spend days transforming it into an L.

"A lot of people like you randomly disappear from the site." She says it like these guys have been bumped off by a hitman for arguing about writing.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

getting along with people in this business sounds really taxing, these days. i'm not being sarcastic either. when i was in high school, my english teacher gave me a writing website where i could sign up for free, something like a workshop. folks were catty there, badgering each other on a constant basis. if they weren't being quarrelsome, they weren't really being very helpful or productive to begin with. i don't remember why i took this screenshot exactly but let's say this was around 2011-2012. either way, it was repulsive, and the last straw for me before i stopped visiting.

View attachment 5268738

FWIW, this gal looks like she hasn't published anything in quite a while, last novel in 2015. Also, all of the GoodReads novels I checked are unavailable on Amazon, meaning I assume they can't be bought anywhere. So she must have taken them down.

Looks like she also tried her hand at Kindle Vella, which I don't understand at all, but it looks like she did one installment each in two works and then stopped. Pretty sure that's not how that is supposed to work.

larry correia may be a good writer (haven't read anything) but his rants on twitter are radioactive. a few weeks ago he spent several days raging on some unabashed incels - which i'm all for, don't get me wrong. but the more he kept posting, the more he sounded like a MGTOW schizo. i've never seen anyone grab a simple W and then spend days transforming it into an L.

Eh, not really. The average reader of Correia gunporn laps that shit up. I'd agree with your sentiment if there was any expectation of a Hollywood adaptation of something of his at some point, but that ain't ever happening, whatever he tweets or does not. In fact, I think they find it a bit endearing how he is willing to engage in endless internet food fights. As best I recall that incel business was very much a back and forth.

 

[augment]

Yeah I just read his stupid post over Goodreads reviews as an arbiter of popularity.

EDIT: Oh Jesus I just saw this.

View attachment 5267721

If this sad sack of shit doesn't motivate you to learn narration, writing and editing, I truly do not know whatever will.

 

[Boston Brand]

Second recommendating the Writer Dojo Facebook group.

Honestly, good rule of thumb: If there are Baen authors and staff present, its probably a chill place. All the lousy ones tend to never let them in.

As for why Larry Correia is still on Facebook/Gets into Twitter fights, easy: Because both help him sell more books.

 

[Sayer of the N-Word]

If this sad sack of shit doesn't motivate you to learn narration, writing and editing, I truly do not know whatever will.

If you can write one page of dialogue between two people without leaving the reader unsure of who said what, you've got him beat.

 

[2525ABC]

Some school library insanity out of Canada

All books more than 15 y.o. are presumed offensive and must be positively declared acceptable in current year or purged from shelves.
Can't attach file for some reason, but the policy document is here and is worth a read for dystopia chills alone.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Some school library insanity out of Canada

All books more than 15 y.o. are presumed offensive and must be positively declared acceptable in current year or purged from shelves.
Can't attach file for some reason, but the policy document is here and is worth a read for dystopia chills alone.

jesu so replace books kids are reading with books no one but cat ladies read is that the rule now?

 

[Kalsarikännit]

Some school library insanity out of Canada

All books more than 15 y.o. are presumed offensive and must be positively declared acceptable in current year or purged from shelves.
Can't attach file for some reason, but the policy document is here and is worth a read for dystopia chills alone.

What a coincidence, I consider all books less than 15 years old to be worthless and pozzed until proven otherwise.

 

[Autistic Orson Welles]

This is sort of off-topic for the thread as a whole, but on-topic for the last few pages.

Spoiler: trigger warning: autistic indie author rant

I've been self-publishing (fairly niche) books on Amazon for a year now. It's hard for me to express how much I hate Jeff Bezos. If I want to sell a shorter novel for $0.99, I only get to keep 35% of sales. If I take the time and immense cost to record audiobook versions and release them on Audible, I similarly get to keep 35% of sales. Meanwhile most of my promotion and advertising is done via Amazon Ads, which means I'm paying Bezos for the privilege of letting Bezos take more than half of the money from any individual sale. Then I go spend whatever paltry few dollars I've made on ramen off Amazon.com so I can eat that week.

I finally managed to get some decent Kindle Unlimited page reads in September, for the first time. Unfortunately Mr. Bezos has decided to cut the payments for KU+ by more than half since I started out, so I now get about one dollar per 300 pages read. Fantastic. In a marketplace like that, you have to have tens of thousands of readers just to make minimum wage.

My biggest problem is marketing. It's not something I'm good at to begin with, but I have no idea how to market non-pozzed books without doing some kind of conservative grift (which I also don't know how to do). My first few novels were historical fiction, and one included the nigger word out of absolute necessity; I couldn't find a single critic in that genre who I was confident wouldn't chimp out when she (it's always a woman) made it to that point in the book.

I didn't even bother making submissions to publishers. The publishing houses will do everything possible to avoid white male authors, and if you sift through agents, you'll be lucky to find a single one without pronouns in bio. Several magazines I've considered submitting to have literally stated: "If you're able-bodied, cisgendered, and male, we don't want anything to do with you!" (Which I'm fairly certain is illegal--I can't outright say, "If you're a faggot nigger, don't bother applying!" in a magazine that I run, but no one cares).

I guess seizing the means of cultural production is what these people do, but it's staggering how woke publishing is. Glance through submission guidelines and you're sure to find more deranged identitarianism than existed on the entirety of Tumblr eight years ago. Honestly it could make a good thread; the favorite I found was a wheelchair-bound woman with PTSD looking for genderqueer horror stories by disabled authors, but whose list of triggers and forbidden content could have fit several novels on their own.

I didn't bother sending her anything.

TL;DR indie publishing is AIDS and the ability to make profit as a relatively unknown author has been annihilated by Kindle Unlimited

 

[Kari Kamiya]

That's probably by design, too. Something must've happened in the past 20 years or so that makes it to where unless you bend the knee (to woke or whatever's popular that week) or are able to get in by nepotism, the old guard just doesn't want newcomers coming in to take the glory from them. Indie publishing being that fucked sounds no different from how Hollywood would fuck over indie filmmakers over the slightest thing.

The husband and I have talked about perhaps founding our own publishing LLC of sorts since we have ideas to write our own books, but the headache might not be any different.

 

[frap]

so I now get about one dollar per 300 pages read.

I'd heard the KU rate was bad but I didn't realise it was that bad. That's abysmal.

 

[Autistic Orson Welles]

I'd heard the KU rate was bad but I didn't realise it was that bad. That's abysmal.

I guess I was exaggerating. It's really more like $1.20 per 300 pages read. Much better!

 

[Kalsarikännit]

I've been self-publishing (fairly niche) books on Amazon for a year now. It's hard for me to express how much I hate Jeff Bezos. If I want to sell a shorter novel for $0.99, I only get to keep 35% of sales. If I take the time and immense cost to record audiobook versions and release them on Audible, I similarly get to keep 35% of sales. Meanwhile most of my promotion and advertising is done via Amazon Ads, which means I'm paying Bezos for the privilege of letting Bezos take more than half of the money from any individual sale.

As absurd as only keeping 35% of sales sounds, I did some research on what traditional publishing houses give authors, and it’s even worse: royalties are 5-15% of profit, after manufacturing costs are subtracted from the price of the book sold.

Its insane that Amazon seems to be the place you really stand to gain the most money if you hit it big, unless trad publishers have lump sum sign-on bonuses of some kind, or if Amazon has a tier system where they start taking a larger percentage the more you sell.