Embrace transience
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, pulp to pulp. Bitrot to bitrot.
Lindyness is overrated. And can’t be engineered anyway.
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This is my null hypothesis too. I do think the industry discovers and deservedly launches some books to zillion copy bestseller zone, but rate of false positives and false negatives is so high, median writer is best off going indie
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Replying to @vgr
Put another way: the problem is that your book is mediocre and not worth reading let alone enthusiastically recommending. We can trick some number of people into reading mediocre books through fashion and influencers and NYT gamesmanship, but only so many.
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I don’t object to hitting the jackpot. If anything I self-publish hits a big nerve, I have no objection to doubling down appropriately with some of sort of deal. Just don’t fancy my bootstrap odds in this particular casino.
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I think a deeper philosophical divide
is over the popular Talebian view that short term content is noise to be filtered out. That anything that’s irrelevant in 2y is noise. I think extracting signal from <2y time constant content is to 2022 what literacy was to 1900
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I also tend to suspect that timeless is generally vacuous. And the better we get at preserving information the more true this gets. Cultural heritage mostly grows out of highly transient stuff that triggers live cultural currents. Not preservation as such.
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Tweets that make history > books that make the NYT bestseller list
Saw some stats that showed that books we generally consider most significant culturally were generally not bestsellers or even popular in their time. If you’re concerned with legacy, this should give you pause
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Another shift for me is that the pleasure of reading good fiction has slowly given way to impatience with tech limits of converting to screen media. Good stories are not the same as their initial telling. They can be retold well across media, transposed to different times/places
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If you think your story is unfilmable, 99% of the time it’s a bad story, 1% chance it’s some sublime thing. And I prefer screen generally where available
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Switch flipped for me with Harry Potter and LOTR and MCU. Prefer screen versions of all. Most authors should view text as an intermediate for screen. Including literary fiction types. Because filmability is a increasingly a valid test of quality.
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Sometimes I think physical books today are really just extra thick wall paper
Maybe we could just sell beautiful hardcovers… and I literally mean just the covers. The content can be faux pages edgewise but a box on inside to store stuff. Put a QR code of ipfs hash inside lid.
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Obligatory buggywhip ref
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Replying to @TheLincoln
My point is it’s 90% misallocated effort and the industry is kinda a dinosaur
like buggywhip makers miraculously managing to continue selling whips to a market which had moved on from horses to cars. It feels like car owners buying whips as a backup 
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Works great until our Star does it's thing again. Without books, be kinda hard to rebuild.
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This might be the first time I’ve looked at something from you and thought, “maybe he hasn’t thought this through.”
Critique of the industry a-ok. Filmability: we’ve only had 100 years, not sure how that’ll pan out. Photo/painting problem.



