Usually the last thing I create in a written work is a title. Well, I'm on Chapter 20 on the follow up work to my first book which I put here for free reading and I've had some time to think about what I want to do in relation to marketing it and so, the title showed up!
Between events like Amazon denying my existence and other experiences, I've noticed that I don't particularly like the publishing industry at the moment. Twitter is a hellscape of "I'm trying to get an agent" and "Boy, I sure hate AI/I'm gonna use AI/Your Mom is an AI". It all produces a kind of pandering which revolves mostly around the same kinds of work and so the creative risk is minimal. To be sure, this isn't a new thing in publishing, but it is definitely a more obvious thing. Everyone is trying to gain their fifteen minutes of fame so they can make a living doing what they love to do. (I mean, I guess they love it. Maybe they hate humanity, and this is their revenge?)
The response in terms of financial support on what I published here before was rather "Meh." It was still better than a lot of other places in general. It points out a flaw though, in the value for value model. When a person is making a post on something like Stacker.News, many people likely read a given post who don't value the information with sats for whatever reason. A repost is a whole different world from creating a book. A repost is, "Hey yo, I found this cool shit, you might also find it to be cool, and it took me like a nanosecond so if you want to toss some sats, cool". A book is more "Hey, this took me years of effort and focus, and so like, if you want to read this and you like it at all, then the author needs to realize some form of your valuing the work if you want more of it". Traditionally, the publishing houses "address this" but most of um are part of the "deep shill network" now.
One of the things I tried also with my next version was offering a crowd sourcing option through various means, but the response was minimal to non-existent. So, in the "show me the money department" the financial incentive to write simply isn't there. (That isn't stopping me from writing though)
For my next work, I'm thinking since the last one was open to the world, and the world was kinda "Eh, we got better stuff to do--you aren't amusing enough to us and don't dance the way we like you to dance" I'm considering keeping the distribution channels very small for those who supported the last work. That is truly a more "value for value" experience. However, I also thought that if there was a way on Stacker.News to generate some kind of Sat paywall, I might be open to that. Then, if somebody really wants to read it, they wouldn't mind parting with say, 10, 20, or a 100 sats which might then generate enough to make it "worth the while" so to speak. It strikes a different balance between entirely free and somewhat free that places the limit "back" on the reader. Of course, this might be outside the scope of what Stacker.News wants to be, but it is an idea for the future of sats kinds of content markets.
What do you guys think? Where do you see publishing going, and is the sat world a viable market for publishing, or is it simply going to become some kind of crypto-circle jerk where people who write about bitcoin feature people who write about bitcoin?