I'm currently writing a book about independent thinking and I have zero expectations that it will sell even a single copy. However, the net gain I will get from having completed the goal of writing the book is invaluable to me personally.
I had this idea for a hard science fiction story that I have been thinking about for years. Nobody else is going to write it, so I started. 20 000 words in my beta readers say it is good, so I think I will continue. And I don’t expect to sell it, but I want to know what happens and so do the beta readers. So on we go.
You really have to write it for yourself if you want to keep going - unless you're lucky or have a large following already it's hard to get a lot of readers. I've written stories and serials and posted them on social media, my personal site, etc. (I release them as Creative Commons works) and few people read them. Self-published authors who want to make a living typically have to do a lot of promotion to get a chance.
Also there are times when I decide I want to read my own stuff for entertainment instead of a published novel. And the joy I get from that keeps me writing.
Many successful artists in any medium say they create things for themselves; it's more a compulsion than a business activity. Some are lucky that others like it; some are even luckier that others like it during the creator's lifetime; the luckiest even make money from it!
If you want to make money you're often creating for your audience rather than for yourself too. For instance I know professional artists who don't enjoy their work that much since they end up having to please the client rather than make what they really want. Even for my own CC fiction my themes and language are affected by current trends and what I think my readers will like. Of course if you're lucky you can create whatever you like and your fans will eat it up, but how many people can do that?
As an aside though I feel that the science/engineering heavy HN crowd would bring some life to science fiction. We have the ability to write things that make technical sense and I'm sure many of you internally roast the handwaviness seen in some franchises. I don't know if I'm the only one that does this but I plan out the computer networks my characters use, draw cutaways and chip architecture diagrams for new devices I come up with, read scientific papers for research, and so forth. Sometimes that's even more fun than the actual writing!
Cixin Liu was a computer engineer working at a power plant before writing 3 Body Problem and its sequels. He very clearly embeds his love for science into his books.
Keep at it. I've self-published my first two (and beaten the odds - somewhat - judging by this article, while still paying substantially below minimum wage for my time, but that's ok), and the experience is "interesting". The first time I had someone somewhat accusingly message me on twitter to ask when I'll get the next one out (I'm way overdue) was exciting.
I have two projects at the moment. Both slow-going because of other things, but one is the third in a series and I'm hopeful it will reach (very) low thousands based on the performance of the previous ones (over a period of years, not quickly; it's niche SF), the other is fiction, but will have code fragments in between chapters and I'd consider myself lucky if I sell a dozen. I'm more excited about writing that one...
Or in other words you are doing research, a bit like a PhD and the book is a byproduct!
Like how HN was recently talking about 8 hours to code the first time, but half hour to retype the same code from memory the next day. The code is almost an small (but critical) artefact.
I love the idea of owning books you can’t find anywhere else. One of the main reasons I don’t bother going to bookstores is because I know everything there is just gonna be on Amazon anyway, and with reviews.
But the idea of coming across a strange book few people have read, and finding unconventional wisdom and writing inside that no publisher would ever put out, sounds exciting!
I think more people should write books and publish them in small quantities and just give them away for others to discover some day. Let the books circulate through the world, growing old and more mysterious with time. It’d be better than keeping some static blog site that will disappear after a decade.
Pretty much all of the physical books I own are like this: rare and impossible to find online, in digital format or otherwise. People really overestimate how many books have been digitized.
- Paradigms Lost by John Simon. A lot of these older cultural/writing commentary books don't seem to be digitized, but are absolutely worth reading
- Some older tourism books. For example, I have a little pamphlet book on visiting Yugoslavia, written in Polish.
- Unique/interesting formats. For example, I have a book of "useful words for dealing with capitalists and their markets" that was written in German during the DDR. It has about 2,000 words written side-by-side in 8 languages, including English, German, French, Czech, and some others.
- Older magazines, especially fashion magazines. Very hard to get a hold of or find online.
What I want is some easy way to print any website as a book. Some web serials would be best read as a physical book, but it’s often hard or impossible.
I'm not sure I'd phrase it as a _joke_, but I see your point. I think a lot of people aren't even aware of how much of their thinking is done for them. We all hold assumptions (like your comment) that are subject to different kinds of biases or influence. If you can read something that provides a framework for helping analyze your own decision-making and introspectively discover how you arrived at your conclusions, then I think that can be helpful.
