alt Hacker News> Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience.
And that's precisely the issue here. For a while, the internet allowed you to find an audience, just like that. Start a blog / podcast / YT channel, keep going, get enough attention. You could then approach a traditional publisher and tell them "hey, I'm kind of a big deal", or you could self-publish and rely on the word-of-mouth from your followers.
Now, how would that work? If you have a blog, AI answers will summarize it without attribution and not send anyone your way. Even the "references" cited in AI answers often point to AI-slop blogs, not the original source. The articles we discuss on HN are often AI-written too. So yeah, it's about reaching the audience, but you're now competing with machines that produce an endless stream of human-like text, good enough for most consumers, practically for free.
Word of mouth is not marketing. The way you find the audience is by marketing. Paying to get in front of people. Targeting people who read similar books. Getting people who already have audiences to review your book or interview you.
A book won’t sell itself.
Which addresses your second point: machines can produce an endless stream of human-like text, but they have exactly the same problem as human generated text: finding an audience.
How are these endless streams of human-like text finding an audience? Most of the time they are not.
And as soon as you scratch beneath the surface there is no one to interview. No one to turn up at literary festivals. No one to write opinion pieces or blog pieces for book-interested audiences. As I said: writing isn’t the problem. Finding the audience is the problem.
What distinguishes a book that is read by no one from a book that is read by a bunch of people? It’s definitely not the writing. There are great books out there that never find an audience because no one ever went out there to find an audience for those books.