alt Hacker News> Authors are desperate because books aren’t selling, traditional marketing isn’t working, and publishers are offering less support per title. We’re feeling pretty helpless about our career trajectories, watching sales numbers decline while wondering what we’re doing wrong.
What's wrong? There's nothing wrong. Just people addicted to FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, etc.
Book publishers have spent the last few decades making a profit off of managing the decline of their entire field of endeavor. Every opportunity to expand the medium was thrown out, and every big fad wound up hurting rather than helping. For example, you know that "generation of readers" a certain YA book supposedly made? What it actually did was destroy graded readers because publishers thought YA books had to go upmarket. The publishing industry is just chock full of short-sighted moves like this.
If you look outside the Anglosphere you see far healthier[0] book publishing, to the point where translations of those books into English are filling the holes domestic publishers are leaving in the market. It started with comic books[1] and expanded into basically all fantasy fiction.
Social media has little to do with this, except that they're also filling a hole publishers aren't interested in filling.
[0] Healthy in terms of sales and audience. The authors of these books are being treated like shit, which perhaps is its own shortsightedness.
[1] It is hard to understate how weirdly pigeonholed western comics are, even after the death of the comics code and the indie comics boom gave authors way more creative freedom.