Thread 24598714

How's the writing career coming, /lit/?

>>24598714 (OP)
I'll never make it a full time thing but I do have
hartglass.neocities.org

I don't wanna be a writer, I'm not gay

I quit. Every single great novel would be unpublishable today because it gives some 40-year-old cat lady agent the ick. No one reads serious books anymore and the only purpose literature serves is as a feeder medium for Netflix rights.

>>24598714 (OP)
Career???

>>24598714 (OP)
Not well. My plan is unironically to get rich off of cuck erotica but I keep getting distracted and jacking off to my own ideas instead of writing them down

My fake obnoxious people I use to review things happening around my city is being stymied by my social isolation. Does anyone know how to find things happening in a large metropolitan U.S. city?

i wrote and revised my first longform thing and im showing it to friends now. i dont want to be famous or make money but i have five more ideas that will take at least as much time as this one (min 3 years) and i have just as many music projects too.

>>24598829
I quit too. I bought a camera and now I make horror movies in abandoned buildings.

I lost my real career because I offended someone with my writing.

I was getting nowhere writing screenplay I couldn't produce so now I'm writing fiction I can't get published.

>>24598714 (OP)
Unfortunately my optimism toward ever getting my work published shrinks more and more by the day. Hope you guys fare better than I have though I’ll never give up.

>>24598829
This is sadly true and understandable. It’s exactly why I feel so depressed about my chances. But don’t quit, anon. Keep writing and if it’s meant to work out it will, for just as the past is already written so is the future - neither can be changed only lived through.

>>24598714 (OP)
Writing a bunch of books that plunge deeply into myself and that i endlessly workshop until I have real revelations pertaining to who I am and my life.

Then the taste of the book spoils in my mouth and I don't want to write it anymore

>>24598714 (OP)
I'm not even close to becoming a viable writer for myself, let alone for anyone else.
But I'm leagues ahead of my younger self, and know now about the structuring of story in general.
I never had any training in this, no real passion for it, so to see myself go from barely managing a coherent paragraph to writing out example prose to help get the overall "feel" of character within my story was a shock. High school math was more of a slog than this.

>>24598714 (OP)
I'm trying, bro. I think I have something good going on with one I'm almost finishing, and for my new WIP I also think I've finally found my voice. I legitimately think I have something unique here, even if not mindblowing or canonical. But from what I've read and seen analyzed, traditional publishing is almost dead.

>>24598714 (OP)
Just wrote four articles in the span of 48 hrs

I don't know how to be socially attractive and build an audience.

What good is it if no one reads your writing?

>>24599278
No one will ever take your work seriously if you have attached your name to cuck porn

Got a short story published recently, that was pretty kino.

I'm supposed to find out this month how I did in a poetry contest I entered back in June. Wish me luck, lads.

>>24598714 (OP)
Putting the finishing touches on my magnum opus but don't believe anymore that it will get published (I don't have the right resume for them even to read it). I will self publish it tho.

>>24599291
Same. Switched to film.

I'm sick and slumped, waiting to pounce on my next manic creative burst, which I shall then ride until the cycle repeats. All these little deaths.

>>24599555
The spirits read your writing. The ancestors read your writing. God reads your writing. Don't write for the living. The Greeks understood this.

>>24598714 (OP)
115k words on my first novel as of yesterday. I estimate I've got another 20k to go before I hit the end.

>>24599291
>>24599832
Based. Good luck to you both.
>>24598714 (OP)
I don't want to do it as a career anymore but I'm still writing. Anything I can do to be a voice against the tide of slop.
Even if it never goes anywhere at least it's not being complicit in the trash flood.

pretty good day today; published 4 racist posts, 2 homophobic posts, 3 off-topic posts about my fetishes, and 2 mildly insightful on-topic posts.

>>24598714 (OP)
Self-published my first book on Amazon earlier this year after seeing how bad going the traditional route's gotten. Haven't started advertising yet because I've heard it's not worth it with a single book, but sold around 20 ebooks/paperbacks. Not in this for the money, though, realistically, I'll have to sell about 3x that to even recoup the cost of my cover. Honestly, even though I'm already working on the next one, the whole process has kind of soured me on mixing writing with business. I'm extremely introverted, which is probably part of why I got into writing in the first place, and marketing takes a whole lot of networking that I don't care for.

>>24599299
It better have been some good ***smut

>>24600314
>sold around 20 ebooks/paperbacks
that's pretty good. how many reviews did you get?

>>24598714 (OP)
I'm working on it at least

>>24599840
Hell yeah. Better to aim for the mastery. Basic mastery.

>>24599618
See Georges Bataille. He's quite famous despite (or because of) writing all sorts of deranged porn novels.

40 k words in about 40k more to go. Been working on it since January. Coming along quite well

>>24600116
Yeah I have a similar attitude. Seeing shit made by ai all the time makes me miserable. Even if I put out a poem and only like 10 people see it, at least they're interacting with something that came from a human being instead of a prompt.

>>24598829
I think it would be sad in a way if my "great novel" never gets published. But I also don't write it in relying on it being published. I hope it's published, but I've accepted it's not a guarantee and I'll write it anyways. If I want to write it, I will. If I find preferable ways to occupy myself, I will. For now, I write it. I suggest you keep doing the same. Writing's not a career for me, but a hobby. I do not have to be desparte with a hobby. Nobody should be. Just write it without being desperate for it to be published one day if you truly want it to be "great". Otherwise you'll find yourself invisibly conforming and compromising in small enough ways that add up.

>>24599430
You can't write a deeply personal story until you've lived one. Your person is rebelling and demanding you try to give yourself your own story before you try to write a fictional one.

>>24600314
I'm never going to self-publish. Yes, the publishing industry is full of gatekeepers. It should be. Self-publishing digitally just feels pointless. If I'm going to be published, I want to be PUBLISHED. I want it to be real. If I get gatekept, that'll be unfortunate, but oh well. Maybe if the editors or any of them end up having feedback for me, I'll try to take some of it to heart that might actually help.

>>24601985
Thanks for the psychoanalysis but no. It is that the writing of the work has changed me as a person, to the point that I do not feel any connection to the work anymore because it is now from the perspective of another.

>>24600138
Uh-huh-huh-huh. You're based. Uh-huh-huh.

>>24598714 (OP)
at long last I finally finished something and self published it online at hiddenmomentum.xyz ! (excuse my self promotion)

feels good to know I can finish something. For a while I had a fear that I was somehow constitutionally incapable of finishing things and that fear probably slowed down every project, but now this fear has been overcome.

keep writing everyone!

I write reams and reams of first-person comedic delusion in a range of voices, and perform them aloud on a cult internet radio show with ~3 listeners. It’s going well, ta for asking.

>>24600314
>sold around 20 ebooks/paperbacks
That's actually not bad, especially with 0 advertising. Do you have any idea how your book got in front of these 20 buyers? Is it just the Amazon algorithm? Or do you think the free preview of the book did the heavy lifting?

Did you choose your cover based on what would get the most results? Or did you just choose a cover you wanted without thinking of pleasing marketing and algorithm conventions? Sorry for asking a lot of questions but I'm curious, as I've also considered self publishing for the hell of it.

>>24601992
So you'd rather be subject to the whims of random 40 yo cat ladies that almost exclusively read smut? I mean, I get it. I'd also love to get traditionally published but I don't thinkyou understand just how bleak the publishing landscape is.

>>24600558
4 ratings/2 reviews so far. Seems to be notoriously difficult to get people to leave ratings on Amazon for anything, which is why there's all sorts of strategies to get more, but I just want to see how it does organically for the first year.

>>24601992
>Yes, the publishing industry is full of gatekeepers.
Brother, gatekeepers are the least of the problems. The publishing industry in its current state is overwhelmingly women that are largely uninterested in debut male authors and you're now expected to have a sizeable social media following and do most of the advertising yourself. On top of that, advances have gotten lower and with most authors not selling enough copies to earn out, they never start getting royalties, which makes publishing future books harder. I had the same attitude you did for a long time, obsessed with the prestige of it, but traditional publishing's a shell of its former self.

>>24602543
To be fair, at least a few of my sales early on were from friends and family, so it's possible my book appeared in "Similar items" "Customers also bought" for other books they purchased. I also paid a lot of attention to the seven key words Amazon asks you for to try to make them as specific yet generic as possible to boost it appearing in search results. As far as the cover, I just went with what I felt fit the story best while still looking good as a thumbnail. If you do decide to self-publish, check out some youtube guides because there are things I neglected like advanced reader copies that might have given me a stronger start.

>>24601959
>Seeing shit made by ai all the time makes me miserable.
So don't?

>>24598714 (OP)
One day soon one of my books will break through and i'll be able to quit my day job and fuck art hoes half my age.

>>24598829
this

>>24604183
How much have you made from your three books? if you don't mind sharing

>>24598714 (OP)
Paradoxically, if your shit sells then it probably sucks.

>>24604416
Not much, I still have a day job. In all honesty I think I need a screen adaptation to make any actual money.

>>24604575
Does your wife know you want to fuck art hoes half your age despite being obese

>>24604826
if she read any philosophy about the human condition it would be implicit

>>24604826
Every dude wants to fuck young hoes.