/lit/ - Literature

>>18584189
Give me the first sentence of your best story.
This is the place to get brutal honesty, and some brutal lies.

>>18584189
YWNBAW (you will never be a writer)

>>18584189
Develop a good story first. You have a nice dream/goal in mind, but don't get carried away just yet

>>18584193
He wasn’t called the King of Bastards for nothing. Between daily consorts with the Prainem Capital city’s finest whores and several weddings he attended ending in an old-law proposition of a prima-nocta, he had racked up more then a few bastard sons in his life.

>>18584259
I would read on.

>>18584263
The Princess and the Bastard

(106k words, first part of a trilogy)

The King announces in one year he'll hold a contest for all his bastard sons to make their case to be heir to the throne. His one true born child, the princess, takes one of these bastards under her wing and starts grooming him with the hopes she can install a puppet on the throne she can manipulate for her own ends

>>18584189
you live in the age of the internet anon
web fic

>>18584189
Fuck Amazon. Make your own shit, learn the trade from top to bottom. Eventually you can pay other people for their writing and sell it yourself.

Become the publisher. All these "YWNBAW" people would have all told Stephen King that his shit sucks and to kys.

Putting your book on Amazon as an ebook... feels cheap. There's something about working on the entire process yourself that is very, very satisfying. This way, you can make your own book and the total cost will be pretty close to under a dollar a book or something. Sell that shit in person a bunch, and sell them on your website.

Let me know if you want some help!

>>18584189
Don't move out until you can afford not to rent. At which point you are also more of an adult and less of an arrested development adult-ling. And once you are such an adult you might have a story idea that goes beyond fanfiction of Lord of the Rings.

>>18584314
Dude thats the dream, if I can figure out how to sell my own books, my goal is to start my own publishing company, LGBT says they're marginalized, but its the traditional guys who are actually marginalized, I just got to find a way to get the average people to see my shit, I think they would love it

>>18584314
There are people who make a small fortune adding nothing to society by doing retail arbitrage on Amazon because Amazon has the largest laziest customer base in the world, and you want to tell a commercially minded generic fantasy writer to ignore Amazon as a publishing option?

>>18584189
my advice
Don't be a fucking retard, DON'T QUIT YOUR FUCKING JOB

save money, and grind away, do all the self publishing thing, make your own books, post them on the web or something, but DON'T BE DELUSIONAL
the notion that this might not pick up steam, and you could fail in achieving your dream should Never leave your mind

>>18584326

I have figured out the entire process from writing, to editing, to graphic design, to cover, to chopping, to even binding. Just don't have enough practice yet to consistently get the quality I expect in the finished product. Really need to practice with the hot glue perfect binder.

How much money do you have saved? A hot glue perfect binder is only $400-$500 USD.

As far as the book goes, finish the story, edit it with an app to help you quickly spot errors, make sure the story progresses and most loose ends are tied up, leaving a few open for a sequel... voila... you have a book.

Of course people will say it is shit, but like McDoanld's, as long as you scratch an itch for some creativity and a story, people will enjoy it. I truly believe that, since whenever you put on the fucking TV or Netflix these days everything is so fucked.

>>18584338
It is not that you fail at the dream, but that the dream can take longer on some parts. You might even have some very pleasant detours!

>>18584350
yeah, but too many times do I see retards do the leap of faith and fall flat on their faces

>>18584347
Amazon can print, bind, and ship your book in 2-3 days. Is there any advantage at that point to having your own printer and doing your own fulfillment? Or is it just for ideological reasons?

>>18584332
An ebook... ehh... I feel like it cheapens the art. Also, Amazon is horrific with how much they take from you, not only that, but the entire "review" system is completely botted and gamed. Hell, everyone knows when a new book comes out now, there are entities that buy up big chunks of the book and use bots to rate the book up and leave glowing reviews. Same with GoodReads... it is all hyper-fake and in line with globohomo. Competing on their territory is like starting a right-wing news channel on YouTube in 2021.

>>18584352
That is why we pick ourselves back up and keep going forward... that is how life is a cycle of ups and downs and, hopefully, you've had a lot more ups than downs. Hell.. I've re-invented myself several times and I'm still having a blast.

Life on the edge or the seat of your pants is a helluva lot more fun than working a steady 9-5 job.

>>18584314
Not op but i could use your help, any tutorial or site or something where i can learn how to print a book from a epub or pdf to the paper itself?
some dude told me i should use adobe indesing, if i can print the pages the correct way, a friend of mine is gonna be in charge of chopping, binding, etc

>>18584338
i know, i know that hard

I just need to make 800 a month, if I get the ball rolling it could be something, but 800 is all I need

>>18584355
I think there is a lot of tinkering you can do with the book size, and you can see the result immediately. Like if I want to change the font around or move the page number location, or add a graphic image to the book, I can add it to the PDF and then immediately print a book and hold it in my hand and see what it looks like.

With Amazon, to do that, each tweak or thing you changed would take however long for them to print it and ship it to you...

The process is more engaging and much more fulfilling, in my opinion.

>>18584374
I'm not saying like don't take risks, I'm saying that life is rarely Ever that dramatic
you can work a 9 to 5 and still have time to work on your dream
but people out there, acting like if they put Everything on the line, as if it's somehow going to increase the chance of them succeeding are just being at best reckless, at worst delusional

>>18584380
I have the whole system figured out, I went the InDesign route and then mother fucking Adobe made Windows 10 the minimum requirement and I lost access to my entire fucking project... THEN those mother fuckers charged me extra for cancelling, AND hit me with my last month renewal because it wasn't within 30 days or some bullshit... holy fuck.

You CAN, of course, use InDesign... but there is a much, much, much simpler way to do it. I'm lazy, I like to figure out the easiest way to do something. There are 2 subscription services you need online and a local piece of software that is like $150 USD. These 3 things working in concert will get you to be able to fucking cook up books in two jiggles of a crackhead's leg.

>>18584388
Oh I get it... there has to be some balance in your life to truly follow your dreams. One of my former friends, a guitarist, he was all about living the musician dream but he only did it to fuck hot chicks. He never even worked on his music, he just played a few songs to impress babes and bang them. I mean, it worked, whenever we went out we were a great team at meeting women. But he never ended up making a single dollar with his music.

>>18584362
>Amazon is horrific with how much they take from you

> bezos bad, he only gives authors between 30% and 70% of the profits
> now the (((publishing house))) royalty rate of 5% to 12%, that's more like it

>>18584383
Leave, shill

>>18584410
Publishing house has vast resources and tons of media people in their pockets... how else did that Canadian author of such a boring novel, Glass Hotel, get a shout out from Barack Obama? Like this type of shit is 100% contrived because big book is extremely woke. Woke promotes woke, they are all in a big club together. Amazon too, even.

Didn't Roosh get his books deleted from Amazon? He got cancelled harder than a statue in Canada!

>>18584414
Okay.

>>18584424
I'm not familiar with Roosh, but he has at least some books up on Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00649OS0O

>>18584424
Really if you're just going to write dumb eceleb audience milking pseudo-autobiographical jeremiads you deserve to be marginalized for better content creators like Chuck Tingle. I'm sorry you got Pounded in the Ass by Cancel Culture So Deep You Became a Torn Down Statue in the Middle of a BLM Protest

>>18584444
Witnessed!

>>18584189
https://www.youtube.com/c/BookEndsLiteraryAgency

not a be all end all on advice but handy starting point for hunting down info

>>18584189
Just live with your parents you modernist cuck. Embrace tradition.

>>18584462
I like how trans is just shoving its way in that rainbow flag.

>>18584314
>>18584383
The problem with this is that, as an individual, you simply don't have the time and resources to compete with Amazon in terms of "operational efficiency". Sure, you can do your own printing and binding, but you will have issues scaling up if you grow any more successful than hobbyist tier. As an author it just generally doesn't make sense to get into actual book manufacturing. The only exceptions to this would be serving a highly specific ideological community like the US homeschool book market (who fucking hate big tech and have their own physical book markets, in which printing your own books and getting high margins makes a lot of sense), or choosing to be an artisan book maker to create high quality collectible books. But as an author, it wouldn't make sense to only sell artisan books because this limits your audience - you would just do it on the side if you really wanted to, while still selling ebooks and paperbacks in the normal established outlets.

In short... People who want to be authors should be very wary of getting in the business of "making books" as opposed to the business of "writing stories" because these are two completely different things.

>>18584679
I see. So we should be getting into the homeschool market

>>18584701
If you want to write weird niche Christian fiction in which your audience will freak out if the characters so much as go on a date or kiss... by all means, yes.

>>18584737
I meant homeschool non-fiction. essentially it's the same as secular non-fiction, like math, science, history, english, social studies, etc, except without evolution or black people and sex and more emphasis on christianity

>>18584748
Based.

>>18584579
They passed away already...

Yes trannies and blacks are being forced into everything.

>>18584679
Well.. selling a book for $20-$25 and being able to make like 5-10 an hour means even if you are just a hobbyist you can still earn a great living independently!

>>18584189
sorry bro you lost me at traditional heroic fantasy. best of luck

>>18584189
Don't self publish, rightly or wrongly self publishing is tainted, it's viewed as a dumping grounds for fangirls writing terrible Harry Potter erotic fanfic.
Find a small indie publisher.
I did it.
pic related

>>18584803
>small indie publisher in Canada
>all blue haired fat chicks or extreme mask cucked faggots
Yeah... no thanks. I'm thinking self-publishing is fucking BASED and you answer to nobody but yourself.

>>18584784
The point is that you need to somehow differentiate yourself from Amazon's business model. If that means you are just an author making and selling your own books - fine - but what happens if/when you need to scale up? Optimizing your own manufacturing and logistics is going to take an enormous chunk of time out of your writing, especially as you grow in size and complexity. Just seems like you would be taking on many risks and challenges that are not associated with your core business of "writing stories" for the sake of a higher margin. You would want to make sure that you clearly understand what kind of business you are setting out to create, and that you are willing to accept the cost of getting that higher margin (and does it make sense compared to just using that time and energy to write more books?).

There are many ways to approach this, but it is just not typical for an author to run their own manufacturing and there is likely good reason that we don't see more of that.

>>18584859
With my method I could easily hire someone to run the machines and crank out the books... I mean... I'm not greedy, if I even had the demand for... say... 50 books a day, I could easily get that done and shipped with an employee, at $20 a book that's $1000 a day... I mean... even after an employee that would be $800 gross still left over per day. Like I said, I'm not greedy, I just want to put out books people like and have completely control over getting them printed, chopped, bound, and mailed.

>>18584259
>he had racked up more then a few bastard sons in his life
>more then a few bastard sons in his life
>more then a few

>>18584859
Honestly I enjoy the process of actually physically making the book. It is a good feeling to actually touch the paper that someone will eventually read.

>>18584869
> selling 50 books a day
> not greedy
uh ok

>>18584876
This machine and my process could handle probably 50 books a day, based on my own time spent using the process. Still could do it faster.
>getting the demand for 50 books a day? That's another story...

>>18584874
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5PhUErm8I4

>>18584888
What /Lit/ does best is dunking on authors who post here... haha.

>>18584189
>I want to be a writer, I need to be a writer.
You will never be.

>>18584901
I believe in anon.

>>18584424
>Didn't Roosh get his books deleted from Amazon?
90% sure he took them down himself after his conversion sperg

>>18584189
>My dream is to eventually turn my website and brand into a publishing house for real fucking stories
Buy a domain. Start accepting submissions. Publish them online. Write to your city/state's politicians about getting an art grant. Tell them you want to start publishing stories resonate with young people. Leave out your anti-SJW agenda, that'll get axed real soon. Show them your website and what you're doing online. It might help if you pretend to be black or gay or a woman. Once you get money start printing things.

>>18585080
Someone on /Lit/ had posted before that they couldn't remove a book from Amazon, and they were worried that they used too many real names in the book. Never heard what happened to the guy.

>>18585100
you can never really remove a paperback's landing page from Amazon, because once your ISBN or AISBN is in their database, it's there forever. But what you can do is stop production of any more copies. For example, Learned Disguise's Amazon page will be there forever, but it will have the " Out of Print--Limited Availability" sign. The only exception is if Amazon themselves manually remove the book, which they won't do unless it violates copyright or has sexy rape in it

https://www.amazon.com/Learned-Disguise-R-C-Waldun/dp/107402138X

>>18584259
Than? A few. The other anon is nit picking but you should know the difference bro.

>>18584259
Also, this is kind redundant as a first sentence. I would read on but I'm already not too interested.

>>18584314
How much did that thing cost you anon?

>>18585143
I had to blow a homeless guy 33 times.

>>18585108
Yeah I remember the guy said something like he wrote a book and didn't change his friend's names and he left in info that could sink his friend's business... that was like 2017? I don't remember.

Interesting info. It is always great to have control over your own art!

>>18584297
Incest?

>>18585156
If that were the case, why didn't he simply reupload his manuscript interior again, with his friend's names and business changed

>>18584259
>>18584189
I truly hope you don't make it. The world has enough trash already. We don't need another hack cashing in on trope trends and corrupting the youth with the latest flavor of popcorn literature.