Bad Reason #1: “I want to sell millions of movie tickets and make a lot of money.”
Because movies should only be made for altruistic reasons.
Besides, who is going to be the gatekeeper to decide if my reasons are pure enough?
Well, it’s just advice. I don’t think he’s going to try to physically prevent you.
This guy is nonsense on stilts.
Let’s change this a little:
Bad Reason #1: “I want to sell millions of movie tickets and make a lot of money.”
Because movies should only be made for altruistic reasons.
This attempt at rebuttal fails for two related reasons:
1.) The number of movies produced in this country annually is about a factor of a thousand less than the number of books published.
2.) The costs of producing a movie are incomparably greater than the costs of publishing a book.
This was actually good advice. Be aware the reality of how hard it is to be successful, success doesn’t lead to fame, you don’t become a writer without writing and selling, a book may only be marketing for another product, and you need to write to the audience’s interests.
As long as you are OK with not making money, not being famous, doing a lot of work for free, and having a small audience, write your book.
There are a lot of books which are arguably not very good.
I hiked over to the campus bookstore to get another lab notebook and I spent some time browsing their used book sale.
There was a conversational-French textbook that was somewhat interesting with all of the hip Anglophonisms (MacDo for the Ur Anglophone restaurant). There was also a conversation script on how to scold the hotel clerk who lost the reservation you had made two months prior.
There was a modern chemistry textbook that had one of those infamously socially relevant “side bars” on an environmental issue — this being DDT. It had the usual stuff about Swiss chemist blah blah important in WW-II so that jungle fighters wouldn’t get malaria (mosquito borne) and refugees wouldn’t get typhus (louse borne) blah blah Rachel Carson blah blah raptors with thin eggshells blah blah blah, with a refreshingly frank admission that DDT-phobia has resulted in millions dead and kids brain damaged in lands where malaria had been almost brought under control followed by a province in South Africa where the brought back DDT and drove their malaria rates down to nothingness (again).
There was also this book “When Love Goes Wrong”, actually a whole shelf full of copies of this book giving a checklist regarding whether you are the victim of spousal abuse, testimonials of the victims, and a roadmap on how to extricate yourself from such a relationship. And another book with maps and charts on planet abuse and the signs to expect in terms of Greenland and Antarctica melting down to bare rock.
Finally a book “On Crime” offering, dunno, a series of what are called “conversations” on the subject that are probably orthogonal to what is happening “on the streets.”
In other words, a set of books offering a remarkable cross section of the world view held at the U.
I am sure that pesticides have done environmental damage, that women, especially, can be victimized by abusive boyfriends and husbands, that warming will result in changes in ice caps, and that crime is complicated in its causes and cures. All true, but the way these concerns are addressed, like our esteemed fellow participant in Rand’s fine forum Jim, are so entirely predictable that a person wonders if their content could be summarized in a few aphorisms or slogans and the money to disseminate these in book-length form could be saved?
This famous writer that I never heard of (but that could be my fault) is not keeping up with the times very well. If I write an ebook that sells at all well, that can bring writers to my other books. If I write twenty ebooks over ten years and they average ten thousand sales the first year and three to five thousand each in later years, I am doing fine. Not rich, but okay. If a particular book is doing real well, I might explore print options.
The trick is to keep writing and letting the synergy of your various titles boost your sales. As for his comment about taking a year to write a novel, well, he’s just not trying. Most people making a living at it these days are publishing at least four a year. Hint: there is this modern thing called Word Processing and, maybe, an assist from voice-to-text.
And, yes, I promise to get those other books written any day now. My current excuse: house torn apart in renovation. Once I get a quiet room all to myself, look out world! I hope.
I’m writing a book anyway. “Never tell me the odds.”–Han Solo
But seriously, the odds are against any kind of artist, literary or otherwise. I once heard Jack Lemmon say something like, “To be an actor, you have to be the kind of person who. when told that the odds against you making any kind of basic decent living out of it, let alone being a real success, are about 50,000 to 1, says anyway, ‘Okay, I’ll do that.'” I imagine with writers it’s something like 100,000 to 1.
This guy is nonsense on stilts.
Let’s change this a little:
Bad Reason #1: “I want to sell millions of movie tickets and make a lot of money.”
Because movies should only be made for altruistic reasons.
Besides, who is going to be the gatekeeper to decide if my reasons are pure enough?
Well, it’s just advice. I don’t think he’s going to try to physically prevent you.
This guy is nonsense on stilts.
Let’s change this a little:
Bad Reason #1: “I want to sell millions of movie tickets and make a lot of money.”
Because movies should only be made for altruistic reasons.
This attempt at rebuttal fails for two related reasons:
1.) The number of movies produced in this country annually is about a factor of a thousand less than the number of books published.
2.) The costs of producing a movie are incomparably greater than the costs of publishing a book.
This was actually good advice. Be aware the reality of how hard it is to be successful, success doesn’t lead to fame, you don’t become a writer without writing and selling, a book may only be marketing for another product, and you need to write to the audience’s interests.
As long as you are OK with not making money, not being famous, doing a lot of work for free, and having a small audience, write your book.
There are a lot of books which are arguably not very good.
I hiked over to the campus bookstore to get another lab notebook and I spent some time browsing their used book sale.
There was a conversational-French textbook that was somewhat interesting with all of the hip Anglophonisms (MacDo for the Ur Anglophone restaurant). There was also a conversation script on how to scold the hotel clerk who lost the reservation you had made two months prior.
There was a modern chemistry textbook that had one of those infamously socially relevant “side bars” on an environmental issue — this being DDT. It had the usual stuff about Swiss chemist blah blah important in WW-II so that jungle fighters wouldn’t get malaria (mosquito borne) and refugees wouldn’t get typhus (louse borne) blah blah Rachel Carson blah blah raptors with thin eggshells blah blah blah, with a refreshingly frank admission that DDT-phobia has resulted in millions dead and kids brain damaged in lands where malaria had been almost brought under control followed by a province in South Africa where the brought back DDT and drove their malaria rates down to nothingness (again).
There was also this book “When Love Goes Wrong”, actually a whole shelf full of copies of this book giving a checklist regarding whether you are the victim of spousal abuse, testimonials of the victims, and a roadmap on how to extricate yourself from such a relationship. And another book with maps and charts on planet abuse and the signs to expect in terms of Greenland and Antarctica melting down to bare rock.
Finally a book “On Crime” offering, dunno, a series of what are called “conversations” on the subject that are probably orthogonal to what is happening “on the streets.”
In other words, a set of books offering a remarkable cross section of the world view held at the U.
I am sure that pesticides have done environmental damage, that women, especially, can be victimized by abusive boyfriends and husbands, that warming will result in changes in ice caps, and that crime is complicated in its causes and cures. All true, but the way these concerns are addressed, like our esteemed fellow participant in Rand’s fine forum Jim, are so entirely predictable that a person wonders if their content could be summarized in a few aphorisms or slogans and the money to disseminate these in book-length form could be saved?
This famous writer that I never heard of (but that could be my fault) is not keeping up with the times very well. If I write an ebook that sells at all well, that can bring writers to my other books. If I write twenty ebooks over ten years and they average ten thousand sales the first year and three to five thousand each in later years, I am doing fine. Not rich, but okay. If a particular book is doing real well, I might explore print options.
The trick is to keep writing and letting the synergy of your various titles boost your sales. As for his comment about taking a year to write a novel, well, he’s just not trying. Most people making a living at it these days are publishing at least four a year. Hint: there is this modern thing called Word Processing and, maybe, an assist from voice-to-text.
And, yes, I promise to get those other books written any day now. My current excuse: house torn apart in renovation. Once I get a quiet room all to myself, look out world! I hope.
I’m writing a book anyway. “Never tell me the odds.”–Han Solo
But seriously, the odds are against any kind of artist, literary or otherwise. I once heard Jack Lemmon say something like, “To be an actor, you have to be the kind of person who. when told that the odds against you making any kind of basic decent living out of it, let alone being a real success, are about 50,000 to 1, says anyway, ‘Okay, I’ll do that.'” I imagine with writers it’s something like 100,000 to 1.