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Taken by the Chains of Markov.
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May 24, 2016 20:38
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Finger Wagon posted:I don't understand how they think this is going to work when pretty much every other option around is cheaper and more reliable. Two words: Silicon Valley
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May 24, 2016 20:51
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From concept to market in 2 months, is all I'm gonna say. Lol if you think this isn't five guys in a basement reading it and giving your their ''assesment.''
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May 24, 2016 21:02
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Not that I don't think that this could be the future, but at those prices and at an early adopter disadvantage, you'd be much much MUCH better off hiring some kind of consultant. Like, absurdly so.
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May 24, 2016 21:08
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EngineerSean posted:Two words: Silicon Valley I... well-played. I still always wonder how people justify this, though. Do they think they're being progressive and cool by supporting small businesses and startups? Do they genuinely believe that the more expensive it is, the better it is? Y'know, my parents own a construction company, and after growing up listening to my dad complain about people not understanding why he can't magically come up with a quote with zero details or about having to repeatedly explain to someone why it's a stupid idea to put your septic tank uphill, you'd think nothing would surprise me anymore, but I still find myself shaking my head. Arkanomen posted:Taken by the Chains of Markov. Is this an idea for a title? Is it a reaction to our discussion? I've been trying to figure it out for a while and I'm still not sure.
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May 24, 2016 21:08
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Don't do this for a cover, unless Mario is about to loving pound that goomba
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May 25, 2016 15:51
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Finger Wagon posted:
I meant it more as, if you can have an AI determine marketability than why not just have the robot churn out the content of the book itself, hence a robot romance novel.
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May 25, 2016 19:45
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Books can teach you how to write, right? Latest StoryBundle has them. http://storybundle.com/writing If the thread lord could put the new Slack in the OP, I would be thankful. To get an invite you just need to email me at selfpub@mail.com.
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May 25, 2016 20:33
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ravenkult posted:Books can teach you how to write, right? Latest StoryBundle has them. quote:From curator Kristine Kathryn Rusch Pass.
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May 25, 2016 20:48
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EngineerSean posted:Not that I don't think that this could be the future... So I wonder how far of a leap it is to write a program that tracks for suspenseful phrases, the frequency of them, how they trend over the space of several chapters.
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May 26, 2016 12:38
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You can't automate literature, no matter how much tech blogs would like you to believe.
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May 26, 2016 13:04
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In order to judge a narrative on a basic level, the program would have to be able to determine what characters existed, which would involve combing through the entire text and understanding not just basic descriptions like "he was tall" but also interpreting actions, since good writing is show-don't-tell. Then it'd have to work out through contextual clues alone what was going on in the story, since often actions are assigned to a pronoun rather than a name. It would have to understand metaphors, similies, and probably flashbacks and sudden scene changes as well, to say nothing of the unreliable narrator present in so many works. Basically the program would have to have near-human levels of understanding and language that won't be viable for at least the next twenty years, especially not at a commercial level. That's just to understand if a story has a solid narrative, to say nothing of whether or not it's good. I'm willing to bet that the best thing it could do is analyse your text and compare it to samples from pre-existing works that are proven bestsellers and determine how similar the text is to insert-genre-masterpiece-here. And even that is a terrible way to do fiction because seriously.
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May 26, 2016 13:18
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The question might be not 'can a bot write a good book' more than 'can a bot write a book whose quality level is acceptable enough that 50% of the audience won't care or notice' and honestly think that point is not impossible. Not probable say, within 10 years, but after that? Machine learning has come a long way in a short period of time. I think people underestimate just how threatening the mass automation of everything will be, but that might just be because I work full time retail and lust for robot death, and soon.
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May 26, 2016 13:28
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Yep. Basically, auto-tune for horror. I'll call it "Horror-tune." There's no way to automate a creative experience, but it's possible to programmatically analyze patterns, compare against expectations. Identify trending overuse of passive voice, (which unties the tension, right?) Maybe provide a tally of exclamation points per chapter. Yes, I realize this is useless and abstract, but it also is common poo poo a new writer tends to do. Going back to Slickwrite, it analyzes sentence length and provides a chart to show how your sentences progress through a chapter. One of the tricks to jacking up the tension or action is to use shorter and shorter sentences, right? So, the program won't tell you "you're using longer sentences here when you should use shorter ones because we see that Lisa is running from zombies." But it CAN show you how the pacing evolves, tell you that the shorter sentences will help to build up tension... if that's your goal, then, whammy. first chapter of my upcoming abandoned project for example:  I'd think of it more like a light meter for photography, or maybe a histogram in photoshop, wave shapes in sound editing. If you're going for a lovely pop song, your song is too long, too quiet, no dynamics, and uses too many chords. Now, a good artist will say, "that's intentional." But for a sucker with $1000 who just finished their first future number one NYT best seller, seeing some kind of technical analysis that compares their turd alongside similar books in their genre will illustrate places they can improve their turd. Not saying I'd be that sucker. (I've already donated too much money to other can't-miss opportunities) I'm just saying, I can see how it could function. I'm probably way off of course. But drat I want to build something like that now. magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 13:56 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 13:51
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magnificent7 posted:first chapter of my upcoming abandoned project for example: seems promising
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May 26, 2016 18:11
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It'll only be useful at a structure level, like someone said earlier. It won't even be able to tell you if your beats are right because how the heck would it understand where those are?
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May 26, 2016 19:11
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flowbee abortion posted:seems promising So much.
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May 26, 2016 22:09
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Sooooo frustrating to see that Amazon bumped their last month Kindle Firsts up to the Top 1-6 spots inorganically again. edit: like I'm sure what they're doing isn't illegal but it definitely undercuts their "oh yeah we're a totally merit-based storefront" when they do this time and time again. EngineerSean fucked around with this message at 03:42 on May 30, 2016 |
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May 30, 2016 03:31
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EngineerSean posted:Sooooo frustrating to see that Amazon bumped their last month Kindle Firsts up to the Top 1-6 spots inorganically again. That does seem pretty uncool. Do you know if they artificially boost the ranks of their own imprints and stuff like "Kindle Worlds" books?
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May 30, 2016 04:57
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walruscat posted:That does seem pretty uncool. Do you know if they artificially boost the ranks of their own imprints and stuff like "Kindle Worlds" books? They don't gIve a poo poo about kindle worlds books (I've got four of them myself) but in addition to the kindle firsts there are two random cases of them boosting an amazon imprint book to number one for no reason.
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May 30, 2016 06:35
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It's gotta suck for the poor bastards whose books get pushed out of the top 100. That's potentially a huge hit to their income. E: Looking at the six books, it's not surprising they've boosted them. There's pretty much no way any of them apart from maybe The Butterfly Garden is getting there on their own merits. Bardeh fucked around with this message at 08:57 on May 30, 2016 |
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May 30, 2016 08:43
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Yeah, that does seem really lovely. Definitely goes against the whole meritocracy vibe. And they are basically lying to their customers and going against the philosophy of putting stuff in front of them that they'd be interested in buying. Instead of what they want to sell as a company.
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May 30, 2016 19:19
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Hey, I have a question about choosing your genre for publishing that I just can't seem to find a comprehensive answer to- I'm writing something that's definitely speculative fiction but seems to sit in a weird sort of grey zone between urban fantasy and superhero fiction and I'm honestly not sure what the right choice is. On one hand, the central narrative is about living with what is essentially a superpower (in that it operates outside of what should be possible and this person has it), but in all other respects it's devoid of the classic heroes and villains and girlfriends in refrigerators. I mean, there might be some suggestion that those are things happening outside of the narrator's perspective and realm of interest, but at best, it's background noise. On the other hand, it fits the criteria of "fantasy within an urban environment," but urban fantasy seems to still go along with certain expectations of magic and monsters, and that doesn't really fit either unless you consider being an urban hermit who lives with what is essentially a chronic and frequently debilitating sensory disorder especially magical. It's a narrative more about people coping and communicating- and about being the target of widespread social fascination- than it is about powers and grand acts of ability. Also: the protagonist is a gay man and I'm not sure if that automatically delegates me to GLBT fiction land. It's not a huge part of the story- he's just a guy who has issues and also happens to be gay. There's a bit of "coping with my what my lovely ex did" and later, very minimal romance, but that doesn't even happen until after ten chapters in. Does writing a book about a gay man mean that from a marketing standpoint, I am writing GLBT fiction?
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May 31, 2016 22:15
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I can't answer many of your questions but I can say that if sex isn't a focus of the story, you don't have to use LGBT categories or brand it as LGBT in any way. I wouldn't call "Battlestar Galactica" LGBT fiction even though it had near as many homosexual romances as heterosexual ones. However, I will say that your book seems to be a medley of social justice topics and that it might actually be a bonus if you make a bigger deal about the protagonist's sexuality in the book's presentation, since people who want to read about one kind of adversity (and your protag seems to have several) might want to read about a more incidental potential source of adversity as well.
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May 31, 2016 22:58
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Bardeh posted:E: Looking at the six books, it's not surprising they've boosted them. There's pretty much no way any of them apart from maybe The Butterfly Garden is getting there on their own merits. I missed this comment before but yeah, you'll see that every month with the Kindle Firsts. When they do put a marketable book in there, it stays up there for several months.
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May 31, 2016 23:03
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EngineerSean posted:I can't answer many of your questions but I can say that if sex isn't a focus of the story, you don't have to use LGBT categories or brand it as LGBT in any way. I wouldn't call "Battlestar Galactica" LGBT fiction even though it had near as many homosexual romances as heterosexual ones. However, I will say that your book seems to be a medley of social justice topics and that it might actually be a bonus if you make a bigger deal about the protagonist's sexuality in the book's presentation, since people who want to read about one kind of adversity (and your protag seems to have several) might want to read about a more incidental potential source of adversity as well. I know you said you can't answer much, but thank you for responding, regardless! In terms of whether or not I'm somehow obligated to brand my book with This Is A Gay Book, this has been very helpful. I would consider making more of his sexuality as per a handy marketing tool, but given that it doesn't cause literally any adversity in the book, I don't think i really can. In the text, nobody ever really indicates giving a singular poo poo about that, because realistically, his social circle is very small and half of it is comprised entirely of three university students who like to argue backstage about sociology. The closest you get to someone giving a poo poo is a guy making an "eh? eh? you know how it is"-style joke about his last girlfriend to him, and that's just an old straight dude assuming he's a younger straight dude. (He never appears again and goes on assuming he's straight, presumably, because most people don't go "actually I'm gay (haha holy poo poo I didn't know it was going to do that)/a non-obsessive gay/bi/a ravenous space squid" every time someone references their heterosexuality.) I mean, by the same token, I could make a big deal out of the fact that he's biracial, but that's also a non-issue within the narrative.
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May 31, 2016 23:20
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I personally think that's the best way to go about it if it's not a focus of the story.
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Jun 1, 2016 01:46
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EngineerSean posted:I personally think that's the best way to go about it if it's not a focus of the story. I'm of the opinion that the way to go about characterization is to keep in mind that sometimes people aren't straight/white/neurologically average/sharing your personal worldview, and that not being one or more of those things doesn't automatically become a major defining trait of that character. Sometimes people aren't X thing, but chances are, they mostly go about their business just like everybody else.
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Jun 1, 2016 05:57
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Here's the Kindle Firsts and their respective ranks. I'm also tracking them all on SalesRankExpress so that I can see when they all magically change rank at the same time. I'll gladly admit I'm wrong if these aren't all in the Top 6 with some absurd simultaneous leap at some point in the next three days. Link / sales rank as of 3 pm PST June 1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017LGAKEQ - 565k https://www.amazon.com/dp/B013P22OIU - 254k https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01A8G7OE0 - 1.4m https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017RBIZII - 107k https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01619OXG0 - 101k https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014WBAUDO - 335k
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Jun 1, 2016 10:58
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That last post should be 3 am PST (the current time) but I don't want to edit my post because that looks shifty when making predictions.
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Jun 1, 2016 10:58
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The highest is now 300 or so, and the lowest 1.2k. I guess that's reasonably consistent with just a 'normal' big promo push?
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Jun 1, 2016 17:51
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It seems they are free for Kindle First members, but still have paid rank? So could their Top 10 status just be secured through free purchases that count towards paid?
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Jun 1, 2016 20:24
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Bardeh posted:The highest is now 300 or so, and the lowest 1.2k. I guess that's reasonably consistent with just a 'normal' big promo push? It is, the effect I'm talking about hasn't happened yet. Of course I'll be happy if it never happens this month, but I'll still make a post next month making the same prediction.
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Jun 1, 2016 21:40
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Also, when the big promo push from Amazon goes, you know it because they also tend to suddenly get several hundred simultaneous reviews. Edit: McCluskey is up to #45 in the store.
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Jun 1, 2016 23:48
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Do we know the terms these Kindle First authors get?
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Jun 2, 2016 05:44
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Bardeh posted:Do we know the terms these Kindle First authors get? They don't get a royalty for any of the free copies given out, it's strictly promotional. Other than that, it's the same as the regular Amazon imprint terms.
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Jun 2, 2016 06:09
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I've sent out a whole bunch of ARCs today. Despite the instructions being extremely simple and clear (add me to your accepted senders list on your Kindle and give me said Kindle's email address OR just tell me if you want me to send you the book file as an attachment) readers can't manage it. They get their Kindle email address wrong, they ask me to resend 3 or 4 times when I know they're just not adding me to the accepted senders list, they ignore the instructions entirely and just respond with 'me' 'me plz' 'ARC rdy' 'me ty'. I think I'm going to have to automate this process better next time.
Bardeh fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 19:40
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It doesn't matter how much you automate, there will always be tons of idiot readers. Always.
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Jun 3, 2016 21:52
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moana posted:It doesn't matter how much you automate, there will always be tons of idiot readers. Always. Oh wait that's what you wrote.
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Jun 4, 2016 00:25
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Bardeh posted:I've sent out a whole bunch of ARCs today. Despite the instructions being extremely simple and clear (add me to your accepted senders list on your Kindle and give me said Kindle's email address OR just tell me if you want me to send you the book file as an attachment) readers can't manage it. They get their Kindle email address wrong, they ask me to resend 3 or 4 times when I know they're just not adding me to the accepted senders list, they ignore the instructions entirely and just respond with 'me' 'me plz' 'ARC rdy' 'me ty'. I think I'm going to have to automate this process better next time. I send my ARC readers a few different file types and a link to https://choosybookworm.com/how-to-add-an-ebook-onto-your-e-reader/
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Jun 4, 2016 00:50
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