The GIG economy is growing bigger and bigger by the day. Here in Los Angeles it is thriving and companies like Fiverr are beginning centralize and localize events that support GIG workers and the economy. https://latechnews.org/los-angeles-gig-economy/
California sounds more and more like a dystopian hellhole between the rampant homelessness, absurd economic inequality and now "events for GIG "workers""
> A GIG equals a freelancing job and thanks to technology you have ways to easily convert your skill set into a highly profitable revenue generating stream of income.
Slightly off topic, but I don't have a lot of sympathy. If you want health care, vote for it or move to a country that has it. If you want a job that provides insurance, acquire the skills you need to get the job.
People need to stop blaming externalities for what is entirely the realm of their own personal sphere of influence.
Software engineers have it pretty easy in terms of low costs for skill acquisition, but in many other areas it's just not going to be something you can do yourself. If you want to become a machinist, you're going to have to have access to a machine shop. Not impossible, but a higher bar than acquiring a computer to learn how to program. So society has to end up participating in mapping together skills acquisition and the various resources needed to actually acquire the skill.
Which entirely ignores all the systemic issues that make it easy for, say, a boy growing up in a middle class household to learn programming but make it very difficult for the boy in a poor household. Or how it's not just skills that are important to getting 'above' gig work but credentials as well. We are not free agents, wading through a thin meritocracy, we are agents anchored by our circumstances, trying to swim through mud.
I'm not even thinking about poor vs. rich kids, or kids living in a ghetto vs. kids living in the suburbs. What about the man who gets laid off from work and has a family to support? When exactly is he supposed to pick up new skills, if nobody's hiring for his current ones in the area?
I got laid off last week, and I've been thanking my lucky stars that I'm a software engineer; I'm actively talking to three friends about going to work for their current employers, and I've got recruiters rattling off lists of companies looking to hire me - plus I get a severance, and my wife makes enough money that we have some bit of runway before I start having to sell clothes to feed our child.
If I were, I don't know, working at a coal mine that closed down? Or at a Toys'R'Us that got shuttered? Can't exactly hop back into a college curriculum for three years, kids don't eat lectures.
Moving to another country is not always possible. And it's never easy.
Edit: I mean this literally, sometimes it can't be done. Not every country is going to want to take you, and if you have a criminal record or something you might not find anyone willing to let you immigrate. Plus it costs money and if you haven't got money, then you're just stuck.
It's not easy but it can be done. The US is a nation of immigrants. Unless you're native American, you either emigrated here or descended from someone who did.
It turns out hard things are hard. There's no free lunch or get rich easy schemes.
I'm an immigrant (I was completely broke when I moved to the US) and my parents were immigrants and their parents were immigrants.
Some resources are scarce, but food in the U.S. is not. We have allocation and distribution issues, with political choices as a major factor, not supply constraints.
You're thinking that someone will get paid proportionally to how much value they produce. But productivity is up +100% and wages are flat. The "economy" is doing fine so there's no reason people can't get paid a decent wage. Employers are keeping the value of their employees' work.
>In the United States of 2018, that's a matter of explicit political choice, rather than harsh base reality.
The point of the saying "there's no free lunch" is that even if it's free to you, /someone/ is paying for it - lunches do not simply materialize without effort. This principle will hold up as long as the laws of thermodynamics do - even in the United States of 2018.
The point is that you can't give a lunch to one person without taking it away from someone else. But there are enough resources in America that we could reallocate them to give everyone "lunch" without anyone going hungry.
Uh...hm. Y'know, since you put it that way, I have saved a decent amount of money working and am thinking of starting a new business, but I'm concerned about the myriad layers of risk.
I could just move to a country that has health care and invest there, though. Great idea!
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Excuse me for not confirming your biases. I will, however, continue to think freely as I choose. I don't care much for echo chambers. If that does not work for you, please do ban me.
Using HN as intended doesn't require that you change your views. It requires that you post civilly and substantively, not feed flamewars, and not use the site primarily for political battle.
I wonder how much of a writer's success is balanced between being a good writer, and a good marketer. How much give is there? If your prose is excellent but you're bad at getting your book in front of eyeballs, you'll almost certainly fail - but how bad can you be as an author, while still making money by being a better salesperson?
Prose is very little indication of success, sadly. Some of it is marketing, but some of it is just hitting a moment in time. Look at Fifty Shades of Grey, the prose is terrible, but a lot of women needed what it was offering them on an emotional level and so it sold a TON of copies. And then once a book hits a certain critical mass people will start to pick it up who aren't the target audience just to see what the hell the buzz is about.
Doesn't that, like, happens frequently with women (movie, book, like fashion or something) ? Or do dudes the same thing. Maybe it just felt natural for me being a dude.
I don't know about you, but I binge read something like fifty Star Trek novels when I was a kid because that's what the library had. That was once I ran out of the other shitty sci-fi on offer, because I'd already read all the Asimov three times over.
I think we think of women as doing this more because men tend to be employed more often than women, and once the kids are old enough to become self-sufficient - and/or shipped off to school - homemakers of both genders get more downtime to sit down and read.
Yeah a non-trivial portion of the Romance market is stay at home moms who have down time while the kids are at school (obviously not all day with cooking/cleaning/etc) and they will read multiple books a week commonly.
And on the guys front, plenty of guys read cheap thrillers that are all about explosions and blood without much prose behind them.
Motor vehicles (muscle cars, Japanese sport bikes, Tesla, etc.), programming languages (JS, Lisp, Rust), liquor (vodka, whiskey, Moscow mules), electronics (hi-fi audio, pagers, TVs, smartphones), web frameworks (too many to list), beer styles ("imports", stouts, IPAs, Pilsners), grooming (sideburns, beards, mustaches), etc.
As far as I can tell, the main difference between men chasing trends and women doing is that dudes sink way more money into it and take it way more seriously.
Same could be said for programming regarding prose. You can write beautiful code (modularized, great exception handling, proper form, etc.) that doesn't solve the problem properly or write ugly code (huge monolith, repeated code, meh error handling) that solves a large business problem.
An ugly monolith that solves pain is going to be worth more than a beautiful piece of software that doesn't solve the pain. I'm not saying you can't have both, just that writing beautiful code by itself doesn't help, much like very good prose in novel writing.
Sure, but I'm saying even something that is beautiful and does offer a decent amount of emotional impact still isn't guaranteed success, either from simply not being found or not hitting the right emotion that impacts a wide swath of people. And trying to do that is mostly guesswork, since it is a regularly moving line.
Well okay, but there's a big difference between code and literature, which is that the end user of software doesn't read the code: the code isn't the product, it's what the code does.
It could of course be argued that in literature what is said is more important than how it is said, but at least it has to be understandable. You don't have to have a wonderful prose to be a great author, but at least people need to be able to figure out (some of) what you are saying.
> It could of course be argued that in literature what is said is more important than how it is said
This could be said about most things to be honest. What something says or does is generally more important than how exactly it does, regardless of whether the thing is a book or a piece of tech or anything else in between.
It's one of the reasons so many startups and projects struggle, because they think their work is going to be about solving a programming problem while it's actually about solving a marketing/network/human one. So many people all programming community software to become the next Facebook or Reddit or whatever else. So many losing to some guy setting up a forum script because the latter actually focused on the community and the former were interested in the shiny tech.
A friend of mine used to do marketing for a romance novel house and she told me how they used to do stuff like sending small gifts with book club subscriptions and A/B test their effectiveness.
It might just have been her bias but she gave me the impression that sort of stuff mattered quite a lot.
Having a good headshot probably helps, too. I guess it would count as a key component of one's marketing package. I'm reminded of this Adam Gopnik article on a discovered Shakespeare portrait:
And that Shakespeare was good-looking as a young man, before he lost his hair and puffed out from home-cooking, seems at least likely, on the fixed general principle that writers who become very celebrated in their youth, as he did, are, to a first approximation, almost always good-looking. Byron and Shelley, Mailer and Updike and Salinger, Fitzgerald, Dickens, Tennyson, Lowell, Ted Hughes—all celebrated in their youth, all not just O.K.-looking but an oil painting, each and every one. There are many good funny-looking writers, but it’s hard to think of good funny-looking writers who get famous young. Funny-looking writers, at least funny-looking male writers, get famous late—Samuel Johnson and Sinclair Lewis and John Milton and Philip Larkin all come instantly to mind—or else they don’t get famous. They get read, but they don’t get celebrated.
The term I see often now is: "Writing to the Market". That it's part formula, part SEO, part trying to fit into "readers who liked X might like Y".
In startup terms it's often like "Uber for X". Consider Harry Potter. There are tons of variants around the theme of "Young person with powers goes to school". So you end up with things that are like "Harry Potter for College", "Harry Potter but Superheroes", "Harry Potter but Female lead".
None of which is marketing in the sense of placing ads, but more fundamentally about writing/making something that will sell.
As with other things, it's some of each. As well as identifying the elements of your creation that make something appealing.
Dan Brown is the quintessential example of a horrible writer who is nonetheless successful. By any measure his prose is terrible. His fact checking is nonexistent. (In the first book, the hero looks out the window of a bathroom in the Louvre towards the Eiffel Tower, and you can't see the tower from there.) ...And yet he is a good tale-spinner and excellent with "and _then_ what happened?" plot, so it works.
One very successful fiction writer pointed out to me years ago that fiction can rely on several items: voice, plot, character, setting, etc. So "being a good writer" is just an overall label that obscures those things. Ideally an author is great at all of them, but few are.
And as the same author pointed out, if you write (and want to make a living at it), you have to publish, and you have to get noticed. There's an old saying that books don't become bestsellers if they're hidden in a trunk. In the olden days when book publishers ruled the earth, an author could rely on the effectiveness of a good agent or publisher (and the luck involved in finding one). Now, the author has to learn to present herself with confidence, which does not necessarily come naturally. It becomes another relevant skill that has little to do with plot, character, etc. -- rather like the skill of getting your own butt into the chair in the first place.
That does indeed map to tech skills. Just as a thoughtful writer (and reader!) identifies the various parts of the novel, so too does a thoughtful developer consider her tech skills (idea generation, debugging, team building, whatever). And the ability to communicate/market is among them.
I think that for plot-focused fiction, “terrible” writing is better —- the Count of Monte Cristo would have been worse if it developed the characters better.
I see what you mean, but I'd argue that stories succeed when they have more than one of these attributes. (And I'd enjoy the argument. This is a fun two-beer discussion!)
Sometimes the absence of an attribute encourages the reader to fill in the blanks; readers' own imagination is an important element. So if the characters are undeveloped but the worldbuilding is superb, the reader supplies what the story lacks.
>His fact checking is nonexistent. (In the first book, the hero looks out the window of a bathroom in the Louvre towards the Eiffel Tower, and you can't see the tower from there.) ...And yet he is a good tale-spinner and excellent with "and _then_ what happened?" plot, so it works.
It works because people read fiction for good storytelling, not for the facts within. I can't see how getting that detail wrong makes him a poor writer.
I agree with you. But that individual fact isn't the point.
Each of us is sensitized to different things. A doctor friend watched less than 60 seconds of the original "E.R." TV show because in that minute he saw someone use an IV upside down. That made the entire show untrustworthy.
It rarely takes a lot of effort to get it right. Why not do so?
> It rarely takes a lot of effort to get it right. Why not do so
Because, contrary to your claim, it takes a lot of effort to get it right, since there are a near-infinite number of ways every individual element of description or presentation can be wrong. And it's often a high cost:benefit ratio, because most errors will only be noticed by a small share of the target audience and will only break suspension of disbelief in an even smaller share (conversely, getting it right will often strike non-experts wrong and break suspension of disbelief; verisimilitude in fiction is not actually about matching reality, but audience expectations.)
So, except on the things about which your target audience is particularly knowledgeable and concerned, accuracy may not be worth the effort put into it.
I've been running one of the largest writing communities online for many years now, and the first thing I always tell writers when they say they want to self-publish, is that after the novel is done, then your work is only just beginning.
Marketing is just as, if not maybe even more, important than actually completing a saleable novel. Unfortunately like many of us, writers are usually only interested in their specialty--writing--and so find marketing difficult and tiresome. Lots of great novels have languished due to an author's disinterest in marketing. Likewise lots of mediocre or bad novels have succeeded thanks to clever and diligent marketing.
This is one of the many reasons why self-publishing will never overthrow the big publishing houses, like so many people predicted a decade ago. The fact is that going from manuscript to financial success involves lots of different skills that most authors just haven't been trained for, like cover design, copyediting, printing, and marketing. In the traditional arrangement, publishing houses do all of that non-writerly work for the author in exchange for a profit share.
One can self-publish and keep all the profits, but most writers don't understand that that also means you must also be a pro-level cover artist, copyeditor, printing expert, and marketer (or have the money to hire them yourself).
(There are other good reasons why publishing houses aren't going away anytime soon despite technologist's frenzied predictions, this is just one of them.)
This is true in any endeavor. I see it all the time in software, for example. Great products languishing because the author couldn't be bothered to do marketing, and crummy ones becoming hits because of adroit marketing.
Not just disinterest, but competence. The skills that make you a good writer are very different than the skills that make you a good marketer.
My brother in law, whom I love dearly, self-published a novel. He's gone to all sorts of local fairs in order to sell it. But when I ask him for the elevator pitch, he can't give one. I've listened to him talk about it, and he can't even get ME interested in reading it.
I was once at a reading by a famous writer, don't remember the name. When asked what the secret was to be a bestselling author he asked people to take a close look at the word "bestseller". There is a reason why it's not called "bestwriter".
Because there's a clear, objective metric you can use measure how well something sells (how many books were sold) but no clear, objective metric you can use to determine the quality of a writer?
Hands down it's marketing, with a side of product-market fit. The latter was part of why Twilight and then Fifty Shades of Grey exploded. Product-market fit for a book relies more on engagingness, and pressing the right buttons of a certain demographic, than it does on literary or academic measures of quality (which are subjective, of course).
To be honest, you can be pretty damn awful as a writer and still become successful if you write what people want to hear. Lots of terrible books sell really well because they were well marketed and offered people a sort of escapism that they wanted at any cost. And if you want a non book example, well just look at many news sites. From those fake news pages complained about in the election to all matter of niche ones and even mainstream publications, there are quite a few utterly terrible stories that have become hugely popular simply because they published at the right time and got the interest of an audience who wanted to hear exactly that.
How much of the genre's success can we attribute to an inclusive
culture? I would guess it may have helped level out the income curve - a $10,000 median annual income is higher than I would have guessed for a saturated, hit-based industry.
But in terms of aggregate genre growth, I think the Kindle and iBooks/Audible helped much more. Seeing the three-fold increase in romance author income coupled with the halving of other authors' income from 2008 to 2014 suggests that readers really altered their preferences to avoid being seen with a physical romance novel.
It feels like a similar phenomenon occurred with scifi/fantasy, judging by the audible best seller list.
I think it is specifically self publishing, as I'm pretty sure almost all if not all of the increase in romance writers breaking 6 figures is with some amount of self publishing in their stable. Many romance houses (Harlequin etc) famously don't pay a ton to their writers outside a few big names, but when you can charge $2.99 to self publish a book and get $2 of that, that can generate a TON of income really quickly. Especially if you can put out 3-4 of those books a year.
"suggests that readers really altered their preferences to avoid being seen with a physical romance novel" I don't think that is necessarily what is happening, at least not primarily. People who read romance novels tend to read a lot of them, so I think that simply reducing the friction of purchase and allowing you to buy it and then immediately read it has more to do with the appeal.
a $10,000 median annual income is higher than I would have guessed for a saturated, hit-based industry.
I suspect the only reason this income is listed that entirely failed writers aren't included. And I suspect there are more failed (or "aspiring") writers with zero income than all the successful writers put together.
The article's only story is that successful romance writers are getting substantially more than they used to (it seems demand for romance novels has increased for cultural or cyclical reasons). But trying to be writer is a less reliable way to survive than an average sketchy gig where you get paid on a semi-regular basis.
The whole thing is in the "they made it, why can't you" genre.
It's really hard to make a living just by writing books. If you write non-fiction related to your day job they can be really powerful promotional tools. Book author still has cachet. But I'd be starving if my actual book sales (which are admittedly priced for maximum reach and not maximum revenue) had to pay the bills.
> readers really altered their preferences to avoid being seen with a physical romance novel.
I'd be cautious about coming to this conclusion so definitively. The vast majority of romance readers are women, many in a cultural milieu that differs from yours. Reading romances is not universally looked down upon — several of the highly educated women in my family do so unabashedly, for example, as do I.
E-reading is also cheaper and consumes less space than physical books. The number of niches and options therein exploded with self-publishing. I suspect that those factors are more important than avoiding the potential embarrassment of someone seeing you reading Danielle Steele. But I wouldn't put high certainty on my guess either :P
Overall agree... even with Danielle Steele comment... but what about paranormal reindeer shifter novels? Or erotic menage a trois set in Victorian England? There are plenty of "simply sweet" books you wouldn't mind being asked about on the train, but there's a wide swathe of books you might not want to explain!
E-books solve a real "fat-tail" problem in romance at the same time that they allow discretion in public places. These days only Amazon knows you've got a thing for hot billionaire Navy SEALs who turn into otters at night. A physical bookstore would not be able to stock all Chuck Tingle's novels and turn a profit, and people in towns too highbrow to stock romances wouldn't be able to buy them without mail-order. (In some towns it can actually be really hard to find romance novels for sale on paper, and there's a huge bias toward the NYTimes bestsellers.)
Or erotic menage a trois set in Victorian England?
Ha! A former colleague who was a Tech Writer later followed her dream and became a published author specializing in Victorian era historical romances.
She was particularly thrilled at her first contract because she most loved to travel to London, and now she could write off the travel costs on her taxes as research.
> Three practices set romance writers up for success: they welcome newcomers, they share competitive information and they ask advice from newbies.
That last one is interesting. People entering a field do so for a reason. It might just be to do a job and get paid, but it could also be because no one is making what they want. Newbies unconsciously represent gaps in the market where someone with better execution could make a killing.
Brb, got to dive beginner programming forums and look at the types of projects that are so pressing that someone is willing to learn how to program.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] thread> A GIG equals a freelancing job and thanks to technology you have ways to easily convert your skill set into a highly profitable revenue generating stream of income.
just yikes
https://twitter.com/b_cavello/status/839876313473150976/
> Here in Los Angeles it is thriving
It's thriving, huh? How about the workers themselves? Are they thriving, too? Or just the economy?
People need to stop blaming externalities for what is entirely the realm of their own personal sphere of influence.
I got laid off last week, and I've been thanking my lucky stars that I'm a software engineer; I'm actively talking to three friends about going to work for their current employers, and I've got recruiters rattling off lists of companies looking to hire me - plus I get a severance, and my wife makes enough money that we have some bit of runway before I start having to sell clothes to feed our child.
If I were, I don't know, working at a coal mine that closed down? Or at a Toys'R'Us that got shuttered? Can't exactly hop back into a college curriculum for three years, kids don't eat lectures.
But you made it sound so easy!
Edit: I mean this literally, sometimes it can't be done. Not every country is going to want to take you, and if you have a criminal record or something you might not find anyone willing to let you immigrate. Plus it costs money and if you haven't got money, then you're just stuck.
It turns out hard things are hard. There's no free lunch or get rich easy schemes.
I'm an immigrant (I was completely broke when I moved to the US) and my parents were immigrants and their parents were immigrants.
In the United States of 2018, that's a matter of explicit political choice, rather than harsh base reality.
> or get rich easy schemes
Gig workers aren't asking to get rich, they're asking to literally not starve to death.
Food isn't fucking scarce.
>In the United States of 2018, that's a matter of explicit political choice, rather than harsh base reality.
The point of the saying "there's no free lunch" is that even if it's free to you, /someone/ is paying for it - lunches do not simply materialize without effort. This principle will hold up as long as the laws of thermodynamics do - even in the United States of 2018.
Inheriting money work well for several friends of mine.
I rather enjoyed my free college experience w/ free lunch plan not to mention a healthy mind and body.
I could just move to a country that has health care and invest there, though. Great idea!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't know about you, but I binge read something like fifty Star Trek novels when I was a kid because that's what the library had. That was once I ran out of the other shitty sci-fi on offer, because I'd already read all the Asimov three times over.
I think we think of women as doing this more because men tend to be employed more often than women, and once the kids are old enough to become self-sufficient - and/or shipped off to school - homemakers of both genders get more downtime to sit down and read.
And on the guys front, plenty of guys read cheap thrillers that are all about explosions and blood without much prose behind them.
Also, Star Wars.
Motor vehicles (muscle cars, Japanese sport bikes, Tesla, etc.), programming languages (JS, Lisp, Rust), liquor (vodka, whiskey, Moscow mules), electronics (hi-fi audio, pagers, TVs, smartphones), web frameworks (too many to list), beer styles ("imports", stouts, IPAs, Pilsners), grooming (sideburns, beards, mustaches), etc.
As far as I can tell, the main difference between men chasing trends and women doing is that dudes sink way more money into it and take it way more seriously.
In my opinion this trait exists for all genders.
An ugly monolith that solves pain is going to be worth more than a beautiful piece of software that doesn't solve the pain. I'm not saying you can't have both, just that writing beautiful code by itself doesn't help, much like very good prose in novel writing.
It could of course be argued that in literature what is said is more important than how it is said, but at least it has to be understandable. You don't have to have a wonderful prose to be a great author, but at least people need to be able to figure out (some of) what you are saying.
And then there is James Joyce :-)
This could be said about most things to be honest. What something says or does is generally more important than how exactly it does, regardless of whether the thing is a book or a piece of tech or anything else in between.
It's one of the reasons so many startups and projects struggle, because they think their work is going to be about solving a programming problem while it's actually about solving a marketing/network/human one. So many people all programming community software to become the next Facebook or Reddit or whatever else. So many losing to some guy setting up a forum script because the latter actually focused on the community and the former were interested in the shiny tech.
It might just have been her bias but she gave me the impression that sort of stuff mattered quite a lot.
And that Shakespeare was good-looking as a young man, before he lost his hair and puffed out from home-cooking, seems at least likely, on the fixed general principle that writers who become very celebrated in their youth, as he did, are, to a first approximation, almost always good-looking. Byron and Shelley, Mailer and Updike and Salinger, Fitzgerald, Dickens, Tennyson, Lowell, Ted Hughes—all celebrated in their youth, all not just O.K.-looking but an oil painting, each and every one. There are many good funny-looking writers, but it’s hard to think of good funny-looking writers who get famous young. Funny-looking writers, at least funny-looking male writers, get famous late—Samuel Johnson and Sinclair Lewis and John Milton and Philip Larkin all come instantly to mind—or else they don’t get famous. They get read, but they don’t get celebrated.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/adam-gopnik-look...
Of course, he was already becoming famously reclusive by this time so maybe he's exempt from this rule.
Anyway, I love that headshot.
In startup terms it's often like "Uber for X". Consider Harry Potter. There are tons of variants around the theme of "Young person with powers goes to school". So you end up with things that are like "Harry Potter for College", "Harry Potter but Superheroes", "Harry Potter but Female lead".
None of which is marketing in the sense of placing ads, but more fundamentally about writing/making something that will sell.
Dan Brown is the quintessential example of a horrible writer who is nonetheless successful. By any measure his prose is terrible. His fact checking is nonexistent. (In the first book, the hero looks out the window of a bathroom in the Louvre towards the Eiffel Tower, and you can't see the tower from there.) ...And yet he is a good tale-spinner and excellent with "and _then_ what happened?" plot, so it works.
One very successful fiction writer pointed out to me years ago that fiction can rely on several items: voice, plot, character, setting, etc. So "being a good writer" is just an overall label that obscures those things. Ideally an author is great at all of them, but few are.
And as the same author pointed out, if you write (and want to make a living at it), you have to publish, and you have to get noticed. There's an old saying that books don't become bestsellers if they're hidden in a trunk. In the olden days when book publishers ruled the earth, an author could rely on the effectiveness of a good agent or publisher (and the luck involved in finding one). Now, the author has to learn to present herself with confidence, which does not necessarily come naturally. It becomes another relevant skill that has little to do with plot, character, etc. -- rather like the skill of getting your own butt into the chair in the first place.
That does indeed map to tech skills. Just as a thoughtful writer (and reader!) identifies the various parts of the novel, so too does a thoughtful developer consider her tech skills (idea generation, debugging, team building, whatever). And the ability to communicate/market is among them.
Sometimes the absence of an attribute encourages the reader to fill in the blanks; readers' own imagination is an important element. So if the characters are undeveloped but the worldbuilding is superb, the reader supplies what the story lacks.
It works because people read fiction for good storytelling, not for the facts within. I can't see how getting that detail wrong makes him a poor writer.
Fiction requires the willing suspension of disbelief. But you should not have to hang it until dead.
Each of us is sensitized to different things. A doctor friend watched less than 60 seconds of the original "E.R." TV show because in that minute he saw someone use an IV upside down. That made the entire show untrustworthy.
It rarely takes a lot of effort to get it right. Why not do so?
Because, contrary to your claim, it takes a lot of effort to get it right, since there are a near-infinite number of ways every individual element of description or presentation can be wrong. And it's often a high cost:benefit ratio, because most errors will only be noticed by a small share of the target audience and will only break suspension of disbelief in an even smaller share (conversely, getting it right will often strike non-experts wrong and break suspension of disbelief; verisimilitude in fiction is not actually about matching reality, but audience expectations.)
So, except on the things about which your target audience is particularly knowledgeable and concerned, accuracy may not be worth the effort put into it.
Marketing is just as, if not maybe even more, important than actually completing a saleable novel. Unfortunately like many of us, writers are usually only interested in their specialty--writing--and so find marketing difficult and tiresome. Lots of great novels have languished due to an author's disinterest in marketing. Likewise lots of mediocre or bad novels have succeeded thanks to clever and diligent marketing.
This is one of the many reasons why self-publishing will never overthrow the big publishing houses, like so many people predicted a decade ago. The fact is that going from manuscript to financial success involves lots of different skills that most authors just haven't been trained for, like cover design, copyediting, printing, and marketing. In the traditional arrangement, publishing houses do all of that non-writerly work for the author in exchange for a profit share.
One can self-publish and keep all the profits, but most writers don't understand that that also means you must also be a pro-level cover artist, copyeditor, printing expert, and marketer (or have the money to hire them yourself).
(There are other good reasons why publishing houses aren't going away anytime soon despite technologist's frenzied predictions, this is just one of them.)
My brother in law, whom I love dearly, self-published a novel. He's gone to all sorts of local fairs in order to sell it. But when I ask him for the elevator pitch, he can't give one. I've listened to him talk about it, and he can't even get ME interested in reading it.
But in terms of aggregate genre growth, I think the Kindle and iBooks/Audible helped much more. Seeing the three-fold increase in romance author income coupled with the halving of other authors' income from 2008 to 2014 suggests that readers really altered their preferences to avoid being seen with a physical romance novel.
It feels like a similar phenomenon occurred with scifi/fantasy, judging by the audible best seller list.
https://www.audible.com/adblbestsellers
I suspect the only reason this income is listed that entirely failed writers aren't included. And I suspect there are more failed (or "aspiring") writers with zero income than all the successful writers put together.
The article's only story is that successful romance writers are getting substantially more than they used to (it seems demand for romance novels has increased for cultural or cyclical reasons). But trying to be writer is a less reliable way to survive than an average sketchy gig where you get paid on a semi-regular basis.
The whole thing is in the "they made it, why can't you" genre.
I'd be cautious about coming to this conclusion so definitively. The vast majority of romance readers are women, many in a cultural milieu that differs from yours. Reading romances is not universally looked down upon — several of the highly educated women in my family do so unabashedly, for example, as do I.
E-reading is also cheaper and consumes less space than physical books. The number of niches and options therein exploded with self-publishing. I suspect that those factors are more important than avoiding the potential embarrassment of someone seeing you reading Danielle Steele. But I wouldn't put high certainty on my guess either :P
E-books solve a real "fat-tail" problem in romance at the same time that they allow discretion in public places. These days only Amazon knows you've got a thing for hot billionaire Navy SEALs who turn into otters at night. A physical bookstore would not be able to stock all Chuck Tingle's novels and turn a profit, and people in towns too highbrow to stock romances wouldn't be able to buy them without mail-order. (In some towns it can actually be really hard to find romance novels for sale on paper, and there's a huge bias toward the NYTimes bestsellers.)
She was particularly thrilled at her first contract because she most loved to travel to London, and now she could write off the travel costs on her taxes as research.
That last one is interesting. People entering a field do so for a reason. It might just be to do a job and get paid, but it could also be because no one is making what they want. Newbies unconsciously represent gaps in the market where someone with better execution could make a killing.
Brb, got to dive beginner programming forums and look at the types of projects that are so pressing that someone is willing to learn how to program.
In relation to HN, there is also the noob-submissions section: https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories