Great submission. Pretty relevant to Hacker News, since writers and startups work in the similar high odds environment (like NNT's "Extremistan"). Circumstance, timing and luck have at least as much influence on the ultimate result as merit. (Though, unlike writers, startups can have investors financing their attempts. Some writers have it in the form of advance payment. I wonder if there's a YC model for authors..)
As for "A Web server and worth-of-mouth is all that you need to reach an audience of 50 million", I think this is telling of the time this was written, in 1996. Seems to me we've since discovered that reaching a large audience online requires similar amounts of luck or self promotion as it did pre-Web, perhaps with cheaper costs.
(BTW, I always thought this doers vs credit takers is the main underlying theme of The Wire. The conflict between the McNultys and Rawls's of this world.)
That's the second "The Wire" reference I've seen in recent days on HN. I like it as much as the first.
PhilG is apparently echoing Mark Twain: ""There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded."
On that note, I just can't resist saying to Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson: "Hi"
I'm not that familiar with Kevin's and Jay's stories. Could you please enlighten me and let me know which of the two groups they belong and why? (Please feel free to email if you don't want to offend.)
Re Greenspun's bundles of skills: One of the Rich Dad books talk about being "one skill away from great wealth". Because of Robert's best selling book, he is interviewed by a young woman who's also a talented writer. But she isn't getting published. He points out that he is a "best selling" author, while she is a "best writing" author. "It's not fair," she says, then reiterates Robert's thesis.
I think you can have both bundles.
It's just that if it's hard to become really good at just one skill-set, it's going to be twice as hard to be become really good at two. Could be it's even harder - but isn't x2 enough to explain why so few people practice both? I say "practice", because that's how you become really good at something.
I fancy myself as a writer. I'm often constructing story outlines. I'm a published author (technical writing, alas). I model my startup/research life on those of writers. In other words, I'm a creator, a builder. It's not just what I do, it's what I value; what is meaningful to me.
Yet, I've spent this August researching licensing agreements in my industry, to discover and understand what the standard approaches are, from the web. Once you're into it, it is quite interesting and challenging. It's a lot of work, and terms as used in price-lists and licenses are often ambiguous without the context of their use in action - it's like learning a foreign language from books. That's OK. The problem is that it is worthless in the eyes of a "creator" - my eyes. It's part of "selling". However, it's necessary in order to make money at reasonable rates. It makes sense to practice this skill, and gain this knowledge.
Basically his advice is make sure you have another source of income, such as a rich uncle, before you decide to become a full-time writer. There is no guaranty that you will make enough to support yourself, even in genre writing.
Note that I submitted this in part because it relates to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=777584 earlier HN thread, and it should serve as a cautionary tale more than anything else for those who think about trying to make real money writing.
I note that it's from 1996, when the bubble was getting hot; are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?
I think that the date of Greenspun's essay is indicative of how little has changed, rather than how much. Most writers didn't make very much money then, and they still don't, which many people don't seem to realize, and they often work like astronauts to achieve relatively modest financial success, which people like the poster in the original HN thread might want to know before getting started in earnest at trying to write for the book market. Take a look at these posts: http://pimpmynovel.blogspot.com/search/label/knowledge%20is%... regarding current advances for most types of fiction.
"are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?"
Depends on what you mean by "panned out" and "screwed"; I can't really tell from the nature of the question. If you mean, "Do I think writers can make enough from the Internet to support themselves?" the answer is yes; if you mean, "Will many of them do so, especially relative to the number who would like to?" the answer is "no." In fact, I even wrote a blog post on the subject of how unlikely it is for people to make money from blogging: http://blog.seliger.com/2009/06/17/youre-not-going-to-be-a-p... .
Still, I write this a wannabe novelist who is nonetheless going into things with his eyes open, rather than closed. I originally posted a link to this post: http://jseliger.com/2009/08/19/the-very-very-beginning-write... concerning advice for beginning writers who want to learn how to write well. But even if you do write well, you're not likely to be paid well for it, at least by trying to do so doing fun, creative work for the conventional publishing industry.
But to expand on what I meant: I remember that back in the dot-com bubble, the bubble Greenspan wrote that essay in, there was a lot of enthusiasm and hype about how the future would be so much better for authors and artists than the old world of offline publishing - the Web would empower creators, cut out the middlemen, and channel tons of money to them, via the magic of 0-cost publishing, micropayments, and other things like search engines or aggregators. Greenspan's essay seems to buy into that zeitgeist, albeit relatively modestly.
Of course, that vision has largely come failed to come true (spectacularly so in the case of micropayments and agents). I wondered if the point of your linking this old essay was to emphasize the contrast and make clear that writing is still a marginal business regardless of where it's being distributed or what neat technical gadgets are involved.
"I wondered if the point of your linking this old essay was to emphasize the contrast and make clear that writing is still a marginal business regardless of where it's being distributed or what neat technical gadgets are involved."
It wasn't, but if I'd been smarter or had greater foreknowledge it would've been!
People buy benefits, not features. It's not what the product is, but how it helps them - what use is it.
If Wilcox eloquently illustrates the unreliability of other people and the inappropriateness of optimism, this could reassure people in some cases. Certainly, its very eloquence can be of use to people who appreciate that in itself, or who want to study it (but that's what Stephen King complains of here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633935)
People want to be encouraged and inspired by their reading. Most of us don't need assistance in being discouraged. I think I might go read some more Emerson.
I've met several people who told me they would like to become journalists, and they did not even have a blog. All they cared for was to appear in the respected newspapers.
"Here's what the back of the jacket said: Gretchen Peabody, fortyish and only just a bit frowsy, has decided to abandon the comforts of Manhattan for a new home in Tula Springs, Louisiana, having been swept off her feet by Frank Dambar, a fetching widower she has happened upon in a New Orleans souvenir shop. ... While Gretchen is baffled by the small town's provincialism, it pales next to the weird household her new hsuband has assembled, which includes a handyman/mystic and his arthritic niece, and a stolidly Tueutonic housekeeper determined to keep the first Mrs. Dambar's memory alive...."
When you bring the camera in that close, discarding heroic romance and other popular tropes, you find yourself competing with some insanely good writers. That may be his problem; Wilcox's work is lost in the noise floor not because of an unfortunate choice of genre (or lack thereof), but just because he's not that great. Can you imagine the blurb above on the back of a book with Alice Munro's name on the front? The truth is, most writers need some kind of genre schtick to identify themselves to the market and sell books. No shame in admitting that.
Writing is like any other field of endeavor: the more replaceable you are, the less money you make.
"you find yourself competing with some insanely good writers."
Not only that, but you find yourself competing against writers who were alive centuries ago (Jane Austen, Melville) or decades ago (Fitzgerald, Hemingway). You also find yourself competing against many, many novelists in a fragmented marketplace, as I described in response to an agent's blog here: http://jseliger.com/2009/07/25/literary-fiction-and-the-curr... . Note in particular that you're also competing against a used book marketplace that's got decreasing friction.
That's not to say I'm complaining: but it's also how it goes, and people who don't understand the structure of the publishing industry or the forces acting on it might find some very unpleasant surprises as they wade into the riptide. One nice thing about Greenspun's comments about writing is that they're realistic and readily accessible. A lot of people who write about writing, especially on blogs, seem more romantic than knowledgeable.
As for "A Web server and worth-of-mouth is all that you need to reach an audience of 50 million", I think this is telling of the time this was written, in 1996. Seems to me we've since discovered that reaching a large audience online requires similar amounts of luck or self promotion as it did pre-Web, perhaps with cheaper costs.
(BTW, I always thought this doers vs credit takers is the main underlying theme of The Wire. The conflict between the McNultys and Rawls's of this world.)