The idea that "marketing" is a simple, turnkey thing one can do to build an audience is incorrect. It's time-consuming and expensive, and most people lose money.

It's like saying "you can make money on Kalshi." Not false, but reductive.

I know plenty of authors, self-publishers and traditionally published, who've lost five and six figures marketing their own books. Whether this is worth doing is subjective, but for most people, it's not.

> Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience.

And that's precisely the issue here. For a while, the internet allowed you to find an audience, just like that. Start a blog / podcast / YT channel, keep going, get enough attention. You could then approach a traditional publisher and tell them "hey, I'm kind of a big deal", or you could self-publish and rely on the word-of-mouth from your followers.

Now, how would that work? If you have a blog, AI answers will summarize it without attribution and not send anyone your way. Even the "references" cited in AI answers often point to AI-slop blogs, not the original source. The articles we discuss on HN are often AI-written too. So yeah, it's about reaching the audience, but you're now competing with machines that produce an endless stream of human-like text, good enough for most consumers, practically for free.

> The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience.

You are literally responding to

> I really don't know if it'll have an audience

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