alt Hacker NewsWord of mouth is not marketing. The way you find the audience is by marketing. Paying to get in front of people. Targeting people who read similar books. Getting people who already have audiences to review your book or interview you.
A book won’t sell itself.
Which addresses your second point: machines can produce an endless stream of human-like text, but they have exactly the same problem as human generated text: finding an audience.
How are these endless streams of human-like text finding an audience? Most of the time they are not.
And as soon as you scratch beneath the surface there is no one to interview. No one to turn up at literary festivals. No one to write opinion pieces or blog pieces for book-interested audiences. As I said: writing isn’t the problem. Finding the audience is the problem.
What distinguishes a book that is read by no one from a book that is read by a bunch of people? It’s definitely not the writing. There are great books out there that never find an audience because no one ever went out there to find an audience for those books.
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You're not wrong, but you're sorta saying "the reason most people don't make money on Kalshi is because they're bad at gambling." Marketing matters, but most writers have no idea how to do it.
Maybe I am being too hard on you, but I think everyone who follows the writing world knows that writing doesn't influence sales. That's why publishers exist. Authors right now fucking hate traditional publishing with a passion—not just rejected authors, but career midlisters and lower-tier lead-title authors—and the only reason you don't hear more rage is that they know how replaceable 99% of them are. No one would put up with them if there weren't strong economic reasons to do so.
Most marketing strategies break even or have slightly positive EV for traditional publishers, due to all the entrenched unfair advantages they have. They're -EV for self-publishers who are trying to replicate the benefits of the stolen village on a shoestring.
The low budget marketing channels that worked in the past are harder in this post-LLM world. SEO seems to have changed a lot, email marketing now involves trying to escape the Promotions tab, organic social media marketing is much harder too (I suspect the large social networks want you to buy ads, not get organic reach as a person/business promoting a product or service). Marketing something like a self published book online has changed dramatically.