So, there's a dirty little secret in indie publishing a lot of people won't tell you, and if you aren't aware of it, self-publishing feels even scarier than it actually is.
There's a subset of self-published indie authors who write a ludicrous number of books a year, we're talking double digit releases of full novels, and these folks make a lot of money telling you how you can do the same thing. A lot of them feature in breathless puff pieces about how "competitive" self-publishing is as an industry now.
A lot of these authors aren't being completely honest with you, though. They'll give you secrets for time management and plotting and outlining and marketing and what have you. But the way they're able to write, edit, and publish 10+ books a year, by and large, is that they're hiring ghostwriters.
They're using upwork or fiverr to find people to outline, draft, edit, and market their books. Most of them, presumably, do write some of their own stuff! But many "prolific" indie writers are absolutely using ghostwriters to speed up their process, get higher Amazon best-seller ratings, and, bluntly, make more money faster.
When you see some godawful puff piece floating around about how some indie writer is thinking about having to start using AI to "stay competitive in self-publishing", the part the journalist isn't telling you is that the 'indie writer' in question is planning to use AI instead of paying some guy on Upwork to do the drafting.
If you are writing your books the old fashioned way and are trying to build a readerbase who cares about your work, you don't need to use AI to 'stay competitive', because you're not competing with these people. You're playing an entirely different game.
I’m sorry but literally at what point do we cross the line between “I’m so cool with gay people that I can make jokes about myself and my coworkers” into straight up homophobia 2.0
Fabric sample ‘Ornito’ with a pattern of stylized birds that have been designed with an enlarged fingerprint to which have been added beaks, eyes and legs. Material: cotton, metal, paper, 1968. Designer: Heinz Edelmann (1934-2009). Produced by the fabric manufacturer Weverij De Ploeg. TextielMuseum, Tilburg, Netherlands.
I constantly think about the quote (literally no idea what it’s from) I read once about how teenage girls want to fuck their band guy idols because it’s the closest they can get to wanting to BE their band guy idols. Like damn… way to recontextualize my entire adolescence with 1 sentence
people are saying do it scared, but you also gotta do it alone. you'll miss out on so much you want to do if you wait til someone will do it with you. do it scared and do it alone.