The current AI chaos is prompting people to write all sorts of posts and articles about the imminent death of the web. The current debacle surrounding the TikTok ban (forced sale?) in the US is making journalists believe that the internet as a global town square where people can interact is over if governments start banning these huge platforms.
I don’t believe the web is dying. Not for one second. Maybe this specific version of the web is dying, that might be true. Let’s imagine we ban TikTok. And Facebook. And Instagram. And Threads. And all the other huge platforms. There would still be one global town square left. It’s called the web. The web itself IS the global town square.
Sure, it’s a lot harder to reach a million people if you have to start from your own little corner of the web. But you know what? Tough shit. Some things in life are hard. And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe being able to instantly become viral is not a good thing overall. Maybe we do want some friction in the system.
The web is not dying. People won’t stop creating because silly AI tools will flood the web with generated crap. Photographers won’t stop taking pictures because Midjourney exists. Filmmakers won’t stop creating videos because Sora is now available to everyone.
Creative people are driven by the passion for creation. Writers write because they love writing. Bloggers will keep blogging away because that’s what they do.
The web is not dying. I started People and Blogs last September. I post one interview a week. I almost completely stopped searching for new people to interview because my list of potential guests had enough entries to last a few years. And yet I’m still finding new blogs daily. Ooh.directory has more than 2200 blogs listed. The Kagi small web dataset contains more than 12000 entries. I have more than 1400 sites listed on theforest.link. You could click on a new link every day and have enough new content for the next 40 years. And I am 100% certain that those sites will contain links to other new sites you can explore.
The web is not dying. The web is huge. The web is ever-expanding. The fact that the web is just the same 5 big websites is a fucking lie. It’s like saying the restaurant industry is the same 5 fast food chains. It is not. It’s up to you to decide to stop visiting those 5 sites and stop ingesting their fast food content.
The web is not dying. Start clicking around. Be curious. Follow random links. Search something on Marginalia or Wiby. Make a blog on Bear Blog or Micro.blog and start creating. Join a Webring. Write something for the IndieWeb Carnival. Connect with others.
The web is not dying. The only thing that’s slowly dying is the spirit, the mindset that made the web such a wonderful place to begin with.
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Braintrust query: I'm interested in getting an adjustable height desk. I'd like to start with an inexpensive one, and if I like it, I'll get a real one. If I can get it via Amazon that would be best. #
I won't believe the NYT has any integrity until they let people criticize them on their op-ed page. #
My camas! I way overplanted this trough in years past so it’s weirdly drooping out of the planter bed but tbh looks pretty! Iirc I think this might be common camas (Camassia quamash) and the stuff in the ground is great camas (Camassia leichtlinii)?
Win of the week: took it pretty chill after finishing my work work on Monday
Looking forward to: we’re going to try to hit the rhodie garden soon — last time we went, we’d missed all the rhododendrons 🤷♀️
Stuff I did:
7.5 hours consulting — got ahead of myself last week and really thought I could wrap my deliverable in a couple hours, then I wasn’t happy with one last thing and fixing that broke a bunch of other things 🤦♀️
Met my friend for a walk at the nearby State Park and the trail
Informational interview with a new grad in the sustainability field
Finally bought a small stockpot during a Sur La Table 20% off sale — I’ve been putting it off because it’s $$$, but I tried a cheapo nonstick pot and scratched it instantly, so I’m going with All-Clad since they honored their warranty on my other pots
Went to Homebrew Website Club
Played games with my sister
Baked strawberry biscuits, though for some reason they came out super flat (I used fancy butter, blaming that)
Two weeding sessions plus extracted my ocean spray shrub from some encroaching blackberry vines and pulled all the euphorbia starts I could find — I thought it was a cool plant but it self-seeds *way* too aggressively
Mark Gurman says that Apple “has renewed discussions with OpenAI about using the startup’s technology”. GPT-4 is simply more advanced than anything else. Makes a lot of sense for Apple to have their own small models run on device, and lean on others for larger server infrastructure.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the presidential immunity appeal from Donald Trump this week (coverage from Election Law Blog, Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse, CNN takeaways, CNN live coverage, and The Bulwark). The outcome is uncertain, but appears to be headed for delaying the January 6th trial past the 2024 election. In 2022, I wrote a post on the theme of “it is up to us”, and this post can be considered a refrain. Several weeks ago, I wrote that our hopes for the courts to stop Donald Trump have been dashed. It is time for us to stand up to fight for our country. I just got a copy of “A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump” from the library today, looking to take some action soon. It is time to get started.
I feel ridiculous saying this before I've even started working full-time, but I'm afraid I'm burning out. Of what I'm not sure. I'm not even doing all that much right now, and I know it'll get much worse in June and July.
I have yet to plan for my four private lessons this weekend. Recently I've been struggling to figure out what to do in class. I've finished teaching my students the basics of the curriculum so now what we do in class is up to my discretion. My supervisor told me that I can pick whatever in-class activities I want, like free writing prompts or analyzing a video/passage of my choice. The lack of specific guidance paralyzes me. There are plenty of things pinging around in my mind, but I don't know if they're things elementary and middle schoolers would find interesting.
I'm also building the new online portal for my tutoring company, a process which is occasionally rewarding but mostly frustrating. I'm frustrated right now because the task I'm working on right now is far more complex than the spec initially made it out to be: I have to do all sorts of funky SQL joins to get data from different places and my brain does not currently have the bandwidth to support tasks of that magnitude.
The sheer amount of things I have to do in the coming months weighs on my mind. On top of moving into a new apartment, the very day I start my new job I'll begin teaching writing bootcamps in the evenings from 8 to 10 PM. I'll teach every day from mid-June to around mid-July. The schedule gives me Saturday nights off, but I won't be able to rest then either because that's when my private lessons are. Three of them, back to back from 7 to 10 PM.
I know I could back out of this arrangement now but I won't. Selling an entire month's worth of evenings for two months of rent is too good a deal for me to pass up. But needing the money and even wanting to teach doesn't make me feel any less tired thinking about it.
My mom's been going around and telling all of her three friends about my new job, who have in turn texted me to congratulate me. She's also trying to take me out to celebrate tonight. I'm not really in the mood. I just want to lay down and dissociate for a while. (And eventually catch up on all the work staring at me.)
Elle Griffin seems to have carved out a niche for herself telling hard truths to would-be writers – which is an unpleasant but useful service, I think. But there’s one troublesome point I think she actually understresses — though it will take me a few minutes to get to that point.
Griffin cites this chart from Penguin USA:
Category 1: Lead titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up
Advance: $500,000 and up
Category 2: Titles with a sales goal of 25,000–75,000 units
Advance: $150,000-$500,000
Category 3: Titles with a sales goal of 10,000–25,000 units
Advance: $50,000- $150,000
Category 4: Titles with a sales goal of 5,000 to 10,000 units
Advance: $50,000 or less
Four times in my career I have received Category 3 advances; in two of those cases (The Narnian and How To Think) I ended up with Category 1 sales, thus significantly overperforming my advance. In one case (Breaking Bread with the Dead) I have achieved sales to match the “sales goal,” though not (yet?) enough to earn back my advance; in the fourth case (Original Sin) I underperformed the sales goal.
All this assuming that the above information is correct, which, I dunno.
Anyway, this track record should make it possible for me to get another Category 3 advance, should I want one, and if I can come up with the right proposal. I’m not a sure-fire winner, but I’m a decent bet when I do get a big-house contract. (My academic books don’t figure into this discussion, because while they sell well for academic books, even taken together they don’t make enough money annually to pay my property taxes.)
And if the numbers Griffin cites are correct, the sales of my more successful books put them, to my surprise and puzzlement and discomfort, in the top 5% of published books. It’s true that How to Think has sold more copies than books from the same period by Billie Eilish and Justin Timberlake, which should tell you something – mainly that fans of Billie Eilish and Justin Timberlake don’t read books. I should also add that How to Think really took off for a little while because Fareed Zakaria loved it and hyped it on CNN. Funny old world, ain’t it. But still … the “top 5%” thing just feels wrong.
Anyway, let’s imagine that I receive a $100,000 advance for a future book. Not impossible by any means. The thing is, and this is the point I think Griffin should lean on more heavily: “advance” is a misleading term. Advances don’t come all at once, they come in stages, either three or four of them, for instance:
$25,000 at contract signing;
$25,000 at submission of an acceptable (but still to be edited) manuscript;
$25,000 at publication of the hardcover;
$25,000 at publication of the paperback, or, if the publisher chooses not to make a paperback, one year after the publication of the hardcover.
(Sometimes the unit payments vary: for instance, for Breaking Bread with the Dead my agent negotiated bigger payouts for the first and third stages, smaller ones for the other two.) In a typical situation, after you sign the contract you might need two years to write the book. Supposing that your manuscript is pretty good and just needs editing, that process can take several months, and then getting the book ready for publication can take several more months. And the final payout will come a year after that initial publication. So while a $100,000 advance sounds like a lot of money, it often ends up being $25,000 a year; not nearly enough to live on.
The moral: Writing books can be a nice supplement to your day job, but it is virtually impossible for it to replace your day job, even if you’re in the top 5% percent of sales. That I, several of whose books appear to be in that category, couldn’t make a decent living if I sold three times as many of those books as I do, should suggest … not, as Griffin keeps saying, that no one buys books, but that the whole industry is smaller than most people think and a money machine for only a handful of writers. You probably have to get into the top 1% of published-by-publishers writers to make a living solely by writing. Probably only a few hundred, or at most a few thousand, people in the entire world manage that. (Griffin seems to think Substack offers a better chance for success, but I bet the percentages there are roughly the same.)
P.S. I’m probably not going to get another significant advance, because I doubt I will ask for one. I can’t at the moment imagine wanting to write a book that a Big Five publisher would want to pay for. That could change, of course, but I don’t expect it will. I decided to write my Sayers biography for a university press rather than a trade house primarily to write the book I wanted to write — not the book I needed to write to earn back an advance.
P.P.S. I see Freddie has weighed in also. Some good thoughts there, but I’m not sure about the title: “Publishing is Designed to Make Most Authors Feel Like Losers Even While the Industry Makes Money.” Maybe that’s right. It’s certainly that advances used to be smaller for the biggest sellers and larger for the mid-list writers, which made it possible for mid-list writers to make a modest but firmly middle-class living — especially when they could supplement their book income with writing for periodicals that, in inflation-adjusted dollars, paid much more than they do now. (Why could so many magazines back in the day pay so much more? Because they got much higher ad revenue in periods when ad money didn’t have nearly as many places to go.) The publishing industry has clearly borrowed the Silicon Valley venture capitalists’ practice of hoping for one or two hits in a thousand investments, but I don’t understand how that affects their decisions about how to distribute the money they have available for advances. I wish I did.
