My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.

  • Southrydge Freedom@vlemmy.net
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    1 year ago

    It’s honestly heartbreaking considering how much work it must be to write a book and how scary it is especially with so many influencers and celebrities in the market now already making it harder for real authors to get noticed

    • blindsight@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      The two communities I’m most missing from going cold turkey on Reddit are niche book subgenre subs. I used to check them daily for new book announcements and discussions, and I got literally all of my “fun” book recommendations from those subs.

      I guess they have a Discord group which is okay, but I’m not really interested in sitting in a chat room.

      So yeah, agreed. Discoverability is a huge problem for authors already, even before AI-written drivel starts filling the Kindle store.

      • hazeebabee@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        What genres are you looking for? There are a couple good communities, but youre right, not nearly as big or as niche as most subreddits. Though ive found the reccomendations to be higher quality when i do see them.

        • Dusty@l.dustybeer.com
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          1 year ago

          For me it’s fantasy. Stuff like Dungeon Crawler Carl, Joe Abercrombe or R A Salvatore etc… If you have a suggestion for an active community that’s not on discord I’d love to hear it.

          • hazeebabee@slrpnk.net
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            1 year ago

            Hmmm I am more of a sci-fi person, but I’ve definitely still seen some threads talking about fantasy books. I’m guessing you’re already on the main book communities like [email protected] [email protected] ? They are pretty active and I do see discussion on threads talking about fantasy books. There is also the fantasy community [email protected] – which does admittedly have pretty low traffic (though, you could be the change you want to see…). I found one niche community that was very recently made [email protected]

            I get how hard it can be to find active book reading communities & wish I had more suggestions in the fantasy realm. If you have a specific sub genre in mind, search for it or maybe even make a community for it. I was surprised to find a few different scifi sub genres already had active communities on lemmy & even recently made communities are growing fairly quickly with the new users.

            Good luck finding your next page turner & lmk if you want sci-fi recs :)

            • Rekorse@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              To be fair you don’t need that many people to commit to a session in a book reading club before it’s full enough to work. Anything more is just a bonus.

            • sgtlighttree@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Just a heads up, I think you should remove the exclamation points in your links, it resulted in a 404 for me before I removed them.

      • Southrydge Freedom@vlemmy.net
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        1 year ago

        Isn’t there a fediverse site for books? Book Wyrm? Or something like that, I wonder if that’ll ever take off, but considering it’s not very mainstream, maybe not

        • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          It’s still super basic.

          I don’t blame them, but you can’t actually functionally break your books into lists. They exist, but you have to manually search each one to add them, which isn’t practical unless your history is extremely small.

    • VoxAdActa@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn’t be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I’d be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

      • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        One thing we’re re learning is that curating content is necessary. Whether you pay a publisher by buying books they sell or crowdsorce via some website, it’s near impossible to just yourself go through the firehose.