Ask HN: Posted AI book on algorithms–5.3K views, zero sales. What now?

If you're going to write satire... AI is not very good at creative writing like that- try finding your own style! You may surprise yourself.

Books are a hard sell. Think about it. You need to get someone to spend their time, lots of time, reading a book they have very little knowledge about. You have to convince them that its worth their time. You do that though promotion and trust. It takes time and hard work. Most authors, by a long shot, don't make money from a book , specifically their first. It takes lots of promotion and time to get started as an author.

The author of The Martian gave away the book for years before it caught on and made money for him and that book is outstanding.

Writing is a career not a one time book. Even then, it's a hard career to make a living at. Many people use books to express their ideas as a way to improve their true career. Think politicians that are running for office. Or people that want to improve their resume.

You need to continue to promote your book and hope it catches on. Think of it as a hobby until you can turn it into a career.

Also, if you tell me it's written by AI, I automatically think it's not something I want to read. I can get any LLM to write stuff to read. I don't need to buy a book. Use AI to help you but use your own style and words to write something people want to read. People are writing books written by AI by the thousands. You need to standout in that crowded market place. Good luck.

The Reddit commenter nailed it - community first, product second. But there's a timing thing people miss.

You can't speedrun trust. I've been building software tools for accountants and spent months just answering questions in bookkeeping forums before anyone even knew I made anything. No links, no mentions, just being useful. Eventually someone asks "what do you do?" and the conversation happens naturally.

The 5.3K views means the topic resonated. The zero sales means they didn't trust you yet. That's not fixable with better marketing copy - it's a relationship problem.

For your next project: pick one community, show up consistently for 3-6 months, share your actual process (failures included), and let people watch you figure things out. By launch time you won't need to convince strangers - you'll have 50 people who already know your work.

The Substack/email thing works but only if you're already interesting to someone. Cold signups don't convert either.

This is the clearest roadmap I've gotten. "You can't speedrun trust" hits hard.

Your point about "share your actual process (failures included)" is exactly what I'm missing. I tried to show up with finished product instead of letting people watch the work.

Question: when you say "pick one community" - how did you choose? Did you already use the tool you were building, or did you specifically go where your potential users were?

(Currently trying to apply this on r/nosurf - engaging without promoting, seeing if the fit is real.)

You're right that "written by AI" is an instant credibility killer. I thought transparency would be interesting meta-commentary. It wasn't - it just signaled "don't bother reading."

The Martian example is sobering. Years of free distribution before catching on. I expected results in weeks.

Taking your advice: next project I'll use AI as editing tool, not co-writer. Voice needs to be unmistakably mine or there's no point.

Thanks for the brutal but necessary reality check.

You're right. AI can't do satire well - the politeness always shows through. Lesson learned the expensive way.

Why would anyone pay for a book written by an llm?

There is a nice writeup [0] by the author of “100 Go Mistakes and How to avoid them”

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43647880

Seems like you already received plenty of good advice. It's time for you to move on.

There is a saying "Every author has a million words worth of crap in them." Have you written a million words?

Writing is a hard business. If you aren't willing to write the first five books just for yourself why bother? Selling 5000 copies is a bar very few books meet.

If someone wants to read slop they can just generate their own.

"Using LLMs at Oxide" [0], as seen on the HN frontpage yesterday, had a bit to say about LLMs as writers

> LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

> If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576