The Writing Cooperative

Thanks for reading. I'm pretty open about the fact that "bestseller" is relatively meaningless, but that I use it anyway. Some people will say that you only have a "real" bestseller if NYT or WSJ say so. And, as described in the article, you could sell 3,000 99¢-cent ebooks in a week and be a WSJ bestseller. Well short of 11k or 8k for that matter. No guarantee you'd sell another book after that timeframe. Authors manipulate these lists all of the time. Especially NYT, which is curated. Just about anybody can get a "bestseller" tag on Amazon. Is that somehow not a bestseller? It's an argument in semantics. I talk about it more in this article: https://writingcooperative.com/yes-your-amazon-best-seller-is-a-real-b…

I don't know where you got the notion I look down on populist authors or its writing. I'm talking about the market of writing itself, and the incentives actually in effect for writers. Book sales at the time of Shakespeare would have been hampered by a number of factors, including the slow rate of printing presses (about 60--120 impressions/hour), the cost of books (cheap pulp-based paper had yet to be invented), and low literacy rates (25% or less of the population). It wasn't until all of those were developed, largely during the 19th century, in which printing rates increased roughly a millionfold (wood grape-crush presses to electrically-powered, steel-framed, Linotype-set, continuous-paper-roll web presses), cheap paper, and 90%+ literacy rates), that owning more than a handful of books became common. Development of the paperback further accelerated this, often through the re-issue of out-of-copyright "classics" in low-cost libraries for the everyman. Even the notion of a bookcase or bookshelf as a notable item of furniture is a surprisingly late development, largely since 1860, and growing markedly in prevalence after 1900, judging by Google's Ngram viewer: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bookshelf%2C%20bookcase%… (A methodology with issues, but a methodology all the same.) Sales of modern books are largely all but nonexistent. It might not be only a dozen…

Reminds me of one of the writing tips by Neil Gaiman [1]: "Start a compost heap" The act of entering information into a Notes app feeds the compost heap in a more or less indirect way, which then acts as subconscious nurture for later creativity. If you of the creative kind, that is. [1] https://writingcooperative.com/neil-gaimans-top-13-writing-tips-d78848…

I found this article on it: https://writingcooperative.com/the-anatomy-of-an-amazon-6-pager-fc79f3…

There are lots of other articles about what's in an Amazon doc [0]. They're mostly accurate but it depends on the team quite a bit. Comments are exactly what you'd expect from any doc comments. (what does this mean? who's the audience? does it scale? what are alternatives?) There are other links in the comments here with more examples if you're curious. Most of the documents are shared via calendar invite. Lots of teams/products have team folders to collect docs centrally. Finding docs at Amazon has been the biggest gap IMO. There are too many places a document can exist and no way to centrally search them all. [0]: https://writingcooperative.com/the-anatomy-of-an-amazon-6-pager-fc79f3…

Someone who used to work at Amazon wrote one[0] describing their game engine, as well as a description[1] of the important mechanics of the document. 0: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPh1LWx1z67YFo67DENYUGBaoKk39dtX7r… 1: https://writingcooperative.com/the-anatomy-of-an-amazon-6-pager-fc79f3…

Blogspam of https://writingcooperative.com/the-first-word-exercise-1ab3fa590387