Hanabie

If you just write for yourself, it only costs time. If you plan to (*self-) publish it, though, you want at least a good cover, and optimally, you'd hire an editor and maybe things like sensitivity readers. And then, most people seem to prefer audio books these days, which is either expensive, or hard to pull off, due to having to find a narrator who's okay with royalty share with a non-established author. And then you haven't advertised your book at all yet.

I've so far only worried about cover and editing. Wrote 4 novels. Now I'm writing a series and am considering writing the whole thing completely first, then getting a deal with an artist for all the covers. This also makes it easier to do foreshadowing properly over the course of more than one book, and it's probably advantageous to stagger book releases, even if that means a few years without putting anything out to the world.

*All these points are moot if you aim to get published by an established house, but then you're dealing with "the suits", and people who rank "will it sell" higher than "is it good".

Still on Liftoff, but I wonder if it's still being updated.

No, I'm not writing Shadowrun, but the genre has some similarities.

I've always been of the opinion that people who truly love what they piratesd will at some point want the author to carry on writing. Just like someone who just stumbled upon your work by accident. That's the beauty of humanity, people do remember, and they do care, and creative arts are a pursuit that connects author and reader.

I tried on Kindle, but the reality is that every day, a six-digit number of books are being released, which leads to insane odds.

I wrote cyberpunk/urban fantasy crossover books, but am now switching over to space opera. If you're still interested, I can give you the title of the "entry book" that starts the story.

I agree, and the optimist in me desperately wants to experience a post-scarcity society like the one we're seeing in the The Culture books, where AIs run the world, and we humans are free to chase whatever it is we're dreaming of.

Maybe that's a romantic notion, but I'm hesitant to give up on in. Dreams are what's kept us going for the past millennia.

We might end up like people who do graphics... replaced by AI tools. There aren't any that make it as easy yet (and maybe there won't), but who knows where tech will lead us.

If you do it as a hobby, you don't need to worry about it so much, but it does take something away for sure.

I'm an indie author, and all my novels ended up on PDFdrive.

Not that I'd be mad about it. If someone pirates my books and likes them, maybe they'll support me in the future.

Just saying, I'm not wearing suits. I'm working full-time and write when I have off and got the time and energy.

For us Indies, getting eyeballs on our books is next to impossible anyways, so I already gave up on the idea that writing will ever be more than an expensive hobby.

Good thing I'm using Firefox.

He'll be in his 30s when wars start, because immigrants will overrun still habitable lands and fight for the quickly diminishing water reserves. If you're not yet in your 60s and nothing happens, you'll see it yourself.

We need way stricter laws and enough participant countries, and I'm sure it will happen. Things have already been accelerating these last 20 years, and it's taken dried out rivers in Europe and a high frequency of devastating hurricanes and wildfires in America and Australia to get things started. It will require even worse summers that drag out and eliminate spring and autumn for humanity to really be dead serious, but it will happen.

I doubt that very much, lol.