Ask HN: Has anyone made money self-publishing tech criticism?
I'm an Italian writer who published two satirical books on Amazon: 'The Algorithm Is an Asshole' and 'The Performance: 36 Portraits of Life in the Attention Economy.'
Zero sales in months. I tried BookSprout ($9 for 108 fake impressions, 0 reviews). Every platform I use to promote books about algorithm manipulation... uses algorithm manipulation to bury me.
The irony is crushing. Has anyone here actually sold indie books criticizing tech without getting destroyed by the systems they criticize? Or is this just Kafka's final joke?
I think the problem you're having here is you feel persecuted by the algorithms, and the algorithms don't care. Everybody is getting persecuted and buried by the algorithms, whether they criticize or praise them.
You're absolutely right. The problem isn't that I'm special - it's that the system buries everyone equally, whether you're criticizing it or celebrating it.
So the real question becomes: if algorithms bury criticism by design, what's the actual path to reach readers? I tried paid promotion (BookSprout), organic posting (Reddit blocks new accounts), and now HN.
For anyone who's actually broken through: was it luck, persistence, or something I'm missing?
Who's your audience? What did your beta readers say? Did they pass it on to their friends? You're probably not going to get to meaningful revenue from word of mouth, but if you can't get your first few dozen real reviews from people passing it on to their friends, you likely haven't identified your niche.
That's the core problem: I didn't have beta readers. I went straight to publish thinking 'good satire sells itself.'
My assumed audience: tech workers frustrated with algorithms, digital minimalism crowd, people who loved writers like Mark Manson or Tim Urban's Wait But Why.
But I never validated that audience actually EXISTS on Amazon, or that they'd buy books vs just reading free blogs.
Zero reviews = I can't even test if the content resonates. It's like shouting into a void with no echo back.
How do you know if it's good satire if you don't have trusted readers to give feedback? It's nearly impossible to judge the quality of your own work. I notice that the book was "created with the assistance of AI tools"... hopefully you didn't interpret AI's syncophancy as a signal? Part of writing for an audience is engaging with that audience to understand how they perceive the work. If you don't have beta readers from an existing network (writers' workshop, etc), they're available as a paid service.
You're right - I used Claude heavily as an editor and co-writer in my 'Industrial AI Publishing' model. I generated drafts with GPT, then refined everything with Claude for tone and coherence.
I was transparent about this process because I thought 'AI-assisted satire about AI' was meta-interesting. But maybe that's exactly why it doesn't sell: people smell the AI sycophancy you mentioned.
The brutal question: can AI-assisted satire ever feel genuinely sharp, or does the tool's politeness always dull the blade? I'm starting to suspect the latter.
1 comments