What are the best ways to publish rational fiction nowadays?
Where do people publish something like ratfic now? I couldn’t find any contemporary posts or discussions on LessWrong on this topic, so I decided to raise the question myself. There is a wikitag Fiction with a lot of posts, but the majority of them seem to come from elder days.
Options I considered
LessWrong
Pros:
Kind of the target audience.
Many people actually read what you write here.
Active feedback.
Cons:
No one seems to be doing this here now, and maybe there are reasons for that.
I don’t want to pollute the space with something potentially irrelevant.
My pieces are not concentrated ratfic, only partially so. They are more about rationality culture as a cultural phenomenon than about rational thinking manifested directly in the plot.
Pros:
Thematically seems very relevant.
Some stories there appear to be popular.
Cons:
Easy to remain unnoticed.
It’s just a subreddit with no good infrastructure to manage and maintain a book over time.
Pros:
Literally dedicated to ratfic.
Cons:
Doesn’t seem very active; most people just crosspost from somewhere else.
Substack
Pros:
Seems like one of the default ways for people to write fiction now, and it has all the necessary functionality.
Cons:
I don’t have any audience there. How do I get one?
Pros:
Also seems like one of the default ways to publish, and there are some success stories where people got noticed without an existing audience.
Cons:
No concentration of the target audience; it doesn’t seem like many people interested in this kind of fiction would be hanging out there.
Anything else? I would appreciate any suggestions I haven’t considered.
Obviously, I also consider multiplatform publishing. For example, something like “original posting on Royal Road + crossposting to LW, reddit, and telegram”.
About my books specifically
You don’t need to read this section if you only want to answer the question above, which would already be very helpful. But if you’re curious, here is some context about the books.
Generally, the genre is a combination of:
Rational fiction as it is commonly defined.
Depiction of rationalist culture as a cultural phenomenon.
Optimistic proud-human-spirit golden-era-style sci-fi, but very hard.
Depiction of Eastern European (or, to be more precise, Ukrainian) science olympiad culture.
Not a utopia, but what I call an antiantiutopia: a world from whose point of view our world looks like an antiutopia.
First book — “Coming of Age”
Our time, but a parallel timeline that diverged from ours in the mid-20th century. This is a timeline where history has gone well. They have their equivalent of “What happened in 1971?” but in the positive direction.
Slow pace, not much action, a lot of worldbuilding and multiverse-nostalgia about a better world; philosophy and culture. Essentially an encyclopedia of my dream world disguised as fiction. A lot of references, hidden messages, and structures to decipher.
Central topic: seriousness, civilizational adulthood, and cosmic responsibility.
It would be logical to publish the first book first, but it is probably more boring and risky than the second one, so I’m not sure. Especially if I publish chapter by chapter, since some chapters don’t contain any action and are there for contemplation, so readers can’t be held by dopamine alone.
Second book — “Second Try”
The same universe as the first book but three centuries later.
Pre-singularity ASI alignment drama, but with a society that is not insane. Almost everyone is very sane, doing their best as they see it.
Glorious transhuman future in the flesh.
Sci-fi action, contacts with extraterrestrial civilizations.
Central topic: a better humanity still contains a great evil in its heart but can overcome it.
Intuitively, this book feels like it would catch more people, and it is also about ASI and the approaching singularity, while being carefull technical and scientific realism, so the topic is hot, and overall it is more action-oriented. However, it relies on many things from the previous book, and some elements may be unclear or feel unrealistic without the explanations and plot events of the first one.
My default plan is still to launch the second book first and then offer the first book to the interested audience who want to know how that world was born and formed.
Regarding monetization: I don’t care. I care only about reaching the audience.
Let me know if you have any thoughts on any of this.
I feel like there’s still a fair amount of fiction on LessWrong, e.g. from @TomasD or @Richard_Ngo. I plan to post some of my own fiction here soon.
If people on LW don’t want to see your fiction, they won’t upvote it and it won’t “pollute the space.” I think you have nothing to lose from posting it. I’d personally be interested to see it in my feed.
That makes total sense, and it is good to know there is contemporary fiction on LessWrong. However, couldn’t find anything on @TomasD account. Maybe you meant some other account?
Oops, I meant @Tomás B.
I started my rat-fic on RoyalRoad and immediately announcing it on r/rational. It got a good number of upvotes, at least by the subreddit’s standards. There are far more subscribers than evident from regular posts. Everyone feels starved for content and will happily give something new a shot, and they will extend sometimes unwarranted levels of courtesy to some works of uneven tenor. It’s enough to get you a few hundred viewers on the first chapter and at least a handful of comments. My most dedicated readers did come from the subreddit.
Eventually, I burnt out because of IRL work and exam pressure, but I did find the exercise fun, and I did write something comparable in length to the entire HP series even if it’s technically unfinished. It was meant mostly as a proof-of-capability that I was a decent writer, just before LLMs were at a point where they could do substance well and could barely manage style. Once they’re strictly superior to me, or any human, I want to retain historical bragging rights.
It was also an excuse to nerd out and share my niche and otherwise unproductive knowledge of speculative engineering and medicine, orbital mechanics and military tactics in a post-Singularity setting. I think I had just read a ton of Worm and felt rather annoyed by perceived inconsistencies in the worldbuilding (which some have told me were later addressed, but I’d read several million words already and that is as long as my patience held). All of this is a verbose way to lead up to the point that it was niche, but hey, it was my niche and I enjoyed writing it for the few thousand people with exceedingly specific taste.
As general advice: if your fic is complete, then consistent posting is the best bet for traction on RR. It keeps it near the top of the recent updates list, which moves fast but is seen by many potential readers. You might want to schedule the chapters ahead of time. r/rational frowns upon posting more than a single link to your own work a week, though this is more enforced by the users complaining than the mods. I ran afoul of it because I wrote very fast, but eventually switched to bundling chapters together when sharing them. The more popular works like Super Supportive (never liked it honestly) have enough readers that they someone will share for you, but it’s a luxury.
You can also
shamelessly begcall to action readers to upvote your submissions elsewhere. I did, sometimes, and I think it worked.Good luck! There really isn’t enough of this stuff out there, and I am happy to see someone else try. I would love to read it when it’s out.
Thanks, that is helpful!
Regarding completeness—my first book is complete, and the second is in the middle. I had a hard time enforcing consistency across the first book and making sure that there are no contradictions in different places once the main plot was there, so I am a bit hesitant to release chapters of the second book before it is finished, because I fear I will need to rewrite some parts. But yes, I have like 10 chapters ready for weekly posts let’s say.
Can you share your piece by the way?
Welcome to writing fiction that aspires to ratfic territory. I have faced massive headaches when it came to resolving dangling plot threads, or finding a way to make a plot where even a rational actor wouldn’t see every twist coming a mile in advance. But it’s a good challenge, I hate it when other writers take the easy way out by making characters selectively intelligent or depict genius in absurd ways, so I held myself to higher standards.
(Maybe I should have plotted things out in advance better than I did, but I don’t find that fun, and I write for fun)
If you intend to act soon, then I strongly advise starting with the complete book. Alternatively, you can post both at once, and work on the latter till you catch up, hopefully before you run out of scheduled posts.
>Can you share your piece by the way?
Happy to, since you ask even after my caveats:
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/65211/ex-nihilo-nihil-supernum-original-hard-scifi-with
Cover blurb:
>Dr. Adat Sen has been having a bad week. >You think you have it good, after the sudden appearance of superpowers into the world revolutionizes everything. Especially when your wife is a one in a billion teleporter, it’s a cushy gig right until the draft notice arrives and she’s forced into a war of apocalyptic proportions under alien suns. >The same star system where, every day, hundreds of trillions of dollars and the lives of millions of normal humans and metahumans alike are destroyed in a meat grinder, barely managing to hold the line against the K3 civilization that a superpowered research experiment accidentally brought to our doorstep. >Let’s not forget that his promised pay raise didn’t come through, or that someone’s out for him to the extent of trying to trying to fry his brain with a Basilisk hack. Who would have thought that being a a cyborg psychiatrist for the UN could be this stressful? >Then there’s the matter of publish or perish, handling nasty cognitohazards on a daily basis, convincing suicidally depressed superhumans not to take everyone else with them, all while living under the shadow of the hostile advanced aliens building a Nicoll-Dyson laser in the solar system next door. Oh, and the one Superhuman AGI that humanity produced might be out to get them.
>Welcome to the world of ENNS, where superheroes have actual jobs and don’t run around in costumes fighting muggers, humanity faces existential threats around every corner, and Adat has the bad luck of finding himself fighting threats way above his pay grade.
In my experience, the blurb will very quickly tell you if this novel is not for you, or if it’s very for you.
Personally I wrote a novel on RR and posted chapters of it to /r/rational last year and… never got any comments. Not even critique. I think I gave up after a month. Was it too generic RR-bait? Was it just not appealing for some reason? I don’t know, and I don’t think I ever will.
That soured me on linking anything there.
I can’t speculate without seeing your actual novel. All I can say is that even very recently, I have seen people upvoting and engaging with very bad submissions, including what were clearly mostly AI-written books, though of course there were complaints. My experience is that the community is quite open-minded, and starving for content. But you might very well have had bad luck despite an otherwise decent book.
I think lots of people interested in ratfic do exist on RoyalRoad just by dint of it being so popular. I agree there isn’t concentration, but the way I see it you can help advertise to a more targeted audience on r/rational (or if it gets popular enough maybe LW).
Consider how Worth The Candle is popular enough that people with no knowredge of rationality read and enjoy it; and as more of an edge case, Mother of Learning is literally the top of all time on RoyalRoad. A Practical Guide to Sorcery is likewise popular there. This all generally suggests that using the standard popular thing is fine.
Thanks, makes sense!
Could you maybe expand on what you mean by “or if it gets popular enough maybe LW”? Like, to post it on LW if it becomes popular enough on RoyalRoad?
That’s what I meant, yeah. My reasoning was originally “well, not much fiction is on LW, and it’s not very primary here”, but now I’m remembering active encouragement to post fiction here, and so now I think you should just also post it here and the worst that would happen is lack of engagement.
People have done this in the past. I personally quite like it, and don’t mind scrolling past stories I’m not interested in. (And I’m far more likely to read a story if it’s dropped into my daily check of less wrong than if it requires me to learn it exists on RR or a sub stack or whatever.)
I think the core of it is that it’s a genre where a number of very prolific writers covered the core tropes as thoroughly as anyone could expect a while ago. Sort of like how The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ‘killed’ the Western genre by covering all the bases well enough that there wasn’t much left to be said.
IABIED has a bunch of short stories embedded in the text as fables depicting each argument in sequence, but the stories all revolve around a core point that’s currently in the zeitgeist, and the fiction isn’t the core point behind the book’s marketing. Besides that, there are still some writers here, as others have pointed out, but their writing is much more differentiated and experimental than older work was.
I disagree! Of the ratfic fans I know, many have frequented royal road, myself included.
You’re looking at it backwards. A large fraction of ratfic readers also read royalroad. But a very small portion of royalroad reads (or wants to read) ratfic. Not enough to affect site trends or gather momentum for an audience. (Though there’s some good near-ratfic in the classic RR-bait categories, like Sky Pride in cultivation.)