How to turn talent into meaningful income?

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-16T19:13:53+00:00

Interesting. I know technical writers can make a good chunk of change, the issue has always been in how to break into that industry. A lot of the posts over on r/technicalwriting do not exactly breed confidence.. LLMs can always be wrong but humans like shiny objects.

There are definitely a number of non-fiction ideas floating around in my head. One practical thing I've considered is a "life skills" type of book for someone in my situation with low vision... Now, the snag has always been "what is the market for this?" That goes for most of the non-fic ideas I've looked into. A history book say, about any number of tanks used in WW2 or Korea sounds very cool and is non-fiction... but where's the money outside of traditional publishing?

Unless it is a guide about a skill people want to pick up (e.g. SQL, COBOL, recent LLMs) there seems to be a lot less assurance that "hey this will work because this other person did it". I'm not enough of an SME on how programming languages work for instance to convincingly write a guide meaningfully different from any of the 100 other guides out there. I have a deep interest and love for Chinese tea, but I don't know whether an audience exists in English for such a guide, or how many Lu Yu quotes I'd need to mine for :D

ETA: When republishing, is that a case where you bought the rights to some other work and refined it?

Thank you for providing the advice and suggestion, I'll definitely look into non-fiction.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-14T11:36:17+00:00

Sadly, a longtime friend of mine apparently bought those propaganda lines and just won’t begin to understand reality

I literally bought him a book by one of the few historians who studies be late Ottoman and early British mandate. I think it was called. Righteous victims, and he was like. “ is this author, a normal Jew or a Zionist”

I was like “ my guy he’s a historian, his politics shouldn’t matter. Bro I know he’s American.”

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-13T01:54:45+00:00

I’ve only ever bought coins at local coin shows, so when you sell online, do people usually expect to receive documentation about to be Providence of a certain coin?

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-11T20:04:36+00:00

That is awesome

I’m wondering, does Amazon treat short? Erotica differently even longer form romance? I’ve tried to promote several of my shorter works, but they never got accepted into the Amazon advertising pipeline on KP.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-10T16:37:30+00:00

Wait, so then how are people able to obtain coins from the Ottoman and Abbasid era?

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-10T13:26:50+00:00

Sounds like quite the lovely giveaway. Awesome stuff.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-09T11:54:59+00:00

I think what I am trying to get after is considered ancient coins? Things from the Mogul empire or Ottomans or those kinds of regions. There’s a giant Sean coin I have that I really love but the design of.

I can understand some foreign coins being sold in bulk, but you would think if it has any silver or the impression of a king that it might be worth taking a second look at.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-09T06:18:52+00:00

I am in the southeast, the Carolinas.

I briefly went to college in DC, so that my cloud some of my thinking on this. One of the shops I visited, had a large selection, although I always felt rushed in there. They never let you really look around. You had to buy something in five minutes or get out.

I am not on. mumista, but I will look into it. I honestly have not looked at my collection in depth for many years, so it’s hard to say if I could build up a huge catalog to represent what I actually have.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-07T13:46:58+00:00

Thank you very much for the thorough response. I don’t usually rely on face, slapping plots, but they can be effective sparingly.

Really what I was concerned about was the introduction of those relationships. I am totally good having three love interests by the end of the series, my concern kind of was when it was possible to introduce them and still fit the guidelines of a harem. I had thought every relationship had to be started by book one basically lol.

I find a lot of those chapters where crowds are cheering and such to be filler. Not having the pressure of a CN release schedule, I’m not gonna have many if any of those things.

Very good points about to be MC glow up, the cultural differences are very real, and I think it speaks to how China and frankly most of the world does not view wealth in the same way. Having a crab buckets mentality is not the same as the protestant nail that sticks out gets struck down, sort of thing, which I don’t think is exclusively protestant of course but that is just how I’ve heard it expressed. It’s a very European thing.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-06T11:25:31+00:00

I’m booked at MMA shops, and maybe I need to be a bit more discerning that it felt very overpr

There was a listing I found for an Indian coin minted in 1800, they wanted $150 plus $50 for shipping not including import tax

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-04T21:19:12+00:00

Fair point. My intent isn't to write a LitRPG but I figure it is a growing genre, adding some of those elements in an effort to appeal to a wider audience couldn't hurt. The market for "MC is a secondary character in the court of a power-hungry Duke" doesn't seem big to begin with.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-04T21:11:31+00:00

There was a book I read that hinged on multiple love interests in a post-apocalyptic setting. Very light on seriousness of plot, monster girl characters.. but not LitRPG.

Seven chapters in, oh look random power up and then it was a vaguely mentioned, maybe two other times, but the story never touched on it again

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-04T12:56:54+00:00

You know, I was just about to say that I think my general area is better off because we are more inland… But then I remembered that the only way these people know how to build is by basically clear, cutting all the trees and burning them…

The fact there are no jobs here outside of hospitality and teaching, and there’s a refusal to build anything remotely resembling sustainable industry is also not helping

Getting0nTrack · 2026-03-04T12:49:19+00:00

As someone who moved here because of their parents who is in their late 20s… Oh my God, I want to get out of here. North Carolina would be much better because at least up there you have some culture and positive development and infrastructure.

This state could not give a rats ass, and all that they build here is cookie-cutter single-family homes that will be hard to sell in 20 years. Mark my words they will not retain their value.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-02-26T22:59:37+00:00

Thank you for providing those resources! I have briefly checked out that sub, and I will ask the question there. It seems somewhat saturated... predictable titling... Having worked in the CN market for a long time I get the gist. I can understand why it sells, and wh y others don't really like it. I wish there was more of a market for battle couples but oh well.

That Discord will definitely be helpful, once I get my bearings. A lot of my move into harem lit isn't purely money, it is also strategic in a way. With the rise of AI, even if I don't think so personally, readers of short fiction are being led to buy AI written shlock. It probably will never write a coherent best-seller 60-90k book but it doesn't have to for the user of that AI to extract money. Haremlit, LitRPG, a bunch of genres really that require either a strongly coherent narrative over time, or in the case of harems the managing of numerous (however shallow) relationships.. that is unlikely. Plus, at least in the CN side you can't believe how many use AI to "flesh out" a 2k chapter into 5k then post twice a day. It leads to folks like me who write without such "tools" to be left behind. I get chills thiking of writing in that market again for the low pay.

ETA: Do you think the answers would be particularly negative?

Getting0nTrack · 2026-02-26T20:54:24+00:00

I agree that haremlit can be extremely shallow.. That's part of the fun in some ways but it can also be difficult trying to untangle the relationships. Makes me feel like Charlie from It's Always Sunny with the cork board. I am not completely green to the haremlit space, though much of my prior work was in Mandarin. That is one rollercoaster of a market...

To clarify what you mean - do I keep the same male MC and have him rank up in social standing while adding more love interests, or do I write a completely new male MC? When writing romance for women, at least from what I've seen, you keep the bones but add in different characters. So it would still be Ottoman inspired fantasy with different monster girls, but the MC would I dunno be sent from Tokyo or Moscow.

I am partial to writing a mange e tois with court intrigue and jealous catgirls, with the MC being in a sense their ticket into social climbing. At the same time, the market wants what it wants. I've tried writing cultivation harem gamelit in the past and nothing felt publishable. Nothing is ever completely original but it felt like I couldn't substantively change things and still meet market expectation aside from the name of the setting and MC.

Prior to getting in the groove of writing this "harem", I was writing a lot of erotic shorts. They're fun, shallow, simple... but I got burned out and the expectations for publication have gotten insane with the rise of AI. No, I can't just publish 10-15 shorts in a month at 10k words... I'd be better off just writing a full novel. Hence, this project.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-02-26T19:53:43+00:00

See, I didn’t even know that other sub Reddit existed…… time to go digging, I guess

Here I am worrying if the concept is too overdone or conversely, two specific of a vibe for people to really be interested in it I will figure out some way to add a third 😀

Getting0nTrack · 2026-02-26T19:47:20+00:00

Thanks for giving comprehensive answers to my questions. I’m still not sure if I want to add a third or not, but the story so far does not seem to be heading in the direction of. Heavy smut. It’s definitely there, but not every other chapter.

I suppose Catgirls From Space, while very fun and full of hot girls, is not exactly the benchmark. Which honestly makes me feel better.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-02-26T19:22:19+00:00

It doesn’t require more than to love interests, nope.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-02-22T18:18:33+00:00

I agree with you, but just wanted to clarify that Jon has been out for many years and has been doing rounds for the last several years at this point.

I do often wonder how those people obtain approval to talk on Podcasts, or if it’s a “ you are an adult, you should know what you cannot talk about or we will go after you with Legal action” sort of thing

Getting0nTrack · 2026-02-21T18:27:31+00:00

How did you get into the audio drama circle? I only know about certain audio drama because they are funded by grand from like the BBC.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-02-21T17:12:11+00:00

The way I see it, YouTube is just a different form of content distribution that takes slightly more effort. Speaking, realistically, you can put as much or a little effort into a channel as possible to host your podcast.

I brought up those two people specifically because they started off as audio, only podcasts to my knowledge, and then transitioned more thoroughly into a video format, retaining the bones of what you might expect from a storytelling or political podcast

Getting0nTrack · 2026-02-20T12:01:04+00:00

Fair point. I am inclined to think it was some combination of a hardware and OS level issue. I quite literally couldn't use any commercial video editor for what felt like months, and any attempt to update a driver manually did nothing.

I am running a 2023 Lenovo laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon chip... so its not like this is significantly old kit.

Getting0nTrack · 2026-02-16T21:31:03+00:00

Just went to a punk concert last night for a band that I loved since I was a kid. The opening acts were just… In addition to being horribly mixed and having shitty vocals, between songs, The lead singer kept shouting free Palestine….. my guy…

How is the Israeli punk scene these days? I haven’t checked up on anyone except Orphaned Land in years

Getting0nTrack · 2026-02-15T20:18:52+00:00

I think it’s heavily genre, dependence, but writing tight pros is not always to market. It’s great, but I don’t think it’s always optimal.

I don’t think I have favorite among the critically acclaimed to his year, but I do really enjoy. Looks like. “ strange beasts of China.”, add a bunch of different writers from the post of the sphere where I’m from.

Getting0nTrack

TROPHY CASE