> If somebody creates a book like The Jungle, it would become a success anyway and more people would fund the author through consistent or one-time donations.
But you need something to actually get this going in the first place. It's worth noting that Dwarf Fortress only started getting a financially stable stream of donations because an alpha was bootstrapped. You can't really bootstrap a book based on investigative journalism, there aren't really stretch goals that a book can hit, etc. It works for small tidbits on a regular cadence like a podcast, but this isn't how a book works.
Books are also different from games, in that generally speaking when it comes to community funded games the creator and the patrons are broadly aligned. This is not a good dynamic for book publishing, because then people won't write content that for all its truths may just piss off their existing patrons and leave them destitute.
But you need something to actually get this going in the first place. It's worth noting that Dwarf Fortress only started getting a financially stable stream of donations because an alpha was bootstrapped. You can't really bootstrap a book based on investigative journalism, there aren't really stretch goals that a book can hit, etc. It works for small tidbits on a regular cadence like a podcast, but this isn't how a book works.
Books are also different from games, in that generally speaking when it comes to community funded games the creator and the patrons are broadly aligned. This is not a good dynamic for book publishing, because then people won't write content that for all its truths may just piss off their existing patrons and leave them destitute.