Novels - A Guide

[Death-Jester]

^{Edit: This topic was initially created to figure out how to get the Masterpiece novel, but since that was answered, I decided to turn it into a list of all the types of novels. A big thank you to everyone who helped contribute to this!}


Fantasy Novels - Write 3 Science Fiction Novels

Satire Novels - Write 3 Humour Novels

Masterpiece Novels - Write 25 Novels (Thank you BlueSoup!)

Vaudenville - Write 2 Romance, Humour, Drama, Mystery and Science Fiction Novels

Biography - Gained temporarily for Opportunities

Autobiography - Write 3 Biographys

Article - Reach Rank 3 in Journalism Career


Check this post to see what pbox managed to get out of the gameplaydata.package
And check out this post to see a fine list of hidden stats that PolecatEZ found.

[Roflganger]

Am I the only person who gets supremely annoyed by reading a thread title that suggests it is offering information, only to find out it is someone requesting information?  Bah.  Call it "Wanted - A Novel Writing Guide" or something. </grumpy>

[Skadi]

I've got a writing/novel guide here.
Masterpiece is unlocked by being a level 10 writer.

[BlueSoup]

I've got a writing/novel guide here.
Masterpiece is unlocked by being a level 10 writer.

Your information is incorrect.

Masterpiece shows up after writing 25 novels.  Usually the author is Level 10 by then, but it won't show up before 25 other novels are written.  As well, vaudeville only needs 2 of each of the types listed, not three.

[Death-Jester]

Am I the only person who gets supremely annoyed by reading a thread title that suggests it is offering information, only to find out it is someone requesting information?  Bah.  Call it "Wanted - A Novel Writing Guide" or something. </grumpy>

It is supposed to be a guide, but I need information to fill it in!
Why don't you contribute to it and then it would be a guide rather than a request for information.

[Roflganger]

I can add in the Articles info when I load my game, since I have a Sim in the Journalism career who just got the article writing ability.

(Aside: I did say I was grumpy earlier.  Am over it by now.)

Edit:  Articles become level at the Freelance Writer position, which is Level 3.

[purplebunny]

You can also get Opportunities to write Biographies--one of my sims has written 2 of them already and she's a full-time novelist. Both times the Opportunity has been to write the memoirs of her one and only friend.

[vilia]

One of my sims also got an opportunity to write a biography. She was level 8 in the Cooking career. She had only written 3 sci-fi novels up to that point and I wasn't really focussing on writing as a skill for her but I had her go through with it as the person wanting the biography was her boss.

[Kyna]

Am I the only person who gets supremely annoyed by reading a thread title that suggests it is offering information, only to find out it is someone requesting information?  Bah.  Call it "Wanted - A Novel Writing Guide" or something. </grumpy>

It is supposed to be a guide, but I need information to fill it in!
Why don't you contribute to it and then it would be a guide rather than a request for information.

How kind of you to create a guide where none of the information is provided by you.  I stand in awe of your awesome in-game knowledge and helpfulness.

Thanks, that was great.

[BastDawn]

You can read this stuff I tested out in the game, but the text file pbox attached to her post below is the best guide possible, because it uses the actual game data.

My learnings, let me show them to you:

Genre	av. pages	§	actual royalties earned
Fiction	90	$	66, 81 (hit), 123 (best seller)
Non-Fiction	90	$	58, 56, 95 (best seller), 59
Science Fiction	150	$	158
Trashy Novel	190	$	146, 265 (best seller), 169
Drama	305	$$	398
Children's (req. 4 painting)	105	$	265 & 339 (best sellers), 66 (flop)
Humor	345	$$	450
Historical (must be Elder)	345	$$	919 (best seller), 782 (hit)
Mystery	510	$$$	904 (hit)
Romance	675	$$$$	1603
Fantasy	440	$$$	1059, 1028 (best seller)
Satire	350	$$$	1216 (best seller), 1044 (hit)
Vaudeville	1250	$$$$	1155 (flop)
Biography	400	$$	308
Masterpiece	2000	$$$$$	5788

"Average pages" and the § numbers are taken from the Skill Journal; the "actual royalties earned" numbers reflect the weekly royalty my sim received, not the total.  I did not notice that skill level made any difference in royalties; it only seemed to unlock genres.  Most of this data was gained with a YA sim with the Clumsy, Good, Loves the Outdoors, Workaholic, and Vegetarian traits.  Some traits are alleged to give bonuses to related genres, and the traits I chose for this sim were not represented on that list.  Three novels were written by an elder sim with the Bookworm, Genius, Good, Hot-headed, and Workaholic traits: one non-fiction book with a §59 per week royalty, and the historical novels.  The elder sim had a skill level of 6, while the main test sim had maxed the writing skill before I started collecting royalty numbers.

In keeping with the spirit of this thread, I will note that the royalty information could use more data to allow us to make a reasonable average for flops, average sellers, hits, and best sellers.  Additionally, I have no information for the Autobiography.  Please feel free to post additional data, preferably noting the sim's traits and the performance level of the novel.

EDIT:  It would also be good to know if the sim has any lifetime rewards related to writing books.  (Neither of my sims had any.)  With more data, we can figure out how much those perks are really worth.

[BlueSoup]

My Sim at Level 10 writing, with Dislikes Children, Workaholic, Ambitious, Neat, Green Thumb and Charismatic traits:

Masterpiece: §20828 for best-seller, §15420 for hit, §9784 for regular sales.

She's a Vaudeville writer, so I'll start to keep track now but so far I haven't.

[BastDawn]

Does the sim have any perks related to writing books?

[Czezechael]

Has anybody bothered testing to see what, if any, effects the library's aura has on novel writing?  It seems to make it faster in my experience, but I'm honestly just going by feeling.  Sims also seemed nigh-guaranteed to crank out hits and best sellers when writing a book in the library, but that could just be dumb luck.

The library does seem to make skilling up faster, so it's worthwhile for that reason if nothing else.  Though I do believe that it does have an impact on profitability of books, I'll have to actually test it 'afore makin' any right-boastful claims.

[Gus Smedstad]

I'm curious what effect, if any, the genre type has on actually reading the books.  I've never quite understood the value in the very expensive books in the book store.  The books with game effects I understand, but not the ones that only increase Fun.

I wonder if we'll eventually get a SimPE-like took that will let us add additional markers.  Since, for example, you can't write Pregnancy books, there are only 2 in the game, and Sims constantly roll Wishes to read them when having kids, even if they've already read both.

 - Gus

[Czezechael]

I wonder if we'll eventually get a SimPE-like took that will let us add additional markers.  Since, for example, you can't write Pregnancy books, there are only 2 in the game, and Sims constantly roll Wishes to read them when having kids, even if they've already read both.

Well, you know, since puddings have no memories it's like a brand new experience for them!  Though obviously there's SOME marker indicating what they've done before (ergo "reread Broken Rubber: A love story"), just no way of going back and seeing what the hell happened.

So all the proposed virtues of having no memories, is it just a readily visible record that helped cause VBTs or existence at all?  Since there are obviously memoryoid toggles somewhere.

Also, would the fun rates of books be something more akin to script or XML?  With all the dandyriffic things extracted from the XML, maybe the answer to "does it fucking matter what book you read?" lies in there.

[kiki]

I love the names of the books that come up My sim wrote a Masterpiece last night (after having written nothing but non-fiction novels) she got $7406 for called "101 Reasons Why Frosting Is a Food Group". I almost wish that was a real book, I'd LOVE to read that.

[Heinel]

I'm curious what effect, if any, the genre type has on actually reading the books.  I've never quite understood the value in the very expensive books in the book store.  The books with game effects I understand, but not the ones that only increase Fun.

I wonder if we'll eventually get a SimPE-like took that will let us add additional markers.  Since, for example, you can't write Pregnancy books, there are only 2 in the game, and Sims constantly roll Wishes to read them when having kids, even if they've already read both.

 - Gus

My Sim got a "read a masterpiece" moodlet buff after reading a masterpiece.

[pbox]

I haven't yet had the chance to poke around in the actual game files, but I looked at a "Faster Writing" mod on the weekend in order to find out what exactly is tuneable - it seems to include all the relevant keys (although I belive they only actually changed the PPM (pages per minute)). I'm attaching a .txt below -- perhaps it helps to find the relevant entries, or give a quick overview for those who are just curious but don't plan to actually tune stuff themselves.

I re-grouped the entries to make it more easily readable - the list is not XML, just the keys/values and the comments that were in the file.

Example:

kRoyaltySatireMin value="350" - Min Royalty of a Satire novel
kRoyaltySatireMax value="410" - Max Royalty of a Satire novel
kRoyaltyMysteryMin value="325" - Min Royalty of a Mystery novel
kRoyaltyMysteryMax value="340" - Max Royalty of a Mystery novel
kRoyaltyRomanceMin value="600" - Min Royalty of a Romance novel
kRoyaltyRomanceMax value="890" - Max Royalty of a Romance novel
kRoyaltyHistoricalMin value="290" - Min Royalty of a Historical novel
kRoyaltyHistoricalMax value="360" - Max Royalty of a Historical novel

.. that's why people say "Romance is the most profitable genre" - it's tuned like that.

Also:

kMinLevelForHumorGoodSenseOfHumor value="2" - Required writing skill level for Humor if Sim has Good Sense of Humor trait
kMinLevelForRomanceHelplessRomantic value="5" - Required writing skill level for Romance if Sim has Helpess Romantic trait
kMinLevelForSciFiComputerWhiz value="0" - Required writing skill level for SciFi if the Sim is a Computer Whiz

kNumSciFiWrittenForFantasy value="3" - Number of SciFi novels written for Fantasy
kNumHumorWrittenForSatire value="3" - Number of Humor novels written for Satire
kNumEachGenreForVaudeville value="2" - Number of books written in each Drama, SciFi, Humor, Mystery and Romance for Vaudeville
kNumBiographiesWrittenForAutoBiography value="3" - Number of Biographies written for Autobiography
kNumBooksWrittenForMasterpiece value="25" - Number of total books written for Masterpiece
kMinLevelJournalismForArticle value="3" - Required Journalism level for Article

.. in a word, there's no need to test this kind of stuff; it's all defined as nice, simple, human-readable XML.


The mod I was using is by "Gorre" and is called "FasterWritingMoreMoneyV2" - unfortunately I don't remember where I got it from. Again, I have no way of telling what exactly they changed (i.e. which values in my list are still the original ones and which ones are changed) but I *believe* they probably only changed the base PPM since that's all you need to get the desired effect in their case. Do not copy+paste from the attached .txt if you want to tune things yourselves - there were a few typos and gremlins in the file, I believe the game could easily choke on that. Search for the relevant entry in gameplaydata.package instead; I'm only posting this to make it easier to actually find things.
 
(With the txt editor I use I can simply open a .package and look at the XML with no further ado - not sure if everyone's aware of that? This makes it very easy to just take a quick look at something, if you're curious what exact trait/skill/perk influences the XYZ feature - you don't need to install a separate tool or anything. This even works with TextEdit, so should work in Notepad and its ilk, as well.)

[Gus Smedstad]

"Most profitable" really needs to take into account $ / page, not just raw $.  Assuming that time required to produce a novel is directly related to the page count.  The highest $ / page I'm seeing on Bast's list is Satire, at $3 / page, but that's for a hit.  The Romance listing is $2.4 / page.

I've finally created a full-time writer.  It's much more interesting than a Sim who barely manages to write one or two novels while holding down a regular job.  My royalties are much higher, but he was tuned to be a writer with "Bookworm" and "Artistic" and the "Acclaimed Author" perk, not to mention the bonuses from Specialist and Prolific.  I had fun with the book titles - Children's books such as "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie" and "The Noodle Incident," or a Romance novel titled "Do Androids Watch Electric Porn?"

Since there are benefits to volume of books, there's some strategy to writing some of the shorter works like Children's and SF.

 - Gus

[Czezechael]

I had fun with the book titles - Children's books such as "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie" and "The Noodle Incident," or a Romance novel titled "Do Androids Watch Electric Porn?"

My partner had fun naming her childrens' books "Mommy and Daddy's Littlest Buzzkill", "Mommy and Daddy Yell Because They Don't Love You", "Why Mommy and Daddy Hang You Upside-Down", and a bunch of others I can't recall.  She just spammed childrens' books to get a 25-book wish.

Since I'm slightly less bored with TS3 right now, I'll try actually testing the library effect.  3x the same genre in home with specialty vs. 3x the same genre in library with specialty should hopefully be enough.

[Gus Smedstad]

Those are pretty good.  Better than what I was thinking along those lines but didn't do, such as "The Smurfs Are Eaten By Sharks."

 - Gus

[minidoxigirli]

My author sim had some rather sardonic children's books:
"Why Didn't Mommy Come Home Last Night?"
"Fun Secrets With Grownups"
"Chris Hansen and Friends"
"Clifford Goes To Sleep"

[PolecatEZ]

I haven't yet had the chance to poke around in the actual game files, but I looked at a "Faster Writing" mod on the weekend in order to find out what exactly is tuneable - it seems to include all the relevant keys (although I belive they only actually changed the PPM (pages per minute)). I'm attaching a .txt below -- perhaps it helps to find the relevant entries, or give a quick overview for those who are just curious but don't plan to actually tune stuff themselves.

...

It did answer a question I had about reading books.

I guess, from the top parsing this data file presented as-is (hopefully close to original values).

*UPDATE* I parsed the original .xml and got a little more info, updated below.  Original questions still stand though.

Speed hidden stuff:
- Reading 50 books caps out your speed bonus, seems to be a very tiny linear speed progression per book read from 0 to 50.
- Writing 20 books caps out another speed bonus in addition to "Prolific Author" bonus.
- Writing skill (0 through 10) grants another small speed bonus.  Bonus is based on partial skill points, full skill points are not needed.  Reaching Level 10 doubles this bonus.

Quality (flop/hit/best-seller) hidden stuff:
- Hidden "Genre Skill" for each genre, goes up with every hit and best-seller, goes down with every flop (capped out at 60% bonus chance), also multiplies royalties.
- Sim can be Genre Novelist in multiple genres, regardless of what text says (confirm?).

Writing payments:
- Sim is paid every 20% of his book he completes.
- Sim is paid .5 simoleans/page completed (seems to be flat rate, though can be tweaked).

Royalties:
- A multiplier is added based on your writing skill. 1x (at level 0) to 4x (at level 10).  Its a smooth transition, doesn't require you have a full skill point.
- Royalties and book sale value are NOT tied at all to # of pages.
- Flops give 35% of the adjusted payment, hits give 125%, best-sellers give 160%.
- Hidden "Genre Skill", gives 10% bonus per previous book in the genre, maxes out at 200%.

Traits:
- "Supporting Traits" for each genre have 2 effects, increases royalties slightly and allows you to write some genres sooner than normal skill allows.
- The multiplier effect for supporting traits are cumulative when increasing royalties if they are applicable to the genre.


Open questions:
- How do you write a biography except through opportunity chance card?  No mentions are made for minimum skill, previous writings, or career level in any field.
- Is there a difference between Life Story, Autobiography, Biography, and Political Memoir? These 4 genres are mentioned separately, with only Autobiography mentioned as having a minimum requirement.

[Czezechael]

Maaagical Library Aura Test, RE: Writin'
Subject sim: specialist in science fiction, Speed Writer perk.

Procedure: three sci-fi novels at home, three in the library, testing for PPM (time spent writing) and quality.

Results:
Home tests:
Book 1 (04:50-08:50), hit
Book 2 (09:23-13:23), best seller
Book 3 (14:10-18:10), best seller

Library tests:
Book 1 (19:08-23:08), hit
Book 2 (23:25-03:26), hit
Book 3 (03:50-07:50), best seller

Conclusion: hells of disappointing.  I was hoping the library'd at least do something, I guess its effect is either a LIE or is limited to skilling.  I'll test that next.

[Pinstar]

I'm confused about a few things. I know you need to get an oppertunity to write a Biography, but does that unlock the Biography genre? Or do you need to get three seperate oppertunites before you can write your autobiography?

Also, I see in that file "Life Story" yet there is no mention of how one gains the ability to write that genre? Is that also oppertunity driven or is there somthing else that is needed to write it?