Reddit reviews The Hotel Of Insanity: Teaching English In Korea (The Korea Trilogy Book 1)

I also live in Korea--I'm a white half Jewish guy married to a Korean with a mixed-race son--and I want to describe the experience of living in a country with such absurdly high population density, since I think that this is more important than the various cultural factors working against procreation in East Asia. I was raised in New York City but spent most of my life in New England.

So. You're at home in Korea. It's Sunday morning. Want to go hang out somewhere with your s/o? Let's head to the river. You walk outside, and there are people everywhere. If you take the subway, it'll be so crowded inside the cars you might have to wait for the next one to come along. If you want to drive or take a bus, you can expect to wait on a huge eight-lane highway in idling traffic regardless of where you want to go. The cafes are full. There are lines outside all of the restaurants, and if you manage to sit down at a table you'll be surrounded by talking eating people who have few qualms about staring at you or commenting on whatever stands out about you (even if you yourself are Korean). If you manage to get to the river, you'll have to contend with people riding their bikes in random lanes, people walking on the wrong side of the path, and other various annoyances.

Faced with all of these obstacles, you two decide to just go for a walk. You have trouble navigating the sidewalks (when there are sidewalks) because, as I said, there are people (mostly old grumpy people) everywhere, and it's impossible to walk for a minute without bumping into someone, without having to stop and wait, without having to change directions. Don't forget to watch out for the motorcycles zooming along through the crowds. Crossing the street also takes time. You spend a lot of time, in fact, waiting for lights to change, as though the entire country is giant factory, instead of a warm comfortable pleasant place to live.

Conversing on the sidewalk with your s/o is difficult: everyone is listening, and besides, what are you even going to talk about? All of the shops are more or less the same, too--a cellphone store, a computer repair place, a noraebang (or private karaoke room), a convenience store, a Korean restaurant, a crappy western restaurant, a fast food place, a cafe, a small grocery store, a car repair place, a bar specializing in world famous Korean beer, various cram schools, and apartments and office buildings, repeated endlessly, in every direction.

The number of unique or quality institutions in a given Korean megalopolis could fit on a single city block, but they're usually spread out all over the place; moving from one end of town to the other can take hours, unless you have a helicopter. There are few parks, and all of them are jam-packed on a Sunday. There is little variety in this country. The businesses, the banks, and the government, are all in the hands of the old people, who very literally had whatever creativity they possessed beaten out of them by their teachers in grade school. It's a crowded place, and you have to conform.

So you get kind of tired after walking around aimlessly with nothing to do and nowhere to go, and decide to head home to your massive cement apartment building, which was constructed in the middle of a forest of massive cement apartment buildings. Don't forget your address, because they all look exactly the same. You don't feel like walking up thirty flights of stairs, so you wait for the elevator, but it takes forever to come down since so many people are using it.

Once you get back to your room you can't think of anything to do with your free time because you spent most of your life studying or following orders, so you decide to turn on the TV to watch any one of the most popular comedy shows in the country: each is somewhat like Whose Line Is It Anyway, with extra wacky sound effects, random computer animation, and relentless bubbly subtitles. It's all improv, all the time, unless you want to watch one of the formulaic soap operas or yet another documentary featuring old men talking about Chinese calligraphy or old women discussing the delicious food they grow on their farms. In Korea.

Given these factors and choices, it's no surprise to me that the population here is decreasing: there are too many people. I personally don't think Koreans have much of a problem finding people to date (I work at a university and I see couples all over the place), but I do know that they aren't interested in dealing with the burden of raising children. It's expensive, it's difficult, and as other posters have mentioned, there are thousands of other hardworking children (and their relentlessly bored and ambitious unemployed tiger mothers) to compete with: although abortions are illegal here, my wife has a friend who seems to prefer this method of birth control over all others, having done so five times. I doubt her case is uncommon.

tl;dr: There are simply too many people in East Asia, and I don't think anything can solve that problem until you can go outside without having to duke it out with thousands of random strangers on a Sunday morning.

[shameless plug] If you managed to get through this entire post, you should check out my ebook. [/shameless plug]

I'll be checking these out, thanks for posting them. Thus far I've found Make A Killing on Kindle to be the most helpful book I've seen (though I read some of Write, Publish, Repeat, and liked that as well).

That first book I mentioned resuscitated my totally moribund sales. I've spent the last year writing about unpopular topics--two books about traveling in Korea and one about a cross-dressing silk trader in the tenth century--and following Michael Alvear's book did get me a few more sales when there had been absolutely zero for about a year. The trouble is that even the top books in Korea-related categories don't seem to sell that well (the historical fiction book was just released and I'm still working on getting some reviews before I focus on promotion).

I liked Michael Alvear's book a lot because it said that social media is more or less a waste of time for selling books, which I found to be the case. Dealing with facebook also makes me feel physically ill.

I try to bear in mind, I try to hope, that the books aren't selling because they suck--they're not selling because no one knows about them. It does seem, unfortunately, like you have to be in the right place at the right time (with a well-crafted story) for things to take off.

I found putting a page at the end of each book with links to your other books, the amazon review page, as well as an email link, to be helpful.

I've been thinking of hauling out the big guns and blowing two hundred dollars on bookbub mostly because it was recommended here, and I'd love to see if anyone else has any experience with that site. Sorry this post was kind of random, I was just pumping out thoughts as they came...