Looks like that’s fixed.
[quote=“thirdworldtaxi, post:39, topic:40212, full:true”]Having insufficiently unvetted, unprofessional work represented alongside professional work devalues the whole craft.[/quote]It may devalue the automatic cachet that used to come with having a work on the market, but I don’t see how it devalues good works. Actually I think it is quite the opposite. Works stand and fall on their own merits as they have never done before.
If you want even the slightest chances of economic success, then you still have to work very hard to stand out from the crowd. There is still plenty of room for publishers and their selection process, although the relative importance of their different functions has changed. What has changed is that those things have become optional.
I don’t see what is so bad about that. I do not care how bad the average book is because I will never have to read it. The same technologies that allow us to create more bad books than ever also allow us to handle them just fine.
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I was a publisher for many. many years. And I have written more than a few books – all that I will admit to non-fiction.
One of the problems that comes with self-published books is that two of the filters is removed. The agent and the book editor.
Yes, agents and book editors have let through a surprising amount of rubbish. But, in fairness, they have stopped a serious amount.
A reasonable rule of thumb was that an agent and a publisher pushed through 1 in 10 submitted…
Which had the downside that to be a published author you not only had to be a good writer but also had to have the hide of a rhinoceros (is that the correct spelling?) to put up with rejection after rejection.
Still and all this filter kept out a lot of seriously bad stuff.
That filter does not exist in vanity publishing – I do not know whether much of that goes on – and self-published ebooks. These can range from appalling to ‘needs tight editing before releasing to the public.’
In a sense it is a sadness that ebook publishing is going to let loose on the world on awful lot of rubbish.
Who knows, with ebooks I may republish as an eBook my history of facsimile which deservedly sold very, very few copies.
Gareth Powell
I haven’t used iBooks so I can’t speak to how things work there but I’ve used Amazon’s Kindle app on any number of Android devices and Nook’s 1.5th generation eReader plus the Nook app across an identical number of (non-Nook) Android devices. I don’t use the chapters constantly either.
However, when I need them, they’re absolutely crucial and lacking them has become one of the marks of a poorly formatted ebook.
Heck, if I’m making something for just myself, if it’s longer than a few pages I’ll put official chapters in.
The editors and agents you laud also kept a lot of stuff that just “wasn’t general interest” enough out of our hands. “Sure, it’s well-written but there isn’t a market for it.”
So now we’ve got to prove that there is a market for it before we’re allowed to sell it? Not allowed to buy eggs until you’ve had a chicken. Not allowed to have a chicken unless you’ve grown it from an egg …
No thanks. Preview chapters and reviews are enough of a “gatekeeper” to protect the “unsuspecting” consumer.
There is much in what you say. If I sound as if I am lauding agents and publishers then I am guilty of bad writing. They do reject good work. There are reports that A Time To Kill by John Grisham (his first book) was turned down by 16 literary agencies and 12 publishers.
On the other hand there are very, very few authors who are able to criticize their own early work intelligently. I hate to say this but, yes, I think agents and publishers can play a major role in keeping rubbish off the market.
So if I see a book that has been published by, say, Penguin or Faber or whatever I think that there must be something worthwhile in that book for it to have got the screening process. Yes, it may mean that they turn down some mute inglorious Miltons as Thomas Gray suggested. But they do make buying books a lot easier for the average reader.
And not I do not think reviers are enough. Preview chapters maybe but they take up a lot of time.
I am not taking a firm stance on this. There is much in what you say. I do not think I lauded agents and publishers. Honest.
Just as in the old days, curmudgeons used to have to write letters to the editor of their local newspaper in the hopes that their complaints about the world today might be published before a wide audience. Nowadays they can just go to the comments section of a popular website.
I tell you, it’s a brave new world.
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Author designs his product to be the first of it’s kind on Apple gear, then complains about it being received with uneducated snobbery. That tells you plenty right there. Also, despite complaining about not feeling his book had been paid proper attention to, his complaints about the review are shallow when considering it as a comprehensive discussion about the merits of the book.
Wait. Are you saying that the average comment section is comparable to an editorial/letters page? Also wtf does that have to do with what I said? I wasn’t making a blanket argument against all technology. Reading comprehension?
I though Dan Brown had been polluting the intellectual fountain again.
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The review for “Shark Sandwich” was merely a two word review which simply read “Shit Sandwich”.
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Leonard Maltin’s review of the 1948 movie “Isn’t It Romantic?” is reproduced in it’s entirety below:
“No.”
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I have SO missed the boat on the entire Teddy Bear detective genre! If I swapped them in to my Hello Kitty slasher stories, do you think anyone would notice?
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Do they feature a devlishly-handsome, wittlily-bantering man-about-town detective named Tom? Sound interesting!
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Except that, for the most part, self-published e-books are NOT “on the shelf” next to proper, “real” authors. Amazon, for example, doesn’t do anything to promote self-published authors (unless they’re willing to shell out the big cash like actual publishers do). To find these awful non-mainstream self-published e-books, you actually have to put in a concerted effort to go looking for them. If you’re not actually looking for them, you’re going to still see the same mainstream big-publisher books that you’ve always seen. So I don’t think there’s much to worry about in terms of this phenomenon ruining literature forever.
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Why yes, yes they do! How did you know?
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I am a genre aficionado.
I write in a completely different realm, however. If you are, by chance, interested in well-illustrated ebooks of workplace satire featuring a middle-aged programmer who is beseiged by sex-starved female co-workers whom he gallantily defends after the alien zombie-robopocalips, please let me know! It also features his manager, who turns out to have been an ancient vampire set on destroying the InterNet!
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I think his responses to the review may very well have been longer than his actual book. But that might be cheating since he seems to have quoted 75% of the book in there.
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This is obviously not merely a hypersensitive author who has never suffered a critique, it’s someone who is suffering from mental illness. It’s pathetic and even contemptible to mock a person like this who is not living in the same world as everyone else. The reviewer should have deleted the whole thing (or at least the comments) once it was clear the author was incapable of engaging normally with other people.
This somehow sounds even worse than Dan Brown’s output, although the addition of teddy bears to Dan Brown’s oeuvre would be a definite improvement.
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The Pooh Vinci Code?
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