Publishing Bias

[The Big Peat]

Hmm. You sure that trad publishers sneer at self-pub as a way of identifying talent? Because I know that Orbit picked up Aparna Verma who'd been self-pubbed first. Ditto Devin Madson and whoever picked her up. Orbit picked up Michael J Sullivan from self-pub and he's the author I was talking about up thread who went back to self-pub due to an argument about audiobook rights. I know there's a couple of fanfics that have been picked up and republished (50 Shades being one of them).

Etc.etc.

And re Stephen's question -

To a certain extent, the fact that sites like Wattpad are fairly recent as a way of putting new writing before a live audience is part of why writing and music are different. Music has always had that outlet. Writing hasn't. Given the way sites like Wattpad tend to trend to a couple of popular things, it's still not exactly blanket.


That said, the big difference I'd treat those two as different is

a) It generally takes a higher level of technical ability for someone to call themselves a musician than it does for someone to call themselves a writer.

b) It generally takes more work to make something stay entertaining for 4 hours than for 40 minutes

In other words, if someone tells me they're an indie musician, I am looking for less proof that they know what they're doing than indie author

For me, the great worry is that, above a very low level, quality might not actually matter so long as the book contains the right (perhaps just fashionable) tropes. I see lots of romance novels advertised as just a list of tropes, and always find myself thinking "Yes, but is it any good?"

On the one hand, goodness, I feel this. Tells me nothing, particularly as a reader who detests the idea that we're focusing more on how a book is like others than how it is it's own thing.

On the other... well, is there any form of book advertising that actually tells you if it's any good? Beyond that, I get why it exists for romance. It's a giant hold-it-all bucket and the first thing readers need to know is "does this hit the emotional buttons" I want it to. Which kind of brings us to the question of what is quality and whether this...

I think Toby's point above is also valid. Listening to music is primarily an emotional experience, whereas writing, though it can and should make readers feel emotions, is primarily an intellectual experience.

Is true. Because I think for a lot of books, it isn't.

I think for a lot of genre fiction, it's all about the vicarious living wild experiences. Fall in love with the perfect person as improbable as it seems! Save the world! Be the baddest man alive! Find out just how foul humans are! The success of these works is about making people feel that thrill and buzz of emotion.

 

[ColGray]

Hmm. You sure that trad publishers sneer at self-pub as a way of identifying talent? Because I know that Orbit picked up Aparna Verma who'd been self-pubbed first. Ditto Devin Madson and whoever picked her up. Orbit picked up Michael J Sullivan from self-pub and he's the author I was talking about up thread who went back to self-pub due to an argument about audiobook rights. I know there's a couple of fanfics that have been picked up and republished (50 Shades being one of them)

Oh there's absolutely outliers, but that's what they are: outliers.

And those are outliers that a) had SP books that sold really well and b) the trad pub snatched up the rights to books that already sold really well to re-release them while investing in a future catalogue. To continue the music analogy, it's Nirvana leaving Sub-pop (record label) for Geffen after Bleach and Smells Like Teen Spirit exploded: the band demonstrated viral success and signed with the deep-pocket house to get paid, but their original label did, too.

I may be off on this, IIRC, the 50 Shades author started writing Twilight fan fic and people responded really positively and told her she could write -- but she followed a traditional process and wrote 50 Shades and queried. A trad publisher wasn't like, WOW, We read your Twilight fanfic and will pay you to write a book. The fan fic was her learning to write and getting that positive feedback to keep going.

Sort of a different topic, but the SP-to-Trad tactic hasn't worked out well for trad publishers -- because the author's don't see the value in the relationship. The two marquee examples of SP-to-Trad authors I can think of (Howey and Sullivan) both left their trad publishers after a few years. Howey's been very open that he didn't see the value of a trad publisher -- paraphrasing, but basically, "I have a name, so I don't need their marketing. I have an editor and layout people and cover design. What do you do for me besides add annoyance and remove margin??" Sullivan ... Give a listen to his Publishing Rodeo episode--it sounds like there was a lot of conflict with the trad publisher over a lot of areas.

a) It generally takes a higher level of technical ability for someone to call themselves a musician than it does for someone to call themselves a writer.

b) It generally takes more work to make something stay entertaining for 4 hours than for 40 minutes

That may be the perception but ... I've been waaaay too many shows where musicians aspired to a basic understanding their instruments. It's like reading an 18 yr old's writing: you can see potential, but also, there's a lot of work ahead. And playing with other people, being in musical conversation together, is a different skill than simply playing an instrument. Honestly, it's similar to writing. It's people that think, I write work emails/school essays, ergo, I'm a writer, and fail to grasp that writing a novel is only vaguely related to writing an email.

Totally agree on b -- but also, most people listen to an album or a song more than once. It isn't about something be entertaining for 40 mins: it's about being entertaining the 40th or 400th time you listen.

 

[Montero]

Mind you, quite a few people read a book more than once......

 

[Oligonicella]

Totally agree on b -- but also, most people listen to an album or a song more than once. It isn't about something be entertaining for 40 mins: it's about being entertaining the 40th or 400th time you listen.

I don't believe it's a love preference so much as it's ease of use. You start the album and clean house. How many times have you queued up TV or song and later when it's over you realize you didn't even listen to it? Or just tune the radio and forgot about it?

True, you can sit there nodding you head in rhythm and contemplate things... maybe. Important things? More likely not. Lots of times people just enjoy the sound. Yes there's a sad decline in people who read - or can - but there's also awareness of the twists things have taken. Just read an article a few hours ago about the increase in classic schools.

It's a coin flip between social media and government being the most damaging. And now we have information aggregators in the mix. It'll be interesting.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I’m long since over it but I have lots of validation in lots of ways. Without validation it can be hard

 

[JunkMonkey]

95% of everything is rubbish, including everything through a publisher.

90%

Sturgeon's law - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And even then it's a Bell Curve with a big bulge of mediocrity and tedium in the middle, 5% genius creativity at one end, and 5% demented weirdness at the other. So 95% may be rubbish but there are diamonds in there. Forgive me if I have posted this before:

 

[ColGray]

I don't believe it's a love preference so much as it's ease of use. You start the album and clean house. How many times have you queued up TV or song and later when it's over you realize you didn't even listen to it? Or just tune the radio and forgot about it?

We might listen to music really differently (but also, i know i'm an outlier)

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

95% of everything is rubbish, including everything through a publisher.

I get tired of hearing that. It's so glib and cynical.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that one reader's idea of rubbish is going to be another reader's idea of one of the best things they've ever read. "It's rubbish" is often just another way of saying, "it didn't speak to me."

Let's not lose sight of the fact that for a considerable portion of the population, all science fiction is rubbish. Sure, that's partly ignorance. They haven't read enough of it to have the least idea of what riches it has to offer. They judge the entire genre by the cheap, slick, lazy stuff they happen to have read. Nevertheless, it's questionable whether they would think any better of it if they read the best that the genre has to offer.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that a significant number of people don't understand why anyone wants to read fiction in the first place. After all, it's not "real," it's all made up, it's not true. They find reading difficult, so if they are going to the trouble of doing it, they want to learn something. (Never mind that a large part of what they consider true, is no such thing.)

Rather than just dismissing what other people have written, what other people like, we should focus on making what we write the best that it can be, and on promoting other people's books that we have read and admired. It may be harder these days to seek out the best new writers, the ones that no one is talking about, but if we want more variety, if we want to read fresh voices, we're going to have to put some effort into it. It will be a lot more satisfying when we do find something special that way than waiting for something good to fall into our laps and then complaining when it doesn't.

 

[Toby Frost]

I agree with both @Teresa Edgerton and @JunkMonkey . While 90% of everything probably is bad (however you define bad), I don't know how much that matters in the world of publishing. Everyone can think of a novel that did very well but was objectively poor, by which I mean lacking in some basic quality that you'd expect a half-decent book to have. Some of the biggest successes are what I think of as "zeitgeist books", which happen to fulfil a role at a particular moment in time rather than being especially brilliant. And a fair few published books are "fine", in that they're alright and people who like that sort of thing will find them to be the sort of thing they like. And then there are books that are genuinely lasting works of art (which you might not like anyhow).

 

[ColGray]

one reader's idea of rubbish is going to be another reader's idea of one of the best things they've ever read

And sometimes that other reader is you!

Look, I know that every book is written with me in mind as the sole reader and arbiter of quality, but after 40+ years, I'm slowly beginning to accept that publishers have a different idea...

Thinking back on some of the books I bounced off vs the books I devoured and loved as a teenager--especially an early teenager--is a lesson in humility. Piers Anthony? R. A. Salvatore? The best! Colleen McCullough? Ursula K. Le Guin? Meh.

Not only do reader tastes change and grow (they should change! It's a giant red flag when they don't!), but the context in which we understand and can digest art evolves. Left Hand of Darkness is a great example -- teenage me in the 90's was like, Gender? Gender identity?? There isn't a question here? A few years later, Ooooooooh. The reader brings their experiences to the artwork and that changes over time.

 

[Montero]

I have always found Terry Pratchett to contain hidden gems, that become revealed with a new experience. Something that you didn't get ten years ago is a wow (or snort) moment right now.

Sadly there are authors I loved and re-read twenty to thirty years back, and they are now "I liked this why??"

 

[ColGray]

I get immense pleasure from sharing and reading books with my son (6.5 yo) and the things he clamps on to and finds interesting because they're different than what I see and take away from it now and they're different than what I recall loving when I was young (though, memory is a funny thing).

We've started working through my favorite books from the age and some (Charlotte's Web, Magic Treehouse, Frog & Toad, Wind in the Willows) he loves. Others that I'm certain he's going to love (My Side of the Mountain, Hatchet) he's like, this is boring/nope/no thanks.

We're about to start, Fantastic Mr. Fox and I'm cautiously excited. It was the first book I fell in love with and I read it 100 times, then tried to write it. Trying to prepare myself for my son being like, Meh, no thanks.

 

[Montero]

I liked My Side of the Mountain. Probably still a little young for The Dark Lord of Derkholme by Dianna Wynne Jones. Will need to have read some fantasy first as well, probably.

 

[Oligonicella]

I get tired of hearing that. It's so glib and cynical.

On average, a self-published book is going to be rubbish.

95% of everything is rubbish, including everything through a publisher.

I was glibbing a glib. Slightly wrong on the percentage but, not my original glib. I was just the parrot.

 

[Montero]

95% of everything is rubbish, including everything through a publisher.

I was glibbing a glib. Slightly wrong on the percentage but, not my original glib. I was just the parrot.

Erm. I think you have to take responsibility for what you repeat, as well as anything original starting with you.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The thing is, I've been hearing people bring up Sturgeon's law for something like fifty years. Sometimes they get the percentage wrong. And they never seem to explain—or even, in many cases, know—the context. When did he say it, what did he mean by it, what point was he trying to make? How does it even apply to any given discussion where it comes up? (There is an explanation in the Wikipedia article, but brief and not in Sturgeon's own words, and besides Wikipedia is not 100% reliable. But it appears that all he meant to say was that science fiction is no worse than any other genre. And if that is what he meant, then it doesn't apply to discussions like this one.)

There are a lot of people who decide they want to be a writer, and they have this great idea, and therefore hey, presto, they are a writer! It is easier than it ever was before for such people to scribble something down in a hurry and put it before the public. (In the old days, many of them would endlessly talk about their story but never get around to writing it down. Or they'd say things like, "When I get a new computer I'm going to start writing it." I suppose that before I became aware of these things, the line was, "When I can afford to buy a typewriter." But when they did get that typewriter or computer, the manuscript languished unseen in a desk drawer, or at most was vanity published, sitting in unbound sheets gathering dust in a spare room or storage unit. But these days they are able to bring it out in a digital edition or POD without too much expense or exertion on their part. ) So if I didn't convict myself as glib by saying so, I'd say that these days the 90% is much too conservative an estimate.

But it is all subjective anyway, so I won't.

But what is the POINT? Does it mean that those who work hard at their writing must compete with those who make practically no effort at all? Does it mean that publishers are swamped with sub-par manuscripts to an extent they never were before? Does it mean that we, as readers, must work harder to sift through what is available to find the kind of reading material we want? Does it mean all of these things? Well, then what are we willing to do about it ... besides complain, that is?

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I think the nub of the gist is this: in the good old days, publishers did the curating for us. On balance, they published work that to their eyes looked good. They were gatekeepers. The internet has done away with gatekeeping and curation. We're now drowning in words, which is not a pleasant experience.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I do wonder if what @Stephen Palmer posted is behind the bounce back of bookshops like our own who curate ranges. People want to know what a good book might be. They want to talk to experts who can advise. If curation is the key that can be done both e and on paper - and it should support mid list authors especially

 

[Astro Pen]

I think the nub of the gist is this: in the good old days, publishers did the curating for us. On balance, they published work that to their eyes looked good. They were gatekeepers. The internet has done away with gatekeeping and curation. We're now drowning in words, which is not a pleasant experience.

Let us not forget that agents are also drowning in words. The only agent I ever submitted to told me she had had 600! manuscripts submitted in a couple of months. She manages a small pool of half a dozen authors.

 

[Toby Frost]

Yesterday I heard an advert for a radio show "curated" by Paul Gambaccini, which made me think that "curate" has reached irritating buzzword status. But perhaps this is the reason for it: so much stuff is thrown our way, and so much of that stuff is poor quality, that we need an expert to come in and pick the good bits. But then that's what happens when the mid-list disappears.