Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Don't think many people are saying that; most of us think there is nothing inherently superior to the gatekept books from the point of view of readers: there is crap on both side, there are jewels on both sides.
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There's a lot more crap on the self-pub side.
That's not a condemnation of self-publishing. It's just that, at the very least, mainstream publishing books have been through a handful of readers--the agent, the editor, the proofreaders--all of whom had to agree, "this book does not make me want to throw it through a window and then punch out the person who wrote it."
There's no comparison. Mainstream books have been through a filter. Sometimes the filter works well; sometimes it fails to block out the stuff it should; it always, at the very least, blocks totally incomprehensible and/or hideously offensive drivel. Mainstream books are full of sentences with subjects and verbs. The run-ons, which they try to avoid, are rarely more than 35 words long. "I" is capitalized except for deliberate, stylistic-choice situations. A character named "Mary" is not called "Marry" in half the dialogue.
Self-pub books have *no* filters. So while they have plenty of terrific authors who, for whatever reason, are not going with mainstream publishers, they also have plenty of offerings that *no reader anywhere* thinks are worth spending money on.
It's like comparing art gallery paintings to refrigerator art. Sure, some galleries show awful stuff. And some refrigerators host terrific artworks--especially by those people who could also have art careers. But the criteria are so different there's not really any point in directly comparing them, as a group.