Quote:
Originally Posted by JD Gumby
You might not like the *contents* of those books from regular publishers, but the quality (at least for physical books - editing, proofing, and binding) has most likely been a lot better than most of the self-published ones you've encountered.
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Books from mainstream publishers are indeed usually better-quality, in both content and formatting, than self-pub books. This is in part because "self-pub" doesn't have any boundaries at all; anyone can throw their awful rambling wish-fulfillment self-insert dreck into a word processing program and upload it to Smashwords or compile their last year of blog posts (or worse, tweets) into a single document and call it an "ebook."
Even among actual writers who are working at real craft, mainstream publishing tends to have more quality. There are some *awesome* self-published authors; they are far outnumbered by earnest-but-less-skilled cohorts.
However... mainstream publishing doesn't publish in some genres I like. Random House doesn't have a "sci-fi m/m erotica" line. They don't do genre crossovers like "high fantasy/mystery" except as occasional experiments. They almost never publish anything that's overtly polytheistic except in high fantasy, and especially not in science fiction. Recently, I've been reading original superhero stories... mainstream houses won't do those, either.
And mainstream hasn't figured out how to capitalize on manuscript lengths that are truly only marketable as ebooks. The 20k-word novella has to be included in an anthology. 20k-word nonfic has to be bundled with a set of other articles on similar topics. 6k-word pieces are never offered as solos; mainstream publishers don't consider it's worth their production time to create & market short works.
Maybe they're right... but it's worth my reading time, and my reading dollars, to acquire them. And it's worth my time to wade through the endless slush to find the pieces I'll enjoy. If I have to read the previews of a lot of duds on the way to the ones I like, that's fine; I read fast.
I do, however, ruthlessly cull my reading. If the blurb has typos or grammar errors that bother me, I don't bother even reading the preview; if the author/publisher couldn't be bothered to proof the blurb, I don't trust the quality of the story, no matter how interesting int sounds. I read the first few pages at Smashwords; if I'm not hooked, I skip it, and am likely to never see it again.
Oh, it also matters that, for the price of one mainstream bestseller novel, I can get four or five novels of the same length and similar quality on Smashwords. Spending an extra hour or two to find them is worth it; I wind up with a lot more to read.