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Originally Posted by GeoffC
One book I recently read was poorly edited in the sense that formatting of chapters and paragraphs on the page were untidy and, despite the good storyline, it became annoying.
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Unless the book is self published, there is *always* a layout person involved in setting up books for print. Everyone from POD all the way up to BPH's have layout people. So if the layout was bad, blame the publisher, not the author, with self published authors excepted.
Quote:
Originally Posted by neilmarr
...every man woman and their household pet can knock out 65K words and then send it to hundreds of agents and publishers at the tap of a few keys.
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Sorta reminds me of Ratatouille. In his case it was "everyone can cook". In this case it's "everyone can write". But as was evidenced by the movie, you may be able to cook, but that doesn't mean you can cook well. The same goes for writing. Just because you can write doesn't mean you can write well. Heck, I'd just about bet a box of books that there's only really one readable book per 10,000, and maybe 1% of those readable books is actually good enough to be publishable.
I think the biggest problem that comes to this industry as well is all the idiotic famous people who whip out some steaming pile of poo and sell millions of copies. Uh, duh. They sell millions because they're
famous, not because they can write. My gawds, I've read some of the books penned by famous people, and while a few of them were good, most were the kind that nearly make your head implode. >.< And the only way we're going to stop nonsense like this is to get it through people's heads that they better have a knock out awesome novel, or don't even bother. And not awesome by their standards, but by a panel of at least 10 critics.
That's part of what helped me become so good at tech writing. You can't even imagine how many other writers I studied in the beginning in order to get good, and how many Hiroshima level roastings I went through in the process of improving myself. It wasn't until I started getting "Meh, it's ok" responses that I knew I'd finally reached the level of "acceptable". After that it was merely climbing the other half of the mountain to reach the peak. However, most people won't even step out of the house and walk across the valley to get to the mountain, let alone climb it. And yet they want to have that mountain peak success with valley floor experience and skills, to use a mountain metaphor.
And again, it may sound like I'm trying to discourage new writers. I'm not. I'm merely trying to get them to realize that success in writing is not push button. You don't just point, click, and suddenly become the next Stephen King. It's years of writing, hard work, and struggle. Heck, it took me 15 years to get to the level I am now, and I figure it'll be another 15 before I can even dream of writing on the same level as the great masters of the pen. So they either need to be willing to struggle and grow, or else they need to give up on ever being published, or writing for that matter. And I don't mean to harp on the subject, but it frustrates me to no end just as much as I'm sure it frustrates the many editors and publishers here too, not to mention all the good writers who get blocked by all the slush file chaff.
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Originally Posted by Freeshadow
the RPG tech term for a slushpile candidate rulebook is (since they re mostly "it's a lot like D&D, but") "fantasy-heartbreaker". Things written by people who are bot content, with specific aspects of the ruleset in their fav. games and think they can do it better. Unfortunately in most cases they cannot.
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Agreed. Hence why when a friend of mine talked me into doing an RPG version of my book series, I said, "Sure, but you're writing the bloody thing." IE, I'll let him create the rules and the board and all that, and base it entirely on the world I've already created in my novels.