Smashwords: When 5 stars is not enough.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

Good books don't always find publishers. I submit Courtney Milan as an example. She writes historical romances, excellent ones, well-edited and self-published. But her books frequently have middle-class (rather than nobility) heros and heroines, which most publishers don't like... gotta be nobility, and better yet if it's a duke. And she writes in the early Victorian era, when most publishers want Regency.

Now grant you, I'm as fond of a Regency-era duke as the next person, but I love, love, love Courtney Milan's work. Highly recommended.

She's a Harlequin author. What's self published books are you referring to?

Edit:
Ah I see after Googling. She left Harlequin because she wanted more money not because they didn't want to publisher her stories. She really isn't a example because she has the means and contacts to put out quality books herself. I'm sure she could of sold them but she prefer not to.

Now days it's the other way around. Indie authors are getting picked up by the big 6 left and right. Let's look at a few Jamie McGuire, S.C. Stephens, Kristen Ashley, Tammara Webber, Samantha Young and my personal fav, Samantha Towle. These all were indie authors and now are published authors.

Publishers right now don't know what they want. The readers are finally deciding it for them! You can check out this post by Dear Author that lists all the romance published deals from Indie authors that happen last year. Even more in the past two months have been picked up.

It's becoming if you see a Indie book on the NY Times bestseller list you can almost count on the book being picked up by a publisher.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by usuallee

It's hugely frustrating to have to do this (again). APK: let's review the transcript shall we? Because there is a huge flaw in what you continue to insist that I said. You said above that I want self-published works not to be published at all, and therefore for everyone to be deprived of works that are not published by traditional publishers.

Show me where I actually said that. You can't!

You said:

Originally Posted by usuallee

Publishers are necessary because they can decide not to print stuff that is absolute garbage. There has to be some sort of redeeming quality to the writing. An editor can only do so much.

This implies--whether or not you intended it to do so--that books that haven't been through a publisher should not be available. You say that editors are not sufficient to keep quality works available, and that someone should be deciding not to publish them at all.

If you didn't mean "we need publishers to prevent some books from being published," you should've said something like, "I prefer to only read books that have been through a publisher because I want someone else to filter out the garbage."

I will say this very clearly: I don't begrudge the right of people to self publish, or of readers reading those works.

I'm glad for the clarification; that wasn't apparent in your original statement. Saying publishers are "necessary," without any qualifiers like "for me," implied that you think someone (publishers) should be filtering the "garbage" books away from the general public.

I just personally don't want to bother with self-published works. That's not saying I don't want it to exist.

Great; glad we've got that established. It's often hard to put all the disclaimers and qualifiers into every statement, which is why a couple of us questioned your original, sweeping statement. And then you got defensive, insisting that your words meant something more than what's contained in the text, instead of saying, "oh, what I meant was [this]; I just thought it was obvious that I was only speaking for myself."

But, as someone else said, there are very few undiscovered gems out there.

I disagree. The problem with that is confirming it is that undiscovered gems are, by their nature, fairly unknown. If I list a half-dozen self-published novels I found breathtakingly original and meaningful, you'd have no way of confirming my opinion other than reading them yourself--and if they're not in genres you care for, you'd have no way to know if they're truly literary masterpieces or just competently-written stories. If I named a dozen bands who had the talent and creativity to be bigger than the Rolling Stones, there's no way to confirm that, either.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

You said:
I disagree. The problem with that is confirming it is that undiscovered gems are, by their nature, fairly unknown. If I list a half-dozen self-published novels I found breathtakingly original and meaningful, you'd have no way of confirming my opinion other than reading them yourself--and if they're not in genres you care for, you'd have no way to know if they're truly literary masterpieces or just competently-written stories. If I named a dozen bands who had the talent and creativity to be bigger than the Rolling Stones, there's no way to confirm that, either.

The point was that if the authors is persistent and tries to publish it with a publisher then it sooner or later will be published if it was a gem. of course that do not hold for examples that an effort was not made to get it published.

[Yolina]

I know of a writer who had several books trad published, including one that was shortlisted for the Orange Prize... A few years ago no publisher wanted her new book because IIRC she was told something along the line of "although beautifully written, it isn't in genre and can't be marketed easily, and is too harsh for the modern reader". Mainly they don't like the fact that she writes what she wants to rather than what she's told to.
With other people she then started a (very) small publishing thing - they broke even within the first year.