03-12-2014, 02:00 PM | #271 |
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I agree. No matter how good the story idea if I pick up a book and find it full of grammar, spelling and/or punctuation errors I'm going to put that book down and reach for the next. If a book isn't well written it will fail no matter how much else it has going for it, and word of mouth alone will get the author a name of the sort they don't want.
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03-12-2014, 02:15 PM | #272 | ||
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03-12-2014, 02:21 PM | #273 |
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Great. So how do we go about having a label applied that ONLY identifies books/authors who write books that fail to meet the level of "structural integrity" deemed appropriate by ... the Committee for Standards in Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation? And would Cormac McCarthy make the cut?
Or are we coming full circle to the tired old idea that only trad-published authors' books could possibly meet the fictitious committee's exacting standards? Meaning that all others will be initially assumed to be inferior until such time as they're deemed not inferior (by an unbiased third-party). This is pointless. There can't BE a label that would include ONLY "structurally sound" books while excluding ONLY those structurally unsound. To suggest there could be only proves someone's willingness to throw babies out with the bathwater in order to make themselves feel warm and fuzzy about their own personal concepts of "book" and "author" (which nobody's really forcing them to redefine anyway). Last edited by DiapDealer; 03-12-2014 at 03:00 PM. |
03-12-2014, 02:52 PM | #274 | |
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You use the word 'banned' and then continue as though I had suggested it, so that you could insert a 'Hitler comparison' to discredit my point of view. |
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03-12-2014, 03:02 PM | #275 |
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03-12-2014, 03:06 PM | #276 | |
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03-12-2014, 03:10 PM | #277 | |
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Draw all the analogies you wish between constructing a house and constructing a novel -- but it remains true that "suspension of a roof" and "suspension of disbelief" do not share the quality of objective determination. |
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03-12-2014, 03:11 PM | #278 | |
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03-12-2014, 03:11 PM | #279 |
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03-12-2014, 03:16 PM | #280 | |
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I mean I can wait 10 year with reading a book and the shop might not exist. |
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03-12-2014, 03:16 PM | #281 | |
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Put simply, the vanity model extracts money from the creator, not the end user. Self publishers produce books, which they then sell (or attempt to sell) to readers. Vanity publishers take money from author to publish a book, then sell copies back to the author. The end user, or reader, is not part of this picture at all. Getting back to quality, while many self-published works do have more errors than they would had they gone through a commercial publisher, this is not true of all such books. Some are as good as anything else you can buy. |
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03-12-2014, 03:22 PM | #282 | |
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2. And your second paragraph is just plain silly. Nearly every business that sells to consumers has a return policy. Most of them are "No Questions Asked". If you're silly enough to wait past the return limit date to inspect your product, see 1. |
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03-12-2014, 03:23 PM | #283 |
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An improperly build house is a considerably more serious matter than a bad book. The last time I checked, houses costs tens of thousands times more than a book. An improperly constructed house could collapse or catch fire, killing the occupants. A bad book is harmless. Most people are not competent to tell if a house is properly constructed or not, that's why we have building inspectors. Readers can see for themselves if a book is well-written or not. If they don't like it, they can return it.
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03-12-2014, 03:26 PM | #284 |
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If there really is a business model for putting a scarlet letter on self-published books, then perhaps some other company will provide such a service. Amazon appears to have no interest in doing so: perhaps you should do business with someone who is.
Last edited by QuantumIguana; 03-12-2014 at 03:30 PM. |
03-12-2014, 03:28 PM | #285 | |
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Should we have a special marking for those books when a reader finds a gaping plot hole in a trad published book? Or what if we find terrible formatting/grammar issues? Or do those just get a pass because gosh, there probably aren't very many of them? |
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