Quote:
Originally Posted by GlenBarrington
Sorry folks, but I'm going to assume all self promoted books are crap until the overwhelming evidence indicates otherwise. We are talking about my sanity here. My hobby isn't finding great new authors in a crowd of hacks, it's reading good books.
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Unfortunately, I can't say I blame you on that one. The whole question of self-publishing online is interesting but problematic for a number of reasons.
The publishing industry has never done a very good job of choosing books. Many of the books they choose don't make money; many of the ones they reject again and again eventually become bestsellers. A lot of what they do publish isn't stuff I personally care for (more vampire novels, anyone?). Despite its defects, however, the publishing system does ensure a certain minimal standard of quality, largely because all authors, in order to become published, have to survive frequent rejection. Rejection forces authors to review, revise and rewrite, and the quality of the end product can only improve in the process.
The publishing industry is now in serious trouble, of course; their profits are sliding and I suspect the future will see them fade into a well-deserved obsolescence. Online publishing or some variant thereof is the wave of the future. The problem is that without the rejection process, authors have far less incentive to spend all that painstaking time rewriting, revising and revisiting - it's so
easy to just throw that first draft on Kindle and get it out there. Moreover, there's an awful lot of stuff that should never have left the drawer but now ends up on Smashwords instead. So how will readers figure out what's worth reading and what isn't?
The answer to that question will emerge over the next 5-6 years - in some form is probably emerging already. I think we'll see a kind of crowdsourcing develop here over time, and eventually we'll get to the point where we wonder why we ever needed the publishing industry anyway. Right now, however, there's a sea of questionable-quality material floating around out there (just check out the Smashwords main page sometime if you doubt me) and a lot of readers probably think Indie books just aren't worth their time unless a creditable source can vouch for their quality. Again, I can't say I blame them.
I guess I should add that none of this is really a problem for me. I used to spend way too much time reading fiction (especially sci-fi) but these days I find I only ever read nonfiction instead. Truth tends to be stranger than fiction, and certainly more believable. Besides, if I'm going to spend a few dozen hours with a book, it might as well be information I can use somewhere down the line. I might have a tough time sticking to my word, though, if I spend too long in a library...
