I think a lot of it is that ebooks are still so new in comparison to what we think of as traditional publishing. Of course I can imagine someone from around 1450 or 1500 being dubious that investing in a company that prints books for mass media would be a good idea as well. Hindsight is always easier than foresight. Will paper books and the way they are promoted still be around in say 50 yrs? I don't know, but when you can go from receiving an advertisement via email to a link to a site to the purchase of a book in under 5 minutes I guess you have to expect that there will be some changes on how things are marketed. I agree that some authors probably 'overpromote' their works. Saying that everyone will enjoy their book etc. for example is something that a traditional book publisher would probably frown on since everyone has their own tastes and not all writer's are likely to be great shakes at proper editing before they put the link to their books up on their sites. Of course there have been bad books published throughout the history of publishing I'm sure too. No editor is perfect and traditional advertisers aren't incapable of error either. The only real constant is change and there are always a few rough spots to be smoothed when a new way of doing something is first put into practice.
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Originally Posted by ChaoZ
Maybe this is just me, but when I see an author I'm not familiar with aggressively promote his or her own material through forums and social media, a part of me automatically casts a negative view on the book. It's as if subconsciously, I feel that if a writer's product is good, there would be no need for self promotion of that kind - it would be done through word of mouth, through the publisher etc.
I realize this may be impractical these days as publishers expect a writer to provide their own audience to a degree. (A few of the writers I follow are very active in their online promotion activities). And it's certainly not to say that self-published books are always garbage. Perhaps I am stuck with an outdated publishing model in my head, where publishing houses and editors act as a filter of the slush pile; where, to appear in print, significant amount of time and money (outside of the writer) has been devoted into pushing worthwhile products.
With the increasing popularity of ebooks, more and more previously unpublishable material will (and has) hit the marketplace. And of course, all those authors will aggressively push their own works.
Is the mindset of automatically dismissing authors and books which are self-published (or even works from small publishers) and aggressively marketed at a grass-roots level, a valid way of cutting through the noise? I feel guilty for doing it, but one has to be able to filter somehow.
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